His knuckles went white.
“Ma’am,” he said.
His voice had changed.
Low.
Careful.
Almost reverent.
“Did you say Iron Ten?”
Mason’s smile twitched.
“Staff Sergeant?”
Maddox did not look at him.
He looked only at me.
I held his gaze.
For three seconds, I was back in a burned-out schoolhouse outside a city no American news anchor had ever pronounced correctly.
Rain hammering through holes in the roof.
A radio coughing static.
A child breathing into my sleeve because I had told her not to make a sound.
A pilot screaming that the landing zone was blacked out.
A man named Reeves bleeding through my fingers.
And a voice in my earpiece saying, “Iron Ten, you are not cleared to move.”
But I moved anyway.
Because twelve Americans were about to become names on folded flags.
Because command had bad coordinates.
Because the enemy had our route.
Because somebody on our side had sold us out.
