“Jesus Christ…” Jim repositioned his night goggles and retrieved his weapons, then crawled through the sand to his boss.

“Matthias… oh, fucking A…”

The man’s lower leg looked like a root that had been torn up out of the ground, the limb nothing but a ragged stump that was shredded at the end. And there were patches of darkness on his fatigues that had to be blood.

Jim checked the pulse at the neck. There was one, but it was faint and uneven.

Unbuckling and shucking his belt, he cranked the leather around Matthias’s upper calf and pulled hard, torniqueting the limb. Then he quickly searched for other inj-

Shit. When Matthias had been tossed back, he’d fallen onto a wooden spike. The damn thing went right through him, the toothpick to his pig in a blanket.

Jim pretzeled up and tried to see whether it could stay in place to get Matthias out of here…

It appeared to be freestanding. Good.

“… Dan… ny… boy…”

Jim frowned and looked at his boss. “What?”

Matthias’s eyes opened like his lids were steel shutters he could barely raise. “Leave… me.”

“You’re blown to shit-”

“Leave me-”

“Fuck that.” Jim reached for his transistor and prayed that Isaac, not that freak second in command, answered. “Come on… come on…”

“What y’all needin’?” The soft Southern drawl coming over his earpiece was good news.

Thank God for Isaac. “Matthias is down. Bomb. Make sure we’re not target practice as we come into camp.”

“How bad?”

“Bad.”

“Where y’all at? I’ll get a Land Rover and pick you up.”

“We’re forty-six degrees n-”

The gun went off across the way, a bullet slicing through the air right next to Jim’s ear-to the point where he assumed he’d been hit in the head and the pain had yet to register. As he braced himself on one palm, Matthias let his SIG fall to the side… but what do you know, Jim did not fall over thanks to some kind of cranial wound. Warning shot, evidently.