# Chapter 18: The Ambush
December came in hot and wet.
Tim had been tracking the pattern for two weeks. The particular way the local VC unit moved through the sector. The timing of their contact. The routes they favored and the ones they avoided and the specific configuration of terrain around a river crossing three clicks east that his instincts kept returning to.
He brought it to Daniels on a Wednesday.
Spread the map on the table in the forward operating base and pointed.
"Here" Tim said. "If they're going to hit us it's here."
Daniels looked at the map. Looked at Tim.
"What makes you say that."
"The ground favors it. The sight lines. The approach routes." Tim kept his voice level. "And I've been hearing movement in that sector for three days that doesn't match the animal patterns."
Daniels looked at him sharply.
"Hearing from how far."
"Far enough" Tim said.
A pause.
"How do you want to handle it" Daniels said. Which was his way of acknowledging the thing without naming it.
Tim appreciated that about him.
"We don't take that crossing" Tim said. "We go two clicks north. Longer route but we control the approach the whole way."
Daniels looked at the map for a long time.
"Alright" he said. "We go north."
---
They went north.
The crossing they avoided exploded forty minutes after they passed the point where they would have been if they'd taken the original route. Tim heard it from two clicks away — the particular crack and concussion of a coordinated ambush hitting empty jungle.
Nobody said anything.
Forrest looked at Tim from across the column.
Tim kept walking.
---
But December had more than one ambush in it.
The second one Tim didn't see coming.
Not because his senses failed him. Because it came from a direction he hadn't anticipated — a small unit that had been sitting completely still in the canopy for what must have been hours, patient in a way that Tim respected even as the first shots came down.
It was bad fast.
Tim moved on instinct — Ghost Rider's combat experience taking over the way it always did in situations that required not thinking, just acting. He was between Forrest and the fire before he'd processed the decision. Between Bubba and the worst of it a second later.
He took hits.
Several of them.
He kept moving.
The healing was fast enough to keep him functional if not fast enough to keep him from feeling it and what he felt was considerable but he filed it away in the part of his mind that handled things that needed handling later.
Daniels was down.
Not dead. Tim's hearing confirmed that immediately. But down and not moving.
Tim got to him. Got him behind cover. Looked at the wound with the clinical assessment of someone who had been reading injuries since they were seven years old in a jungle.
Serious. Not unsurvivable.
"Stay here" Tim said.
"Where are you—" Daniels started.
Tim was already moving.
---
What happened next Tim didn't discuss afterward.
Not with Forrest. Not with Bubba. Not in any report or debrief.
He moved through the ambush the way he moved through the jungle — efficiently, quietly, with complete commitment to the immediate thing in front of him. Ghost Rider's combat experience knew exactly how to operate in close terrain under fire. Wolverine's senses knew exactly where everyone was.
He didn't use the claws.
He didn't need to.
When it was over he came back to where Forrest and Bubba were behind cover and crouched down beside them.
Both alive.
Both looking at him with expressions that occupied different points on the spectrum between impressed and deeply unsettled.
"You alright?" Tim said.
"Yeah" Forrest said.
"Bubba?"
Bubba looked at him for a moment.
"I'm okay" he said slowly. "You got a lot of blood on you."
"I know."
"Is it yours?"
"Some of it."
Bubba looked at the wounds that were already closing on Tim's arms and said nothing for a long moment.
Then he looked at Forrest.
Forrest gave him the small nod that Tim recognized from twelve years of Forrest communicating volumes with minimal expression.
*I know. Don't say anything.*
Bubba looked back at Tim.
"Okay" Bubba said simply.
Tim looked at them both.
"Let's get Daniels out of here" he said.
They got Daniels out.
---
The medevac came at dusk.
Tim sat at the edge of the landing zone while the unit processed what had happened around him and wrote a letter to Alex on the back of a supply manifest because it was the only paper he had.
He didn't write about the ambush.
He wrote about the quality of the light at dusk in the delta. About something Bubba had said about shrimp that morning that had been genuinely interesting. About Forrest writing a letter home with his tongue between his teeth the way he always did when he was concentrating.
He wrote *I miss you* at the end.
Folded it.
Put it in his jacket pocket with the others.
Looked at the darkening sky over the delta.
*Come on* he thought at the universe generally. *Let's get through this and go home.*
*TBC*