Sergeant Alvarez looked up from a dead communication console, her face pale. “Major, we’re dark.”
“Define dark. The storm took down the towers?”
“No, ma’am.” Alvarez stood up, lowering her voice. She glanced nervously at the two other specialists in the room. “Not the storm. The primary uplinks were physically severed. The backup generators for the comms array have been flooded with water. Someone inside the perimeter did this. We have no internet, no radio out of the county, no secure military channels.”
A mole.
Someone on this base had watched that live news feed, seen the cargo I exposed, and immediately cut the cord to keep me from reporting it. The realization locked around my chest like a vice. I was the commanding officer of this unit, and someone wearing the same uniform was currently hunting me in the dark.
“Lock down the building,” I ordered quietly. “Nobody enters or leaves. Issue sidearms to the command staff.”
“Major, we can’t hold the perimeter indefinitely without comms—”
“Just do it, Alvarez.”
I retreated into my private office, locking the heavy steel door behind me. I paced the floor, my mind racing back to Fort Bragg. I had been a low-level logistics officer who found a discrepancy. I thought it was missing Humvee parts. My superiors told me it was a clerical error. But now those same missing crates had just detonated on a Colorado highway, and someone was willing to isolate a military base to cover it up.
Suddenly a harsh, buzzing sound shattered the silence of my office.
I jumped. It was the emergency satellite phone locked in my bottom desk drawer—a hardline reserved strictly for catastrophic command failures. No one had this number except my highest chain of command.
And, for reasons of emergency family protocol, my father.
I yanked the drawer open and snatched the heavy plastic receiver. “Hale.”
“Becca.”
It was not my father. It was Jason. His voice was ragged, pitched high with a terror I had never heard from my polished, corporate stepbrother.
“Jason? How are you calling this number?”
“I took Dad’s emergency file. Becca, you have to listen to me. Oh god, I’m so sorry.”
“Slow down. Where are you?”
“I’m in Dad’s study. I… I opened the envelope. The one Erica gave me years ago. She said if she ever went missing, or if things went wrong, I had to find it.”
Erica Whitmore. A civilian analyst from the Fort Bragg investigation who had vanished without a trace eleven years ago. Jason had confessed earlier that he had a brief, strange connection with her.
“What was in the envelope, Jason?” I demanded, pressing the phone hard against my ear, listening to the heavy, panicked sound of his breathing.
