"And gotten the kid killed. And your team leader. And probably my entire team." Mara leaned forward. "I made the callhe forced me to make. The same call any of you would've made in that situation. So if you want to sit here and second-guess it, go ahead. But it won't change what happened and it won't help us get him back."
The team bay went quiet. The five Delta operators exchanged glances. Some kind of silent communication that Mara couldn't read but recognized. They were deciding whether to trust her. Whether to work with her. Whether to believe that Shadow Veil was actually trying to help instead of covering their own asses.
Finally, Hawk spoke again, his voice softer but no less intense. "You're right. What happened, happened. The only thing that matters now is getting Steele back alive."
"Agreed."
"Tell me about him," Mara said before she could stop herself. The words came out before tactical sense could intervene. Before she could remember that personal questions had no place in operational planning.
Hawk's eyes sharpened. Studied her face. Saw something there that made his expression shift slightly. "What do you want to know?"
Everything. "What kind of operator is he? What should we expect when we find him?"
It was tactical. Professional. The kind of question that made sense in mission planning. Except the way her pulse kicked up when she asked it had nothing to do with tactics.
Bulldog answered, his voice carrying a mix of respect and frustration. "Stubborn as hell. Won't quit. Won't break. If anyone can survive what Nazari's putting him through, it's Steele. He'd do it for any of us. Go back. Risk everything. Never leave anyone behind. That's who he is."
That's who he is. Present tense. Still alive. Still the man who'd looked at her through smoke and chaos and made a choice that had changed everything.
Mara felt something settle in her chest. A certainty that went beyond logic. They were going to find him. And when they did, she was going to look into those dark eyes again and figure out what the hell had happened in that compound that made him impossible to forget.
"Quinn says you have three possible locations."
"We do. Quinn, show them what we've got."
Quinn pulled up the satellite imagery on both screens. Site one. Site two. Site three. Red markers showing the locations. Blue overlays showing security patterns and communications traffic.
Ghost leaned forward on Delta's side, studying the data with the focus of someone who lived and breathed signals intelligence. "This matches our analysis. How did you get confidence levels this high without direct access to DOD satellites?"
Quinn's smile was thin. "I'm very good at my job."
"Clearly."
Hawk pointed to site one. "This is our primary target. Basement structure, recent security upgrades, highest probability based on Nazari's pattern-of-life."
"We agree," Mara said. "But we can't ignore sites two and three. If we hit one and he's not there, Nazari will move him immediately. We'll lose our window."
"So we need to hit all three simultaneously," Bulldog said. "Split our forces. Maximum coverage."
Sloane spoke up for the first time. "That spreads us thin. We're eight operators. You're five. Thirteen people total against three fortified locations with unknown guard strength and unknown prisoner location. Those are bad odds."
"Bad odds are better than no odds," Risk said. "And right now, Steele doesn't have any odds at all."
Winter had been studying the tactical maps. "What if we don't hit all three? What if we use reconnaissance first? Narrow down the location before we commit to a full breach?"
"Takes time we don't have," Hawk said. "Every hour Steele's in custody is another hour they're interrogating him. Another hour he's bleeding or injured or worse. We move fast or we don't move at all."
Mara understood the urgency. Felt it herself. But Sloane was right about the risk. Splitting their forces across three targets was tactically unsound. One team would be too small to handle serious resistance. If they guessed wrong, if Steele was at a different site, they'd have burned their element of surprise for nothing.
"What about coordination?" she asked. "We hit site one as primary. You hit site two. We leave site three for secondary assault if both primaries come up empty."
Ghost shook his head. "By the time we clear two sites and move to the third, they'll have moved him. Or killed him."
"Then we need better intelligence," Quinn said. "Give me twelve hours. I can narrow it down to one site with ninety percent confidence."
"How?" Ghost asked.
"Communications intercepts. I've been monitoring encrypted traffic between Nazari's associates. I can't break the encryption, but I can track the patterns. Heavy traffic to one location. Medical supplies being moved. Changes in guard rotation. All of it points to where they're holding a high-value prisoner."
