FIRST LIGHT

The Trident weighed more than he'd thought it would. Everything that followed was lighter.

Kenny Wayne pinned his Trident at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado on a Tuesday in June 2003 and shipped out to Kuwait forty-eight hours later. Team 3 was already rotating. Chief Petty Officer Decker handed him the deployment like a receipt and didn't linger. There was no time to, and as far as Kenny could tell, that was the correct posture for everything that followed.

He is not the kind of man who needs ceremony to know what he is.

What he becomes in the mountains on the far side of that deployment — and what it costs Torres, the wide man from San Antonio with a chest wound that has no business leaving him standing — is the only part of the story that matters. Not the briefings or the exfil routes or the two hundred and twelve meters. The call on the ninth day of stand-down. The twelve minutes of nothing in particular. Torres winning his fight against a physical therapy treadmill in San Antonio.

Next one.

FIRST LIGHT is Book 1 in the Kenny Wayne series — for readers of Vince Flynn and Brad Thor who want an operator without the mythology.