Sergeant Blocked Her from the Helicopter — Until the Pilot Yelled "That's Black Talon Actual"

The wind howled across the tarmac of Forward Operating Base Ravenholm like a creature desperate to escape, carrying with it the acrid smell of diesel fuel and sand that had infiltrated every crevice of the facility. Above, the rotor blades of the Black Hawk helicopter thundered against the suffocating Afghan sky, their rhythm matching the chaos of evacuation operations that had consumed the past six hours. Dust devils twisted across the concrete, obscuring visibility to mere meters, turning the entire scene into something that existed between reality and nightmare.
Lieutenant Marcus Hendricks stood rigid at the helicopter's open door, his clipboard gripped so tightly his knuckles had turned white beneath the grime of emergency triage operations. He was a bureaucrat first and a soldier second—the kind of officer who believed that rules existed for reasons, and those reasons were usually written in triplicate on some form filed in a office three thousand miles away. His jaw was set with the particular stubbornness of a man who had never been questioned in his authority, and the sweat trickling down his temple had nothing to do with the 127-degree heat.
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Behind him, a line of personnel waited to board the evacuation helicopter. Medics, communications specialists, support staff—the non-combatant backbone of the base that needed to be extracted before enemy forces overran the perimeter. The intelligence reports had been clear. The insurgent attack would come within hours, maybe less. Every minute counted. Every person on that manifest had a number, a designation, a reason to be on that helicopter.