“Jug,” Talon said suddenly, his voice cutting clean through the hum of electronics, “I think we need a full threat assessment of the Arjun Ridge facility. Security protocols, defensive positions, and evacuation procedures. Everything.”
Jug’s brows rose. “That’s outside our scope of operations. Mine security’s handled by their private contractors.”
“I know what our scope is.” Talon’s voice dropped into that controlled tone that allowed no argument. “I also know that if something goes wrong at that mine, we’re the ones who’ll be called in to clean up the mess. I want to know exactly what we’re walking into.”
Jug’s eyes narrowed slightly, but he gave a short nod. “Copy that.”
Talon returned to the map, tracing the red line of the convoy route. His focus was still on the forty-seven kilometers of hostile territory and the time they had to forge a fighting unit out of raw recruits. But his brain was now running on two paralleltracks, the mission and the reality that Riley was returning to this dangerous area. She’d said she was, but … damn, this made it real.
“All right,” Talon said, his voice carrying the weight of command. “We’ve got eight weeks to get the SRF ready for the real convoy exercises. That means intensive training every day, no exceptions. Jug, draft a schedule assuming eight weeks total. If we get more, great. If not, they need to be ready.”
“Roger that,” Jug replied, already pulling up files.
“What about the equipment situation?”
“We work with what we have and improvise the rest,” Talon said, shifting his weight forward, his palms flattening against the cool metal of the table. “Hammer, jury-rig whatever training aids you can from available materials. Stryker, provide medical training with the supplies they have. We can’t train them on ours; it’s too advanced. Wolf, long-range reconnaissance using civilian optics if necessary.”
The team began breaking into their respective planning sessions, the space filling with the muted scrape of chairs and the low rumble of voices. Talon stayed where he was, gaze fixed on the red line that cut across the map like an open wound.
Forty-seven kilometers of hostile territory. Eight weeks to make soldiers out of men who barely knewhow to hold formation. And now, Riley was there. The woman who’d been a constant in his life over the last year, her words threading into the spaces between missions, grounding him when the chaos pressed too close.
He pulled out his phone, his thumb hesitating for a second over the keyboard until he tapped out a message.
Talon:Things are progressing here. Challenging but manageable. How did your meeting go with your father?
Simple.Professional. Nothing that gave away the sharp, insistent undercurrent of emotion he’d been ignoring since seeing her name on the manifest.
As he hit send, the air in the ops center seemed heavier. Outside, the rising sun burned away the shadows. Heat already radiated off the sand in waves that fooled the eye. The Sahel didn’t forgive mistakes. The teams he was in charge of training needed to understand, embrace, and work with it, or they would die. And dying wasn’t an option.
CHAPTER 10
The roar of the twin-engine transport bled into a steady hum as the aircraft dropped toward Burundu. Riley gripped the worn armrest, not because she was nervous about flying—she’d done worse landings on worse planes—but because her chest felt tight with anticipation.
A year. A whole damn year since she’d set foot on this soil. The air here had a weight, a taste—hot dust and faint metal—that hit her even through the sealed cabin. It carried memories she’d spent twelve months forcing into neat boxes.
Her phone, locked in airplane mode, sat in her lap like a live grenade.Talon.His name was there in her messages, miles of texts stretching back day after day. No voice calls. No video. No contact outside thethread that had become the most reliable part of her life.
And now she was back in his area of responsibility.
The plane touched down with a tooth-rattling jolt. Riley’s spine stayed straight, her white-knuckled grip the only betrayal of nerves. The cargo door groaned open, letting in a wall of Burundu heat that wrapped around her like a suffocating wet blanket.
Her boots hit the airstrip, and the old familiarity came back hard. The smell of fuel fumes, scorched asphalt, the muffled sound of French, Burundian dialects, and the mechanical whine of overworked engines were familiar. It was chaos, but a chaos she knew how to navigate.
She didn’t pause. A cluster of Shoemaker Mining Consortium personnel waited nearby. Some of the faces she half recognized; others she didn’t. Most were sweating in the heat, looking like they regretted every life choice that had brought them there.
“Container manifest’s a mess,” a junior logistics tech mumbled, looking flustered over a clipboard.
“Then fix it,” Riley said sharply, her voice cutting clean through the clatter of the airstrip. Heads turned. “And if Customs tries to hold you up overyour own paperwork, you stand there until it’s sorted. We’re not losing another forty-eight hours over preventable screw-ups.”
The tech opened his mouth, but she was already moving past him, scanning the unloading cargo with practiced eyes. Two shipping crates marked for Arjun Ridge were stacked wrong, straining the tie-downs. She stalked over, the oppressive heat welding her shirt to her back.
“Hey!” she barked, and the local driver froze mid-shift. “That crate doesn’t ride there. Re-stack it. You shear a bolt on the convoy road, and you’ll have two million dollars of equipment bleeding uranium dust into the Sahel. Move it. Now.”
The driver gave her a look of half defiance and half disbelief, but something in her stance made him reach for the tie-downs without another word.
She felt it then. The old familiar pulse of adrenaline, the sharp-edged satisfaction of being back in the field. It was a thin layer of armor she could pull over herself. And it was just enough to cover the truth.
In actuality, her stomach was a knot of nerves. She was running on equal parts determination and pride. She’d come back to prove—to herself, her father, to everyone who whispered that she wasn’tcapable—that she could still do the job. That she could walk into this heat, this chaos, this danger, and hold her own.
