Chapter 4
Rachel was already adjusting.
One of the three made it forty meters off the road before it stopped being driveable. The second stalled on the embankment. The third reversed and put itself behind the disabled column, which was the safest place available to it, which was also the farthest from James.
James was still crawling.
He had covered another sixty meters in the time it took the convoy to reorganize, which meant he was now eighty meters from the base of the ridge, and the ridge was climbable at its base, and the men still trying to reach him on foot had to cross open ground to do it.
Rachel made crossing open ground expensive.
James reached the base of the ridge at 1631 hours. Rachel watched him through the scope for the ten seconds it took her to confirm that the remaining armed elements had made the operational decision to stop advancing into the fire that was coming from above them, and then she left the rifle on its bipod and went down.
The slope was loose shale and she went down fast, not elegantly, prioritizing speed over any consideration of personal dignity. James was sitting at the base with his bound hands in front of him and his back against the first solid rock he had found, and he was breathing in the deliberate way of a man managing pain that is significant but not currently his primary problem.
She reached him and crouched and pulled her field knife and cut the zip ties in one pass.
He looked at his hands for a moment. Then he looked at her.
"You weren't supposed to be here," he said.
"Neither were you," she said.
His mouth did something that might have been the beginning of a laugh, or might have been a response to the leg, which she was already assessing with her hands. The wound was through the outside of the thigh, which was not a good location but was not the worst available location, and he had not lost enough blood to make the next two hours impossible. She packed it with what she had in the trauma kit she carried in the left pocket of her pack and told him to put weight on her shoulder and push, because they had a ridge to clear before anyone down there organized a flanking approach that actually worked.
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They moved.
James did not talk on the climb. She did not talk on the climb. There was no conversation available that was better than putting altitude between themselves and the road, and they both understood this, and they climbed with the mutual efficiency of two people who had each survived things that made talking seem less urgent than it once had.
