Different uniform, same verdict

Three days without sleep in the North Carolina swamps, Specialist Shane Alexander is making every checkpoint of Assessment and Selection when he's pulled out mid-exercise. He hasn't failed anything. Someone higher up has flagged his name. After Bosnia and Leavenworth, the Army calls him expendable, and that makes him deniable.

Two American college students, Regan Owens and Rene Williams, have been taken near Colombia's Magdalena River Valley. Shane joins a small off-the-books team: team lead Joey Bennett, comms man Presley, intel officer Randy White, and a local fixer, Jesus Gonzalez, whose loyalty lasts exactly as long as it keeps him alive. Their first raid finds an empty compound and a frightened boy named Nico, and it becomes clear they were sent in to see who would move.

The trail runs through a Bogotá warehouse and back into the valley, where the team finally reaches the women. As the others carry them out to the helicopter, Shane drops his pack and climbs down a hatch into the cartel's tunnels after José Orlando Henao Montoya, the broker who turned a botched abduction into leverage. He wanted a kill. He comes back with something more useful, and has to answer for it in the rooms at Langley and Fort Bragg where success gets its official definition.