Steve McGarrett

After landing in Afghanistan, Steve and Catherine discovered Amir bleeding from a stomach wound against a tree a long walk from his village. So far, Steve thought to himself, this was going just about as well as he'd expected.

They brought Amir back to his home and settled in as his wife went running for the village's equivalent of a doctor. Steve caught Catherine smiling at a ratty soccer ball off in the corner. "That's what brought us together," she said, pointing to it. "The first time I met Amir and Najib was through a intelligence-gathering program focusing on Afghan women. Najib was playing soccer and kicked the ball into a field full of landmines."

Steve hissed in a breath.

Catherine smiled. "So I made a call and Billy brought around one of the MRAPs and we got the ball back."

Steve blinked. "So let me get this straight. Uh, you spent thousands of the taxpayers' dollars--"

"--to get a ball back, yeah," Catherine said, grinning at him. "It was important local outreach!"

Steve frowned hard but was interrupted by Amir groaning from his bed. Catherine raced over. "Amir!" she said, carefully not reaching out to touch him.

"Najib?" Amir asked.

"We're still looking," Catherine said quickly.

"Do you know which of the factions took your son?" Steve asked, walking over at a much more sedate pace.

"Splinter group," Amir murmured, "under the command of Omar Hassan."

Steve frowned again. "That can't be. Omar Hassan was a high value target, and he was killed in a drone strike two years ago. It was a major operation."

Amir shook his head. "He's alive, and he took my son."

A few hours and some extremely legally dubious contacts later and Steve and Catherine were looking at keyhole satellite imagery of a village a few miles away from them. "Two pick-ups like what Amir told us about, and one canvas-topped truck," Steve said, pointing them out on the image. "If Hassan's been out collecting village kids, they're probably in the back of that truck." His eyes narrowed as he looked more closely at what the picture was telling him. "This village is heavily fortified. I don't think the two of us can take them there." He was about to suggest calling some backup--Danny would be so proud--when Catherine cut him off. "So we'll catch them on the road here," she said, pointing, "when they head for the larger Taliban headquarters to the south."

Steve resisted reaching up to rub the headache blooming between his eyes. There were a thousand ways this could go wrong and he was trained to see all of them, but Catherine was determined. "Let's get ready, then."

Steve hated being right. They'd borrowed a pair of horses from Amir and rode to the village from the satellite images, then waited for the terrorists to come down the road. They got a lucky break when the convoy's route intercepted a local shepherd and his flock and quickly turned into a shouting match between the driver of the first truck and the shepherd. With Steve covering from the brush, Catherine snuck up to the back of the canvas-topped truck and discovered two dozen petrified Afghan boys. "Najib?" she asked, glancing around at the faces and switching to speak Pashto. "//Is Najib here?//"

They shook their heads as she quickly opened the back of the truck and herded them away from the truck. She'd gotten half of them out when the driver of the truck stopped watching the shepherd-boss fight in front of him and checked his rearview mirror instead, then shouted out a warning before reaching for his gun.

The rest was a blur of gunfire and explosions as Steve raced out of hiding to distract the Taliban from Catherine and the kids. He took down a couple of the terrorists, and Catherine was doing her best while also watching out for the boys, but they were havily outnumbered. He looked at where Catherine was, where the Taliban was, and ignoring where he was, tossed a grenade. The last thing he saw was Catherine's eyes going wide as the concussion blast threw him backwards into the windshield of the middle truck.

[OOC: Taken from H-50 episode 4.21! Sorry, Steve.]