“I don’t care.” He spoke in a ragged whisper. “Take me.”

Take me instead of my son.

How many fathers through the millennia had cried out those same words?

Drew coughed and spat, catching his breath as he came to a lull in the upward sweep of the mountain. The summit was another thousand feet up, but he had no intention of going that far. In all his seventy-seven years, he had never operated on such blind instinct. He couldn’t stop himself-he had to be here, now, at this moment, asking questions, searching for answers.

He wasn’t an emotional man, but he couldn’t shake the fear that had gripped him since dawn.

He couldn’t shake the images.

The certainty.

I’m an old man.

Let me die in my son’s place.

As he eased among a dense grove of tall spruce trees, their branches drooping under the weight of the clinging, wet snow, he saw young men huddled, battling an unseen enemy.

He saw their blood oozing into the ground of the faraway land where they fought.

He heard their moans of pain amid the rapid, nonstop gunfire.

An ambush…

The vision wasn’t born of books and movies, and it wasn’t a nightmare to be chased off with daylight and coffee. It was real. Every second of it. Drew didn’t understand how the vision of his son in battle had come to him, but he trusted it-believed it.

It wasn’t a premonition. The attack on Elijah’s position wasn’t imminent-it was happening now.

Drew stood up straight, out of the worst of the wind. The ice had abruptly changed back to snow. Fat flakes fell silently in the white landscape, but he saw, as clearly as if he were there, the bright stars of the moonless Afghan night. Elijah never talked about his secret missions. He had joined the army at nineteen, without discussing his decision with anyone-not his two brothers, his sister, his friends.

Definitely not his father.

But there were reasons for that.