“You have your orders, Mark. There are now just six people left in the world who have even a slight idea about how to handle this.”

“We have no idea how to handle it.”

“Okay, let me put it another way. You’re the only person the army has ever found who can even begin to track these things, and your unit is trained around you. So do not put yourself or your people in harm’s way. That’s an order.”

“What’ll you do if I disobey?”

“Brig you!”

“You’ll brig a corpse?”

For a moment, she was silent. When she spoke again, her voice was low and intense. “Just get out of there.”

He closed his phone. “She said to return to base.”

Linda started to head for the kids.

Mark blocked her way. “It’s the right order and you know it.”

Rage made her tremble.

“We return to base and regroup, Linda.”

“They’ll kill those boys, Mark.”

He was silent.

“Yeah,” Louis muttered. “They’re just kids, Colonel.” Louis had boys of his own, just like Massy, who’d had two.

“People, this is no job for a reconnaissance unit. Somebody else will be out here to help those kids.”

“Ten and twelve,” Knotty said.

Mark looked at Knotty’s punch-twisted face. He’d been tortured in an Iranian jail. Then Mark looked along the seats at his crew. Of course people like this would want to save children.

He had lost today, big-time, and he did not like to lose, and he felt the choking helplessness of anger that could do nothing. He’d need to write Pamela Massengill a letter about her husband. Of course, the army would do its thing, but he had an obligation, too.

“Willoughby,” Richardson called over his shoulder. They’d arrived back in the town they’d staged from.

“Break out of your carries,” Mark ordered, and everybody dropped away their complex packs and weapons, the noise of it briefly filling the stuffy panel van. “Put us down at the motel,” he told Richardson.

“Got it.”

There would be no eulogies, not today. They’d all lost a friend and a hell of a soldier, and that hurt, and they were in the middle of a battle, and there was no time for the dead, not right now.

Mark saw that Knots was twisting his hands between his huge knees. “Hey,” Mark said softly, to telegraph his concern without embarrassing him.

Knotty smiled, but then his eyes stared into nowhere. Mark could imagine the thoughts of defeat, the sense of helpless rage. When that rage turned to apathy, and it would if they took many more hits like this, a good man would need to be rotated out.