Chapter 1
The forward operating base had no real name left.
We called it Dust Bowl because that was honest, and honesty was one of the few things the position had not yet stripped from us. Three months of sustained pressure had reduced the installation to sandbag walls, failing equipment, and a perimeter that seemed to contract slightly every morning when the sun came up, as though the desert itself was tightening around us. The radio tower had taken two direct hits and been repaired both times with components that were not quite right for the job. The water filtration unit ran at forty percent. The perimeter sensors threw false positives at three in the morning with enough regularity that the men had started treating them as alarms rather than information, which was precisely the kind of exhaustion-driven adaptation that gets people killed.
My name is Commander Ethan Brooks, and I had filed seventeen supply requests in six weeks and received four responses, two of which were denials and one of which was a form letter that did not reference anything I had actually asked for. The fourth was a delay notice for equipment I had stopped expecting to arrive.
I was standing outside the command tent at 0615, drinking the worst coffee of my twenty-two-year career, trying to calculate how many more days the position's math continued to work in our favor, when Sergeant Dale Morrow came around the corner of the communications shack moving faster than the situation called for. At Dust Bowl, fast movement meant something had gone wrong or something had arrived. In my experience, it usually meant both.
"Commander," he said, slightly out of breath. "We've got a visitor."
I waited.
"Enemy contact?"
"No, sir. Headquarters."
That got my attention fully.
"They sent us sniper support."
I turned toward him and looked at his face for the part where he explained this was good news. I did not find it.
"Why do you look like that?"
He shifted his weight. "You should probably just come see."
I followed him past the motor pool, where two mechanics were performing surgery on a vehicle that had stopped believing in its own future sometime around Tuesday, and around the communications shack to the main gate. A cluster of men had gathered there, not in the way they gather when danger arrives, but in the way they gather when something has given them permission to stop thinking about danger for thirty seconds. Laughter had become rare enough at Dust Bowl that it drew a crowd.
She stood just inside the gate with her hood still up and a rifle case in her right hand. The case was old — latches worn to bare metal, corners scuffed in ways that suggested the case had seen more of the world than most of the men laughing at it. She was not small. She was not the kind of person who read as immediately imposing. She was the kind of person you might look past twice before registering that something about her did not match the environment around her.
Morrow had apparently started his inspection before I arrived.
"She came in on the resupply run," he announced, loud enough for the crowd. "No escort. No advance notice. Told the gate sergeant she's our sniper support."
May you like
Corporal Tate, eighteen months in-country and still young enough to believe that making his sergeant laugh was the same thing as judgment, called out from the edge of the crowd.
"Commander, you should see what she's got on her wrist."
