A day or so after the events of last issue, we pick up the tale in Afghanistan, where the Sergeant Major and Lincoln Griffin are busy training the Mujahedin rebels how to defeat the onslaught of the Soviet army. During a break in the discipline, Lincoln and the Sergeant Major get to talking, and they discuss how silly it was that Mark's made it through everything else in life, but got shot down in New York.

 
The conversation eventually turned to the Sergeant Major's first meeting with Hazzard, which occurred well after the Sergeant Major retired from mercenary work with the so-called 'Wild Geese', got married, and settled down. He hired the Sgt. Major to do exactly what he was up to right now, training hopeless peasants to defend themselves against Cubans and other communist, would-be 'liberators'.

Of course, things went bad, eventually, when Treetop took over Mark's shop's contracts, and only recently got better once Mark ended his professional ties with the man. Later, as they prepared an ambush on a Soviet convoy with their Mujahedin allies, another break before the action caused more conversation between the two mercenaries, and the Sgt. Major in turn asked how Lincoln got into the business.

He went on to discuss how he'd become a Navy S.E.A.L., mostly in order to see if he could, and got caught in a sabotage mission gone wrong one fateful night towards the end of the Vietnam war. As luck turned out, it was Hazzard that pulled Lincoln's fat out of the fire, and the two had been on and off allies since then in their mercenary work, which Lincoln began after a failed career in law enforcement.

Once he finished his tale, the Soviets they were after came into sight. As such, the two mercs quit jawin' and got down to business, and as they planned, the Mujahedin took the Soviet forces apart as though they were rank amateurs, thanks to a combination of planning and training. Afterward, the mercenaries joined the troops in their celebration, though their thoughts kept turning to Hazzard's fate, in New York...

Meanwhile, in a New York hospital, Mark's friends and family were hanging around in despair, hoping their friend would recover from Gordon's cowardly attack. As it turned out, the docs had to perform a risky operation to save his life, and this left the group with nothing to do but camp out in the waiting room until they got word about Mark's fate, one way or the other - quite a nerve-racking experience, that.

Having little else to do, Mark's friends simply traded stories about the man, telling how they'd first met up with him. Mal told a tale about how he first met Mark during the Tet offensive, the two of them narrowly escaping an N.V.A. assault and becoming true friends after that, working together both during the war and after - especially after Mark saved Mal from a life drowning in his cups.

The Priestess then related her story, about how Mark saved her from a life of debauchery when she'd run away from home as a teenager, steering her away from predatory street pimps at the last second and taking her to his pal, the Sensei, who ran a martial arts dojo nearby. The Sense taught her how to take care of herself, in life and in combat, thus ensuring her independence, and she'd never forget that.

After the operation, there was nothing but more waiting involved, so Treetop added to the mix of stories, telling about the time he'd first met Mark - namely, when Hazzard beat the tar out of him for extracting his 'copter from a sticky spot, as he was trained to do, instead of picking up Hazzard's dead and wounded men. He was an officer, but knew that Mark was right, and didn't press charges as such.

The two worked together a lot for the duration of the war, and Treetop found that combat was still a great way to make money once he left the 'Nam. He would do merc work for the highest bidder, regardless of the inherent morality of the job - as long as it paid good, he didn't care about the consequences. After learning about Hazzard's merc shop, he got in on that action, too - but had to be in charge.

As such, Mark's merc shop started taking rather shady contracts as well, until things came to a head between Mark's conscience and Treetop's greed, and the confrontation left Treetop bleeding in a European backwater. Of course, this helped Treetop to see the error of his ways, and though Mark shot him in order to get the message across, he wasn't mad at the ethics-laden mercenary any more.

As Mark's ex-wife detailed Mark's story in a little better detail, filling in the holes left by the others, the doctors came in to explain that the operation seems to have failed, in that Mark was showing no further brain activity, and was only being kept alive by the medical machines. As such, his son Scott told the doctors to turn the machines off, as he knew Mark wouldn't want to live on like that.

Though shocked at first, everybody else present had to agree with that, and though they didn't want to do it, they had the doctors turn Mark's life support machines off, thereby ending his career - and his life - once and for all. Of course, the story of Mark's mercenary pals wasn't quite over just yet, as several of them were still quite busy over in Afghanistan, a tale that would be told shortly...