Chapter 3 - Left on the Ridge
The raid started clean until it didn’t. Bishop climbed to overwatch above the compound while the team breached the front gate below. Sara stayed twenty meters back like she had been ordered, listening for the first casualty call and watching the rooftop edges through dust and muzzle flashes. The compound was old, sun-baked, and full of blind angles. Every wall looked like it had been built to hide a second mistake behind the first.
Then a fighter appeared on the second-floor balcony with an RPG. Bishop’s shot came half a breath late. The rocket hit the ridge near his position, and the overwatch point vanished into fire, stone, and dust. Sara was moving before anyone gave permission. She ran uphill through impacts and falling debris, found Bishop in a shallow crater, and dropped to her knees beside him.
He was conscious, barely. Sara sealed the chest wound, packed what needed packing, and kept talking to him because silence was where wounded men sometimes slipped away. Reaper’s voice came through the radio, flat and final. “Bishop is done. Get yourself back here.”
Sara looked at the man under her hands, then at the Black Hawk lights beginning to lift from the dust below. “Negative. I am staying with Bishop.”
The radio went quiet.
Then the helicopter left.
For a moment, the rotors swallowed the whole world, and Sara understood exactly what Reaper had decided: two bodies were not worth the risk to his team. She tightened the bandage until Bishop cursed through clenched teeth. “Good,” she said. “If you can complain, you can breathe.”
Bishop’s eyes fluttered open. “You should’ve gone.”
“Stop talking.”
“They left us.”
Sara looked toward the ridge below, where dark shapes were already moving through the compound gaps. “Then they better hope they taught you to share.”
His eyes followed hers to the long rifle lying five feet away, half buried in dust, its scope cracked but intact enough to use if the person behind it knew what mattered more than perfect glass.
Bishop whispered, “Your father taught you?”
May you like
Sara pulled the rifle into her shoulder.
“Yes.”
