I hauled myself up the slick metal of the cab. “Stay with me, Walt,” I shouted, wedging my shoulder against the dashboard to relieve the pressure on his leg.
He did not talk about his family. He did not show me a picture of a grandchild. Instead, as I strained to pry the metal back, his bloodied hand shot out and gripped my collar with a strength that defied his dying state.
“She knew,” he coughed, a thin line of red spilling down his chin.
“Who knew? Walt, keep your leg still.”
“She knew you were coming,” he wheezed, his eyes wide, pupils blown wide with shock. “The phantom… Fort Bragg… it never stopped.”
My blood ran colder than the snow melting on my neck. Fort Bragg. Fourteen years ago, I had been a young captain who stumbled onto a massive logistics and procurement fraud case there. It was a case that had nearly gotten me killed before it was buried under layers of red tape.
Before I could demand answers, the metal groaned. The side panel of Walt’s trailer ripped open from the sheer torsion of the crash. Crates spilled out onto the snow. Not commercial goods. Military-grade lockboxes. And stamped on the side of the nearest crate, illuminated by the flashing red and blue strobes of the police cruisers, was a black, serpentine insignia.
The exact insignia from the missing Bragg manifests.
A local news chopper, fighting the storm, was hovering low, its spotlight washing over me, Walt, and the spilled cargo. A cameraman on the embankment had his lens pointed directly at my face.
“Get out!” Walt suddenly screamed, shoving me backward with his remaining strength. “The detonators—”
I threw myself backward out of the cab, hitting the snowpack and rolling furiously down the embankment just as the transport truck’s cargo bay erupted. A shockwave of heat and deafening sound ripped through the canyon, vaporizing the truck and sending a plume of orange fire into the blizzard.
I lay in the snow, ears ringing, staring at the burning wreckage. The news cameras had caught it all. The heroic rescue attempt. The illegal, classified military cargo spilling onto a public highway. And my face, broadcast live to the entire nation, standing right in the middle of a fourteen-year-old ghost story.
For illustration purposes only
Chapter 2: The Blackout
We limped back to the base shortly before midnight. The scent of ozone and burning diesel was permanently etched into my uniform. I was operating on pure adrenaline, a cold, calculated fury replacing the exhaustion in my muscles.
I needed to secure those manifests. I needed to run the serial numbers of whatever had just exploded on that highway.
But as I stepped into the Operations center, the room was bathed in the sickly yellow glow of emergency backup lights.
“What the hell is going on?” I demanded, stripping off my frozen tactical gloves.
