Perfect recon man. Former sniper on our team. Best shot I saw in twelve years of service.
Shade could hit a matchbox at 650 yards. In the southern mountains he dropped a militia commander from a distance they measured three times because nobody believed it. After the service Ian withdrew from people.
His wife left him after his fourth deployment. He took a job as a night watchman on an abandoned construction site in a small town outside the city. Lived in a trailer, hunted deer, talked to crows.
Avoided people. But for his own, he’d do anything. His phone rang a long time.
I was about to assume he was out in the woods with no signal when on the eleventh ring I heard a click. Silence. Then a quiet, flat voice: “Go ahead.”
“Ian, it’s Alpha. Code red.” Silence again.
I could hear wood popping in a stove on his end, and somewhere in the distance a crow calling. Then Shade said, “Where?” I gave him the address.
“Two days,” he said. “Long drive.” Then after a pause: “What do I bring?”
“Everything,” I said. “Copy.” Click.
Silence. Third was Liz. Elizabeth Carter. Call sign: Viper.
Yes, our team had a woman. The only woman in the whole battalion. Former combat medic.
Small. Five foot three. Thin.
Short hair and eyes the color of swamp water. Cold and watchful. Liz came to us as a replacement after our original medic was killed by a mine, and she stayed for good.
She stitched us up in the field under fire, cussing hard enough to make grown men grin through pain. She could stop an arterial bleed with one hand and fire a sidearm with the other. In the southern mountains she dragged a wounded Bulldog out from under fire—270 pounds of him—over rock for two hundred yards.
Two hundred seventy pounds. Five foot three. Nobody knows how she did it, including her.
After the service Liz came back to our city and took a job at an urgent care trauma clinic. She knew the city like the back of her hand. Every block, every alley, every flop house, every brothel, because EMS goes everywhere and medics see what nobody else sees.
Liz answered immediately, like she’d been waiting for the call. “Alpha?” Her voice caught. “You out?”
“I’m out,” I said. “Code red. Liz, I need you, your map of this city, and your contacts. Everything.”
Silence for a beat. Then she said, “I already know why you’re calling. I treated Emily.”
“The ambulance brought her in on my shift. I saw what they did to her. I’ve been waiting for you to get out. I’ll be there in two hours.”
Two days later we were sitting in the garage. Four of us around a rusted workbench, and instead of tools there were photographs spread across it. I laid out the pictures of Emily from the hospital, the ones Liz had taken on her phone.
I set them down without a word and stepped back. Let them speak for themselves. Bulldog stared in silence.
His huge fists opened and closed rhythmically, like pistons. The veins in his neck stood out so hard it looked like the skin might split. Then he stood, walked to the concrete wall of the garage, and punched it.
Once. The wall cracked. Blood ran from his knuckles and he didn’t even notice.
He turned to me and said three words: “Who did this?” Shade didn’t move. He sat on an upside-down bucket with his arms folded, studying the photos with the same calm expression he used to study targets through a scope.
But I knew him. I saw the tips of his ears turn white. Sure sign Shade was ready to work.
He took a folding knife from his pocket and started rolling it slowly through his fingers. Didn’t say a word. He didn’t need words.
Liz picked up one photo, held it to the light, and started reading the injuries the way a surgeon reads an X-ray. “Cheekbone. Right-handed strike. About two hundred pounds of force. Trained hitter.”
“Ribs. Typical pattern for repeated kicks while the victim was on the ground. At least two men working at once”…
