Chapter 6
Callaway shifted position, exposing half her shoulder to the ridge.
A round tore through her sleeve.
She didn’t flinch.
“Cover fire on my mark.”
Grayson grabbed her arm.
“You’ll get killed.”
Callaway finally looked at him.
“That was your plan for me five minutes ago.”
He let go.
Her words hit harder than any slap.
Callaway moved on the next burst.
She crossed the open ground low and fast, bullets cracking around her.
Ellis and two others fired over her.
The ridge answered.
Stone exploded near her boots.
She reached Miller, dropped beside him, and checked the wound.
“Look at me,” she said.
Miller was shaking.
“I can’t feel my foot.”
“That’s because your brain is panicking. Tell it to stop.”
He blinked through pain.
“Are you always like this?”
“Only when people are shooting at me.”
She tied a tourniquet hard enough to make him curse.
“Good,” she said. “Still alive.”
A fighter rose above the drone wreckage with a rifle pointed at her back.
Grayson saw him.
For one second, he froze again.
Then Callaway spun and fired from one knee.
The fighter dropped.
She looked at Grayson across the smoke.
“You want to help? Stop standing where they expect you.”
Something in him broke then.
Not his pride.
That came later.
This was deeper.
The realization that she was not trying to embarrass him.
She was trying to keep his men alive despite him.
Grayson moved.
He rallied the right flank.
He dragged a wounded soldier behind cover.
He finally listened.
Callaway guided the platoon into the irrigation cut on the east side of the valley.
Narrow.
Ugly.
Safe.
At 0430, extraction birds came over the ridge.
By then, the ambush had failed.
The drone core was secured.
Miller was alive.
May you like
No one in the platoon had been left behind.
Read Part 7 to see what happened when they returned to base and Grayson tried to blame her.
