Page 117 of What I Should Have Done

Rolling sideways, I threw my attacker off with my hips, immediately taking the top mount. Ripping the knife from his arm, I cocked my hand back. “Six women in the same room as the children,” I radioed through the comms. The blade hissed through the air, aimed for his throat.

“Tank, Bernie, report,” Dom replied in my ear.

The squelch of the knife splitting flesh and muscle was a distant sound beneath my hand when I caught sight of a shadow standing behind the crowd of kids.

“Tank? Bernie? Report,” Dom radioed again. But there was no response.

Eyes of death stared back at me.

As I buried the knife to the hilt, my fingers twisted the blade, a mindless secondhand thought to the face staring back at me. But it wasn’t so much the fact that Karim-al Jabari was standing like a fucking coward behind children that held my gaze.

It wasn’t the fact that he gestured to the women cowering in the corner, requiring them to come closer to him.

The apprehension that stilled my movements was the explosives strapped to his chest.

“Target in sight. With the hostages,” I radioed.

“Tank, Ber—” Dom started again and then his radio was cut short. Glancing to my left, I found Dom pinned to the ground beneath four insurgents, the barrel of a gun pointed at his chest. But I had no chance to respond as blunt metal rammed against the back of my head.

My world went black.

Chapter 40

SCOTTIE

With a final heave, I thrust a knife into the throat of my last assailant. The squelch as the blade plunged just below his Adam’s apple pierced loudly like a war drum announcing death to our opponents. Why was it so loud? There should’ve been shouting and grunting to muffle my blow. There should’ve been gunfire and the sounds of sinking ships sailing to the underworld.

Panting, drawing air through what felt like a thin straw, I raised my gaze from the dead body at my feet. A gasp slipped from my mouth. There was no way. No possible way. My team never gave up. My team…

Scurrying back to my corner, I tucked into the shadows. Fear ripped like hot iron through my veins.

Below me was a pool of death. Bodies strewn at angles and in ways that will forever haunt the deep recesses of my mind. But as every strained breath slipped through my esophagus, devastation seeped into my pores.

Mikey lay face down, unmoving with a single insurgent standing over him. Blood dripped from a gash in the back of his head. Unconscious.

To the right of Mikey, knelt Dom. His hands restrained behind his back with two rifles pointing at his head. Three final assailants were alive and had bested two of my teammates.

“Fuck off,” Bernie’s unusually flat voice sliced through the air, spinning my attention away from Mikey and Dom. Emerging with a clang from the armory came Bernie and Ford, stumbling with their hands shackled behind their heads. Four more insurgents followed, not nearly as covered in blood as the rest of my team.

Despite the massive blow we’d delivered it had not been enough.

We’d failed.

I’d failed to keep my team secure.

“You pisshats,” Ford grumbled, and one of his captors kicked him in the back of his knees. He collapsed to the ground, kneeling away from me, just as Dom was. Facing the very room that Mikey and Dom had tried to get to.

Slipping silently down from the boxes I was seated on, I laid flat on my belly. Cool metal bit through my uniform, raising goosebumps on my thighs as I packed my rifle back into my shoulder. Through the scope, I scanned the far side of the compound again. There was a reason that Bernie, Dom, and Ford all faced away from me. There had to be a reason that they weren’t dead just yet.

Yet…

Swallowing stiffly, my heart raced in my chest as Mikey groaned, but a boot to the back of his neck had him falling still again without a fight.

No Karim. No airstrike was possible. No extraction of the hostages. There were women in that room too, but from this angle, I’d only seen a few feet filter into view behind a row of children.

“You’ve lost,” came a voice I recognized. A sound that would forever be seared into my brain because, at one point, I’d thought that man had been the cause of Mikey’s death. My stomach plummeted like hard stone to the ground. Adrenaline seeped through my veins, the stench of drying blood and dying flesh permeated thick through the air.

Karim al-Jabari was in that room. Yet, no matter where I pointed my rifle, no matter what I looked at, I couldn’t see him. I was useless to my team.

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