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Cope’s driver swerved into the left shoulder, past the still-moving, burning wreck of the lead Hummer. If this had been Iraq, with insurgent-launched rockets raining down from rooftops, hitting the gas would have been the right thing to do. But this wasn’t Iraq, and here hitting the gas just made Cope’s Hummer the lead vehicle—the primary target.

“Stop this thing!” Cope shouted at his driver. “We’re sitting ducks!”

The Hummer’s brakes. .h.i.t hard, throwing Cope forward.

“Go-go-go!” Cope screamed. “Get to cover!”

He jumped out the pa.s.senger door and started sprinting. He looked up at the sky to see what was killing his people. Apache Longbow attack helicopters. Compact, dark shapes, like flying tanks with that signature radar dome sticking up above the blurring rotor blades.

He was in some deep s.h.i.+t.

As he ran off the pavement and onto the right shoulder, he looked back to his Hummer. Private Bates hadn’t jumped out. Instead, Bates had turned the M249 turret, trying to return fire. The man didn’t even have time to pull the trigger before a h.e.l.lfire missile slammed home. The Hummer erupted in a semi-trailer-size fireball. The blast threw Cope into the ditch on the side of the road. He hit hard, but adrenaline drove him on—he scrambled to his feet and up the five-foot-high slope of the ditch’s far side.

In front of him, a snow-covered cornfield, irregular white spotted with knee-high, rotting-yellow stalks. At least a hundred yards to the trees.

Cope snapped another quick look around him. A few soldiers were sprinting across the fields, headed for the woods. On the road behind him, tall black columns of smoke rose into the air. Five Hummers, two trucks, all destroyed. Looked more like the road to Baghdad than a Michigan highway.

All this open s.p.a.ce. If the Apaches’ pilots couldn’t see him in the afternoon sun, they’d just lock on with infrared targeting—a soldier’s body heat stood out clearly against frozen ground.

A trap. This was a kill point. The Apaches had been waiting, probably just out of sight behind a hill.

He had no chance.

He ran anyway.

Thirty yards to his right, another soldier running. A wavering line of glowing red reached out toward the man, like some science-fiction death ray—tracer rounds from an Apache’s thirty-millimeter chain gun. The rounds erupted when they hit the ground, harsh explosions launching man-size clods of frozen dirt and smoke. The initial shots went wide, but in a fraction of a second the red death ray closed the gap—the soldier exploded in a literal cloud of blood.

Corporal Jeff Cope kept sprinting.

He’d made it almost fifteen yards when he heard a roar on his left. He turned and saw the tracer-round death ray plowing a path toward him.

He didn’t even have time to look away.

12:39 P.M.: We Be Jammin’

She could feel them dying. Her soldiers, her protectors. The enemy was too powerful, too many devils out to stop her.

Chelsea Jewell began to realize that maybe, just maybe, she should have listened to Chauncey. Should have listened to General Ogden.

But that didn’t matter.

She still had Mommy.