Jenny whirled, then marched back to him, staying carefully back out of his reach. "What?"

"You heard me. You." Joey pointed at her. "Me." He pointed at himself. "Not exactly a fun date."

"Oh, man," she said. "You are so full of it. What? You think because you ask somebody out you get to own them?"

"No." Joey sighed. "No, I don't. But I think it should give those two people a chance to get to know each other."

"Really?" Jenny arched a brow. "And just exactly who was I supposed to be getting to know? Joey who lives on his own? Or Joey who lives with his mom?"

Joey took a deep, shuddering breath. Man, tonight had been so totally messed up. He sucked on his split lip and offered his wallet. "I'm Joey Holder. My mom is Megan Gander. My stepdad's name is Sam. Samuel Gander. His friends call him Goose. I call him Goose. He's the one over in Turkey right now that we saw on the television. My dad, Tony, he lives in L.A. I haven't seen him in ten years. I haven't even got a phone call in five years." He took in a breath and let it out. About the time Chris was born, he realized, and he couldn't help wondering if his little brother's birth had something to do with that. He shoved the question out of his mind, knowing it would haunt him later. "I'm seventeen. Not twenty-one."

She stared at him for a minute. "So you lied about your age?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"To meet you." Joey shrugged. "Things didn't work out exactly the way I wanted them to."

Quiet and intense, her arms wrapped around herself, jenny stared at him.

Joey felt incredibly uncomfortable. He was also suddenly aware of the chill that was in the air. It was March. Even in the South, spring was chilly without a jacket.

"For the record," Jenny said, "you asked me to go to the club with you."

"Okay."

"That's not asking me for a date. If you want a date from someone, you ask them for a date. I thought maybe you hadn't been to the club before and wanted someone to go with."

"I hadn't," Joey said.

Jenny sighed and shook her head. "You're seventeen. Of course you hadn't." She held her hand out. "Let's see your fake ID."

Reaching into his pocket, Joey produced the fake ID he had been so proud of only a few days ago when his great plan had begun. He put the ID in jenny's hand.

She looked at it and smiled a little. "Good picture."

"Thanks." Unable to help himself, Joey grinned a little. Suddenly, all the trouble that had been gathering all night didn't seem so heavy.

"Dumb idea." Jenny ripped the fake ID into quarters and let the pieces blow away.

"Oh." Joey's smile melted.

"Do you really have a little brother?"

Joey opened his wallet and flashed Chris's picture again.

"Cute kid," Jenny said.

"Everybody says that," Joey replied glumly.

"How do I know the picture didn't come with the wallet?"

Reaching behind the top picture, Joey showed her an older one of him and Chris together.

Peering more closely, Jenny said, "He looks a lot like you."

Joey almost asked her if that meant he was cute, too. But he didn't. Tonight, thankfully, he was not going to be that dumb.

"So your little brother," Jenny said, "he's still at the child-care place on the base?"

Joey nodded.

"And your stepdad really is over there in all that mess in Turkey?"

Joey nodded again.

Jenny sighed. "Okay. Let's go get the little brother. I bet your mom is going nuts."

"Yeah."

"The curfew thing isn't helping."

"No," Joey agreed.

"You picked a really bad night for all of this, Joey."

"You're telling me."

Jenny started back toward the car. Caught by surprise, Joey had to step quickly to catch up. He reached past her to open the passengerside door. It was something he'd seen Goose do for his mom for years and couldn't remember his dad ever doing. Few guys did something like that anymore, and Joey had liked the idea of showing that kind of respect. Thinking of that reminded him of Goose, and uncertainty filled him again. He slipped behind the steering wheel and got the car moving again.

He paused at the corner, waiting on the light as traffic passed. "About the seventeen-years-old thing," he said.

She looked at him. "What?"

"If I'd told you I was seventeen years old and wanted to go out on a date with you, would you have gone?" After all, once he was ungrounded-if ever-maybe there was the possibility of getting a real date with jenny.

No.

Joey tried to accept that. "Because I'm seventeen?"

"Because I don't date," she stated in a flat voice. "I haven't dated in a long time. I don't let anyone that close."

Just shut up, Joey advised himself. You're ahead of the game. Just shut up and be glad you're not alone right now when it seems like the world is falling apart.

But, of course, he couldn't. Smart and lucky just weren't in the cards for him tonight. "Why don't you date?" he asked.

"Look," Jenny said, "that's something I don't want to talk about. I-"

When she screamed and leaped at him, Joey figured he had set her off again and he was about to have his head beaten in. Then lights of an approaching vehicle flashed against the window to his left. Turning from Jenny, wanting to protect his face, he caught sight of the huge camo-colored Suburban coming straight at him.

His scream got lost in the screech of tearing metal, his head slammed into the window, and his vision blacked out.

Turkey 37 Klicks South of Sanliurfa Local Time 0819 Hours

The earth moved.

Lying under the RSOV, Goose felt the ground quiver and roll from the massive explosions of the 20mm cannon rounds blasting craters into the ridgeline. For a moment, all sound went away as he temporarily turned deaf. Then he heard the drumming rain of rocks and dirt clods against the RSOV.

"You okay, Sarge?"

Glancing up, Goose saw Bill Townsend crowded in under the fighting vehicle beside him. "Yeah. Anybody hit?"

"Not yet." Bill grimaced as he shifted his wounded leg. "But they've got us in a tight spot."

Goose checked the wounded man and saw Chaplain O'Dell pressing his fingers against Digby's throat.

O'Dell looked up. Blood seeped from scratches on his face. "Thank You, God-this boy's still with us."

And if we could get a medical team in to him, Goose thought, he might actually have a chance. He crawled under the RSOV, turning around so he could survey the battlefield again. Switching to the main tactical channel, he heard the lieutenants and sergeants ordering their men to hold their positions, to wait out the attack as much as they could.

Clicking back to the command frequency attributed to him, Goose said, "Base, this is Phoenix Leader. Do you copy?"

"Base copies, Leader," Remington answered.

"We're taking a beating up here," Goose said. "I'm looking for good news."

"Good news is on its way, Leader," Remington replied. "Let me introduce you to Blue Falcon Leader. He's heading up a contingent of Marine Harriers that have been running nap-of-the-earth. The Syrians don't know these guys are even close."

Goose grinned grimly and took out his binoculars. "Glad to have you, Blue Leader."

"Pleasure is ours, Phoenix. Gonna be serving up a little dish I like to call extreme prejudice on those three Syrian flyboys that have dared invade your company's airspace."

The Marine pilot's casual confidence was infectious. Goose felt a little better about the situation the Rangers were in. He scanned the border with the binoculars. The three Syrian jets strafed the area again. In his mind, he was already working on plans to shore up the defense and hold the line once the Syrian air strikes were removed and the wing support provided by USS Wasp and the rest of the 26th MEU(SOC) arrived.

"Phoenix, this is Blue Falcon Leader."

"Go, Falcon," Goose replied.

"We have those rascally rodents in view and have carefully identified them as definite hostiles. We are preparing to engage."

"Good luck, Falcon, and Godspeed." Goose put his binoculars away and glanced up into the sky. He figured he must have seen the Harriers at about the same time the MiG pilots did.

Pound for pound, minute for minute in the air, the Harriers were some of the deadliest military birds of prey in close air support maneuvers. Navy fighter pilots didn't care for the smaller and slower warbirds, but Marine pilots knew how to eke every plus out of their chosen craft.

Powered by Pegasus-vectored thrust engines manufactured by Rolls Royce, the jets measured forty-six feet, four inches long. Their swoop-winged design made them immediately recognizable to anyone who knew aircraft. The vectored thrust could be turned to ninety degrees, giving the Harrier the startling ability to lift off straight up, then launch forward. The VTOL, or vertical take off and landing, craft handled much better in short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) mode. The rolling takeoff made possible by short jump ramps aboard short aircraft carriers enabled the jets to take to the air like their namesake, a deadly British Isles marsh hawk.

The MiG pilots tried to turn tail and beat a hasty retreat back across the border. Mercilessly, the Harriers swooped up, rising above the hard deck with thunderous roars. AIM-9 Sidewinders, air-to-air missiles designed for taking out other aircraft, launched from the Harriers.

With unerring accuracy, the Sidewinders locked on to the superheated jet engines of the Syrian aircraft. Two exploded only a heartbeat apart, turning into a roiling mass of orange and black flames that elongated into ovals of destruction.

The third Syrian pilot heeled over hard to starboard, trying desperately to evade the Sidewinder rapidly closing the distance. A second later, the air-to-air missile slammed into the MiG and ripped the fighter aircraft to shreds. Flaming debris pinwheeled from the sky, plummeting to the ground on the Syrian side of the border and disappearing into the smoky haze that drifted across the battlefield.

"Phoenix Leader, this is Blue Falcon."

"Go, Falcon, you have Phoenix," Goose responded. "That was quite a morale booster you delivered there, Falcon."

"Our pleasure, Phoenix. We've heard you men have been hard up against it. We're spearheading a bunch of leathemecks that are ready to get their land legs back if you want to invite them to the ball."

"Affirmative, Falcon. I'm looking forward to meeting those men."

"Set up for the meet and greet, Phoenix. You should have them in your view to the west-southwest. Blue Falcon has your point."

"Thank you, Falcon." Goose crawled out from under the RSOV. A gaping hole in his left pants leg showed deep, bloody scratches in the bruised flesh beneath. When he moved the knee, he felt twinges of pain, but they weren't as bad or as deep as the aches in his strained shoulder. He didn't believe either injury would require any kind of hospital treatment. If he had a couple hours of rest, he was certain he would be fine.

But he was also certain that a couple hours of rest wasn't going to be possible for a long time. Thankfully, the artillery barrage launched by the Syrians slowed. Maybe those crews were preparing for an assault by the Harriers.

"Phoenix Leader," Remington called over the headset, "can you confirm visual on the arriving relief teams? Wasp reads them five by five on the sat-scan."

Goose scanned the sky, pulling his M-4A1 back into his arms, where the assault rifle felt most natural. "I'm looking, Base."

Behind him, the Harriers opened fire across the border. "Phoenix, this is Blue Falcon Leader."

"Go, Falcon," Goose said.

"You've got a hostile unit moving on your twenty, Phoenix. We haven't confirmed the numbers yet, but you've got rolling stock and cav as well as groundpounders coming under cover of all the haze. We're going to discourage them as much as possible, but we're not going to be able to stop them all."

"Affirmative," Goose replied. He clicked back into the general communications channel. "Bravo Platoon. Echo Platoon."

"Go, Phoenix Leader. You've got Bravo Leader." Bravo Leader was Lieutenant Matthew York, a not-quite-thirty graduate of OCS after a hitch in college and ROTC. He was still a little green to command after only brief combat exposure, but he was a good soldier.

"Phoenix, this is Echo Platoon Two." Riley Bernhardt's voice was grim and steady. Like Goose, he'd been in since high school and worked his way up to three stripes, second-in-command of Echo.

"Echo Two," Goose said, "where is One?"

"One went down with the AA gun, Phoenix," Bernhardt said. "I couldn't stop him."

Lieutenant Hector Dawson had been commander of Echo. Like York, Dawson had come up through OCS. But Dawson had turned out ambitious like a lot of young officers, certain his commanding skills and station in life had blessed him with luck and a certain amount of John Wayne movie hero invulnerability. A sergeant working with a new lieutenant, as Bernhardt had been, had his work cut out for him. Goose had been in that position, too, and had lost a young lieutenant in East Africa.

"All right, Two," Goose said, knowing Remington was listening in and would hear everything he was saying, "you're taking a field promotion and moving to command of Echo. Understood?"

"Affirmative, Phoenix."

Goose knew the promotion would have a positive effect on Echo rifle company. Professional soldiers, even raw recruits, often valued a sergeant's guidance more than an officer's. A sergeant lived in the same air they did, wore the same dirt, and shared the same blood. Officers had to go a long way to prove that to the men they led, and most didn't bother because they were busy trying to earn their next posting and battle their way up the military ladder of success.