Chapter 1
The first paint round knocked Sergeant Cole Ryker to one knee.
For half a second, the entire training compound at Coronado forgot how to breathe. Dust hung over the mock village like smoke after a wreck. The California sun was already hard at 0900, the kind of sun that flattened shadows and made everything look older than it was. Six Marines lay scattered across the field, each marked with vivid green paint that had no business being there at this point in the exercise, because the exercise was supposed to last another forty minutes and none of them were supposed to be down yet.
Ryker was on one knee with his mouth open.
Across from him stood Lieutenant Kara Blake, her blue eyes steady beneath her helmet, her paint marker held low at her side, her expression carrying nothing that required interpretation.
She had not said one word.
Commander Eric Hayes stepped forward from the observation position and looked at the field with the expression of a man updating a long-held assumption in real time. "Exercise complete," he said. "Six confirmed eliminations."
The silence that followed was the specific silence of thirty people recalibrating simultaneously.
May you like
I want to tell you how I got to that courtyard, because the courtyard is not the beginning of the story and Ryker's paint-marked chest plate is not where the real thing started. The real thing started at 3:47 in the morning near the Syrian border, and it started with a word I said so quietly that Crawford almost missed it.
"Hold."
