All three men pulled a weapon they carried and moved toward the service door.
Bateman ordered as he moved.“Lockdown matrix Alpha.Marsh, interior cams now.Ezra, Rick, feed me exterior eyes.Find me a vehicle signature leaving the service road in the last ten minutes, and someone fucking find where they have taken Dale!”
Ty moved to the door and checked the latch.No damage.No sign of a struggle past the meticulous smear.It was careful in a way that made him angry.
“Ty, you’re with me,” Bateman said as they went through the door and into the hallway that led to the trainee barracks and mess hall.“Oren, stay back with Marsh.We track, we don’t guess.”He looked between them, the weight of command and something heavier right behind his eyes.“We bring him home.”
“Copy that,” he said.He met Oren’s gaze and saw the same promise there he felt in his own chest.“We bring him home.”
Chapter Fourteen
He woke with pain inhis shoulders, and standing on his toes.
Metal bit his wrists, warmth tracked down his arms telling him that his wrists were bleeding.A steel pipe ran across the ceiling, and the cuffs forced his arms high enough that every breath pulled at his shoulders.Concrete underfoot, cold through his socks.The air tasted of dust and adhesive—new build, not warehouse.His head rang with a thin bell from the hit.Concussion haze made the edges swim.He cataloged anyway.
Inventory.Head—split, ringing.Face—bruised.Ribs—one good shot, maybe two.Wrists—cuffed, blood warm under steel.Manageable.
He opened his eyes to a room that wasn’t finished.Vapor lights hung on temporary cords.Plastic sheeting ghosted a doorway.A chalk line crossed the slab.
Men stood in the open space in front of him.Four of them moved, one didn’t.The still one watched him the way a man watches a fire he made.
They’d worked him over already.Not for fun—but for efficiency.A punch high on the right kidney to set the tone, a rib shot to fold him, a few careful hits to the face that would look worse later.Somebody knew what not to break.
They spoke under their breath.Not English.Chechen.Now it was all starting to make a horrific kind of sense.
When the still one finally stepped closer, Dale knew him.Not from a name.From a moment in dust and heat, outside under a busted sky, when a man had pointed at Dale as they fled in the back of a busted up truck and dragged a finger slow across his own throat.Not a threat.A promise.
“Soldier,” the man said.His English was clear but heavily accented.“Do you know me?”
“I do,” Dale said.
A flicker that might have been approval moved through the lines of the man’s face.“You killed my son.”He didn’t raise his voice.“He was the last one I had.”
Dale kept his chin level.“I remember the fight.I remember the faces.But it was war.”
“Yes.”The man nodded once.“War.I buried three sons in the name of that war.My brothers buried children.Two buried wives.This one—” he touched his chest, a small precise gesture “—was my last.”He looked past Dale at the others, then back.“We understood this is a road we do not return from.”
