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Rural border between Agusan del Sur and Davao de Oro, Mindanao, Philippines

“One hundred and ninety-two fucking inches of rain and we’re getting it all right now,” Dakota “Bear” Locklear drawled softly in that slow cadence that rolled off his tongue.

Mateo “Zorro” Martinez stared straight ahead.

They were on point, the rest of the team behind mopping up a previous firefight.

He grinned at the big man’s grouching. “Do you know how much South Dakota gets?”

The Philippines was an archipelago consisting of just over seven thousand islands, with three main islands: Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.

Bounded by the South China Sea to the west and the Philippine Sea to the east, it shared maritime borders with Taiwan, Japan, Palau, and Indonesia.

The country was a rich convergence of cultures, languages, and ethnicities and a hotbed of tectonic tension, sitting squarely on the fringes of the Pacific Ring of Fire.

Volcanoes. Earthquakes. A history shaped by upheaval.

But it was the jungle that made men disappear.

The region surrounding Agusan del Sur was a volatile stretch of thick, unforgiving green—remote, lawless, and riddled with decades-old insurgencies.

Nominally under government control, the area was, in truth, a patchwork of tribal territories, smuggling corridors, and militant strongholds.

Recent political instability, coupled with rising black-market trafficking in humanitarian supplies, had turned the jungle into a shadow war zone.

Visibility was poor, movement slow—where every step forward meant entering terrain where maps meant nothing, alliances shifted like mist, and danger came from above, below, and all sides at once.

Zorro worked at not laughing, and Bear was so annoyed. “No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“Sixteen. Well, sometimes more.”

“Doesn’t look like you’re embracing the SEAL motto, amigo .

” They were already six hours into a mission to rescue American hostage Henry Lucas, field communications specialist with Human Atlas, an international non-governmental organization, delivering trauma care access and logistical mapping to underserved and conflict-affected zones in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America.

They had already been in three firefights.

“Don’t start with me, Martinez.”

“But it’s always so much fun.”

“Fun is in the eye of beholder,” he muttered.

“Flint isn’t a big fan of water. Look at him.

He’s bedraggled.” Flint looked like a war-weary ghost of his usual sleek self.

His dark coat was soaked and dripping, ears pinned flat in visible disgust. Mud clung to his underbelly and legs like battlefield insult, and his tail gave a single halfhearted swish before he let out a long-suffering sigh.

He cut a glance up at Bear, eyes narrowed as if to say, We train for hell.

But this? Not even for the birds. No one wants to smell like a wet dog, bro.

“He’s a SEAL dog. You see the irony in that right, big man?”

“Of course I see that. Can’t change him, though. He’ll do what needs to be done, but he doesn’t have to like it. He thinks our motto, ‘only easy day was yesterday’ is a bunch of bullshit. In his opinion, there are no fucking easy days. Ever.”

Zorro muffled his laugh. “Goddammit, Bear. Stop using that dog to be passive/aggressive. We all know it’s your opinion.” The grin faded from Zorro’s mouth.

“Dammit,” Bear said, squeezing water out of his short braid. “Busted.”

Gunfire sounded in the distance. He, Bear, and Flint stopped moving. “Don’t these guys even break for dinner?”

Zorro depressed his comm. “LT, we've got contact, half a click away. Should we go around?”

“We stay on mission. Go around.”

“Copy that.”

The rain pounded them. Thick drops drummed against the canopy overhead, turning the jungle floor into a slurry of mud and moss.

Zorro moved in silence, eyes sweeping the undergrowth, his body lowered in a crouched stalk, Bear and Flint at his back, two shadows in the green, both continuing onward to rescue Lucas. Rain-slick, slow breaths, all edges.

Something in the air, beneath the pounding rain, made his medic’s instincts twitch. Pain. He could feel it before he heard it, a sixth sense. The kind he couldn’t always detect but still felt in his bones. The ragged hitch in breath. The silence that followed a scream.

In the chaos of combat, that instinct was everything.

He wasn’t just trained to kill. He was built to find the wounded during battle, to move toward suffering when everyone else ran from it.

Being a medic meant hearing what others missed, carrying what others couldn’t, and bleeding later after everyone else had stopped. "

Zorro froze mid-step. His hand shot up. Bear halted behind him, still as stone. He tilted his head, frowning into the noise. There . Just under the hiss of rain, a gasp . Ragged. Wet. Almost lost to the jungle. He held up two fingers, gesturing left.

“What is it?”

“Can Flint detect anything?”

“Wak?á??ka ,” Bear growled.

Zorro just grinned. “You calling me an idiot again?”

“If the moccasin fits.” The rest of the team had learned that word a while ago. “Yeah, reassess, kola . In this downpour? He can’t smell his own ass.”

Zorro bit his tongue to keep from losing it. “That’s a tragedy for Flint.”

“Right,” Bear agreed. “You hear something? I can’t hear shit.”

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

They shifted together through the ferns, low and fluid, until the shape came into view, a man slumped against the roots of a massive balete tree, camo soaked, blood darkening the soil beneath him.

Bear whispered, “How do you do that? Hear injured people when even a dog can’t detect the sound in this downpour?”

Zorro tilted his head. “It’s a gift.” The wounded man raised a trembling pistol when they approached. “ Vai embora! ” the man barked. “ Don’t come closer! ”

Zorro immediately dropped his rifle to low ready and raised his hand. “ Somos americanos, ” he said calmly, Portuguese rolling off his tongue. “ Amigos. Médicos. Viemos ajudar. ” We’re Americans. Friends. Medics. We’re here to help.

Bear held on to the dog, who growled low. “Flint,” Bear said, and he sat down on his haunches.

The kid’s arm wavered, then slowly lowered.

His breathing hitched, pain etching across his brow.

Guilt cut into him—Sam “Buck” Buckard had looked like that the last time he was in this steaming jungle.

Buck crumpled in the mud, skull fractured, and he hadn’t been there.

Zorro pushed it away and focused back on the kid.

He was young, maybe mid-twenties, with sharp cheekbones, dark eyes, and the signature black uniform of BOPE, Brazil’s elite Batalh?o de Operac?es Policiais Especiais .

Urban warfare specialists. Jungle-capable.

Known for storming favelas and walking into gunfire like it was a training drill.

This one didn’t look like he’d ever hesitated in a fight, but now, blood soaked his camo, and his mouth was tight with pain he hadn’t yet let show.

Zorro dropped beside him fast, boots sliding in the mud as he got one hand around the back of the young BOPE operator’s neck. He pulled off his vest, jerked up his shirt, too much blood pulsing from a gash just below the soldier’s ribs.

He was breathing fast. “ Nome? ” he asked, breath steady, swallowing hard. “ Miguel Sampaio. ” Another hard breath. “I speak English, and since we’re getting to know each other…it’s Migs.”

Zorro liked him instantly. Bleeding out and still cracking wise. Classic.

Bear chuckled. “Aren’t you a cool customer?” He inclined his head. “That’s Zorro, the pain in the ass who’s going to save your life. I’m Bear and this is Flint.”

Every second counted. Every breath he missed might be the one someone didn’t take. That was the thing about being the one who patched them up—when he failed, they didn’t get a second chance. If he wasn’t fast enough, strong enough, there enough, then maybe he wasn’t enough at all.

“Okay, Migs,” Zorro said, shifting his grip, not even bothering to give Buck a side-eye. He was a pain in the ass. “Let’s keep that heart of yours beating.”

The kid grabbed his vest in a tight grip, his voice urgent. “My team’s in trouble.”

Zorro kept working. “Where?”

“A click north , ” he rasped. “Pinned down. Running out of ammo. They’re going to die. I can show you.”

“Balls of steel. I like this kid,” Bear said.

“You’re not going anywhere right now.” Already moving, Zorro gave him his stern medic look and assessed the wound.

Behind him, Bear stepped back and keyed his comm. “LT, this is Bear. We’ve got a wounded BOPE soldier claiming his unit is pinned down about a click from our current position. Requesting permission to engage and support.”

Joker’s voice crackled back a beat later into Zorro’s ears. “Copy that. Mark your position. We’re less than five out. We’ll be there.”

Zorro leaned close to the BOPE soldier. “ Tell your leader. The Americans are coming.”

With a look of relief, Migs depressed his own comms, spoke rapidly, then nodded when he got the response.

“You’re lucky we got here in time,” Zorro muttered, mostly to himself. The pulse under his fingers was thready. This kid had minutes, maybe.

Zorro popped open a pouch on his vest and worked fast, slipping a pressure dressing against the BOPE operator’s soaked wound and clamping it down hard. The kid let out a sharp breath but didn’t scream.

“Good,” Zorro muttered. “You stay awake, you keep breathing.”

Injecting a coagulant and a small dose of painkiller into the thigh, just enough to slow the bleeding and keep him from passing out, he said quietly, “This will help.”

Migs nodded faintly.