“Jason!” I yelled.
“We’re taking your brother, Major,” Erica said into the phone. “If you want to see him alive, you will not contact the authorities. You will not speak to your chain of command. You will wait for instructions.”
“Erica, wait—”
“Merry Christmas, Becca.”
The line went dead.
I stood in the suffocating darkness of my office, the dial tone humming like a flatline. Everything I was—an officer, a daughter, a hero—had been incinerated in the span of ten minutes. I was not a soldier. I was a pawn.
But a pawn that makes it to the end of the board becomes a queen.
I slammed the sat phone down, drawing my standard-issue M17 pistol from its holster, and racked the slide. The metallic clack echoed loudly in the dark room.
I opened my office door. Alvarez was standing there, her hand hovering near her own holster, looking at me with wide, terrified eyes.
“Major?” she whispered. “Are we under attack?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” I said, my voice eerily calm. “But the enemy isn’t outside the wire. They’re inside the house. And we’re going to burn it down.”
For illustration purposes only
Chapter 4: The Breakout
I did not have time for grief. I did not have time to process the psychological annihilation of my entire existence. My stepbrother had been taken hostage, my father was bleeding out in his ruined study, and a mole within my own command was actively keeping me trapped.
“Alvarez,” I said, stepping into the dim emergency lighting of the Ops center. “Who had access to the main comms array in the last hour?”
Alvarez swallowed hard. “Just engineering. And Captain Mercer.”
Mercer. The executive officer who had tried to send me to the medical ward immediately after the rescue, trying to isolate me.
“Where is he?”
“He went down to the motor pool to check on the snowplow chains.”
“Stay here. Keep the doors locked. Trust no one but me.”
I moved through the shadowed corridors of the base like a ghost. The storm outside battered the concrete walls, muffling my footsteps. My mind was a hyper-focused weapon. My mother—the woman I had mourned for twenty-six years—was an international arms smuggler who had orchestrated the deaths of my friends to protect her supply lines. The grief had not hit me yet. It was dammed up behind a massive, titanium wall of pure, unadulterated rage.
I reached the motor pool. It was a cavernous, freezing garage, smelling of oil and wet concrete. The emergency lights cast long, distorted shadows among the parked Humvees and tactical vehicles.
“Captain Mercer,” I called out, my voice slicing through the gloom.
A figure stepped out from behind a heavy transport truck. Mercer. He did not look surprised to see me. In fact, his hand was already resting on the grip of his sidearm.
“You shouldn’t be down here, Major,” Mercer said, his tone devoid of its usual deference. “You were ordered to medical.”
“Who pays you, Mercer?” I asked, keeping my distance, my hand resting casually near my thigh, inches from my M17. “Is it Erica Whitmore? Or does my mother write the checks directly?”
Mercer flinched. Just a micro-expression, but it was enough.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied smoothly. “I’m trying to get the plows operational so we can restore comms.”
