The injury to his leg meant that he could go no further. And that meant he had to be left behind.

The refugees he was protecting would have one less protector this night. They were coming.

Stepping on the land mine had been the turn of a bad coin - hundreds, if not thousands had passed this way in the months since the first wave was slaughtered by mines laid by government troops. It was common knowledge among the underground that this pass was clear of mines. That made him complacent. That made him stupid.

Christina had stepped right over it, and he hadn't been paying enough attention. Stupid mistake. Used to be stupid mistakes didn't mean he'd lose a foot.

"Fucking hell," he said under his breath. His foot throbbed. Looking down he saw what was left of his right shin end in a field bandage, blood and anti-coagulant mixing in a nasty paste that covered the shredded remains of his khakis. His missing foot throbbed.

Resting the stock of the sniper rifle against his shoulder, he squiggled around and got as comfortable as an ampule of morphine would let him. Looking through the sight, he could see the leading edge of the Special Forces unit tasked with running down his charges.

He remembered his first time with the rifle, just after he'd had to leave the city. Someone had turned him in as a terrorist sympathizer. Probably his girlfriend's father. Nate. Nate had always hated him, knowing that a boyfriend was death to an aspiring porn actress. She'd made it through two years of Voc Rehab training to do porn, and her father had been beside himself with worry that his little girl wouldn't deliver on his retirement, but would instead go off with some crazy hippy and get herself pregnant and build a family. A friend who'd risked way too much had warned him that the Police were coming to serve their "no-knock" warrant. He'd collected his things, and run. North, away from Los Angeles, through the Los Padres mountains, into the San Joaquin valley. He'd met some others in the mountains, and they'd given him the rifle. Surprisingly, since he'd never shot a weapon in his life, he was a crack shot.

And then a miracle had occurred. His first live assignment was to eliminate an Employment Development Department auditor. The same auditor that had been responsible for the torture and interment of his own parents ten years before. It had been like a light, the brightness with which he recognized the path that had led him to that point. He'd been adamant in his non-violence. He'd been too young. He'd watched his parents enter the courtroom, each day a little less there, a little more transparent. Legally, they weren't being tortured. He'd watched, and done nothing. He'd watched his parents being led away in orange jumpsuits, to be sent away, along with the hundreds of thousands of other Oregonians, Washingtonians, and Northern Californians who'd been declared terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. He never saw them again, but he did have to pay off their credit card bills, working in the Foster Family kitchen to pay off the debt.

Then they came for him, and a switch seemed to throw in his head. He would not lay down and let them kill him without some answer, some directly meaningful action. Even if hopeless, SOMEBODY must be made to feel a cost for the wholesale destruction wreaked upon his life. Oppressors will oppress until stopped. They NEVER stop themselves.

Seeing the last of the unit move into the kill zone, with a flash and inordinate accuracy, he drops the first two soldiers, the ones closest to him. Then shifting the rifle to full auto, he starts spraying the trailing edge, trying to stop the last soldier from escaping and flanking him.

The drone, triangulated on the sound of the stealthed sniper fire, almost casually deployed a cluster munition.