Chapter 2
He smiled. The smile of a man who has found something he can dismiss without having to engage with what it said.
He called me sweetheart. He said combat needed speed, not fear of a few rocks. He told the Rangers and Marines in the room that desk jockeys always found reasons to slow real operators down. Nobody in the room laughed, because everybody with functioning eyes could see the ridgelines on the map and had already run the same calculation I had just run.
I kept my voice level. "It is not the rocks. It is the guns men put on top of them."
His face flushed in the specific way faces flush when a person has been accurate and the person listening cannot afford the accuracy. He crossed the room. He used his height the way men use height when their argument has run out — as a physical statement of the conversation's conclusion. He told me he did not take tactical advice from unranked civilians and that he would have me removed from the base.
I did not blink. "Rank does not make you bulletproof," I said. "Change the route."
His fist came up before anyone in the room had time to process what was happening. The blow caught me across the jaw so hard that chairs scraped backward across the tent floor and the metallic taste of blood filled my mouth in one clean instant. My head snapped sideways. The room went completely still in the way rooms go still when something has happened that everyone present will remember for the rest of their lives.
No one moved. Not immediately. Not because they were cowards — because they were watching to see what I did next, and what I did next would tell them what kind of situation they were in.
I turned back slowly.
May you like
I brought my thumb to the corner of my lip and wiped. I looked at the blood on my thumb for one second. Then I looked at Cutler and measured him the way you measure distance before a shot — not with emotion, but with precision. With the specific understanding of where a thing is and where it is going to end up.
He pointed at the tent flap. "Keep your mouth shut or leave this base."
