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target fashioned into a gnarled oak tree just outside the door, and they watched movies on the big screen.
    And though it looked more like a dorm room at a Third World junior college than a home base for two of America’s most elite commandos, once a month or so when T.J. and Kolt ordered a mixed-martial-arts fight on Pay-Per-View and filled the fridge with cheap beer, their dump of a home became party central for themselves and their Delta mates.
    Raynor considered moving away when he left Delta—there was no reason for him to stay so close to Bragg. But he never really felt like he had anywhere to go, so he remained, waiting on some new direction or new plan to carry him away.
    For the past month the former Delta major had done little but lie around and brood, avoid phone calls from his parents and from the media who had gotten wind of his shootout with the African pirates, and drink himself to near oblivion.
    And he was drinking now. He lay back on the mattress, looked at the clock, and wished like hell that the night would not come so soon.
    Most nights he had the dream. If he was drunk enough before the dream, the images would be muddled, less crisp, less real, less nonfiction and more fiction. But it was evening already, he’d fall asleep before successfully pickling his brain, and he knew that this inability to be sufficiently shitfaced before bed, plus Doc Rudolph’s persistence in discussing the events of three years prior during today’s session, all but ensured that tonight’s dream would be stone-cold authenticity. History, not fantasy. Kolt would hear the sounds, feel the fear, smell the death.
    Relive the guilt.
    He chugged the Old Grand-Dad and began to cry. And he wished like hell he could stay awake all night so that he could avoid the motherfucking dream.

 
    FIVE
    Three Years Earlier
    Four pairs of hiking boots dug for purchase on the narrow mountain spur. Four pairs of wary eyes searched the dark distance for threats. Four men climbed onward and upward, sucked lungs full of thinning air, and ignored the churning snow that wetted beards and clothing, adding to the bone-soaked chill of their own sweat. Heavy packs and load-bearing vests, buckles and straps straining with gear, compressed spines and hampered balance.
    Though it was perilously steep and poorly marked, discovering this goat track had been a windfall for the team, even if using it was a gamble. Certainly crossing the mountains via an established trail was preferable to just humping overland, but the men had no illusions they were the only two-legged creatures on this path between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban, al Qaeda, donkey caravans of opium poppy or assault rifles, anyone with an illicit requirement to travel from one side to the other undetected, might well be just beyond the next rise.
    With a craggy limestone wall on his left and a sheer drop-off to oblivion on his right, the lone officer in the silent procession stopped. Thirty-four-year-old Major Kolt Raynor looked ahead into the darkness and surveyed his team. Master Sergeant Michael “Musket” Overstreet clambered up the trail twenty meters on, decked head to toe in high-tech mountain clothing in blacks and browns. He sported an impressive salt-and-pepper beard and wore a pakol, the local wool cap favored by Pashtun men in the region. Though heavily burdened with equipment, Musket showed no obvious strain. He pulled himself up the incline, his gloved hands grabbing and then pushing off the mossy rocks on the wall to his left, and then he looked back over his shoulder. Noticing his major’s halt, the master sergeant dropped to a kneepad and turned his attention to the wide valley arrayed off his right shoulder.
    Looking back now through the darkness and precipitation, Major Raynor could just make out Sergeant First Class Spencer “Jet” Lee moving up the mountain trail fifteen meters behind. He climbed carefully, reaching out to steady himself as he stepped onto an