Ben winced as another bomb screamed overhead. He'd heard them a thousand times on television. TV people made it sound like the bombs whistled, like a teapot finishing up its business on the stove or something. He'd been here on the ground for two years now. He knew better. There was nothing comforting or homelike about the sound coming from overhead.

He braced himself for impact and rode out the shockwave. A box of supplies tumbled from a shelf to his left. No one picked it up. They didn't have anyone who could. Ben was short-staffed as it was. Most of the nurses and the rest of the doctors had fled already.

"Clamp that down," he ordered. "Don't let go."

The nurse, a local, nodded. Aziza would be the last one to turn out the lights here, or at least she would be if they had any left. She had nowhere else to go. She'd lost her family, her children, her husband. She had no one else. The organization was trying to get her a visa to come to France, but she didn't expect it to come through in time. Ben wasn't sure if Aziza cared.

He moved to cut out the piece of shrapnel as quickly as he could. He would normally try to move slower and more steadily. That would be in a modern, functional hospital with equipment that worked. Ben didn't want to keep his patient open any longer than he had to. The poor guy was suffering enough, and they barely had any antibiotics to give him. Ben had to take a gamble—that the risk of operating, with the concomitant risk of infection, was lower than the risk of the young man dying before they could get him over the border and into Turkey.

Not that getting to Turkey would be easy. They were close to the border, but not close enough. While in theory Turkey was accepting refugees from Syria, that didn't always translate to the people working on the ground at border crossings. Turkey had taken in quite a few refugees already, and some Turks felt the numbers created a strain on the country's resources.

Submachine gun fire echoed through the walls, and a hysterical giggle welled up in Ben. He fought it down as he stitched up the wound in his patient's abdomen. He and the other nurse, another aid worker by the name of Carmela, cleaned the abdominal cavity out as best they could. Ben felt good about the guy's chances. He didn't think peritonitis was likely. Then again, the poor guy obviously didn't have much luck if he was here with them.

He sutured the injury. If his teachers in Boston could see him now, they'd be beside themselves. He couldn't imagine any place further from Harvard Medical School than the ruins of a village hospital.

The man's uncles helped him off the table and carried him away. Ben didn't bother to clean the table. They didn't have running water anymore. It had gone out just after he'd scrubbed in. At least he'd gotten that far. He stripped out of his gown and mask and disposed of the bloody gloves. "We should go," he told his companions. "If we hurry, we can get to the border. Once we're in Turkey, we can make contact with Borderless, and we can get to safety from there."

Aziza shrugged. She didn't object. For Aziza, that was progress.

Carmela looked up at the open sky above them. The ceiling had fallen in long ago, after another bombing. He had no idea which side was hitting them now, and he didn't care anymore. He just wanted to treat his patients in peace. "Do you think we can make it? I heard Daesh is close to retaking the city."

Ben swallowed hard. "Anything's possible. We'll never get anywhere if we don't try."

The two nurses followed him out into the sunshine, carrying only their medical bags and a few bottles of precious water. Ben ignored the motor vehicles, the abandoned cars, and derelict military vehicles. He'd learned the only thing that came from messing with abandoned property was pain. How many patients had he seen who'd tried to help themselves to a car, only to find it booby-trapped?

The carnage he saw as they scurried from ruin to ruin defied description. Bodies lay where they fell. Some had been there for some time, blackening in the autumn sun. The stench turned his stomach. Once, this part of the town had been vibrant and alive. It hadn't been a big city like Damascus, but it had been a nice and peaceful town with shops, schools, and cafes. Now it was just a crater.

He tried to keep the trio hidden in the shadows as they struggled to exit the town, but he quickly figured out that had been a foolish dream. Whole buildings had been demolished down to rubble. They had to run through places that had once been stores, but were now open territory. There would be no getting out of the town without being seen.

He would have to take it as a moral victory when they lasted half an hour after leaving the hospital. They turned a corner, hoping to avoid a patrol of what looked like government troops, and ran into a quintet of armed, bearded men in mostly traditional clothes and camouflage jackets.

The men raised their weapons.

Ben and the nurses were unarmed. It was part of the job. As non-combatants, they couldn't claim protection from harm by combatants if they went around with guns and such. Ben held up his hands immediately. He didn't know whose side these people were on, or even if they had a side. Their outfits suggested rebel, possibly fundamentalist, but Ben rarely got a chance to ask questions when he was working.

The armed men surged around them. Without saying a word, two of them dedicated themselves to patting all three down. Ben fantasized about fighting back. He might be able to get the gun from one of them. He could wrestle it away. He could maybe brain one with the butt end, and then escape with Aziza and Carmela.

The likelihood was that there were more of them. Even if Ben's combat skills were up to par with men who'd been fighting in a long and bloody civil war—and who'd survived a long and bloody civil war—he'd just have to repeat the same process again, and once more at the next checkpoint.

The man with the most gray in his hair stepped forward. They had no indicators of rank, but Ben had to assume he was in charge. Aziza and Carmela drew together behind him. "You're spies for Assad."

"No." Ben's arms were starting to hurt. "I'm a doctor. I'm with Borderless."

The leader scowled. He turned to the others and gestured to one of them. That one, who looked younger than the rest, stepped up and went through the prisoners' bags. "Only doctors' things," the youth confirmed. "No radio, no phone. Nothing."

The leader growled. Ben clenched his muscles. Had the man wanted them to be spies? That didn't make sense, unless whatever group he was part of had some kind of bounty for spies. He couldn't think like that, though. All he could think of was getting through the next five minutes. If he could get through the next five minutes, he could worry about the five minutes after that.

A line of sweat dripped down his back.

After a second, the leader turned his back. "Bring them!" he barked, and walked toward one of the burned out buildings.

Ben swallowed hard. If he went into that building, he wouldn't come out alive. If he didn't go inside, he wouldn't stand a chance of escaping.

He didn't fight as his captors roughly forced him indoors and down a flight of stairs.

The basement in which he found himself wasn't large. It was dimly lit, with one old Coleman lantern casting a glow on walls that had probably been hewn out of the ground before the Romans showed up here. The temperature was at least ten degrees colder than it was outside.

Something skittered in the shadows.

"Sit." The leader pointed to a bare patch of ground in the corner. "Make yourselves comfortable. You'll be with us for some time."

Ben sat. He didn't want to give them an excuse. Aziza dropped woodenly to his side. Carmela joined her, tense and miserable.

"Do you know why you're here?" The leader looked Ben over. He barely glanced at the women at all.

Ben sighed. Would it be better or worse to pretend he didn't have enough Arabic language skills to answer the question? Honesty was usually the best policy. Sometimes it got a doctor punched, but it rarely got him killed. "My guess is that you want insurance. You think the regime is going to somehow give you concessions, or maybe negotiate for one of their prisoners, because you have hostages from an NGO."

The leader smirked. "And you disagree."

Aziza nudged him with her foot, very subtly. She was giving him a warning, even though she wouldn't look directly at him or anyone else right now. She knew Ben well enough to know about his tendency to challenge people. "I think you've been doing this, and surviving at it, longer than I have. I'll bow to your knowledge of the subject." He brought his knees up to his chest. "I haven't met with very friendly attitudes from officials in the regime, but I'm guessing you know something about that."

Their captors chuckled. Ben didn't dare relax, but he congratulated himself on that much at least. "We do," the leader told them. "So we're going to inconvenience you and your women for the time being. With any luck, this will be a temporary problem, and you can be on your way soon enough."

Ben closed his eyes and bowed his head. "Thank you for your honesty." What else was he supposed to say? He wasn't exactly thrilled to be here.

Direct fighting had slowed when the three of them left. Now, as Ben and the nurses and their captors huddled in the basement, they could hear the sounds of it picking up again. Missiles landed farther away, thanks to whichever gods happened to be passing by this abandoned place, but the gunfire had gotten closer. And while missiles might have started going off farther away, other kinds of ordinance exploded nearby. A well-placed grenade could cause just as much havoc as an air-to-ground missile.

Ben could have cried. He didn't want to know just how much either form of ordinance could do, not first-hand. He'd seen enough of it on the operating table.

An hour passed. Then another. Gunfire drew closer and their captors exchanged looks. Two of the guards headed up the narrow stairs to check the area.

Could they fight back now? They were in close quarters. Maybe, just maybe, they could get in a lucky shot. Then again, these guys knew what they were doing. Ben did not. Neither did Carmela. Aziza might, but Ben wasn't going to bet all of their lives on it.

He heard a burst of semi-automatic gunfire. Someone yelled. Ben covered his mouth with his hands so it wouldn't be him.

Their guards rose. Ben's pulse rose with them. He wrapped his arms around the nurses. What protection he thought he could offer them, he had no idea. It was an instinct, he guessed, and since they crowded right in they seemed to have the same fears. His breath came fast and shallow.

A tiny part of his mind stayed detached and clear through it all, like a Greek chorus during a play. This is panic. Fifty mg of sertraline, oral, daily.

Heavy, booted feet raced down the stairs into the basement. There were more boots than he'd expected, and Ben closed his eyes and pushed the nurses to the ground, ducking with them as gunfire erupted around them.

There was shouting. Ben couldn't understand any of it, between the different languages involved and the way the gunfire echoed off the stone walls. When it was over, his ears still rang with their echoes.

A pair of dusty boots appeared in front of his feet. Ben risked looking up, only to see a tall man with a closely-trimmed, dark beard staring down at him. The man held a semi-automatic rifle in his hand, and he had an American flag on his uniform fatigues.

"Don't move," the man ordered in Arabic that was heavily tinted with the tones of West Virginia.

* * *

Dave stood at attention as Chief and Adami slipped into the secure room where the three prisoners they'd taken from the fetid basement waited for them. They'd looked innocent enough when the SEALs found them in the basement. They'd looked terrified. Dave figured anyone, even the most hardened terrorist, would look terrified during a basement gun battle. It wasn't exactly hard to relate to them on that count, at least.

They'd found those guys hanging out in the basement, during a raging gun fight, while a bunch of dead bodies rotted on the floor in the shadows around them. In Dave's book, that didn't exactly make for a ticket to freedom. In Dave's book, that made for a ticket to a courthouse. Then again, Dave had grown up with a sheriff. Most things tended to end with a ticket to the courthouse.

Sometimes Aunt Sadie even let him work the siren, if he'd been good that week.

The one guy of the three of them, a slim guy who was handsome as hell, gave Dave a funny look. Dave must have gotten lost in his memories again. Well, it wasn't like he was ever going to see this guy again. What did he care?

Chief cleared his throat. "Doing a little wool gathering there, Hopper?"

Dave kept his eyes straight ahead. "No, Chief."

"Stand down, Sailor. We've had these good folks' identities confirmed by Borderless. The lady on the left is Aziza Karam. She's a nurse. She used to specialize in obstetrics, but well, things change." Chief gave the lady in the headscarf an apologetic smile and passed her a copy of her identity papers. "Borderless had these, and they were able to email us a copy." He switched to Arabic when he addressed her directly. "That will help to expedite the process of getting you accepted into any other country you might want to go to."

Ms. Karam looked at the table. "I'll go wherever Borderless sends me. I have nowhere else to go."

The man glared at Chief. "Thanks for providing her identity papers. Maybe we can table the discussion about her future for now. This has all been very traumatic for her." He had a perfectly bland American accent, with no regional variations at all. That stood out. It was weird.

Dave wrinkled his nose. "Are you her husband?" They didn't exactly have that kind of body language, but they could be on the outs or maybe they just weren't comfortable showing affection in front of strangers. It wasn't for Dave to judge.

The man scoffed. "You're joking, right?" He rolled his gray eyes and nudged Karam with his elbow. "This guy, huh?"

Karam managed to give him a little bit of a grin. Not much, but it was something.

Dave couldn't quite explain the relief that ran through him at the man's response. He didn't plan to see the guy again, so why should he care if he was handsome? Or married, or gay?

Ugh. All of these people from his platoon were running around and pairing off, having babies, and it was giving him fits. He needed to get over it, sooner rather than later.

"And this other lovely lady is Carmela Altuve, from Spain. She's a nurse finishing up a two-year commitment to Borderless." Adami continued to speak in Arabic, since according to Borderless Altuve didn't speak any English. All three civilians spoke French, but none of the SEALs spoke it well enough for this situation. "I'm sorry this was such a traumatic ending for you, ma'am."

The blonde woman just nodded and grabbed Karam's hand. That was fine. They could support each other.

"And your sparring partner, Hopper, is Dr. Ben Michaud, from Boston, Massachusetts."

Karam and Altuve both gasped at their companion. "You're American?"

He looked up at the ceiling. He even let his head fall back, exposing his long, perfect neck. "Yeah. I mean sort of. I have dual citizenship. I used my French passport in Syria, for obvious reasons." He picked his head up again. He bit his lip, like he wanted to say something but thought better of it. "Thank you very much for pulling us out of there. I'm not sure how you knew to find us, but I'm glad you got us out. Did the person you spoke with at Borderless have any messages? Like where they wanted us to go or anything like that?"

Chief sat down across from Michaud. "You can't be serious. No, they didn't want you to go anywhere. They want you to recover. You've just been through a very stressful situation, Dr. Michaud. Even our bosses wouldn't just send us right back out into the field after something like that, and believe me when I tell you they're not known for being overly sympathetic."

Michaud clenched his jaw. "Okay. I'll, um, I'll reach out to them myself, once we've put into port or something. Thank you."

Just then, Hopper decided he hated Dr. Michaud. Not only was he dismissive and rude, but he was an idiot as well. He might be handsome. He might be stunning. But Hopper wouldn't touch him with a ten foot pole.

Chief looked at Michaud for a long moment. "Okay. Well, you're on the Navy hospital ship Solace right now. We're off the coast of Syria. At the moment, our orders are to hold tight and evacuate as many war-wounded as we can, among other things. Eventually, we'll make for the naval base at Toulon, where there's a hospital with which we have a preexisting arrangement. I have no idea how long that's going to take. We are not a cruise ship, Doctor. And we're not a passenger vessel. It will probably be a long time."

Michaud didn't even bat an eye. "I didn't mean to imply that you were at our beck and call. If I gave that impression I apologize. None of us expects luxury or entertainment. I simply stated a solution. Does the ship have enough staff? I'd be happy to fill in." He put his hands on the table. "I have time on my hands, after all, and I joined Borderless to help war-wounded people."

Chief blinked at him again. He obviously couldn't figure this guy out, and neither could Dave. He was all over the place. Better Chief than him, he guessed. "I…I suppose I could talk to the chief corpsman. I wouldn't count on it, though. You're probably an excellent doctor, but they need people in their operating rooms who are used to the Navy way of doing things."

"Of course."

"Petty Officer Adami and Petty Officer Hopper will show you to your bunks." He rose. "It took a little bit of doing to find clothes for you, but hopefully you'll be okay with them."

"They'll be fine, Chief." Altuve chimed in with a gracious smile. "Please, lead on."

She and Karam walked arm in arm to their quarters, while Michaud walked behind them. He seemed to hover almost protectively over them, and while Dave couldn't fault him for that he had to wonder what the women thought. Weren't they creeped out? They didn't seem to be. And what was he doing being all protective now, when he hadn't done a damn thing to save them from the terrorists holding them in a basement?

Michaud paused at the door to his cabin. "I don't mean to impose," he said. "I don't need a cabin of my own. I'm not some kind of celebrity."

Adami shrugged. "I don't make the rules. You're the only omega on board the ship who isn't a patient. We can't just throw you into a general bunk with the alphas. It's not a bad thing, trust me. My husband got one of these bunks to and from Egypt a little while ago, and was I ever jealous." He grinned, oddly open and friendly for someone remembering a fairly traumatic period. "Enjoy."

Dave jogged to catch up to Adami when they left the weird doctor behind. "Wait, what? He's an omega?"

"Yeah, dude. Didn't you figure it out?" Adami gave him a funny look. "Usually you're right on top of this stuff, man. Come on, we've got a briefing."

The whole platoon had assembled in a larger conference room. Everyone had taken their accustomed seats, leaving the seats for Lupo and Miazga empty while they recovered. Dave slid into his seat just in time for DeWitt to start talking.

"Okay, folks. We do have an official mission here." Their lieutenant stood at the front of the room with his hands clasped behind him. "We're here to evacuate civilians wounded in the fighting to the Solace and from there to other facilities throughout Europe. Are we clear on that?"

"Sir, yes, sir!" Dave grinned as he voiced the response with the rest. There hadn't ever been a possibility of dissent, but they needed the ritual of the call and response all the same. It was like being in church.

"We have a secondary mission. This is not the one we discuss in front of civilians, even the folks from Borderless. We're here to hunt down Islamic State."

Chief gazed out at the rest of the group. "If we happen to find any outside volunteers helping Islamic State along, well, that's between them and God. We shut up about it outside of the platoon. Clear?"

"Crystal, Chief!"

"Good. Now. Kelly—you tell me what you saw in the village today."

Kelly stood up and spoke. The squads had been split, and Kelly and his men had gone left while Hopper had gone right with Chief. Chief and his men had found personnel from the hospital, who warned them about a handful of people who stayed to treat one last patient.

Kelly and his men had found White Dawn.

Dave had known guys like the ones from White Dawn his whole life. Aunt Sadie had been the sheriff of a rural county in West Virginia, and they'd had a few troublemakers who wanted to mix it up with people because of their skin. He'd never understood it, but he never tried all that hard to understand it either. He knew right from wrong.

"We didn't leave any witnesses behind, sir," Kelly told him in a dispassionate tone. "Six operatives, all accounted for."

"I'd give a lot of money to know what they're doing in Syria." DeWitt scratched at his chin. "I wonder if any of our medical guests would have any insights?"

Fitzpatrick hummed. "They might, now that you think about it. They've probably seen all sorts of things."

"Let's grab Dr. Michaud after he's had a chance to rest up and shower." Chief met Dave's eye. "We'll wait to catch him in a more social mood, so he won't think anything odd about our having asked the question. Then we'll get the other two."

"Sounds like a plan." DeWitt clapped his hands once. "Dismissed."