Copyright © Desiree Holt 2013. All Rights Reserved, Total-E-Ntwined Limited, T/A Totally Bound Publishing. When Beau Williams became part of Delta Force Charlie, one of the first things his teammates told him was Afghanistan was no picnic. They'd warned him that it was considered one of the most forbidding battlegrounds in the history of war and it didn't take him long to agree with that assessment. Fiercely cold in the winter, hot as an oven in the summer, there were few roads, water was scarce and only the hardiest of the hardy could survive the brutal environment. But the men of Delta Team Charlie, led by Slade Donovan, were just such men, trained in every skill imaginable to fight in the war on terror. They were part of a unit in the legendary Delta Force—or 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment—which operated as part of JSOC—Joint Special Operations Command—in the on-going conflict with radical extremists around the world. Slade and his men were currently in the middle of yet another hair-raising mission in the Hindu Kush mountain range that ran from Central Afghanistan to Pakistan. An unforgiving mountain system, the Hindu Kush was nearly a thousand miles long and two hundred miles wide, running northeast to southwest, mainly through Afghanistan, and dividing the Amu Darya River Valley and the Indus River Valley. It stretched from the Pamir Plateau, near Gilgit, to Iran and had over two dozen summits of more than twenty-three thousand feet in height. Below the snowy peaks, the mountains of Hindu Kush appeared bare, stony and poor in vegetation. For centuries it had been referred to as the graveyard of foreign armies. This wasn't the first time Delta Team Charlie had been here in this soulless place on a mission and they were pretty damn sure it wouldn't be their last. They'd plotted and planned as carefully as they could, absorbing all the intel they'd received, but as many times as they'd been here, they knew planning could only take them so far. Finding cover was difficult as always, but their recon man had found them a perfect place to sequester themselves. Good thing, since they'd been waiting two days and two nights. The only good thing about the endless wait, alternately roasting and freezing, was the wind that had plagued them constantly for most of that time had finally died down. Beau, the team's sniper, hated the wind. An errant wind played hell with the accuracy of a sniper rifle, screwing with the trajectory. He'd been doing this, serving as a sniper, for ten years and had learned how to compensate for nature, how to correct for correct for almost anything up gale force winds. But he liked it better when the air was still and his spotter could give him exact trajectory and coordinates. He'd still rather not have to worry about it. And up here in the Hindu Kush, the winds were very unpredictable. Stretched out full length beside him was Trey McIntyre, the man who had been his spotter from the time he joined the team. By now the two of them were so much in sync, they could almost communicate telepathically. Trey was motionless, staring through his field glasses at the small settlement below. It was little more than a collection of tents, with camels and donkeys staked out under a canvas ceiling. Their target was a tribal leader who had proven connections with a radical Muslim group and who made money stealing guns from the American military and selling them to other tribes. The intel had reached them that the leader would be visiting this outpost and would be more exposed than at any other time. This would be the most optimum time to take him out before he could do any more damage. With their commander they'd plotted the...