Roger: understood and acknowledged

ROGER, WILCO: understood, acknowledged, and will comply

SCIF: sensitive compartmented information facility (a secure location where classified information can be reviewed)

SIPRNET: secret internet protocol router network (a network the Department of Defense uses to transfer classified information)

SITREP: situational report

Chapter
One

KATANGELA, AFRICA

Captain Rick Norton crouched near the edge of the dirt road. Ears still ringing from the intense firefight, the smell of gunpowder burning his nose, he looked around, counting team members. Gerald “Jerry Maguire” McBride and Daniel “Pot Pie” Swanson came out of their hidden and elevated sniper-spotter positions. They both threw him a silent thumbs-up.

Travis “Trout” Fisher crouched nearby with his carbine pointed downrange and his radio rig tucked away. He also offered a thumbs-up. Jorge Peña “Colada” and Bill “Drumstick” Sanders glided backward toward his position with rifles at the ready. “Up!” they said in unison.

Rick scanned the jungle around him. “Ozzy, position?”

No response.

His gut tightened, and he motioned for the men to regroup. Tension flowed through the team like electricity, then came a measure of relief when they found their combat medic, Phil “Doctor Oz” Osbourne, lying under a banana tree. He was trying to patch up his own thigh with a surgical clamp and a threaded needle below his hastily applied field tourniquet. Rick slid on his knees toward him and took the clamp from him.

“Caught one, Cap,” Ozzy said, his voice hesitating as shock started to overtake his body. “No way I’m getting out of this jungle on my own two feet.”

Wordlessly, Rick clamped Ozzy’s artery despite its best efforts to worm up and out of sight, then wrapped a fresh field dressing bandage around his thigh, securing the clamp and protecting the wound.

“You don’t know that, Doc,” Sanders said. “I’d want Daddy patching me up if you were otherwise occupied.”

Despite his tension, Rick internally rolled his eyes at the “Daddy” nickname. Sanders had drawled the words in an Alabama accent just to make them sound sweeter. Rick would address his mockery in a more appropriate manner, maybe with a bucket of ice water in some idyllic moment of downtime. For now, he let it slide and listened to Fisher calling headquarters for their extraction. He looked up expectantly as Fisher ended the radio call.

“They can pick us up twenty klicks from here, azimuth 26.”

Twenty kilometers? With a quick calculation, Rick translated that distance to just over twelve miles. He scratched his red beard, estimated the amount of blood already lost, observed the rate it continued to soak into the field dressing, and concluded that Ozzy wouldn’t make it two miles, much less twelve. He would lapse into hypovolemic shock before they could get halfway there, and he would undoubtedly expire soon after.