Excerpt from "Breakpoint" by JoAnn Ross

Somewhere in Afghanistan

The Afghan mountains had never been Tech Sergeant Dallas O’Halloran’s favorite part of the world, even before he’d had the bad luck to be on a Chinook shot down by an insurgent RPG not far from here.

But he’d survived that experience and it wasn’t like he got to choose the missions. Nor did he have any control over the torrential rain that was pounding down like bullets, causing rivers to overflow their banks, creating mudslides, and turning the ground he was slogging through into a quagmire.

An Air Force Combat Controller, he was accustomed to operating at the sharpest point of the spear. The CCT motto was “first in, last out,” and since Hollywood didn’t make movies about them, like they did those showboat SEAL frogboys or Delta Force hotshots, very few civilians knew they existed.

Which was just the way Dallas liked it.

Tonight he was on a joint mission to rescue a downed pilot and Aussie photojournalist reportedly being held captive by members of the Taliban.

It had been slow-going as they plodded, stumbled, and crawled across mountains once traveled by Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Marco Polo.

The town consisted of maybe fifty mud-brick houses which climbed the hillside, house nearly on top of house. Smoke from woodstoves rose through vents in the roofs and even through the rain Dallas could smell the odor of dung from the goats baa-ing in the distance.

They were met at the perimeter of the town by a barefoot, toothless scarecrow of a man sporting the traditional long beard who claimed that the prisoners were no longer where the intel had placed them.

Dallas and the SEALs exchanged an “it figures” look.

After more conversation, the old guy took a stick and drew a rough map in the mud of where they could supposedly find the prisoners.

“Could be a trap,” one of the SEALs warned.

Apparently sensing their distrust, the man assured them, in broken English, that he was “Not Taliban!”

Which could be true.

Or not.

“Any guy who’d turn traitor against his own people wouldn’t have any compunction about lying to U.S. forces,” Dallas said.

“We’re going to risk it,” the team leader decided.

Unlike his last debacle of a mission in these mountains, the raid went off like clockwork. Armed-to-the-teeth Rangers and Marines, looking intimidating as hell, as if they’d just leaped out of a Rambo flick, didn’t end up firing a shot.

With a lot of shouting, the SEALs kicked open the door of the house, handcuffed the occupants, then clamored down stairs into a mud-floored cellar and found the journalist – whose legs were both broken -- tied to a support post.

After strapping him onto an evacuation board, another contingent located and untied the pilot, who, other than some really ugly bruising, two missing front teeth, a cut over his right eye, and a flight suit that stank as if it had been dragged through goat dung, appeared to be in pretty good shape for someone who’d been held prisoner for three long weeks that must have seemed like years.

“What kept you?” he asked mildly.

The raiding force was on the ground less than twenty minutes.

Intent on getting the former hostages to safety, Dallas lowered the imaginary cone of silence that helped keep him in the zone, effectively shutting out the shouts, wails from the townspeople’s women, curses from their men, along with the ear-blasting rotor noise from the helo he’d called in.

Which was why he never heard the rapid fire click-click-click of a camera shutter.

Two days later Dallas’s rain and mud-streaked face ended up plastered on websites and the front pages of newspapers from Seattle to Singapore. And everywhere in-between, along with the damn rescued journalist’s over-the-top “first-hand” account of the event.

With his cover effectively burned, Dallas O’Halloran’s illustrious ultra-secret Spec-Ops career had just turned to toast.