Chapter 4
The Rangers below began shifting through the fog toward the gap Ava had opened, dragging their wounded, Carver covering Grant, Cruz working on a chest wound that would need a medevac within the hour but would not, because of the timing of that movement, need a body bag.
This is where I want to be honest about what the next several hours actually contained, because the version of this story that ends entirely clean is not the version that happened.
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The recovery extraction took ninety minutes longer than it should have, because the second enemy element — the one cutting off the retreat route — had not been neutralized, only bypassed, and they caught the tail of the column as it crossed the eastern slope. Specialist Jonah Cruz, the medic who had crawled through mud toward a wounded man before anyone ordered him to, took a round through the lower leg during that crossing. He survived. He kept both legs, after four surgeries and a year of rehabilitation that ended his frontline service but did not end his career — he transferred to a training command position at Fort Benning eighteen months later and is, by every account I've heard since, an excellent instructor.
Private Noah Grant, the one whose cheek had been sprayed with bark from that first shot, did not survive the eastern slope crossing. He was twenty years old. He was from a small town outside Lubbock, Texas, and Ava Stroud attended his funeral eleven weeks later, standing at the back of the small Baptist church in a service uniform that still smelled faintly of the gun oil she had not been able to fully scrub from the seams, because some things do not come out completely no matter how many times you try.
