Hit & Fade by Jason Anspach & Nick Cole

Author:Jason Anspach & Nick Cole [Anspach, Jason & Cole, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: WarGate Books
Published: 2021-03-31T13:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

That was when Tanner came and sat down next to me. Right there as Captain Knife Hand walked us through the op order and then we’d run the sand table. Just before that.

Yeah. My dead friend came and sat down right down next to me. So, here’s what you do when your dead friend, who you just watched get laid out in a body bag off in the trees a short way from where you and over a hundred of your best buddies are getting ready to go out and mess with the enemy on an epic scale in the night and all night long… sits down next to you.

You break out in a cold sweat.

Why? Because this isn’t real. This is fatigue. That dragging sensation you get when your body is so tired and you’ve been running on nothing but pure adrenaline for far too long and yet there’s no time to sleep because you’re basically in hostile territory and everyone wants to kill you real bad. It’s real. The Rangers knew it. The command team and the NCOs and a lot of the guys on the line knew it and had been here before in various conflagrations from across the Third World of the world, or time, we once came from. And here… here is when, or where, it gets the most dangerous. Really dangerous. Here’s when it’s life or death and you’re just trying to stay awake while you play with explosives and kill bad guys who are trying to kill you. Really weird bad guys.

Normally we would have had a replacement platoon escort the resupply to the rally point and then replace all of us that had just fought the night before. Rotating platoons to maximize effectiveness and prevent the sapping of ability due to overuse and—and not or—lack of sleep.

“I don’t care how hardcore you are,” the captain told us. A man who was undisputedly more hardcore than everyone else. Rumor was he’d done a stint in Delta. “Mistakes are gonna get made as the candle gets burned down good and tired out there. I know that going into this, Rangers. But there’s a reason we’re gonna bite off more than we can chew out there and ask a lot from every one of us.”

This was back when he was addressing us during the mission run-up, or the pump, as the Rangers called it. Going over why we’d be in the position we were now in. The reason for it. Just so there were no surprises.

“Combat is a marathon, Rangers,” he told us. “Not a sprint. We may have to speed up or slow down out there, but we have to plan for the long haul or normally a unit will just wear itself out. And even though this is a no-fail mission, we may have to fight two battles, and if the last battle does happen to occur, it’ll happen here.” This was back at FOB Hawthorn. “I want the Rangers we’re leaving

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