Good for hiding, bad for everything else.
«Contact left!» Mitchell shouted.
Muzzle flashes sparked in the darkness. Rounds hit their vehicle with metallic pings. Not armor piercing.
Small arms. Rebecca kept reversing. Steady pressure on the accelerator.
No jerky movements on ice.
«Return fire,» she said.
«With what? I told you—»
«Your rifle.»
«Through the windshield? Your window works.»
Mitchell lowered his window. Snow blasted in. He leaned out, fired three quick bursts, and pulled back in.
«I don’t even know if I hit anything!»
«Doesn’t matter. They know we’re armed.»
She was lying. It mattered a lot. But Mitchell needed to believe they had a chance.
Behind them, Convoy Five materialized from the storm. It had rolled to a stop, hood crumpled against a tree. No movement inside.
Rebecca angled around it, giving the wreck a wide berth. As they passed, she saw the windshield. Saw what used to be the driver.
Mitchell saw it too. Looked away fast. More muzzle flashes.
Closer this time. They were being surrounded. Enemies moving through the storm.
Using the blizzard as cover. Smart. Coordinate the ambush when visibility was near zero.
Hit fast. Hit hard. Disappear into white.
The vehicle shuddered. Something heavy struck the side panel.
«Grenade!» Mitchell screamed.
Rebecca wrenched the wheel left. The vehicle slid, back end coming around. For a second they were sideways, completely exposed.
Then traction caught and they lurched forward. Behind them, the explosion lit up the night.
«They’re everywhere!» Mitchell was firing again, but his movements were jerky, panicked. Each shot meant one less round.
They had maybe two magazines left. That was it.
«Mitchell, stop shooting.»
«What?»
«Stop.»
He pulled back inside. Looked at her like she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had.
But ammo was finite, and enemies weren’t. You didn’t win this by shooting back. You won by staying alive long enough to think.
If winning was even an option anymore. The vehicle ahead of them—what was left of Convoy Two—suddenly shifted. Not from wind.
Someone was inside it, trying to get out. Rebecca watched the driver’s door open, watched a figure stumble into the snow. Sergeant Marcus Torres.
She recognized his build, his walk.
«Torres!» Mitchell shouted out the window. «Get in! Get in the…»
The shots came from nowhere and everywhere. Torres jerked, stumbled, and went down. The snow around him turned dark.
Mitchell made a sound that wasn’t quite human. «We have to get him. We have to.»
«He’s gone.»
«You don’t know that. We can’t just…»
«Mitchell.» Rebecca’s voice cut through his panic. «Look at me.»
He looked. She saw it in his eyes. The moment he understood.
Torres wasn’t getting up. None of them were getting up.
«We’re alone,» she said quietly. «No support. No backup. No cavalry coming.»
«So what do we do?»
Good question. Great question. The question that separated the living from the corpses.
Rebecca killed the engine.
«Haze? What are you…?»
«Quiet.»
In the sudden silence, she could hear it. Wind howling. Fire crackling from the burning vehicles.
And underneath that, almost hidden. Voices. Foreign words.
Movement through snow. They were being hunted. The hunters didn’t know she’d stopped.
Rebecca reached down, pulled the rifle from its mount between the seats. Checked the magazine. Twenty-eight rounds.
Mitchell had two more mags. Call it ninety rounds total. Plus her sidearm.
Fifteen more. A hundred and five bullets against an enemy force she couldn’t count, in a blizzard she couldn’t see through.
«Haze?» Mitchell whispered. «What’s the plan?»
She looked at him. Really looked at him. Twenty-two years old.
Fresh face. Probably had a girl back home. Probably wrote letters about coming home safe.
«You know how to hotwire a vehicle?» she asked.
«What? No. Why would I?»
«Then here’s the plan.» She handed him her sidearm. «You’re going to wait here. Engine off. Lights off.»
«Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. When the storm clears, you steal one of their vehicles and drive back to base.»
He stared at the gun like it was a snake. «What are you going to do?»
Rebecca grabbed Mitchell’s spare magazines, stuffed them in her jacket. Checked that her knife was secure. Looked at the white wall beyond the windshield.
«I’m going to make sure you get that chance.»
The cold hit her like a fist. Rebecca dropped from the vehicle and immediately lost sight of it in the blizzard. Snow caked her face, stuck to her eyelashes, worked its way down her collar.
The burning vehicles provided vague orange reference points. Four scattered fires marking where her convoy used to be. She moved away from the road, staying low.
Rifle up. Behind her, she heard Mitchell call her name once. Desperate.
She didn’t answer. Sound carried strange in a blizzard. Better he think she’d already vanished.
Ten meters into the storm, she nearly tripped over a body. Private James Chen. She’d shared a table with him in the mess hall.
He’d talked about his daughter. Three years old. Favorite color pink.
Rebecca kept moving. The tactical situation was simple. She was alone against an unknown enemy force that had just wiped out five vehicles.
They had the numbers. They had position. They had every advantage except one.
They thought they’d already won. She counted it out in her head. Four vehicles destroyed meant roughly twenty personnel dead or scattered.
If the ambush team wanted to be thorough—and they’d been thorough so far—they’d sweep the area. Make sure there were no survivors. No witnesses.
That gave her maybe ten minutes before they found Mitchell’s vehicle. She needed to buy him more time than that. Rebecca circled back toward the burning vehicles, using the flames for navigation.
The heat had melted the snow in rough circles around each wreck, creating zones of visibility. She avoided those. Stayed in the white.
Voices ahead. Foreign words. But the tone was clear.
Victorious. Casual. They were already celebrating.
She found a position behind a fallen tree. Brushed snow off the trunk. Laid prone.
The rifle settled against her shoulder like it had been there her whole life. In some ways, it had. Through her scope, shapes moved in the storm.
Four men. Maybe five. Hard to count.
They were checking bodies, taking weapons, stripping gear. One of them laughed. The sound carried clear across the snow.
Rebecca’s crosshairs found the laughing man’s center mass. Her finger touched the trigger. She thought about Montana.
About her father teaching her to shoot when she was eight. About the first deer she’d taken. How he’d made her field dress it herself.
How she’d cried. How he’d said: You take life. You honor it. You don’t get to look away.
She hadn’t looked away since. The rifle kicked. The laughing stopped.
For two seconds, nothing moved. The other fighters stood frozen, trying to process what had happened. One of their own was down.
But where had the shot come from? Rebecca worked the bolt. Acquired target two.
Fired. Now they were moving, scattering, shouting. Undisciplined.
Panicked. She’d have three, maybe four seconds before they organized. Before they located her position.
She used two seconds to drop target three. Used the last second to run. Behind her, automatic fire tore through the space she’d occupied.
The fallen tree exploded into splinters. But she was already gone. Swallowed by white, moving parallel to their firing line.
They’d expect her to retreat. She circled instead. Flanking in a blizzard.
Risky. Easy to get turned around. Easy to shoot friendlies, who weren’t friendly anymore, because everybody was dead except Mitchell and the enemy.
She counted steps. Fifty forward. Ninety left.
Stop. Listen. More voices.
Orders being shouted. They were trying to organize a search pattern. Smart.
Disciplined. These weren’t random insurgents. This was a trained unit.
Which meant they’d have a command element. Rebecca moved toward the voices. Low and slow.
Rifle tracking. Command element meant someone giving orders. Someone coordinating.
Take that away, and training didn’t matter. You were just scared men in a storm. She found them by one of the burning vehicles.
Six men. Clustered around a tactical map. Trying to use the firelight to see.
The leader—she assumed leader from how the others positioned themselves—was pointing. Dividing the area into search grids. Six was too many for a direct engagement.
But fire was indiscriminate. Rebecca circled to the vehicle’s fuel tank. Already ruptured.
Already leaking. The ground around it was soaked. Fumes mixed with smoke.
All it needed was ignition. She aimed at the metal near the tank. Not the tank itself; movies lied.
Bullets didn’t explode fuel tanks. But bullets did create sparks on metal. And sparks plus fumes equaled fire.