Diaz sighted him, gnashed her teeth, and willing herself into a being of pure steel, frozen, unmoving against the wind, she squeezed the trigger.

Chapter Ten.

NORTHWEST WAZIRISTAN

AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN BORDER

JANUARY 2009

Staff Sergeant Jose "Joe" Ramirez had his eye on the remaining guard, whose head snapped back as he tumbled to the snow. The last thing that had gone through the guard's mind was 7.62 mm long, weighing 21.8 grams, and Ramirez gaped over Diaz's outstanding shot.

Captain Mitchell barked his order to move out, and Ramirez and Sergeant Marcus Brown sprang up from the snow like thawed zombies and charged toward the houses.

It felt good to run. For a while Ramirez thought his legs and a few other more important parts were going to freeze and crack off.

They reached the door of the farthest house, and Ramirez dragged what was left of the guard's body out of the way so that he and Brown could position themselves on either side of the warped wooden door.

Captain Mitchell would join them in a minute, while Diaz was booting her way through heavy snow to reach her secondary position.

The houses were only about four meters apart, so if they made any serious noise, the Taliban guys next door were sure to come out--or at least begin writing letters to their homeowners' association complaining about the noisy neighbors firing all those guns. This was the part about being a Ghost that frustrated Ramirez. If they could just blow the other two houses while simultaneously raiding the last one, they'd only have four bad guys to deal with. However, most of the really fun explosives tended to be a little noisy, and the team was supposed to get in and out without drawing attention. If they could change their name to Big Loud Badasses, they could awaken the pyromaniac in every operator. He'd even pitched the idea to a few colleagues who'd smiled, said they liked the name, and told him he was a fool.

As a kid growing up on the streets of North Hollywood, California, he'd had ample opportunity to get into trouble and develop a taste for blowing things up.

But it hadn't gone down that way. Not at all. His parents had immigrated from Mexico and had held fast to the old ways. He couldn't relate to them or to the kids running the streets. So he retreated into himself, got into ham radios, and talked to people all over world.

During high school he flourished on the ever-growing Internet but lacked the social skills to have any close friends. By the time he graduated, he was part of a hacker community that, well, got him into a little trouble. Petty stuff, initially, but his "skillz" soon implicated him in a case of identity theft that left him staring into the eyes of a North Hollywood detective, Ms. Roberta Perez, who took him under her wing, got him off of some serious charges, and suggested that he join the army before he did something even more stupid.

Perez's brother Enrique was in the army, and he sat down with Ramirez to explain that the military wasn't just for people who couldn't hack it in society like Ramirez had thought.

Ramirez wouldn't lie and say that the army didn't have its share of dummies and criminals (like most government-run organizations), and he had encountered a few of those exceptional individuals during boot camp. But his time in boot was life altering. His drill sergeant, Paul "Papa" Montgomery, had taken a liking to him, and, after driving him to within an inch of death, Montgomery had practically ordered Ramirez to apply for Ranger School.

Long story short, he was accepted and served two tours right here along the border and had already won the Purple Heart and a Silver Star--all while working on his undergraduate degree in history.

And then some administrators at Officer Candidate School got the bright idea to offer him a desk job.

Were they kidding? They'd advertised it like a promotion, even hinted that he was getting a little old for the battlefield. He was now only thirty-one.

Ramirez had tried to be polite, saying what an honor it was to be offered a desk job after engaging in some of the most exciting, adrenaline-pumping operations known to mankind. Yes, what an honor it would be to replace ink-jet toner cartridges and squint at applications files stored via outdated software instead of thwarting the efforts of those who wanted to terrorize and control others.

All right, so maybe he wasn't exactly polite. His wiseass attitude and keen sense of humor were the products of years of living in the field and contending with the great ironies of life. The high school introvert had finally grown up.

It was Lieutenant Colonel Harold "Buzz" Gordon himself, a member of one of the first Ghost teams and now a legend, who had rescued Ramirez from the world of simulated wood grain and stress balls. While some called Gordon "the old man," Ramirez was more fond of "O-G," not for "Original Gangsta" but for "Original Ghost." Lieutenant Colonel Gordon, the O-G, was a man of impeccable taste and unparalleled foresight, in Ramirez's humble opinion.

And Ramirez felt certain that Captain Mitchell had picked him for this mission because of Gordon's recommendation and because of his Ranger experiences in the region. Ramirez was intimately familiar with the people and the terrain. While his Dari and Pushtan weren't bad--never as good as Diaz's--his Arabic was pretty impressive. He even knew a little slang that could incite some folks.

He glanced over at Marcus Brown, who, despite being a burly African-American rising some six feet four inches, appeared lean and white, his face half obscured by his breath.

Seeing how intense Brown was made Ramirez want to lower his weapon and start unzipping his fly--but he thought better of trying to get a laugh now. Sometimes he took the humor too far.

The captain stole his way toward them, then hunkered down behind Ramirez as Diaz, with her mild Texas accent, cut in over the radio, "Ghost Lead. I'm in my secondary. Good to go. Waiting for you."

They were seconds away from initiating the raid, and in his mind's eye, Ramirez went over the interior of the house one more time.

The structure was rectangular, single-story, just a thousand square feet if that. The door was positioned on the left side, forcing them to move deep into the house, past a partitioning wall to get to their package.

Two of the four Taliban were lying in the forward room, near the fireplace, while the other two were in back, in the colder part of the house with the hostages.

This complicated things. They couldn't ram through the door, shoot the first two guys, and hope the guys in the back wouldn't kill the friendlies.

They had to get into the house quietly, dematerializing and walking through the walls, then returning to normal inside.

Damn, it'd be nice to have that power.

Instead it was up to Ramirez to kneel down, fish out his tool pouch, and begin picking the lock.

And no, the door was not unlocked. He always checked that first.

"Ghost Lead, this is Diaz. I got one coming out of the back house. He's stopping, lighting up a cigarette."

In five seconds that guy could round the corner and spot them. Ramirez almost had the lock.

"Diaz, can you take him out?" asked the captain.

"It's not clean. He's in a bad spot. And he seems a little weird now, might be getting ready to look for his buddy. I don't have a shot. No shot."

"Brown, go get him," ordered the captain.

Although Sergeant Marcus Brown was born and raised in the windy city of Chicago, he and cold weather still had a hate-hate relationship. The blood had never thickened, he liked to say. He was a rebel to the core, battling against his parents, nature, and the entire universe. He wouldn't have it any other way.