Page 8 of My Forbidden Commander

Rear security is honest work. It is also not where you put your best shooter on a route where the enemy stacks its ambushes against the front of the column.

I cross out my name at the bottom of the order of march. I write it in second position, right behind Okafor, where a rifle like mine belongs. Then I initial it—NR, small and neat—right underneath the square block letters of GW.

Is it insubordination? Not technically. It’s a written suggestion on a laminated board that exactly one man on this base reviews.

He’ll see it before 0500. He’ll come find me, or he’ll have Okafor drag me in by the collar, but either way I’ll be standing in front of those gray eyes again with a door held open between us.

And then I’ll know.

If he tears me apart like a colonel, I imagined the whole thing, and I’ll eat the mud in trail position and grow up a little.

But if his voice drops.

If he steps in close and forgets to step back…

I pocket the grease pencil and walk back to the barracks through the mud, and I’m smiling again. The same idiot smile from last night.

5

GABRIEL

Ireview the patrol board every night at 2200. It’s the last thing I do before my bunk, the way some men say their prayers.

Tonight, the board has something to say back.

My flashlight beam crawls down the laminated order of march. Okafor on point. Delgado, Spencer. Hayes, Petrillo. And there, in grease pencil, a name crossed out at the bottom and rewritten in second position.

NR. Initialed. Right under my own.

I stand in the rain for a long moment and let the anger come. A specialist with four minutes in theater edited a patrol order signed by a full colonel. In some units that’s an Article 15. In others, it’s a career headstone.

Then the anger burns down, and what’s underneath is worse.

He’s right.

Trail position is where I put men I don’t trust, and Reyes shoots better than anyone on this base, including me, and the Dravosians stack their ambushes against the front third of a column, because that’s where the leadership walks. Any objective commander puts Reyes exactly where Reyes put himself.

I didn’t. I stuck him in the back and told myself it was about trust.

Reyes saw right through it. Twenty-three years old, barely a day on my base, and he read me like a range card, then wrote his answer on my board and initialed it so I’d know exactly whose hand held the pencil. As if there’d be any doubt.

I wipe his edit off the laminate with my thumb.

Then I rewrite the order of march.

He reports to the ops hut at 0450. I sent Okafor to wake him at 0445, and while that’s not exactly tactically wise, there’s a specific kind of pleasure in stealing forty minutes of his sleep. Reyes comes through the door in full kit, face still creased from the pillow, and stands at something close enough to attention that I can’t ding him for it.

I let him look at me across the map table.

“You want to tell me about the board, Specialist?”

He doesn’t miss a beat. “I made a written suggestion, sir.”

I take a slow breath. “You altered a signed patrol order.”

“I altered a laminated one. Grease pencil wipes off.” His eyes flick to my thumb, to the gray smear I didn’t fully scrub away, and one corner of his mouth twitches in a way that’s just criminal. “Sir.”

I come around the table, moving slowly. Reyes holds his ground like he held it at the range—chin level, weight even. This close, I can see his pulse beating in his throat, quick and steady.