Chapter 5 - Watch the Ridge
Now, with the rescue bird hovering behind them and bullets biting the broken wall overhead, Reaper finally watched what he should have seen before abandoning her. Sara settled behind the Barrett-style rifle with Bishop leaning against the rubble beside her, the medic bag open at her knee and rotor dust slashing across her face. She looked exhausted, cut, dirty, and completely in control.
A distant muzzle flash flickered from the ridge. Sara breathed once, adjusted less than an inch, and fired one controlled shot toward the off-screen threat position. The rifle cracked so hard the dust around her jumped. No body fell on camera. No impact showed. Only the muzzle flash vanished behind a burst of dust.
For one long beat, everyone waited.
Then the radio crackled. A stunned spotter voice came through the static. “Threat suppressed.”
Reaper stared from the helicopter doorway, guilt and disbelief finally breaking through the cold tactical mask he wore for men under him. Bishop turned his head slowly toward Sara, eyes wide despite the pain. “Who trained you?”
Sara did not look away from the ridge.
“The man they told me not to mention.”
That sentence landed harder than the shot. Reaper heard it. Bishop heard it. Even the crew chief, one hand extended from the doorway to signal extraction, froze just long enough to understand there was a story underneath the medic no one had bothered to ask.
The crew chief shouted for them to move. Sara slung the rifle, secured Bishop’s bandage, and helped lift him with the calm precision of a woman doing two jobs at once. Reaper reached down from the bird to pull Bishop in, but his eyes stayed on Sara.
“Mitchell,” he said, voice lower now. “Your father was not just a Ranger, was he?”
May you like
Sara climbed in after Bishop and looked past him toward the ridge.
“No,” she said. “He was the reason men like you came home.”
