Deutscher

The belly of the C-130 military transport shuddered as it forced its way through dense cloud cover. The metal deck vibrated at such a high frequency that the fine tremor set teeth chattering. The stale air inside the narrow cargo bay reeked of aviation fuel, unwashed bodies wrapped in synthetic thermal layers, fresh gun oil, and sour vomit. Somewhere near the tail, one of the recruits had already thrown up from the turbulence and adrenaline.

Dim red tactical lights flooded the compartment in a blood-colored haze. Dozens of mercenaries sat shoulder to shoulder on the rigid fold-down benches lining the fuselage. Poles, Colombians, Frenchmen, Americans. A motley rabble drawn to the International Legion for entirely different reasons.

Thomas Bennett stood out among them, and not only because of his age.

He was twenty, and while everyone else stared at the steel bulkhead in front of them, trying to calm their hammering hearts, he radiated feverish energy. Tall and handsome, with a disheveled fringe of dark hair plastered to his forehead by the heat. There was not a trace of fear in his brown eyes—only an unhealthy kind of excitement. To him, this flight was a one-way ticket, a desperate leap to freedom straight out of a courtroom.

Either the uniform, Tommy, or a prison bunk.

His mother’s words still circled inside his head. She had delivered them dryly, without tears or hysterics, while collecting him from the police station for the last time. Street fights, broken faces, wrecked bars, theft—his vicious, uncontrollable temper demanded an outlet, and the Legion had become his only alternative to a cell.

Tom talked without ever shutting up. He bulldozed through language barriers with sheer audacity, a mixture of English profanity, broken Spanish, and hand gestures. The constant stream of words acted as a pressure valve. Between his booted feet, a green ammunition case served as an improvised card table.

“Your straight is bullshit, amigo.”

Bennett slapped a worn playing card onto the plastic lid with a sharp crack.

“I’m taking the pot.”

He grinned, flashing straight white teeth, and swept up the pile of crumpled cigarette packs, lighters, and wrinkled bills. Fresh abrasions marked his fingers, the skin barely beginning to dry. He had already managed to pick a fight with one of the Brits in the transit camp the night before.

You could leave civilian life behind. Your nature came with you.

Thomas gathered the deck in a single smooth motion and began to shuffle, sending the cards from one hand to the other with the practiced ease of a street cardsharp.

“Who’s next?” he shouted over the muffled roar of the engines, sweeping an insolent gaze across the tense faces around him. “Come on, don’t be pussies. You’ve still got time to win your shit back before they dump us into that shit to slog through the mud. Or have you all already shit yourselves over the landing?”

He struck the deck against the case.

“I’m dealing.”

Noah Brandt hated this flight.

He hated the clinging chemical stench from the cramped onboard toilet, where he had just tried and failed to scrub his hands clean. He hated the turbulence.

Most of all, he hated the chaos.

He and Bennett were both twenty. That was where the resemblance ended.

Brandt was shorter, leaner, more controlled. Not a gram of excess weight—nothing but tendons and hard-packed muscle forged through forced marches and relentless drill. Closely cropped blond hair. Cold blue eyes. He had not joined the Legion out of bloodlust or desperation. The military was his family curse. His officer father had driven discipline into him from childhood, and Noah had simply continued along the track already laid beneath his feet. He consistently produced the best marksmanship scores on the range, earning the sparse approval his father rationed out like a military commendation.

But there was no fire inside him.

Only calculation and adherence to protocol.

Brandt did not speak unless there was a reason. His sharp German accent attracted unnecessary attention, so he limited himself to short exchanges with his countrymen.

On his way back to his seat, Noah held tightly to the safety cable running along the fuselage. Navigating the narrow aisle between spread knees, packs, and rifle barrels was an ordeal in itself. The aircraft bucked as if caught in a seizure, while the ribbed metal beneath his boots had become slick with condensation and mud carried in on dozens of soles.

Bennett was a walking insult to common sense.

Loud. Sloppy. Radiating cheap bravado and uncontrolled aggression. Noah felt physically sick from his endless chatter, from the way the piece of shit sprawled across the bench, turned an ammunition case into a casino, and reduced preparations for a combat deployment to a cheap sideshow.

The aircraft plunged into another pocket of dead air. The engines choked as the propeller pitch shifted.

The giant ahead of Noah, a foreign-unit patch on his sleeve, lost his balance in the sudden roll and staggered backward. His shoulder slammed directly into Noah’s chest.

Brandt lost his footing.

His soles slid across the wet metal. The world lurched sideways. Trying to keep his face from striking the steel deck, Noah threw both arms forward.

He landed directly on Bennett.

The impact was brutal. Noah’s knee struck the plastic lid of the ammunition case with a crack, scattering playing cards, lighters, and someone else’s winnings into the dirty puddles beneath their boots. Brandt drove Thomas into the canvas seat back with the full weight of his body, collapsing over him.

The German’s fingers locked around the webbing of Bennett’s tactical vest to keep himself from sliding onto the floor.

Thomas’s smell hit him immediately: stale cigarette smoke embedded in his skin, male sweat, adrenaline.

Noah’s breathing faltered.

He froze with both palms braced against Thomas’s chest. The fabric beneath his hands was hot. Ice-blue eyes collided with brown ones at point-blank range. A single second stretched tight between them.

Brandt did not pull away at once. For a moment, his body refused to obey, paralyzed by the abrupt physical contact and the flare of irritation that came with it. He stared directly into the face of the man he could not stand and felt the idiot’s uneven breath touching his skin.

The mercenaries sitting nearby tensed.

The Colombian to Bennett’s right hastily drew back his heavy boots. After the fight in the transit camp the night before, everyone expected the volatile American to punch the clumsy bastard without hesitation.

But Bennett did not move.

Instead of throwing the German off and leading with his fists, Thomas relaxed his shoulders.

The situation openly amused him. His lips spread into a broad, mocking grin, revealing straight white teeth.

He made no attempt to push Brandt away. On the contrary, he studied the face hovering in front of him with interest. Up close, this proper little army boy, buttoned all the way to the throat, turned out to be pretty. Sharp features, pale skin, and those icy blue eyes now flooded with hatred.

The disgust in that fury excited Tom.

He liked getting under people’s skin.

The transport dropped into another pocket of turbulence.

Thomas deliberately spread his knees wider, depriving Brandt of any easy foothold on the vibrating deck. To keep from toppling sideways into the aisle, the German had to lean forward, pressing his hips more firmly against Bennett’s thighs.

“What the fuck, Bennett?” one of the Poles shouted, shaking dirty water from his boot. “Throw him the fuck off!”

“Shut it, kurwa,” Thomas replied lazily, without raising his voice or looking away from Noah. “Can’t you see the man came over to play?”

Bennett lifted one hand with exaggerated deliberation. His scraped fingers settled on Brandt’s rigid shoulder, insolently stroking the coarse fabric directly over the German flag patch.

“Fuck, you move fast,” Thomas drawled, open mockery threaded through his voice. “I’m used to people throwing themselves at me, but it usually happens in bars, not in the cargo hold of a plane flying to fucking nowhere.”

Bennett raised his chin slightly and leaned closer.

“Take your hands off me,” Noah said through clenched teeth.

His clipped accent sounded particularly harsh now. He tried to pull away, but the shifting deck and the American’s spread legs made it difficult.

“I’m comfortable like this,” Thomas said with a smirk, entirely unbothered.

His gaze dropped to the German’s fingers, still clenched around his tactical vest.

“Why are you so tense? Relax, amigo. We haven’t even landed yet, and you’re already throwing yourself at people. Were you that desperate to meet me?”

Thomas slapped his shoulder in open challenge.

“Looks like we found our next player!” Bennett announced over the roar of the engines, addressing the entire compartment while looking only at Brandt. “Since you’re already on top of me…”

He bared his teeth in a satisfied smile and nodded toward the fold-down seat to his left.

“Sit down, German.”

“Go fuck yourself, Bennett,” Noah said.

Finally finding his balance, he shoved hard against Thomas’s chest and straightened. He brushed at his own uniform in disgust, as if he had just rolled through something contagious.

Thomas laughed.

Loudly. Genuinely.

“I’ll accept that as your opening bet.”

The American bent down at his leisure, collected the cards that had miraculously survived, and shook dirty droplets from them.

“Come on. Don’t be a pussy. We’ll play for your ration pack. Sit down, I said. Or do German military regulations forbid gambling with criminals?”

Backing down was not an option.

Dozens of eyes were already watching them from the red gloom of the cargo bay. In that cramped space, thick with sweat and gun oil, walking away would be the same as raising a white flag. If Noah turned his back and returned to his seat, this rabble would remember him for the rest of the contract as the bitch who had folded under pressure from a loudmouthed American.

Noah stepped to the side without a word. He caught the metal frame of the fold-down seat, pulled it into place, and sat to Bennett’s left. The ribbed deck vibrated beneath his boots, sending a constant fine tremor through his legs.

“Good boy,” Thomas said immediately.

He gathered the damp, mud-stained cards, shuffled them expertly in one hand, and began dealing them across the scratched plastic ammunition case.

“Welcome to the grown-ups’ table.”

Brandt picked up his cards.

In any other game, he would have won without much difficulty. He possessed an excellent memory and a mathematical mind. He was accustomed to calculating probabilities, keeping track of every card he had seen, and reading the body language of his opponents.

But now, all that fucking math was failing against the chaos named Thomas Bennett.

The American did not fall silent for a single second. His mouth produced an uninterrupted stream of verbal garbage that filled the entire compartment, drilled into Noah’s ears through the engine noise, and functioned like a stun grenade. It disrupted his thoughts, disoriented him, and refused to let him focus on either his hand or his own breathing.

“What, did you freeze up, Günter?” Thomas asked, tossing two cards carelessly onto their improvised table while propping his chin on one hand and staring openly at the man beside him. “Or what do they call you proper little boys over there? Hans? Fritz? Does the Bundeswehr teach you how to bluff, or does that violate some paragraph in your regulations?”

“Shut up and deal,” Noah said without looking away from his cards.

His German accent broke the English words into hard, clipped pieces, making every sentence sound like a barked order.

“Oh, I’m dealing.” Thomas smiled as he pushed a pile of broken cigarettes and matchboxes toward the center. “I’m just trying to work out how you people have fun back in Germany. Do you march into brothels in formation? Draw up a schedule telling everyone when they’re allowed to breathe? You look like somebody shoved a broomstick up your ass before takeoff to keep your posture straight.”

One of the Frenchmen opposite them snickered.

Noah stared down at his hand.

Two pair.

Not a bad combination, but far from a certain winner. Under normal circumstances, Brandt would already have calculated the odds and noticed the smallest changes in his opponent’s behavior. But Bennett’s unrelenting chatter filled his head with noise and kept him from watching the American’s hands.

Noah should have noticed that, just before the final bet, Thomas abruptly stopped riffling the edges of his cards.

He did no

“I am betting my ration crackers,” Brandt said, throwing the packet from his thigh pocket onto the plastic. “And if you do not shut your mouth, I will force them down your throat with the wrapper.”

Thomas’s smile widened.

“Aggressive. I like it. But you know what the problem is with your accent, amigo? You’re trying to sound threatening, but you just sound like you’re choking on a sausage. Seriously, relax. We’re all in the same shit, flying God knows where. Tell me instead—Daddy proud of you? Did he let his little boy come play soldier in a real war?”

Noah’s fingers crushed the edges of his cards until the cardboard bent.

The American was striking blindly, cycling through random stereotypes, but he had landed directly on an exposed nerve. Brandt forced himself to breathe through his nose.

“Your mouth moves faster than your brain, Bennett.”

Noah finally looked up.

Cold blue eyes met insolent brown ones.

“Are all Americans such unbearable bastards, or are you a special breed of idiot? Did your mother never teach you manners while she was dragging you out of one gutter after another?”

Thomas did not look remotely offended.

Instead, he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his widely spread knees. The smell of his sweat and shameless confidence struck Brandt again.

“My mother threw me into this Legion so I wouldn’t go to prison,” Thomas replied with mocking candor, looking directly into the German’s eyes. “So manners aren’t really my specialty. Show ’em, robot. Let’s see what you calculated.”

Brandt threw his cards onto the scratched plastic in disgust.

Thomas slowly spread five cards in front of him.

A full house.

No chance.

The American swept Noah’s ration packet toward himself with a lazy, proprietary motion.

For Brandt, the defeat was almost physically unbearable. He was accustomed to controlling everything, calculating ten moves in advance, and now this chaotic piece of shit had flattened him against the wall with nothing more than incessant noise.

Blood surged into Noah’s face. His cheekbones burned beneath the pale stubble as rage and wounded pride flooded his skin with color. Even the crimson tactical lighting could not hide how deeply he had flushed.

“Scheiße!” Noah spat, jerking backward to break the distance between them. “Du verfluchter, arroganter Mistkerl!”

The German curses snapped from his lips like the cracks of a whip. Brandt gripped the edge of his seat and turned toward the steel fuselage. His heart hammered against his ribs. His breathing had become uneven.

Thomas burst out laughing.

It was not a restrained chuckle but the genuine, booming laughter of a man who had just been given the best entertainment of the entire goddamn flight. Bennett was not intimidated by the other man’s aggression. On the contrary, it only excited him more.

“Hey, hey, Private Perfection, slow down,” the American managed through his laughter, leaning after the German.

He possessed no understanding whatsoever of personal boundaries. Thomas reached out and slapped Brandt’s knee.

“Don’t get so worked up. So you fucking lost. Big fucking deal. At least you’ve got excellent posture while you’re losing the pot.”

Bennett continued to grin, savoring the sight of the German struggling to breathe through his anger.

Noah jerked away in disgust, knocking his hand aside, but Thomas only moved closer. Shoulder to shoulder. A few miserable inches separated them, filled with the smell of aviation fuel, gun oil, and sweat.

“What’s got you so upset, amigo?” Bennett lowered his voice, replacing open ridicule with a false, oily concern that was somehow even more infuriating. He leaned in to study Noah’s burning face. “Doesn’t the Bundeswehr teach you how to lose? Want me to give you that dry shit back? I could even feed it to you by hand if you’re really this devastated.”

The American hooked the stolen packet of crackers with two fingers and waved it directly beneath Brandt’s nose.

“Come on, Hans. Breathe. The war hasn’t even started, and you already look ready to cry. We’re in the same boat now. Get used to me.”

Noah’s restraint snapped in a fraction of a second.

He did not raise a fist or offer a warning. Years of relentless drill took over before conscious thought could catch up. He lunged forward and seized Bennett’s tactical vest and jacket collar in both hands.

The fabric strained at the seams.

Brandt twisted the collar and hauled Thomas toward him with a single violent jerk. The difference in their size meant nothing now. So much fury pulsed through the German’s lean, wiry body that it more than compensated for his lack of mass.

Their faces were once again separated by the length of a single breath.

Brandt panted, dragging the fuel-tainted air through his teeth. His icy eyes held a perfectly clear intention: to beat the life out of this bastard right there on the filthy deck of the transport, to grind that condescending smile into a bloody ruin.

Noah’s fingers dug painfully into the fabric. The collar bit into the American’s throat, cutting off his air.

But Bennett did not grab his wrists.

He did not strike back.

He did not even try to break free.

He laughed.

The loud, barking sound struck Noah directly in the face. Bennett was genuinely enjoying himself, allowing Brandt to shake him by the collar. His brown eyes burned with deranged excitement. He stared at the furious, flushed German with undisguised, twisted pleasure, as though Noah had just given him the finest gift of the entire miserable flight.

“Whoa, fuck, easy there, Hans!” Tom forced out through his laughter, unconcerned by the collar choking him.

He tipped his head back slightly, exposing his throat.

“Decided to skip the foreplay and go straight to the cuddling? I don’t mind, amigo, but we’re in public.”

There was something deeply wrong with that laughter.

It made a mockery of Brandt’s rage and shattered his familiar understanding of the world—a world in which aggression was answered with aggression, not genuine laughter. Thomas disregarded the threat and reveled in the moment with the audacity of a man whose instinct for self-preservation had been torn out at the root.

“Halt deine verfluchte Fresse,” Noah said through his teeth, the words aimed directly at Bennett’s lips.

He tightened the collar and drove Thomas deeper into the canvas seat back.

“I will rip out your filthy tongue if you do not shut up.”

“Promise?” Bennett’s grin widened.

He deliberately leaned forward, reducing the distance until their noses nearly touched.

“Come on, good boy. Show me what you can do when Daddy isn’t here.”

Bennett’s laughter scraped across Noah’s nerves like sandpaper. Brandt kept pressing down, using his entire weight to pin the American against the seat.

Thomas did not resist.

He enjoyed it.

That sick, perverse submission, that genuine laughter, dismantled Brandt’s mind faster than a direct punch to the face ever could. The American had turned his burst of hatred into an obscene, humiliating farce.

Without warning, fingers encased in a rigid tactical glove closed around Noah’s shoulder.

A powerful jerk ripped Brandt out of the space between Bennett’s knees. The American’s uniform finally surrendered—the jacket collar tore at the seam with a sharp crack. Noah’s fingers slipped free, leaving dark crimson marks across Thomas’s throat.

Matthias stood behind him, a fellow German from his unit.

He was only a couple of years older, but he dwarfed them both. His short red hair looked smeared with dried blood beneath the red tactical lights. He had to lower his head to avoid the cable running beneath the ceiling, and he casually shoved aside the Colombian who had been watching the approaching knife fight with obvious interest.

Matthias planted himself between Noah and the cardsharp who had clearly lost his fucking mind, blocking Brandt from view. He smelled of gun polymer and menthol.

Unlike Noah, who was shaking with rage and adrenaline, Matthias remained absolutely calm. He looked down at Thomas with the detached assessment of a man accustomed to viewing other human beings exclusively as targets on a range.

“Sit still, American,” he said evenly in passable English. “Keep running your fucking mouth, and I will fuck you up.”

Bennett did not so much as flinch.

The threat rolled off him like dirty water from Teflon. He lazily drew a breath through his nose and settled back against the canvas with unmistakable physical satisfaction, completely ignoring his torn clothing. His scraped fingers rose to his throat. Thomas ran them deliberately over the fresh strangulation marks Noah had left behind.

His lips remained twisted into an insolent grin.

He did not spare Matthias even a glance, dismissing him as a boring obstacle unworthy of attention.

The American’s entire focus remained fixed on the heavily breathing Brandt. Thomas looked at him over Matthias’s shoulder as if they had just finished rough, exhausting sex instead of trying to strangle each other.

The look contained an unmistakable promise that this was not over.

Silence settled around them. Only the C-130’s engines continued their monotonous howl, while somewhere near the tail, a piece of improperly secured equipment struck metal with a hollow clang.

Matthias looked down with open disgust at the cards scattered across the wet deck and the ration pack crushed beneath someone’s boots. Then he turned to his countryman.

“Noah.”

The redhead’s voice sharpened as he switched back to German, though he did not raise it.

“Und du hörst auf, dir an diesem Stück Scheiße die Hände schmutzig zu machen. Los.”

Brandt remained where he was, paralyzed by the crash following the adrenaline surge. His chest heaved beneath the dense fabric of his uniform. Blood pounded in his temples. It took a deliberate effort to tear his gaze away from Bennett’s triumphant face.

Noah jerked his shoulder from Matthias’s grip with unconcealed irritation.

He did not need an escort.

He did not need a keeper.

Brandt lowered his hands and wiped them against the thighs of his uniform. Fabric rasped against fabric. He was trying to scrub away the sticky, invasive sensation of another body, another man’s sweat, another man’s madness threatening to infect him in turn.

Without another word, Noah turned and began pushing deeper into the vibrating fuselage, toward the darkness of the tail section.

Even after putting thirty feet between himself and the improvised card table, he could still feel the American’s insolent stare burning through his back.

“Jesus, you people really don’t know how to fucking lose,” Bennett’s voice cut easily through the solid wall of engine noise.

The American threw back his head, and his laughter once again filled the suffocating compartment.

“But then, history says you ought to be used to it!”

Noah stopped.

The soles of his boots rooted themselves to the ribbed metal deck. The rage he had only just forced under control exploded inside him with twice its previous force, scorching through his organs.

The bastard had not merely made it personal. With that smug, satisfied smile, he had spat directly into the most vulnerable part of Noah. Into everything Brandt wore the uniform for.

National pride, his father’s rigid bearing, duty—to Bennett, all of it was nothing more than material for a cheap joke delivered to an audience of mercenary filth.

Brandt’s shoulder snapped back as he started to turn.

One thought was already beating inside his head with perfect, crystalline clarity: return to the green ammunition case and drive that laughter back down the cardsharp’s throat along with his broken teeth.

Fuck the court-martial.

Fuck the landing.

But Matthias moved first.

A hard palm in a tactical glove struck Noah squarely between the shoulder blades. The shove was rough enough to knock him off balance.

“Geh weiter,” his countryman hissed directly into his ear.

The uncompromising steel of a military command rang through his voice.

“Dreh dich nicht um, hab ich gesagt.”

Matthias physically forced Noah forward, using his own weight like a living shield and cutting off the way back. He understood that if Brandt turned around now, they would reach the landing zone either with a corpse aboard or without a shred of discipline left intact.

Matthias had no intention of finding out which would happen first.

Noah clenched his teeth until the metallic taste of blood spread across his tongue. He forced himself to take one step.

Then another.

As he made his way through the maze of other men’s legs, rifle barrels protruding into the aisle, and packs thrown into heaps, he kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. The red tactical lights washed over the mercenaries’ faces, transforming them into identical blood-colored masks.

The vibration of the fuselage beat monotonously through the soles of his boots, but Brandt could barely feel it. His nervous system was overloaded with rage, slowly and painfully burning down into something colder.

Something deliberate.

Meanwhile, the vacant seat at the improvised table did not remain empty for even a second.

Before the canvas had time to cool, a stocky Pole with an old scar cutting through his eyebrow and a dead cigarette tucked behind one ear dropped into it. He threw a crumpled bill onto the scratched lid of the ammunition case and adjusted the straps of his tactical vest.

“Deal, smart-ass,” the mercenary rasped, casting an indifferent glance at the American’s torn collar and the fresh crimson fingerprints visible beneath it.

Thomas watched the German’s retreating back with a long, openly taunting stare. The grin still lingered on his lips when he finally, almost reluctantly, turned toward his new opponent.

“Excellent.”

Bennett swept the cards into a deck in one smooth motion, entirely unconcerned by the filth clinging to them. His fingers began moving over the plastic once again, shuffling the worn cardboard with the familiar speed of a street hustler.

“The stakes are going up, gentlemen. Who else wants to lose his rations before he dies?”

He struck the deck against the lid of the ammunition case.

“I’m dealing.”