No one.
The General’s office was completely empty. Ransacked, burned, and wet, but empty.
“Clear.”
Callie cursed as she and Phoenix entered behind him. “Shit, this place is a mess.”
Hawk nodded. “Yup, but there might be something salvageable here to tell us where the General ran off to. Let’s look.”
“Phoenix and I tried to grab everything we thought looked important. Documents, flash drives—”
“—Polaroids of victims with names and dates on the back,” Phoenix spat out, disgusted.
“Hey,boss,” Devil grumbled over the headset. Hawk resisted rolling his eyes. He hated that nickname, but someone had called him that the day before and now he knew Devil wouldn’t let him live it down.
“Hawkhere,” he corrected. “What’d you find?”
“Not much since we can’t touch anything. Jaybird and I heard where you guys went over the comms and searched in the opposite direction. It looks like everyone’s either gone, dead, or ash.”
“Topside, we found some tire marks from someone peeling out of the back entrance,” Snake offered. “We can try to match the treads with known makes and models. Perhaps get some answers there.”
“Good find, Snake. Keep your guard up, everyone, just in case. We’re in the General’s office but we’ll be giving the all clear to the feds soon so they can take evidence and bodies into custody.”
“Copy. Devil, over and out.”
“Let’s check everywhere we can,” he ordered Callie and Phoenix. “I don’t want to miss anything.”
Hawk trusted the feds as far as he could throw them, but he couldn’t tell Phoenix that with Callie present. His team needed to get eyes on every scrap of information before the government took over and kicked them out of the investigation after all the hard work was done. It wouldn’t be the first time his team had been so royally screwed over.
He, Phoenix, and Callie fanned out to examine the room. Almost everything had been incinerated, including the ostentatious desk filling a third of the room. Hawk peered through a window taking up one wall. Inside was a dark room, empty but for a chair, a box, and an open metal cabinet with the contents spilled to the ground.
“That’s the room I was tortured in,” Phoenix explained with an unnerving false cheer lilting his voice. “Nice decor, huh? I really like what they did with the place.”
Hawk huffed a dry laugh even though protective rage boiled in his veins at Phoenix’s words. He and his teammates were well versed in gallows humor, but Phoenix had perfected it in this hellhole.
Investigating behind the desk, Hawk noticed a small, square hole high in the wall with a wide-open door. A safe.
“You get everything from in there?” he asked, moving to stand underneath it.
Phoenix shrugged. “I think I did, but it was so high it was hard for me to see inside. Want a boost to double-check?”
Hawk shook his head. “Nah, I think I got it.”
He tested the broken wood and metal that’d burned into a sturdy lump underneath the safe. Making sure it wouldn’t break, he jumped from the ground. Catching the lip of the safe, he pulled himself up and balanced on the mound beneath him.
“Show-off,” Phoenix muttered.
Emptiness stared back at Hawk from inside the four metal walls, until he realized the bottom was covered by a single piece of paper. He swiped it before hopping to the ground.
“What’d you find?” Phoenix peered around Hawk’s shoulder. “Ooooh, a plain sheet of paper. Fancy.”
Callie snorted as she approached Hawk’s other side. “The General wasn’t much for tech. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had the secret codes to atomic bombs just lying around on parchment.”
“Doesn’t seem like you’re too far off…” Hawk examined the string of numbers thinly scrawled on the back with a date above it. “These look like coordinates from… less than a week ago?” He turned the sheet over.
His heart stopped.
His breath ached in his chest.
