Chapter 1
The first transmission came through broken by static, gunfire, and a kind of fear no soldier ever wanted recorded.
"Raven Actual, this is Bravo Three. We're surrounded. Repeat, we're surrounded by at least fifty enemies."
Then came a burst of automatic fire so violent it swallowed the rest of the sentence.
For three seconds, the command tent at Outpost Haven went silent. On the operations screen, fourteen blue icons blinked deep inside Black Veil Forest, clustered in a shallow ravine where no unit was supposed to stop for more than thirty seconds.
Staff Sergeant Ava Stroud heard the transmission from a ridge nearly two miles away.
She was alone except for Corporal Ryan Holt, who lay beside her in the wet grass with a spotting scope pressed to his face and his breathing suddenly too loud. The fog had lifted just enough to show the forest in torn gray pieces. Somewhere below, men she knew were fighting for minutes they might not have.
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Ava did not move at first. That was what Holt noticed later, when he tried to explain the moment to people who had not been there. She did not curse. She did not jerk toward the rifle. She simply listened.
The radio cracked again. "Contact north, contact west, contact south. Heavy fire. We have wounded. They're closing."
