CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE FOREST WAS SILENT, the constant chirp and scream and rustle of native wildlife unnaturally still. Beneath the trees it was impossibly dark. Even if there had been a break in the thick foliage high above their heads, a steel gray sky would have made it hard to see.
Alf’s men had taken the forward line. They were charged with observing and reporting back. Clovis’s ex-Marines waited silently, their stillness matching the unnatural silence of the densely forested area around them.
The radio in Clovis’s hand crackled and Alf’s voice emerged, brief, hushed, and filled with the urgency Clovis had been expecting.
“I have eyes on Mortar One.”
Clovis grinned at Dolfe. His cousin chuckled softly. Brick would kill them when they told him what his code name had been. He com
