Okay, he was operational. All he had left was his sidearm. He got up and ran, heading toward where he thought the girl might be, north along the cliff face.

Behind him, the Little Bird launched its Hydra rockets toward Al Qaeda. Whoooosh! They screamed across the night, just above the ground, throwing insane shadows.

BOOM-BOOOOM! Double explosions as they both hit. Luke though he saw the remains of a body fly through the air.

An instant later, the chopper opened up with its M230 chain gun. The ugly metallic blat of automatic cannon fire was music to his ears. The thing fired armor-piercing, explosive thirty-millimeter rounds, designed to shred on impact—three hundred of them a minute.

Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh. Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.

Luke ran, gun in hand.

Somewhere ahead and to his right, he heard the telltale hollow bonk of the M-79 grenade launcher. Ed Newsam.

Doonk!

The gun made a launch sound all out of proportion to its destructive power. It sounded like it had just served a tennis ball. The grenade skidded across the dark on a nearly flat trajectory.

BOOOM!

Another bright explosion. The ground shook from it.

But the bad guys weren’t done. A missile fired, whistling this way.

BANG!

It hit somewhere behind him. He turned. The helicopter was hit.

“No,” he said.

An image came to him, the bad thing, all those guys in Afghanistan. Wayne. Martinez. Luke had convinced Jacob and Rachel to stay. Always, he was always convincing people to stay. That was Ed’s whole point, wasn’t it?

Jesus.

The auto cannon stopped firing. The chopper spun. It came down with a heavy metal crunch in the darkness, somewhere behind a low ridge.

Luke turned and kept running. There was nothing he could do for the chopper or the pilots. Up ahead, to his left, there was a spot of bright orange on the ground. He made for it, humping it over loose rocks and jagged edges.

There she was. It was her. She lay sprawled out, her body in an odd position, the kind of unnatural position Luke had seen too many times in war zones.

“Elizabeth! Are you alive?”

Her eyes popped open.

“American?” she said.

Luke nodded. “Yeah.”

“I’m playing dead.”

Luke’s shoulders slumped. All the breath went out of him. He nearly laughed.

“Good idea,” he said.

There was a sound behind him, breathing, feet running on gravel. He turned and it was a man—skinny, bearded—running with a rifle. Luke shot from the hip and put one in the man’s chest. The man kept coming, crashed into Luke and they tumbled to the ground. For a moment, they wrestled for the gun, but the strength ebbed out of the man.