The pain spiked high behind her eyes, her breath catching in her chest, but she didn’t stop. She didn’t even blink. Ten strides. Twelve. Until finally, her leg buckled.
Dante moved fast, hands on the rails. “Got you.”
But she didn’t fall. She caught herself and stood upright. The belt slowed beneath her.
The machine beeped once. She stepped off on her own.
Mack exhaled. “That’s it. You’re officially airborne again.”
Shannon wiped her brow with the hem of her shirt. Her hands trembled faintly as she turned to Dante. “I want the flight file,” she said. “Everything Krueger touched. Every second of the sim, the preflight, the comms. All of it.”
He nodded. “You’ll have it.”
Her eyes were steady now. “I’m not finished.”
Dante reached for her hand. “No,” he said. “You’re just getting started.”
NORTHERN MALI – SAHEL REGION
The wind off the flats came sharp and dry, threading through the ridge like a whisper meant to slice. Marcus “Friend” Chandler lay half prone behind a coil of shale, optics steady. He hadn’t blinked in thirty seconds. Ahead, a shimmer off the sand blurred the horizon just enough to hide movement.
To his right, Twee and Sabra moved silently into cover, boots pressing shallow tracks into the stone. The comms rig on Sabra’s back barely rustled, but her eyes were locked west, where the faint line of smoke spiraled skyward like a question mark.
"Smoke line, west," Chandler murmured. "Could be trash."
Chava scanned again through thermal. “No plastic burn. That’s oil. Fuel fire that’s slow, controlled.”
Chandler adjusted the zoom on his scope. “Or cover.”
Their comms cracked softly. Sean Paulsen’s voice came in low but crisp from the OP. “Update.”
“We’ve got crates at the base of the ridge,” Chava said. “Metal. Half-buried under mesh. No markings.”
“Eyes on crew?”
“Not yet.”
On the far edge of the perimeter, the healed Gary “Beach” Sands reported, “I'm inside visual on the burn site. It's surgical. Fire’s a scrub job. One torched Hilux, no brass, no bodies. But they left something.”
Chandler’s voice sharpened. “Left what?”
Beach held up a charred satellite radio fragment, visible on his cam. “Not local kit. Burnt, but NATO build. Whoever ran this, they were cleaned out fast.”
Paulsen was quiet for a second. “This ties?”
“Hard to say,” Chava said. “But the coordinates Krueger referenced… these are damn close.”
Chandler added, “We’ve got twelve crate shapes that match the recon intel forwarded from DC. Short-range rocket launchers. Russian tech. And not black-market knockoffs. New.”
“Confirm?” came Paulsen again.
“Confirm,” Chava said grimly. “They’ve been camouflaged for weeks.”
Joseph “Red” Canal cut in, voice low and dry. “So that bastard was telling the truth.”
“Not all of it,” Chandler muttered. “But enough.”
Beach added, “Lobo called this before he was hit. He clocked this crest—wolf over sword. We’ve got the same one here. Black and red.”
