Page 1 of Traitor

Prologue

Ford

Past - Somewhere in the fuckin’ desert

Despite it beinghot as the devil’s ballsack, my guts twist with an icy apprehension that can’t mean anything good.

There’s nothing as far as my night vision goggles can see but dust, scrubby little plants, and huge towering dunes. The village we’re surveying is dead quiet, which should be reassuring, but it isn’t. It makes years of instincts honed by training scream with unease.

A cold sweat coats my back, reminding me all too vividly of the time we were ambushed on my first deployment, which feels like a lifetime ago. I’d had the same frozen ball of dread in my stomach then, too. I had no sway as a grunt then. I couldn’t tell my command we should turn back because I was worried. I couldn’t have saved my friend, Scott, who lost a leg on that mission and nearly lost his life.

But I can today.

In the years since the explosion, I’ve been deployed multiple times. I rose through the ranks in the infantry until I joined the Marine Special Operations Command (MARSOC) as an operator. The day Scott was injured didn’t only change his life, it changed mine, too. I’d been coasting along in the military, uncertain of what I wanted, where I was going. When I woke up in a German hospital with a severe concussion and a broken arm, with my friend hovering near death, I knew one thing: I wouldn’t let it happen to anyone else.

I was a headstrong shit back then, that's for damn sure.

If I’ve learned anything since then, it’s that no one, but no one, can control what happens under the cover of night. Not even the men with guns and enough tactical training to choke a camel. I do my level best, though, and I like to think it makes a difference.

On a night like this, it brings to mind all the reasons why running headfirst into trouble is never a good idea.

But of course, we do it anyway.

I give a prearranged signal to my second in command, Callum “Cal” Reese, who speaks into his mic, directing the rest of the team to their designated checkpoints. Snipers to the high ground, breachers to the front. The same well-oiled machine we’d become for the past seven months since being assigned to what Cal affectionately dubbed Camp “Hellhole.” Each team is different, depending on mission objectives, but five of the guys I’ve deployed with before. Reuniting with them almost felt like coming home. I’m not sure when an Afghani wasteland started to become my reprieve and home became the place I wanted to escape.

“Creepy,” Cal says, and I nod in agreement.

“I’d be enthused if it didn’t feel like a fucking horror flick.”

“Dun-na, dun-na, duna duna duna,” comes one of our snipers, Killian “Kill” Burke. His partner, James Murdoch, sniggers.

Movement from the village quiets us all and in seconds intense focus descends. Our mission for tonight’s excursion is to clear the village and capture it for our own, along with any enemy objectives or intel. A second team, led by my good buddy, Ryan Tate, will be doing the same, but from the south side of the village. I glance back to our intelligence officer and possibly the most intimidating of our team, Dean Tyler, who nods, confirming Tate’s signal. Behind him a group of support Marines and Afghani military stand ready. They’ll clear each building while we scope ahead for any high-value targets.

The squat little buildings are pressed together, some crumbling from decades of neglect and small-level warfare between battling regimes, others have already disintegrated to dust, husks of their former selves. There are times when I get the feeling I’m stuck in an ancient era at the ends of the earth, when you’ve seen nothing but mud huts and caves for weeks on end. Probably why going home at the end of each deployment is such a shock.

There’s nothing like being covered in blood and brain matter one day and being asked why you aren’t laughing along at your welcome home barbecue the next.

I push those thoughts, and my own niggling doubts, to the back of my mind as we slowly, carefully, move closer to the village. My team and Tate’s depend on me to be focused and ready for any eventuality. Including the worst.

Cal arranges himself supine next to my position beside an outcropping of rock on the perimeter of the village. He readies his high-powered sights and scans the area as I call in an update to the rest of the team and the support fifty yards back, positioned in a ravine. When I’m done, I look back to him and he shakes his head.

No outward sign of danger, but that doesn’t mean it’s not lurking in the shadows, waiting for us to make our move.

Most villagers have already abandoned this settlement and the ones who are left sure as hell don’t want us coming in and taking over, but we have a job to do and lives are always on the line, on both sides. If we don’t move in now, intel villagers have or targets they’re hiding may cost lives, both American and foreign. Tens, hundreds, thousands. It’s a guessing game, in the end, and we do what we can to protect that loss of life, even if it costs us our own.

“Move out,” I order and Cal, Kill, James, and Dean shift in sync without question.

Kill and James crouch down, shadows blending with the pitch-dark sky on rooftops in the distance. Cal and I move on opposite ends of the village, followed by Dean in the back with our support.

Seconds after I clear the first line of buildings, shots ring out against the night, and I hear a short scream followed by the sound of meat and bone colliding with the hard-packed dirt underneath my feet.

“Two guards neutralized,” Kill says into the mic, and I don’t need the reminder to know he earns his nickname with each mission.

As I progress through the village with a small group of Marines, we clear the buildings one by one. After an hour of this, I start to feel like the mission is a wash. There are no high-value targets, no valuable intel to be gleaned. All in all, it’s a fairly easy mission compared to most. More importantly, aside from the two kills at the onset, no significant loss of life. Tate’s team, according to Cal, reports the same.

The constant rapport of flashbangs can be heard in the distance as Tate leads his own team in a mirror pattern. Throughout it all they keep me updated through the mic. Soon, we reached the opposite end of town.

Dean appears, face trickling with sweat and flushed red, followed by Kill and James. Marines and Afghani military crouch beyond, faces bleached of color and drawn from lack of sleep. I don’t blame them. I’m going on thirty hours without hitting my bunk, but the only thing you can do is keep pressing forward.