That approach had worked before. Small teams could penetrate even highly fortified areas more quickly than larger forces with their columns of support vehicles and heavy armaments. Six months before, an American diplomat and a Danish reporter had been extracted by a US Navy SEAL team from a city under siege in Kenya. No one asked Inouye why they were making this trip. It didn’t matter. Orders were orders.

“You’ll travel light—essential personnel only—to leave room for the civilians and any patients who require transport.”

Max wasn’t expendable—and tonight she’d be doing double duty as medic and combat troop. Every team carried a medic—either a regular soldier also trained as a medic or a corpsman or flight surgeon, like Max. Once the assignment of medics to combat missions had become routine, the mortality rates of even the worst injuries were drastically lowered, and now their presence was critical to troop morale. Troops faced the dangers of combat and the possibility of mortal injury with more confidence if they knew medical assistance was close at hand. If the troops believed they would survive if injured, their performance was sharper, mentally and physically. Max’s job was to keep them and their belief alive.

“Who is the target?” Fox asked.

“You know what I know,” Inouye said, waving toward the screen. He narrowed his eyes. “But someone pretty important wants her out of there.”

“Shit,” someone muttered.

“Handle with care,” Inouye said flatly. “Anyone else?”

Max said, “I’ll need at least one more corpsman with that many civilians at risk.”

Inouye nodded. “Griffin will be riding along. That it?”

No one else had anything to say.

“Very well then. Lieutenant Fox can take over from here.”

The captain left and Swampfox walked to the map. He studied it for a moment and turned to the rest of them. “Flying time’s a little less than two hours, depending on headwinds. We’ll leave at zero three hundred. Anybody have anything to add?”

No one did. Max left without speaking to the others and headed directly to the Black Hawk to check the medical supplies. This would be her one and only chance to be certain she had what she needed in the field. This bird was not a medevac helicopter like the ones she usually rode in when picking up wounded. This bird wasn’t marked with the identifiable red cross of a noncombatant helicopter, although in this war the neutrality of medics and their machines, on the ground or in the air, had been ignored to such an extent that many medevac birds now carried defensive armaments. Medics carried assault rifles and sidearms too in case they needed to defend themselves or their wounded. This bird wasn’t going to have the full complement of medical equipment, and she planned to supplement what was there with her individual first aid kit. She relied more on her IFAK when treating injured anyhow—she always knew what she had on hand and could find it in the dark. She was going through the IV bags, checking labels and drugs, when Grif spoke from behind her.

“Thought I’d find you here.”

Max glanced over her shoulder. “Guess you heard, huh?”

He shrugged, his big oval face with its dusting of freckles calm as usual. “Got tapped for a ride along. Not much else to know. Sorry your nap got trashed.”

“No problem. Too hot to sleep anyhow.” Max grinned, the adrenaline anticipation of the upcoming mission having burned off the lingering melancholy and dulling effects of the alcohol. Nothing put the brakes on guilt and self-recrimination like the imminent threat of mortal danger. “At least we’ll be cool up there.”

“Need a hand?” Grif climbed into the belly of the Black Hawk.

“Yeah, now that you’re here, can you check the med boxes for me and stock as much extra antibiotics and IV opiates as you can find room for in your IFAK? Field bandages too.”

“Sure thing. Expecting trouble?”

Max smiled faintly. “Always.”

When she was satisfied they had the bird set for their mission, she told Grif to go get some sleep and headed back to her CLU. CLUville was quiet, or as quiet as it ever got in the middle of the night. The streets were never empty, but most of the admin buildings were dark, the DFAC was dark—late-night suppertime having come and gone. Anyone who wanted food now would have to make do with whatever they could find in the vending machines scattered around the base until the dining facility opened again at zero five hundred. Just about when most troops were sitting down to eggs and bacon, she’d be dropping out of a Black Hawk onto the jungle floor.

The photo of Rachel Winslow flashed through her mind. Whoever she was, she wasn’t just a Red Cross worker. Someone wanted her out of harm’s way and had enough power to make it happen. Max wondered what was really happening in the Juba jungle that these aid workers needed to be pulled out now. They’d been there for a while, so what had changed? She didn’t need to know, any more than she needed to know what had brought Rachel Winslow to the darkest part of a lost land even God had forgotten.

Max detoured to the communal showers and stood under the hot water for a long time, letting her mind empty. When she set out on this mission she wanted her reactions to be sharp and nothing in her head but the objective. Back in her CLU she changed into clean field camos, checked her gear, weapons, and IFAK. When she was satisfied she was prepared, she set her watch and stretched out on her cot in the dark to wait.

*

The night was never silent. After the humans settled into their tents for the night, the animals ruled. The susurrus of insect wings on canvas, the hacking cough of a hyena, the deep-throated roar of a lion. And always, beneath it all, the soughing of the canopy overhead that sheltered them from the sun during the day and shrouded them in shadow at night. At first Rachel had had a hard time getting used to the perpetual shade on the jungle floor, but she soon came to appreciate the protection the dense foliage provided from the relentless heat. Tonight, though, she felt as if the jungle were closing in, isolating them from the rest of the world. She wasn’t naïve. She knew the dangers, environmental and civil, of this mission. She’d always been cautious and careful, but until tonight, she’d never been afraid.

She prided herself on choosing her own path, controlling her own destiny, and now she waited in the dark while events she didn’t understand and couldn’t control unfolded around her. Distant thunder boomed, then boomed again, closer this time. Rachel sat up.

Not thunder. Explosions.

Chapter Four

The Black Hawks crossed into Somalia at 2,000 feet, flying at an average cruise speed of 170 miles per hour. Max rode in the open left rear door, her legs hanging out as she watched the undulating contours of the slowly changing landscape. As the minutes passed, vast expanses of desert and low scrubland slowly gave way to the denser ground cover of the jungle. Reconnaissance images she’d seen taken in daylight showed sparse smatterings of small villages comprising no more than a few ramshackle huts, a parched acre or two of struggling crops, and scraggly goats running through twisting rutted paths; nomadic tribespeople in tent camps ringed by camels; and the ever-increasing masses of displaced natives sleeping on the ground next to their bundles of belongings. Now all was dark except for the reflection of the moon off the few streams traversing the high ground like silver ribbons. The deprivation and desperation of the land and its people were hidden in a shroud of shadows.

The second Black Hawk trailed behind them, gunners on both sides and six Hellfire missiles mounted underneath. Neither bird held a full crew. Besides Swampfox and his copilot, she, Grif, Ollie, and the second crew chief and gunner, Bucky Burns, were the only occupants of their bird. The other Black Hawk carried only four. With luck, they’d be able to transport everyone out, including patients. She understood their orders and that Rachel Winslow was their priority, but leaving anyone behind went against everything she believed in. Wounded or dead, no one was left behind, and those civilians were now her responsibility, just like the troops who ventured outside the wire on a mission. Everybody came home. No matter what.

Burns and Ollie scanned out the doors for signs of enemy activity with long-range night-vision scopes. The rebel forces had no airpower, but a vigorous pipeline of arms and ammunition from Yemen provided them with automatic weapons capable of firing rounds that could penetrate the bird’s fuselage or windshield. Word had it that 400 surface-to-air missiles powerful enough to take out an airliner had been stolen by al-Qaeda forces during a recent attack on Benghazi. The rebels were mobile, at home in the jungle, and skilled after decades of strife. And a Black Hawk was a big target. Rumor had it there was a bounty on Black Hawks.

The wind, as dry and empty as the land, whipped her face below her goggles, an arid slap reminding her she did not belong in this country, but here she was. Here they all were, bound by duty and ideology and, some would say, trapped by the same. She didn’t feel trapped or tricked or coerced into fighting this war whose goals had long since morphed into something far different than they had been a decade before. She and her fellow troops weren’t even in the same country where it had all begun. In Africa, war was a way of life. Entire generations were born into it, lived in it, and died in it without ever knowing anything else.

She’d known when she’d signed up for the Navy to subsidize her medical training she might one day be sent to a place like this for reasons that were not hers to question. That was the way of war. She didn’t regret her decision to get her medical training on the Navy’s dime—she wouldn’t have been able to afford it any other way, and she was willing to pay up on her obligation in any way the Navy demanded. She only regretted the consequences of the war for those she had pledged to serve.