The rifle lowered. “Come with me.”

“Who are you?”

The soldier—the woman soldier, Rachel realized as she calmed down and took a closer look—gave an impatient shake of her head and strode toward her in three long steps. A hand closed over her upper arm. “Commander Max de Milles. US Navy. Come on. There’s no time.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” Rachel yanked her arm free. “I’ve got to get back to the hospital tent. Amina is over there. The patients, my team—”

“They’re taken care of. You’re the last one. Let’s go.”

Max tugged and Rachel stumbled outside. The encampment still looked very much the same at first glance. A few of the tents had been shredded and their torn canvas flickered in the wind like skeletal flags. She sucked in a breath and everything changed. Dacar lay on the ground a few feet in front of the tent. She grasped the hand gripping her arm and tried to break free. “Let me go. That’s one of our people.”

“He’s dead. You will be too if you keep fighting me.”

On the far side of the camp, a helicopter hovered a few feet off the ground. Gunfire clattered from a second one, circling higher up. Amina appeared from behind the closest tent and ran toward them. “Rachel! Rachel, I can’t find the others! I think Mahad is dead!”

“That’s one of our security team,” Rachel said. “We need to check—maybe he—”

“There’s no time.” Max dragged Rachel toward another soldier who knelt over a wounded man. “Status?”

The medic looked up and shook his head. Rachel felt a hand in the center of her back pushing her forward, and Max said, “Get her into the bird, Grif.”

“What about you,” Grif yelled, jumping to his feet.

Max ignored him and said to Amina, “Show me.”

“Deuce,” Grif said, “forget it. It’s too hot down here. We need to get out of here.”

“We’ll be right behind you. Get Winslow on that bird!”

Rachel tried to pull away, but Grif was bigger and stronger even than Max de Milles had been. “I’m not leaving until everyone—”

An explosion of gunfire and rocket bursts drowned her words. The ground kicked up around them, splattering her with bits of dirt and rocks. Her cheek stung and blood ran down her face.

“Sorry, ma’am,” Grif said, practically carrying her now. “We’ll come back for the others. You can count on—”

He grunted, stumbled, and fell, pulling Rachel to her knees beside him. Blood shot from his upper thigh in a brilliant red arc. Rachel instinctively pressed both hands on his leg. Crimson fluid, warm and thick, oozed between her fingers. She pressed harder.

“No,” he groaned. “Leave it. Get to the helicopter.”

“I can’t! You’re bleeding.” So much blood. Rachel leaned down with all her weight, terror closing her throat.

Behind them, the roaring grew louder and dirt swirled in thick clouds. The helicopter rose, and a few seconds later a fusillade of gunfire filled the air with endless metallic clattering. The jungle on the far side of the camp seemed to disintegrate. Tree trunks splintered, leaves split into confetti-sized pieces, and mounds of dirt heaved upward. Rachel crouched over Grif, expecting to be struck by a bullet at any second.

“Get into the tent,” Max shouted, pushing Rachel aside. “That’s cover fire—they won’t shoot at the tent.”

Amina grasped Rachel’s arm. “Come, come inside!”

“I can’t,” Rachel said. “His leg—”

“I’ve got it. Go, goddamn it.” Max ripped open a hemostatic pack, pulled out a pressure bandage, and slapped both onto Grif’s leg. She gripped Grif under the arms and pulled. His heavy body lurched forward slowly, and he groaned.

“Leave it, Deuce,” he gasped.

“Shut the fuck up and push with your good leg. If I try to carry you, that bandage is going to give way.”

Rachel pushed Amina toward the tent, ran back, and grabbed Grif’s ankles. She looked up and saw surprise in Max’s clear blue eyes. “Pull. I’ll get his legs.” Overhead, the helicopters grew smaller until they were just black smudges against a brilliant red sunrise.

Chapter Six

Max spared one quick look into the sky. Both Black Hawks lifted higher and swung away in sharp curves to the north, to safety. Good. The mission had gone to hell, but they’d managed to salvage part of it with only two casualties on their side—Burns and Grif. The civilians had not fared as well. Two Somalis dead and another injured or dead that she knew of. The other three were either dead in the jungle, captured, or hiding. She had an unknown number of rebel forces who might close in at any minute, and she had to keep Grif and the rest of them alive. The firing had stopped and the silence was like a vacuum, leaving the air thin and empty. She scanned the encampment. Nothing moved except the fluttering of torn canvas, weary banners celebrating a questionable victory. The battle was over for the moment but the mission objective had not been achieved. They’d failed to extract Rachel Winslow.

“You need to get to cover,” Max said.

“You can’t carry him alone.” Rachel Winslow’s gaze never wavered, locked on Max’s face like a laser-guided missile. Her face was set in a mixture of defiance and controlled fear—pale lips slightly parted, teeth clenched, pupils so wide the black eclipsed the green Max remembered from the photo. Grif was a former Iowa State linebacker—six-five, two hundred and forty pounds of muscle—but Rachel held Grif’s legs off the ground by the ankles as if he weighed nothing. Adrenaline strength.

Max should order her to get inside. Not that she had any faith Winslow would listen to her. She didn’t have any choice but to give in. Grif’s life was in the balance, he was only intermittently conscious, and if she tried getting him up onto her shoulder, the leg wound was going to blow wide open. That fountain of blood spelled arterial tear, and a big one. He might still bleed to death at any minute. She needed help, Winslow wasn’t going anywhere, and no place here was safer than the other.

“On my count,” Max shouted. “Lift his legs and keep your damn head down.”

Rachel nodded, keeping her focus on Max, on the sharp hard strength in her eyes. The pressure in her chest eased enough for her to breathe, and the scream that threatened to erupt from her raw throat faded. The horror was out there, a few feet away in the bodies of her friends and the still-echoing clatter of thousands of bullets crackling through the air, but she could push the awfulness back to the shadows if she just held on to the certainty in Max’s eyes. “I’m ready.”

For no reason that made any sense, Max felt a wave of calmness flow through her, calm she had no right to be feeling in the midst of chaos and carnage. Strength suffused her muscles. “Three. Two. One!”

Max lifted and so did Rachel, and between them they half carried, half dragged Grif’s big frame the twenty yards to the headquarters tent and inside. As soon as they stretched him out on the packed-dirt floor, Max unslung her rifle and pushed it into Rachel’s hands. “Guard the door.”

Rachel looked from the rifle to Max and her expression widened in disbelief. “I don’t know how to shoot this thing.”

“You’ll learn quickly when someone shoots at you,” Max said, not looking up as she ripped open her IFAK and pulled out a bag of saline and the attached tubing. “If you see someone coming you don’t know, point and pull the trigger. The weapon will do the rest.”

“I am a noncombatant.”

Max paused as she knelt in the dirt, while the blood of her friend seeped through her pants, and spared the woman a fleeting glance. She had no time to debate or reassure or explain. She needed Rachel to follow her orders. “We’re all combatants now, or didn’t you notice the people trying to kill us? The people who were killing us?”

Rachel’s mouth set in a thin line but she turned, went to the doorway, and crouched behind the folded back flap. Something about the set of her shoulders made Max think she could handle what might come at her from out of the jungle, and right now she needed someone to watch her back. She’d have to trust her, and trusting anyone except one of her fellow troops didn’t come easy. Resolutely, she focused on Grif.

Winslow’s friend, the young woman with the dark compassionate eyes, approached and knelt on Grif’s other side. She said softly, “What can I do to help you?”

“What’s your name?” Max asked, cutting Grif’s sleeve open from wrist to shoulder with her knife.

“Amina.”

Max handed her the IV bag. “Hold this up in the air, Amina. As soon as I get the IV line in, squeeze it. He needs fluid.”

“Yes. All right.”

Max pushed a plastic catheter into one of the big veins on Grif’s forearm. Fortunately, he had veins like tree branches and they hadn’t disappeared despite his blood loss. She was in in seconds and slapped a piece of tape over the tubing. “Squeeze.”

She checked his BP again—eighty over nothing. His pulse was thready and his color pasty. He was just this side of shock. She grabbed another bag of saline and shoved a second IV into his other arm. “Can you handle this bag too?”

“Yes,” Amina said, and took the other bag.

The pressure bandage on Grif’s thigh was saturated. Blood seeped from beneath it and ran down his leg in rapidly widening rivers. She needed to control the bleeding or she’d still be playing catch-up while he bled out.

“Keep squeezing.” Max found an ampoule of broad-spectrum antibiotics, popped it into the accompanying syringe, and snipped Grif’s pants from knee to hip. She plunged the needle into his ass and pushed the ampoule home. He grunted and his eyelids twitched open.

“Jesus Christ,” Grif groaned. “What the hell happened?”

“You took a round in the thigh.” Max loaded up another ampoule with intravenous Demerol.