Chapter 7
“Sir, her file is heavily restricted,” Miller said carefully, looking up into Ross’s eyes, trying to gauge if the Major had any inkling of what he was dealing with. “Like… Level 5 DIA firewall restricted, Major. I can’t even open her medical history or her past unit deployments. The system flagged my terminal just for typing her identification number. There might be a legitimate, classified reason she was wearing that insignia, sir. If she was attached to a Tier 1 asset—”
“I don’t care if she was guarding the President’s personal bunker, Miller,” Ross interrupted, his voice dropping into a dangerous, condescending hiss as he leaned closer to the captain. “Look around you. This is the 4th Logistics Support Battalion. We don’t do covert operations. We don’t do midnight raids. We manage the supply chain for the global force. She answers to me, she follows AR 670-1, and she wears the insignia of the Support Command. Do you understand me, Captain? Or do I need to find an adjutant who actually understands how the chain of command functions during peacetime?”
Miller looked down at his desk, his father’s old words about the difference between a real leader and a bureaucrat screaming in his head. A real leader protects his people from the bullshit, Arthur. A bureaucrat uses the bullshit to protect himself.
But as he looked at Ross’s cold, career-focused eyes, the fear of a negative officer evaluation report—the kind of report that could permanently stall his own promotion to Major—won out over his moral compass.
“Understood, Major,” Miller said quietly, his voice tight. “I’ll have the paperwork ready for her signature within the hour.”
“Good,” Ross said, straightening his uniform jacket with a self-satisfied jerk of his hands. “Bring her to my office at precisely zero-eight-hundred tomorrow morning. We’ll do this by the book.”
The off-base apartment Maya rented was located five miles outside the main gates of Fort Liberty, situated at the end of a gravel road lined with towering, dark North Carolina pines. It was a small, one-bedroom unit over an old detached garage, sparse, sterile, and smelling faintly of pine oil cleaner and old wood.
Maya liked it because it contained absolutely no personal history. There were no photographs on the wooden dresser, no decorative pictures hanging on the beige walls, no small tokens or souvenirs from her travels. The entire space looked like a transient hotel room—a place where a person could pack up everything they owned into a single standard military duffel bag within five minutes and vanish into the night without leaving a trace behind.
The evening sun was dipping below the tree line outside her kitchen window, casting long, bloody streaks of deep orange and crimson across the bare linoleum floor.
Maya sat motionless at her small wooden kitchen table, her uniform jacket draped over the back of the chair. She wore only her olive-drab undershirt, her arms bare. On her left shoulder, the jagged, pale pink line of a major surgical scar wound its way from her collarbone down toward her bicep—the remnants of a high-velocity fragment that had torn through her muscle tissue two years ago.
In the center of the table sat the faded, blackened unit patch. Next to it lay a six-inch piece of green nylon parachute cord, its ends frayed and melted into hard, black plastic beads.
She picked up the piece of cord, her thumb rubbing the rough nylon. It had belonged to Sergeant Bobby Miller’s emergency survival kit. She had cut it from his tactical vest in the back of a bouncing, blood-slicked medical helicopter while the medic was pronounced dead over the headset.
Every time the room grew too quiet, the silence would betray her. The steady, rhythmic ticking of the small battery-powered clock on her wall would slowly transform into the deafening, frantic whump-whump-whump of a damaged MH-47 Chinook helicopter trying to claw its way into the thin, freezing air of the Hindu Kush mountains.
It had been late January. The temperature at ten thousand feet had dropped to fifteen degrees below zero, the wind howling through the rocky gorges like a feral animal. Task Force Jericho—a twelve-person unilateral intervention team that officially didn’t exist on any Department of Defense roster—had been inserted into a mountain stronghold to recover forty-three American civilian construction contractors and aid workers who had been taken hostage when a local warlord overran a remote engineering compound.
The mission was supposed to be a surgical, low-visibility extraction. But the intelligence had been catastrophically compromised. The compound wasn’t held by a disorganized local militia; it was a heavily fortified staging area for a foreign-funded insurgent brigade equipped with heavy, Russian-made anti-aircraft weaponry.
The memory hit her now, her eyes staring blankly at the kitchen wall as her mind reeled back into the dark.
