Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 128260 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 641(@200wpm)___ 513(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128260 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 641(@200wpm)___ 513(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
His chin went up in a jerky nod. “Same.”
I nodded back, watching the other four men walk up the rocky slope toward us. “The other team will be here in about an hour,” Eli said.
When we had called in the night before, we had been ordered to stay with the weaponry until another team could get there to inventory it. The sun was already high in the sky.
Noah and I nodded, Noah speaking quietly, holding up his radio. “We’re supposed to be at our rendezvous point in six hours.”
“We’ll be ready to leave as soon as the other team gets here, then,” Leland said, emotionless, a faraway look in his eyes that I didn’t like. Even Josh was somber, patting Leland on his back as he walked by him.
Half an hour later, we had briefed the second team and were ready to leave. I stood up, hefting up my gear and securing it to my back as the other men did the same. We started walking. I only looked back once.
__________
It had taken us longer than we’d thought it would to jog the distance to our rendezvous point, and we were still about an hour away when the sun started to set in the desert sky. It was the end of October, when night temperatures dropped rapidly in Afghanistan. Our breath came out in short, white bursts as we hiked quietly, all of us aware of our surroundings, as we were trained to be, but quiet in our own thoughts.
I tried to keep my thoughts at bay. It wouldn’t serve me to go over what we’d experienced now. I felt the emotions of the night before hovering just in the distance, but instead of allowing them to creep closer, I focused my mind on the sunset we’d watched that morning, and my thoughts of Grace. I thought of her a lot now because we were always up with the sun. And though it may or may not be a good idea to dwell on a woman I hadn’t seen in so long, thoughts of her soothed me and so in a time of little comfort, I took them for the gift they were.
Suddenly, Josh, who was walking in the lead, stopped and held up his hand to indicate we stop as well. We all came to a halt, listening. When none of us heard anything, we moved forward again. A few hundred feet later, Josh halted again and we all followed suit, readying our weapons. We were trained well enough to know that one hunch based on the snapping of a stick in the desert might be dismissed but two most definitely shouldn’t be. We moved so our backs were to each other and circled slowly, squinting our eyes to see as far as possible in the darkening distance.
“Shit!” Leland grunted as one shot rang out and his leg buckled and he went down next to me.
The rest was a blur of gunfire, blood, explosions, and pain. So much fucking pain.
I heard someone moaning from faraway, and for just a second, I was lucid, the noise exploding back into my brain as I came to and lifted my head from the ground, where somehow I had ended up.
Leland was next to me and I could see that his leg was in bad shape, part of the bone broken and protruding almost straight out of the skin. He was moaning and trying to drag himself toward me.
I went to push myself off the ground and bit my lip to stop myself from screaming out in agony, my hands were covered in blood and blisters, the skin hanging loose in several areas. A surge of adrenaline pulsed through me, and I sprung to my feet and hefted Leland under his arms, bearing his weight on my forearms as I dragged him away from the gunfire that was still hitting rocks to the left of us, where I could also hear Eli, Josh, and Noah yelling and returning fire. There was too much smoke for me to see what was going on. My job now was to get Leland out of the line of fire. As I moved away, I tripped on something, my body jerking strangely. I struggled to stay upright with Leland’s weight in my arms and, after a second, kept moving.
Leland grunted in pain as I dragged him with me, my own grunts of exertion mingling with his. I looked behind me and saw a rock big enough that I thought we could both fit behind it and picked up my pace. I rounded the rock a couple seconds later and lay Leland down and collapsed to the right of him, just as a spray of bullets took out a piece of the top of the rock, small pebbles raining down on us as we covered our heads.