Ghost stared at him, his mind working through the angles, looking for the lie. "You expect me to believe you're undercover."
"I've been infiltrating their operation for eight months," Carver said, his voice urgent now. "No handlers. No oversight. Because I couldn't trust anyone in the chain of command."
"Bullshit." But even as Ghost said it, pieces were sliding around in his head. The angles weren't fitting together the way he'd assumed.
Carver's jaw clenched. "You've been blaming me since Kunar. Since that clusterfuck ambush during Bear's extraction. I've seen it in your face every time you look at me."
Something tightened in Ghost’s chest. The memory was there immediately, the chaos, the confusion, walking into what should have been a simple rescue and instead finding a coordinated ambush. They'd been compromised. Someone had sold them out.
He'd blamed Carver. The Ranger who'd been in the area. The one with access.
"I wasn't the one who set that trap," Carver said, his voice quieter now. "But Langley and Hale were."
The words hit differently this time. Not new names, Ghost had been surveilling them for days, building a case against them for arms dealing. But hearing them connected to Kunar, to the ambush that had nearly killed his entire team, his brain started recalculating, reassessing, seeing the operation from a different angle.
"They sold you out," Carver continued. "Set the whole thing up. Because your team was getting too close to their operation. They couldn't risk you stumbling onto what they were moving through that region."
Ghost's fists curled at his sides, his damaged knuckles protesting. Fresh blood welled in the splits. They'd been watching Langley and Hale for weapons trafficking. For corruption. But this, this was betrayal on a different level.
"They knew we'd be in the kill zone." Ghost's voice dipped low. "Let it happen."
"Planned it," Carver corrected. "They fed you intel that was just good enough to get you there, but bad enough that you'd walk straight into an ambush."
The silence that followed was heavy. Absolute.
Torch let out a slow breath. Reaper swore under his breath. Brick shifted his weight, jaw tight. They'd all been there. They all remembered.
And Ghost had been aiming at the wrong target for months.
"How do you know this?" Ghost demanded.
Carver's expression hardened. "Because it's not the first time they did it. Eight months ago, my Ranger unit got hit the same way. Three months before your op. Clean intel, sanctioned mission, then we walked into a kill zone."
He paused, his gaze distant. "I had a man down. Jensen. I wasn't leaving him behind. But I got separated during extraction." His voice dropped. "That's when Colonel Victor Sloane found me."
Ghost's pulse kicked up. He'd seen that name in casualty reports. KIA. Enemy action.
"He had a gun to my head," Carver said flatly. "Tried to recruit me right there in the middle of a firefight. Told me I'd walked into something bigger than I understood. Said he could make me rich if I played along."
"He tried to recruit you," Torch said, disbelief in his voice.
"While my men were bleeding out fifty yards away," Carver confirmed. His expression went cold. "He gave me two choices: work for them, or die in the sand. So I killed him. Put my knife through his throat before he could pull the trigger."
The room stayed silent.
"Before he died, he gave me names," Carver continued. "Langley. Hale. Told me the operation was bigger than one colonel." He met Ghost's eyes. "So I decided to go after them. Walked right into Langley's office two weeks later and told him I'd been working with Sloane before he got killed. Offered to fill the gap."
Ghost studied Carver's face, searching for the lie. "And he believed you."
"He tested me first," Carver said. "But yeah. Eventually he brought me in. That's why I was at that airfield meeting. By that point, I'd been embedded for months. They trusted me enough to have me run security for high-value transactions."
Reaper's voice cut through, quiet but certain. "You're saying you've been undercover this whole time."
"With no backup," Carver confirmed. "No safety net. Because I couldn't risk anyone knowing. Not until I had enough evidence to bring down the whole network."
"Evidence." Echo leaned forward. "You have proof?"
Carver pulled a small thumb drive from his vest pocket. "Dead drops. Encrypted files. Account numbers. Shipping manifests. Three senators. At least five high-ranking military officials. Shell companies in four countries." He held up the drive. "This is a backup. The full archive is buried in three separate secure locations."
