They gave a female captain a scarred, Vietnam-era rifle with a cracked scope to humiliate her, until she unscrewed the optic and chose iron sights.

"Hold your fire!"

The panicked scream came from the third squad, forty meters down the trail.

Elena was moving before the words had finished echoing. She dropped her rucksack in the mud with a single thumb-release and bolted back down the rocky slope, her combat boots finding purchase on the slick limestone with terrifying speed.

Through the parting veil of fog, a nightmare scenario was unfolding.

Private Miller, a green recruit carrying the M249 squad automatic weapon, had slipped on the wet slate. In trying to catch himself, he had tumbled off the trail and slid ten feet down a steep, muddy embankment into a shallow ravine choked with blackberry brambles. His weapon had discharged a three-round burst of blank ammunition during the fall, sending the rest of his squad into momentary confusion.

"Miller! Get your ass up!" Rourke was yelling from the edge of the trail, standing completely exposed, waving his arms in frustration. "You're compromising our formation! Get up the bank!"

"Lieutenant, don't move toward him!" Hayes shouted, grabbing Rourke’s tactical harness. "Look at the ground below him!"

Elena slammed into the line of men, parting them like water. She reached the edge of the embankment and immediately dropped to her stomach, peering over the edge.

Miller was pinned. His leg was twisted at an awkward, unnatural angle beneath a heavy, rotten log that had shifted when he crashed into it. But that was not what made Elena’s blood run cold.

Directly behind Miller’s trapped head, half-buried in the clay of the ravine wall, was a jagged piece of corroded steel—an unexploded 81mm mortar shell, left behind from the days when Fort Bragg used these ridges for live-fire artillery testing during the Cold War. The mud around the shell was liquefying from the morning rain, slipping away in slow, muddy sheets. If the log shifted another three inches, Miller’s weight would trigger a slide that would drop two hundred pounds of rock directly onto the mortar’s rusted impact fuse.

"Miller, freeze," Elena commanded. Her voice wasn't loud, but it cut through the young private’s hysterical sobbing like a slap across the face. "Do not move your hands. Do not kick your legs. Look at me."

The young soldier looked up, tears cutting tracks through the black camouflage paint on his cheeks. "Captain... my leg is broken. I can't feel my toes. And that shell... oh God, Captain, that thing is live!"

"Look at me, Private," Elena repeated, her eyes locking onto his with absolute, hypnotic stability. "You are not going to die out here. But you have to be completely still. Do you understand?"

Miller swallowed hard, nodding once, his body shaking violently from hypothermia and shock.

Elena turned her head toward Rourke. "Lieutenant. Where is the radio?"

Rourke stood there, frozen. His tactical bravado had completely evaporated. His face was gray. "I... Turner has the PRC-117. We tried to call the range safety officer, but..."

"But what, Lieutenant?" Elena asked, her voice dangerously quiet.

"The radio isn't connecting," Rourke stuttered, his eyes darting toward Turner, who was pale as a corpse. "There's a sync delay... the frequency hopping isn't synchronizing with the base station. It's an equipment malfunction!"

Elena didn't waste five seconds interrogating him. She knew instantly what had happened. The coward had tried to sabotage her exercise communications, and in doing so, he had cut off their lifeline when a soldier’s life was actually on the line.

"Rodriguez," Elena said, not taking her eyes off the boy in the ravine.

"Here, ma'am," the Master Sergeant said, crouching at her shoulder.

"Get your team up to the high point on the ridge. Signal the observer tower with smoke. Red smoke. Emergency medical extraction."

"It'll take twenty minutes for an extraction bird to navigate this fog, Captain," Rodriguez said grimly. "And that mud bank doesn't have twenty minutes. If that log slips, that mortar is going off."

Elena looked down at the scarred M14 slung across her chest. She looked at the heavy, steel-jacketed 7.62x51mm rounds in her magazine.