49
You don’t want to stop fighting, but Coulson wouldn’t have given the abort order if he weren’t dead serious about it. Coulson doesn’t do things without good reason; you know that.
You obey the abort order.
When you get to the extraction point, ditching most of your gear along the way to shake off attackers and move faster, there’s already a helicopter hovering overhead. They let down a line for you; you clip on and they pull you up to where most of your teammates are already sitting.
Though you circle the site for another half hour before you start to run low on fuel, Sitwell never makes it to the extraction point. Neither does Woo.
You’re alive, and so are most of what S.H.I.E.L.D. call their ‘special assets,’ but that doesn’t seem like such a great success in the face of an aborted mission and heavy S.H.I.E.L.D. casualties. It doesn’t seem fair, somehow, and everyone is quiet on the flight back to headquarters.
There’s going to be a lot of paperwork on this one. You figure it’s the least of your debt to your fallen comrades.