Everywhere Flint looked, his escape was cut off. He, Gung-Ho, Blowtorch, Barbeque, Roadblock, Flash, Zap, and ten greenshirt Joes found themselves in large crater. Cobra had attacked a chemical factory in pursuit of the last ingredient of their mind control gas, and they had captured the crucial ingredient. In the course of chasing the Cobra forces led by Dusty, Flint and his men had run themselves into this pit, and now they stood facing a large squad of Cobra forces standing above them. The Cobra soldiers only awaited the order to shoot, which they were all too happy to do.

Flint swallowed. The blood seemed to drain out of his face. He had never been caught in a situation like this before.

Think, Flint, think. How are you going to get out of this one?

Elsewhere, the sounds of explosions and gunfire raged all around. But this lone spot was an area of calm amidst the sea of violence.

Dusty, dressed in Cobra officer garb, stood front and center at the top of the embankment. He aimed his rifle at Flint.

"You're surrounded and out-gunned, Flint," Dusty said. "Throw down your weapons and surrender."

"What if we don't?" Flint said defiantly. "What are you going to do then? You're going to kill us all?"

"I will if I have to. I'll shoot every last one of you with no qualms," Dusty declared. But there was a note of uncertainty in his voice.

"Come on, let's waste these little punks," a Cobra trooper said, his finger itchy on the trigger.

"Yeah, kill 'em all," another trooper said.

"No one shoots anyone without my order!" Dusty shouted, asserting his authority.

Lieutenant Carol Demming, second in command of the Cobra group under Dusty, stepped up next to the man she loved with a blind, insensate passion. She put a hand on his arm.

"Are you afraid to shoot your own brothers?" Demming said.

Dusty heard her voice and watched her lips move through the black Cobra face mask, and he trembled. What was this strange power that this woman held over him?

"I'm not afraid of anything," Dusty said. But he still sounded unsure.

"Flint, I don't like this," Roadblock whispered as he stood next to Flint.

Flint held up his hands. He and his men faced certain death. There was only one option left to him, and it went against every instinct in his body.

"Everyone calm down. We surrender. You hear that? We surrender. All Joes, stand down. That's an order."

No sooner had all the Joes thrown down their weapons, when an impatient Cobra trooper let loose a single shot, felling Gung-Ho and setting off an orgy of violence. All of the Cobra troopers opened fire on the helpless Joes at once, while the Joes scrambled to grab their weapons and find what paltry cover their AWE Strikers offered in their position of fatal vulnerability. Men shrieked in agony as they fell. Roadblock charged forward and uphill to confront the enemy, determined to take down a few of the Cobras with him. He shot two of them before he was finally dropped dead. A bullet struck Flint in the chest, knocking the wind out of him and dropping him to the ground. Lying sideways on the ground, Flint helplessly watched as one by one, his friends were cut down. The scene seemed to lose all sound to Flint. It was like watching a silent movie.

At this moment, Flint was convinced he would die. His thoughts turned to Lady Jaye. He wondered what had happened to her in San Francisco. The news of an attack on the Golden Gate Bridge had just broken when Cobra had launched this new attack, thousands of miles away.

Please, Flint screamed in his mind. If I could only live to see her again. I would hold on to her and never let her out of my sight, ever again. I would love her forever. I love you, Lady Jaye. I love you until my last breath.

From above, Dusty hollered in vain for the Cobras to hold their fire. He saw Demming standing next to him. She turned and looked at him and stopped shooting. Dusty saw the quizzical expression in her eyes, asking him if his heart was in it. Are you really one of us, her eyes asked him. To that Dusty could make no reply, and he stared helplessly as the rest of the Cobra troopers continued their orgy of killing.

A grenade sent the bloodied bodies of Zap and Barbeque flying through the air, landing at the edge of the crater. With that punctuation, the shooting stopped. The bloodthirsty Cobras were finally satisfied, for now, and Dusty walked into the crater to finish off anyone who was still left alive.

Passing by one bloody body after another, Dusty came to the body of Flint and turned him onto his back. He was still alive, but gasping for air. Apparently he had been shot in one of his lungs.

"Dusty, we have to get out of here now. Finish him off and let's get moving!" Demming called out to him from above.

Dusty reluctantly drew his pistol and aimed it point blank, at Flint's head. Flint's eyes gazed at him with accusation. He would never understand, Dusty realized. He would never understand I was never really a traitor. No one would have believed me after Duke was killed; he was the only one who knew. And now this. Now I have blood on my hands. So this is the point of no return. Everyone will know that I was here, commanding a force of Cobras that massacred an entire squad of defenseless Joes. They will all think that it was all true, that I really was a traitor. But it's simply not true. My mission was to penetrate Cobra at all costs.

Deep within, Dusty knew that he was hiding from the obvious. No rationalization could justify the way he stood by and allowed his friends to be killed. No, Dusty was a coward. A no good, rotten coward.

He had truly become one of them. One of Cobra.

Flint's lips mouthed the word, "why?"

If only I could make him understand, Dusty thought.

"I'm sorry, Flint, I never meant for any of this to happen. Please believe me," Dusty said softly.

Dusty deliberately shifted his aim off to the side and fired one shot.

* * *

Flint opened his eyes wide and sat upright in bed. Next to him, Lady Jaye was aroused and awakened.

"Dash, what's wrong? Are you having that dream again?"

"Yes, Ally," Flint said calmly, lying down again and putting an arm around Lady Jaye as they lay together in a bed, in an abandoned hotel, alone in Philadelphia.

That's all it was, just a dream. A dream of things that had happened not so long ago, but which seemed separated from the present by the gulf of eternity.

He rubbed his hand over his right temple. The scar would always remain from the pistol shot that should have killed him. He should have died with his friends, but he was the lone survivor. It should have ended there in that dirty, blood-stained crater, but it didn't. Did Dusty spare him out of guilt, or mercy, or something else that Flint could not imagine?

And as a sleepless Flint stared at the ceiling fan, its blades silently rotating above him, he mouthed a single word.

Why?