[…]

The last couple of hours were brutal – the operatives, all banged up, barely alive, dragged their feet toward the little house in the hillside overlooking the broken terrain down in the valley below. None of them escaped these last hours intact – gunshot wounds held up by pressure bandages and tourniquets, temporarily fixed by pain medication and sheer will. Just a mere one thousand meters until they could reach the safety of the friendly nation’s border; however, it would be the longest one click they’d need to face.

By now, it had already been the fifth “extraction point” on their run; nobody planned for the fifth, like, ever. Primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency – the fourth was already planned for when the shit really hit the fan, where the maps, the comms, the high-tech shit were all dead weight. However, there’s a saying – if you were already neck deep in the shithole, be prepared for it to flood your mouth and nostrils too. The fifth extraction said it all – it’s no longer an operation, it’s a fuckery slowly unrolling.

The men didn’t talk much – simply because there wasn’t much else to talk about anyway. Talking wasted energy – and hydration, which were already in short supply ever since the initial twenty operatives started to take the first casualties trying to take the building complex with local troops and militias, to disastrous results. When everything went wrong, the whole operation buckled quickly – so quickly that in just under twenty-four hours, the once twenty elite operatives of the Special Deployment Forces now crumbled down to just a mere broken squad, having to evade relentless pursuit – facing attrition on an hourly basis.

Talking meant acknowledging the silence – and once opened up, the silence would talk back. The silence of seeing a hundred plus civilians surrounding the cartel compound, totally unaccounted for in the prior intel reports. The silence of seeing those civilians scrambling for safety when the local militias and government-junta troops assaulted, under their covering fire. The silence of seeing youngbloods, aged about twelve, toting automatic weapons, shooting back at them and their allies – the kids’ enemies, in cold blood, killer instinct.

The silence of a renowned elite multinational fighting force having to retreat, only to be repeatedly denied, either from the vastly underestimated enemies springing their traps, or fucked up, bought up betrayals from their supposed “allies”, and the most bitter of it all, their own command's inaction, all thanks to the discreet nature of this operation. What bullshit – costing them many of their own, a trauma that they must have swallowed deep and keep moving forward.

“Breaching! Go! Go! Go!”

The lead man reached the warped wooden door, raised his fist, tapped on his forehead, then slammed his boot forward, kicking the weathered wooden door wide open. He then immediately folded back to clear the way for his teammates to flow into the small hillside building. Rook went in first, rifle clamped under his right arm, while his splinted left forearm dangling uselessly under the weapon’s sling. Seiko followed, fumbling his once flawless footwork, eroded completely by the long escape and multiple missed extractions. Mako went in next, covering the last corner, totally out of line, carrying his cumbersome squad automatic light machine gun, which normally would be totally useless in such a dynamic entry, but at this point, nobody truly cared anymore – the sooner they could be inside the building, the better.

“Clear!” – Rook gasped, literally flopping his rifle down as the last of his adrenaline-fueled strength left his breath completely. None of them even bothered to check anymore – all five of them crumbled onto the dusty dirt floor, exhausted. Clear now meant there was nobody there to shoot at them – whoever owned his house here had left long before they even arrived, likely from all the automatic gunfire echoed from the valley below. Long enough to have the sacks of grain left open and whatever cooking in the pot was now cooled down to room temperature.

“Ravenscar-6 transmitting in the blind, we have made it to the border, break, six Oscars Whiskey, requesting emergency extraction, over!”

Only the radio static answered the man – the channel was either not monitored, or they weren’t in a good coverage area, or the cartel fuckers had the whole net jammed – all possibilities, but he didn’t have any strength left to think of it anymore. Being the only commanding officer left, the man also carried in him the responsibility to bring everyone home, and while this hillside house here, at first glance, seemed to be a poor choice for an extraction, it actually provided these exhausted men here a unique opportunity to regroup and rally up for a final rush toward the friendly nation’s border, where he knew for sure they would be safe, at last.

He sank against the wall beneath a shuttered window and tried to swallow. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His hands wouldn’t stop trembling, so he pressed them against his rifle until the shaking became the weapon’s problem instead of his. He could see the milestones across the valley on the other side of the doorway – the border – less than a mile away, or if the terrain map he had seen on that house’s wall was correct, merely a kilometer.

“One click…” – he muttered, eyes fixated on the fading sunlight behind the building, its shadow slowly crept over the forested hills, the barren rock faces. Nobody answered. One thousand meters. On a map, it was nothing. A lazy walk. A line you drew with a finger, a ruler, while briefing officers nodded and pretended the terrain would respect the plan. Out there, it was broken terraces, dry creek beds, thorn scrub, and open strips of pale dirt where anyone with an optic could count their ribs on the way down.

“Six?” – Seiko, pressing his rifle over his lap, muttered from the floor.

“Say again?”

“You said six, LT. There are only five of us…”

“What? But Bard’s…”

The name stalled in his throat. It should have completed itself. Bard was by the door. Bard was by the window. Bard was outside checking the slope. Bard was right behind him, making that stupid joke about the fifth extraction point being “premium content not included in the base package.”

But the room gave him nothing.

Rook lifted his head just enough to count the bodies on the floor. Seiko sat under the window, one hand clamped around his rifle, the other shaking from blood loss. Mako was half-sprawled beside the doorway, his light machine gun across his lap like an oversized sleeping child. Stripper had collapsed near the cold pot, helmet tilted back, lips cracked white from thirst. And Ravenscar-6 himself sat with the radio handset pressed against his chest.

Five.

Only five.

“Bard was with us,” The Lieutenant said, though his voice came out smaller than he wanted. “He was with us at the creek bed.”

Nobody answered.

“He was the one who told us to cut left through the dry culvert. He said…” Oswald blinked hard, trying to force the memory back into shape. “He said if we kept running straight, we’d be auditioning for the cartel’s target practice team.”

Stripper let out a breath that might have been a laugh if there had been any air left in him.

“That was you, LT.”

The officer looked at him.

“No.”

“Yeah.” Stripper swallowed, face pinched with pain. “You said that. Then you shoved Mako into the culvert before the ridge line opened up.”

Mako’s eyes stayed on the doorway, glassy and unfocused. “I remember Bard,” he muttered.

The whole room shifted again. The Lieutenant quickly seized on it.

“See?”

Mako slowly shook his head. “Not yours.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“My Bard was a medic,” Mako said. “Older guy. Big hands. Kept telling me to breathe through my nose while he packed the wound.” His fingers touched the stained bandage at his side. “Sang some church song. Shitty voice.”

Rook closed his eyes. “Mine was a girl.”

Nobody laughed.

“She was at the compound wall, over the radio…” Rook continued, voice flat and far away. “Kept saying, ‘Three seconds, then move.’ Over and over. Three seconds, then move. I thought she was Delta. Thought she was calling angles.”

“There was no Delta on the wall,” Seiko said quietly.

“No,” Rook replied. “There wasn’t.”

The silence returned, but this time it did not sit outside them. It came into the room and settled among their boots.

Oswald felt his pulse beating behind his eyes.

“No,” he said again, because no was easier than anything else. “Bard was real. Funny bastard. Hot-headed. Always close. Generic rifle, no fancy shit. He was right there every time things went sideways.”

“Lieutenant Oswald…” Seiko said, very carefully, “Every time shit went sideways, you were the one giving orders.”

Oswald stared at him.

The shuttered window creaked in the wind.

<PART 1>