Though a modern warrior, Aguilar never outgrew the superstitions he had grown up with. He had been taught as a boy not to speak badly of the dead or wish for something that you might not like. He always did his best to maintain a positive attitude for fear that negative thoughts manifested themselves into evil. Tonight, as his concerns began to worm their way from the recesses of his unconscious mind and palpable fears began to emerge, Aguilar found himself unable to restrain the foreboding sense of doom that grew with each passing moment.

Even before he was able to apprehend what was happening, a flash on the high ground up ahead caught his attention. With the speed of a bolt of lightning, a deadly streak of light tore through the night sky and slammed into a Bradley just off to Aguilar’s front right. Like an eyewitness to an accident, Aguilar watched as the stricken Bradley shuddered, before tearing itself apart from within. Nine men, Aguilar told himself, had just died. The shock of this was even more disconcerting to the young captain since he had come to believe that catastrophic explosions in Bradleys weren’t possible. Bradleys had every survivability feature that could reasonably be installed in a combat vehicle. Nothing, however, is one hundred percent. Chance in battle is part of every move, every action. For the men of Aguilar’s stricken Bradley, chance took a hand by bringing the incoming round fired by the Guard tank into contact with the warhead of a TOW missile stored in the Bradley’s squad compartment.

In rapid succession Aguilar keyed his radio and shouted a warning to his three platoons over the company net just in case someone was suffering from extreme tunnel vision and had missed the death of the Bradley. Next he flipped his radio frequency over to the task force command net and passed a quick spot report to his commander and the task force staff. Finally Aguilar ordered his own gunner to start looking for targets, though the gunner had been doing this all along.

All this took but a matter of seconds, fifteen, maybe twenty. In that time Aguilar saw another Guard tank open fire. Fighting an overwhelming urge to duck down into the safety of his own tank’s turret, Aguilar watched to see where this one went. The relief he felt when none of the vehicles to his front were hit was short lived, as a third projectile launched from a different location was hurled down upon his command. They were in the shit, Aguilar told himself. And there was precious little that he could do except hope that the tanks behind him, tasked with suppressing Guard tanks, got the bastards, and soon.