Membership in the elite gun club better known as the army's Special Operations Forces was closed to women who wanted to participate in combat roles.

Therefore, Sergeant Alicia Diaz could not possibly be a Special Forces operator.

She could not possibly be crouched on a mountainside in Pakistan, peering down the scope of her rifle, about to whisper her report to her team leader.

But she was.

It had taken the open-minded leadership of the Ghosts brass to recognize that a woman who had won the Service Rifle category of the National Long-Range Rifle Championship at Camp Perry, Ohio, for an unprecedented two years in a row belonged on a Special Forces team, U.S. Army doctrine notwithstanding.

And Diaz wasn't the only female Ghost, either. She'd crossed paths with now Major Susan Grey, Lindy Co-hen, Jennifer Burke, as well as a few others. However, she was the only female marksman within the company, a distinction that had garnered her much respect.

She had joined the army to prove that she could perform as well if not better than any man in any situation. Those were strong words, and she had done everything within her power to back them up. Admittedly, she'd been taken down hard during her combatives training, and there was that incident in Kabul back in '05 when she'd almost been knifed to death, but she had learned to use cunning to compensate for her size.

The fact remained that when Sergeant Alicia Diaz was lying on her belly and clutching her rifle, she was the queen of the battlefield, and they would all bow willingly--or unwillingly--as these men were about to do.

"Ghost Lead, this is Diaz. I'm in position. I have your first target."

The captain's reticle floated over the guard at the last house, and his IWS sent an automatic request to Diaz's HUD to take out that target.

She held her breath, ready to fire.

The perfect sniper is 100 percent certain he will hit the target before he squeezes the trigger. He is convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Yet in all her years of practice, being that certain still eluded Diaz. There was always 1 percent of doubt. Just one, but it was there, reminding her that she was just a twenty-eight-year-old tomboy from a ranch in Lubbock, Texas. She was just a girl who liked to play with guns. Hell, it seemed like yesterday that she was aiming at tin cans on fence poles, aggravating her brothers because she'd outshoot them every time.

And the strange thing was, it never got old. The same thrill she'd felt as a teenager still gripped her heart every time she got behind a weapon and sighted a target.

However, the thrill now was tempered by a healthy dose of fear; because if she missed, the entire operation could go south in a heartbeat.