She wouldn't give him the luxury of opening the door and taking a last cold breath. Holding hers, she squeezed the trigger. The Dragunov thumped, the sound echoed by a distant crack from the door as her round penetrated the wood and pierced the man behind it.

The red outline turned white. "Ghost Lead, this is Diaz. Third guy is down."

"Roger that. We're out of here. Fall back on me."

Diaz rose and tried to shudder off the chills. Her blood felt icy, and her joints ached. She was beginning to lose sensation in her toes. "The cold is my friend," she muttered, resorting to survival school mantras drilled into all operators.

Shouldering her rifle, she picked her way down the hill toward the others, their position glowing in her HUD. She smiled to herself as Carlos and Tomas shook their heads in disbelief over what she had just accomplished.

Carlos was now helping run the ranch with Dad, and Tomas had gone on to become a distinguished professor of agriculture at Iowa State. However, whenever they got together, Diaz would gaze into their eyes and always see the jealous twelve-year-old still lurking inside.

She reached the bottom of the hill, just as Captain Mitchell called their chopper: "Black Hawk Two-Niner, this is Ghost Lead. En route to pickup zone. Terrain's rough. ETA twenty, thirty minutes, over."

"Ghost Lead, this is Black Hawk Two-Niner. Roger that. We're on our way."

Carrying an approximately 180-pound man about a hundred meters to the next hill was within Mitchell's capability. Carrying the same man a full kilometer over rocky, snow-covered terrain in subzero temperatures, in the wind, was being unrealistic, but Mitchell gave it a shot nonetheless. Because it was Rutang, his friend.

Mitchell lasted about three hundred meters before he had to stop. He and Diaz unrolled one of their portable stretchers, velcroed Rutang into it, then sought the smoothest paths they could follow while dragging him through the narrow pass, utilizing the stretcher's built-in harnesses.

The delay only lasted a couple of minutes, but Saenz and Vick appreciated the break.

When they reached a large boulder to their left, marking the top of the pass, they paused to recon the barren valley below, where their Black Hawk would land. Now Mitchell paused a moment to bring in the UAV3.

As the drone whirred overhead, Mitchell zoomed in with the cameras, and suddenly red diamonds began to appear in the hills. There were two at first, then three, four, a dozen--maybe more now--all moving along a trail leading directly toward them.

"Ghost Lead, this is Black Hawk Two-Niner," called the pilot, who was no doubt observing what Mitchell saw via the network. "Hold position. The zone is hot."

But it was already too late for a stealthy escape by the pilot and his crew.

They'd been swooping down and immediately drew a storm of small arms fire from the insurgents on the ground.