“Four,” Bell said stiffly.
Shit. Four minutes was an eternity. But Ann simply nodded. She was too well trained to show any dismay to those under her command.
The next four minutes were the longest of her life. The shots were getting closer as Wakil’s followers crept nearer to their location, as if they knew this was their last chance to kill or capture their enemies.
The plan was for the Blackhawk to land a hundred yards beyond where the first one had. They didn’t want to come in the same way to throw off the insurgents. That meant Ann and her men had to cross a narrow ledge along the ridge to get to the landing zone. They’d be sitting ducks for a sniper, but it couldn’t be helped.
Ready? she signed to the others. Using sign language was as natural to Ann as breathing. She’d learned it as a child and it was a very effective way to communicate with her men when in situations where they couldn’t hear each other or were too far away to talk safely. The first team she’d commanded had balked at learning the simple signs, but after an especially harrowing mission, they’d finally seen the benefits. From there on out, Ann had taken it upon herself to teach everyone under her command as much sign language as she could.
Mack and Gabe signaled back that they were ready, and Bell agreed from next to her.
“Thirty seconds,” Bell warned a minute later.
“Go!” Ann signed to Mack and Gabe. As she and Bell laid down cover fire, the other two men scrambled up and headed across the narrow ledge. Ann held her breath until they were across. She saw Gabe give her the all clear.
“Your turn,” she told Bell. “I’ll cover you and when you get to the other side, you do the same.”
She could see the hesitation in his eyes, but Ann hardened her voice. “Go,” she ordered.
The sergeant nodded and headed for the ledge. The communication pack over his head and shoulder was bulky and he couldn’t move as fast as his teammates.
Ann saw a sniper lie down and aim at Bell.
“Oh, hell no,” she muttered as she took aim herself. As Mack and Gabe did their best to keep Wakil’s men from hitting their teammate, Ann took a deep breath, then pulled the trigger of her own weapon.
Swamped with relief when she managed to take out the sniper before he could get a shot off, Ann readied herself to cross the narrow ledge. She could hear the Blackhawk coming in fast and hard in the distance. She didn’t have much time.
As she stood up to run across the ledge, the unmistakable sound of an RPG being fired registered.
Between one second and the next, the rocket-propelled grenade hit dead center on the ledge she’d been about to cross. If she’d left five seconds earlier, she would’ve been blown to bits along with the side of the mountain.
Swearing, she heard the soldiers in the chopper firing their own RPG back at the insurgents. When the dust cleared enough, Ann saw that there was no way to join her teammates. There was literally a hole in the side of the mountain, cutting her off from them and the rescue chopper.
Clenching her jaw, Ann watched as Gabe, Mack, and Bell practically threw themselves into the opening of the helicopter. She saw Mack turn toward her before he signed.
What he was proposing wasn’t likely to work, but she literally had no other choice. It was take a chance or be killed. And Ann wasn’t ready to die.
She signed her understanding back and took a deep breath. She might not be ready to die, but death didn’t take a person’s hopes and dreams into consideration.
Ann lifted her weapon over her head and dropped it to the ground. She unstrapped her helmet and wiped more blood from her field of vision. She took off anything that might hinder her range of motion or weigh her down. She didn’t worry about leaving her gear behind for the insurgents to recover. A few weapons wouldn’t help their cause one way or another.
Keeping her eyes on the helicopter, she saw it begin to fly away, then held her breath as it made a sharp turn, laying down suppression fire as it came roaring back toward where she was standing.
Two soldiers leaned out of the open door and held out their hands.
Thirty feet. Twenty-five. Twenty feet. Fifteen feet. Ten.
This was it.
The pilot had gotten the chopper as close to the edge where she was standing as he could. The ten feet seemed more like a hundred, but Annie didn’t even hesitate. She’d been jumping and climbing on obstacle courses for as long as she could remember. This was a piece of cake.
Ann had room to take three running steps before she was flying through the air. Her arms outstretched. Her eyes glued to the hands reaching for her.
Everything else faded. The gunshots. The yelling. The sound of the helicopter.
For a split second she didn’t think she was going to make it. That she would fall two feet short of her goal. But unlike any of the obstacle courses she’d gone through in the past, if she fell, it would be to her death.
It was only seconds, but it seemed like an eternity before she felt herself slam against the chopper. The pain was immense, but Ann barely registered it as her body began to slip backward. Scrambling for purchase, her legs dangling over the edge of the opening, Ann felt a split second of panic before her arms were caught in iron-tight grips.
She was dragged onboard by the two soldiers at the door even as the chopper banked and accelerated, hauling ass out of the valley.
Taking a deep breath, and regretting it as her cracked ribs made themselves known, Ann looked up, meeting the gazes of her teammates.
“Holy shit, Fletcher!” Bell breathed.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that before,” Gabe said.
“Balls of steel,” Mack said with a shake of his head.
“You all right, Captain?” one of the men who’d hauled her onboard asked.
“Peachy,” she told him.
“Hang on!” the pilot yelled as the chopper tilted suddenly to the right.
Ann closed her eyes. She knew she should get up and help however she could. But at the moment, she was too relieved to be alive. That had been close. Too close. She hadn’t had much chance to think about anything other than surviving for the last six hours, but in that moment, it all came crashing down.
She had to keep it together, but all she could think about was how close she’d come to losing everything.
Including a future with the man she loved.
For the first time ever, doubts about what she was doing with her life struck her—hard.
For as long as she could remember, Annie had wanted to serve her country. To make a difference like her dad had. Like his Delta Force team had done. She wanted to save lives, not take them, although she understood that being a part of an elite Special Forces team like the Green Berets meant she’d occasionally have to kill the enemy.
She wanted to prove to her father, all her honorary uncles, and to herself that she could do this. Wanted to make them proud.
But as she lay on the floor of the chopper after literally making a once-in-a-lifetime jump, Ann suddenly couldn’t help but wonder what in the hell she was doing. Was this really what she wanted to do for the next fifteen or more years? Was this how she potentially wanted to die? Broken and bleeding thousands of miles from those she loved? If she died on a mission, no one would know exactly what happened. It was a fact of life for a Special Forces soldier.
Confusion muddled her brain. This was what being a Green Beret was all about. Taking risks to keep the world safe from dictators and terrorists who wanted to bring harm to innocents. But was she really making a difference? Even if they’d killed Wakil, there would be someone ready and willing to take his place. Wars had been fought since the dawn of time…was anything she was doing really that important in the grand scheme of things?