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last man was in the helo. Matt slapped the skids.
    “Get out of here! Go go go !” he screamed over the noise of the engines as he went down on one knee in the dust, sighting through the Leopold VX III scope. Once, a long time ago, he’d been a sniper. Sniping skills are perishable, but he’d kept his up. Time went into combat slo mo. The dust and the noise and the confusion disappeared as he made the world narrow, then disappear. This shot mattered. It would be his last shot in this lifetime, and it had to be perfect. The old sniper’s mantra. One shot, one kill. Shooters shouldn’t have to shoot twice. In this case, he wouldn’t have a second chance, anyway.
    High low angle rule, he reminded himself. A rule he’d drummed into his recruits’ heads. Shooting up, aim high, shooting down, aim low. He was shooting up. He’d been running, and he knew his heart rate was topping 145 beats per minute, that red zone where motor skills drop, hearing is lost, and tunnel vision sets in. He’d trained for this and knew what to do, only it took some time. It would be a race to the finish because the tango was ready to fire.
    Matt needed his heart rate at 80 bpm, and he needed it there now . He rolled his shoulder muscles and took two deep breaths, relaxing all the major muscle groups as he shouldered the rifle.
    He was at a disadvantage. All of this worked in training and on the range. He’d trained his body to obey his cortex instantly. But the midbrain—the animal part of him that valued personal survival above honor and duty—was going haywire. It knew perfectly well that he was preparing to die, and it didn’t want any part of this. Matt wasted two perfectly good seconds tamping the midbrain monster down.
    He breathed in and out, bringing the heart rate down 20 bps with each breath. He had to shoot between heartbeats and between breaths.
    Now! He breathed slowly, in and out. In and out. In. And. Out. In and—he pulled the trigger—out.
    Seven hundred yards away a tiny figure flung its arms up and fell backward, taking the RPG with it. Fifteen other men on the hillside shouldered their rifles. It was the last thing he remembered. He spent the next three months in a coma and the month after that lying on a hospital cot staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks and water stains.
    Later, he was told that Fred “Goat” Pierce, who’d grown up on a ranch in Texas, had lassoed him just as he was crumpling to the ground. His unconscious, bleeding body had dangled for long minutes from the helo as the pilot banked and hauled ass out of there. He flatlined once they got him up onto the cargo deck, his system closing itself down in shock at the massive blood loss from five bullet wounds. He lost almost two pints of blood in the first minutes, and his heart had stopped beating by the time the medic, Morrison, got to him.
    Morrison refused to give up on him. He defibrillated him and pumped four bags of plasma into him, keeping him stabilized until they got back to base. He’d been airlifted to Ramstein, where a team of surgeons worked on him for eighteen hours straight, and when his vital signs had stabilized, he’d been airlifted—still in a coma—to the VA hospital. He’d first opened his eyes a month ago. He remembered the deep bass whump whump whump of the Huey’s rotors. He awoke to the sound of the EKG machine beeping and an orderly swabbing the corridor outside his room, softly singing a blues song. It had taken Matt several sweaty minutes to realize that he was alive and in a hospital and hadn’t been tossed into some scary hell reeking of disinfectant with puke green walls and cracked ceilings.
    There was someone else in the room with him—a silent figure almost completely wrapped in bandages from his head to the two stumps that ended about seven inches below his torso. Only his nose and his fingertips were visible. A jarhead, a nurse had said. Victim of an IED in Iraq. Double amputee. In the week that Matt