You know what the worst part about being dead is? It’s not the cold. God knows the Rocky Mountains have enough of that to freeze the blood in your veins before it even hits the snow. It’s not the hunger, or the constant, gnawing ache of shrapnel wounds that healed wrong because you stitched them up yourself with fishing line and vodka.
No. The worst part about being dead is watching your friends drive into the exact same hell that killed you, and knowing they have absolutely no idea you’re watching.
My name is Captain Emily Weston. Officially, I’ve been dead for six months. My dog tags are sitting in a drawer at the Pentagon. My name is carved into the memorial wall at Fort Carson, Colorado. There is a grave back home with a casket that weighs exactly what a human body should, but inside, it’s just bricks and sandbags. My team—Miller, Smith, Harris—they’re really in the ground. I put them there myself, in shallow graves under these ancient pines, because we were abandoned.
But tonight, the mountains weren’t a graveyard. They were a hunting ground.
I adjusted my position on the rocky outcrop, the frozen shale biting into my elbows through the ghillie suit I’d spent weeks constructing from scavenged mesh and local vegetation. My breath huffed out in small, white clouds that I frantically tried to dissipate with my hand. At night, thermal imaging picks up everything. A breath. A heartbeat. A ghost.
Below me, winding through the Prut River Valley like a ribbon of suicide, was Highway E58.
And rolling down it were three armored SUVs. American. Delta Force.
Through the green phosphor of my night vision scope—a Russian SVD Dragunov I’d taken off a dead mercenary three months ago—I watched them. I didn’t need to see the markings to know who they were. I recognized the spacing. The aggressive posture of the vehicles. The arrogance of men who own the night.
I zoomed in on the lead vehicle. The thermal image ghosted, but I could make out the profile of the man in the passenger seat.
Master Sergeant Ryan Cole.
My heart hammered against my ribs, a painful, frantic rhythm. Cole. The man who taught me how to clear a room without making a sound. The man who signed off on my selection packet when everyone else said a woman couldn’t handle the operator pipeline. And next to him…
I squeezed my eyes shut for a second, fighting the sudden burn of tears that had nothing to do with the wind.
Lieutenant James Webb.
Webb looked tighter than a snare drum. Even from three kilometers away, I could see it. He was checking his rifle. Again. And again. That was his tick. When the anxiety got too high, when the memories got too loud, James checked his gear. I knew why he was spiraling. He was driving through the same valley where he lost two of his best friends six months ago. The same valley where he lost me.
“Turn around,” I whispered, the words lost in the wind. “Turn around, James. You’re driving into a slaughter.”
They couldn’t hear me. To them, the radio was silent. Just static and the occasional burst of civilian traffic. They thought the mission was clean. Extract Ambassador Jonathan Pierce. Get in, get out, home for breakfast.
That’s what Colonel Thompson had told my team, too. Simple in and out, Emily. Easy day.
Six months ago, that lie cost me everything. And now, history was about to repeat itself.
I shifted my scope, panning away from the Americans and scanning the dense, suffocating treeline that flanked the highway. To the untrained eye, the forest was empty. Just pines, snow, and shadows. But I hadn’t been an untrained eye in a long time. And I hadn’t been a Delta operator in six months. I was something else now. Something feral.
I saw them.
Heat signatures. Barely visible, masked by thermal blankets, but they made mistakes. A boot sticking out. A barrel warming up.
Victor Morris’s men.
Morris was a Russian mercenary commander with a soul blacker than the space between stars. He had thirty men positioned in a classic L-shaped ambush. Kill zone logic 101. They were going to let the convoy roll right into the center, seal off the front and back, and then unleash hell.
I counted them again. Thirty fighters. Three SUVs. Eight Delta operators.
The math didn’t work. Cole was good. His team was elite. But against thirty dug-in mercenaries with RPGs and the element of surprise? They were dead men walking.
I rested my cheek against the freezing stock of the rifle. The moral calculus should have been complicated. If I fired, I revealed myself. If I revealed myself, I lost the element of surprise I’d been building for half a year. I risked capture. I risked court-martial for the unauthorized killings I’d done to survive. I risked facing the very system that had left me to bleed out in the snow.
But then I looked through the scope again. I saw James Webb checking his rifle for the fourth time.
“Not today,” I hissed.
I exhaled, letting all the air leave my lungs until I was empty, a vacuum of intent. My crosshairs settled on a mercenary perched in a pine tree, four hundred meters downrange. He was the initiator. He held the detonator for the roadside IEDs.
Squeeze. Don’t pull.
The rifle kicked against my shoulder. The suppressor swallowed the bark of the shot, leaving only a sharp pfft and the supersonic crack of the bullet.
Through the scope, I watched the mercenary’s head snap back. He fell silently, a ragdoll tumbling through the branches, landing in the soft snow. He was dead before he hit the ground.
One.
I worked the bolt. The action was smooth, oiled with fat I’d rendered from a rabbit because gun oil was a luxury I didn’t have.
Target two. Opposite side of the highway. An RPG gunner waiting for the lead vehicle.
Crack.
The gunner crumpled, the rocket launcher clattering harmlessly against the rocks.
Two shots. Two kills. No wasted movement.
Below, the convoy kept rolling. They hadn’t heard the suppressed shots over the roar of their engines. Cole was still studying his tablet. Webb was still sweating. They were driving into a kill zone that I was dismantling piece by piece, and they didn’t even know they had a guardian angel.
But the mercenaries noticed.
Morris’s voice crackled over the radio frequency I’d been monitoring for weeks. “Kto strelyayet? Gde oni?” (Who is firing? Where are they?)
I understood every word. My grandmother had taught me Russian when I was a child, and the last six months had turned me fluent in the dialect of violence.
They were panicking. They couldn’t triangulate my position. The echo in the valley played tricks on the ears.
I shifted, sliding on my stomach along the ridge line. Shoot and move. Never stay still. That’s how you die. I slithered over the icy rocks, ignoring the numbness in my fingers, and set up again fifty meters to the left.
Target three. A machine gun nest.
Crack.
Target four. A spotter.
Crack.
That’s when the chaos broke.
The mercenaries, realizing their ambush was disintegrating, panicked. They opened fire wildly, spraying the treeline with automatic fire, tracers zipping through the night like angry hornets. They weren’t aiming at anything specific; they were just scared.
Down on the highway, the reaction was instantaneous.
I watched Cole’s hand fly up—the universal signal for STOP. The three SUVs locked their brakes, tires screaming on the asphalt, fishtailing into a defensive herringbone formation. Doors flew open.
This was the part that always made my chest ache with a twisted mix of pride and nostalgia. They moved like water. Eight operators poured out, weapons snapping up, scanning their sectors. No shouting. No confusion. Just lethal, practiced efficiency.
“Contact left! Contact right!” I could practically hear Webb screaming it, though I was too far away for the audio.
But they were confused. I could see it in their body language. They were taking fire, but it was high, wild. And they could see the bodies of the mercenaries dropping from positions that they hadn’t engaged.
“Hold fire,” I whispered to them. “Let me work.”
Morris realized he was losing control. Over the radio, he screamed, “Assault! Assault them now! Overwhelm them!”
Fifteen fighters surged from the treeline, abandoning their cover to rush the convoy. It was a desperate move, trying to use brute force to salvage a failed ambush.
Cole’s team lit them up. The sound of American M4s joined the chorus, a distinct, rhythmic pop-pop-pop that was cleaner, more disciplined than the Russian AKs. Three mercenaries dropped instantly.
But there were too many of them.
One mercenary flanked wide, sprinting through the brush, winding up to throw a grenade. He was in a blind spot. Corporal Foster—I recognized him, the kid was barely twenty-four—was pinned down behind a tire, reloading. He didn’t see the grenade coming.
I did.
I didn’t aim for the man. I aimed for the grenade in his hand. It was a one-in-a-million shot. The kind of shot you take at the range to win a beer, not in a valley with adrenaline dumping into your blood.
I stopped thinking. I just felt the wind.
Crack.
The grenade detonated in the mercenary’s hand. A blossom of orange fire erased his upper body. The shockwave knocked Foster flat, but he was alive. He scrambled up, looking around wildly, trying to understand the physics of a miracle.
“Who’s firing?” Webb’s voice finally carried up to the ridge, sharp with adrenaline and confusion. “That wasn’t us!”
I didn’t answer. I reloaded.
For the next two minutes, I was a machine. I prioritized threats. Anyone with heavy weapons. Anyone flanking. Anyone getting too close to Cole or Webb. I dropped four more. Then two.
Morris’s force was breaking. They had lost nearly half their men to a ghost they couldn’t see and a Delta team that wouldn’t yield.
I heard Morris’s order to retreat. “Fall back! Regroup at the rally point! Burn the forest!”
A tracer round from the treeline arced high and slammed into a patch of dry pine needles soaked in resin. Another hit a fuel drum they must have stashed for the ambush.
Whoosh.
Fire erupted. It wasn’t a slow burn; it was an explosion of light. The forest wall turned into a towering inferno, casting long, dancing shadows across the battlefield. The heat was intense enough that I could feel it on my face even from this distance.
The surviving mercenaries scattered, silhouetted against the flames. Perfect targets. The Delta team finished them off. It was a turkey shoot.
And then, silence.
The heavy, ringing silence that follows a firefight. The only sound was the crackle of the burning forest and the heavy breathing of men who had just cheated death.
I watched Cole stand up in the center of the road. He didn’t look at the burning bodies. He was looking up. At the ridgeline. At me.
He couldn’t see me—I was just a mound of snow and twigs—but he knew. He knew someone was up here.
“Secure the perimeter!” Cole barked, his voice faint but authoritative. “Webb, check the bodies. Find out who the hell just saved our lives.”
I lowered the rifle. My hands were shaking now. The adrenaline dump was wearing off, leaving the cold to rush back in. I had done it. I had saved them.
Now came the hard part.
I could disappear. I could melt back into the mountains, trek back to the abandoned monastery of St. Michael where I’d been living like a rat, and continue my solitary war against Morris and Thompson. It would be safer. Safer for me, safer for the secret of how I stayed alive.
But then I saw Webb. He was kneeling next to one of the mercenaries I’d shot. He stood up, looking at the trajectory, and shook his head. He looked lost.
I couldn’t leave them. Not again. And Morris wasn’t done. He was regrouping. He would bring heavy reinforcements from Yaremche. If I left them now, they’d be dead by morning.
I stood up.
I knew exactly what I looked like. A monster from a folklore story. A shaggy, hulking figure covered in rags and pine boughs, weapon slung over my shoulder.
I stepped out of the tree line and onto the exposed rock face, directly into a patch of moonlight that cut through the smoke of the burning forest.
“Contact!” Cole shouted.
Instantly, eight rifles snapped up. Eight lasers painted my chest.
“North Ridgeline! Single individual!”
I didn’t flinch. I slowly, deliberately, raised my empty hands. I had left the Dragunov on the rock behind me. A peace offering. Or a suicide note.
“Hold fire!” Cole ordered, though I could see his finger tightening on the trigger. “Identify yourself!”
I started walking down the slope. It was steep, treacherous loose scree. One slip and I’d tumble, but I moved with the fluid grace of someone who had memorized every stone in this valley.
“Stop right there!” Webb yelled. “Get on your knees!”
I stopped. I was twenty meters away. Close enough to see their eyes. Wide. terrified. Angry.
I reached up with my right hand. Slowly. I gripped the hood of my ghillie suit.
This is it, Emily. No going back.
I pulled the hood back.
My hair was shorter than they remembered, chopped jaggedly with a combat knife to keep it out of my eyes. My face was thinner, gaunt, the cheekbones sharp enough to cut. There was a scar running from my temple to my jawline—a souvenir from the explosion that “killed” me. But it was me.
I saw the recognition hit them like a physical blow.
Webb’s rifle dipped. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. He looked like he was seeing a ghost. Which, I suppose, he was.
“That’s impossible,” he whispered. The silence was absolute.
Cole stared at me, his tactical mind trying to process data that shouldn’t exist. “Weston?”
I forced a smile. It felt brittle on my face. My voice was raspy from disuse, but I made sure it carried over the burning timber.
“Reports of my death were greatly exaggerated, Lieutenant Webb.”
I took a step forward.
“Stay back!” The command came from Sergeant Mitchell, but his voice wavered. They didn’t know if I was real, if I was a hallucinations, or if I had turned traitor.
“We need to talk,” I said, my voice hardening into command tone. “Because Victor Morris is calling in forty reinforcements from Yaremche, and they will be here in fifteen minutes. So you can either shoot me, or you can listen to me. But we need to move.”
Cole lowered his rifle just an inch. “Emily? We buried you. I saw the report. KIA. Confirmed.”
“You buried an empty box, Sergeant,” I said. “Just like Colonel Thompson intended.”
The name hit them harder than the bullets. Thompson. Their commanding officer. The man who signed their paychecks.
Webb stepped forward, his face twisting in confusion and anger. “What are you talking about? Thompson? Why would…”
“He left us,” I interrupted, the anger finally bleeding into my voice. “February 15th. Operation Granite Shield. We didn’t just get ambushed, James. We were sold. Thompson cancelled the extraction. He left Miller, Smith, and Harris to die to cover up his kickbacks from Redstone Military Solutions.”
I locked eyes with Webb.
“I didn’t die in that ambush. I crawled out. And I’ve been hunting the men who killed my team for six months.”
The wind howled through the valley, carrying the smell of burning pine and the weight of a truth that was about to shatter their entire world.
Cole looked at me, then at the burning forest, then back at his team.
“You’re accusing a Colonel of treason,” Cole said quietly.
“I’m accusing him of murder,” I corrected. “And right now, I’m the only thing standing between you and the same fate.”
I pointed toward the east, where the faint rumble of heavy trucks was already audible on the wind.
“Morris is coming back. And this time, he’s bringing a BTR. We have maybe twelve minutes.”
Cole stared at me for one long, agonizing second. Then, he made his choice.
“Webb, get the comms gear,” Cole snapped, turning his back on me to address his team. “Martinez, rig the vehicles to blow. We’re walking.”
He looked back at me.
“Lead the way… Ghost.”
Fire is a cleansing thing.
I watched from the treeline as Sergeant Martinez’s thermite charges turned three million dollars of taxpayer-funded equipment into slag. The SUVs burned hot and bright, sending a column of black smoke into the night sky that screamed “we are here” to anyone watching. But that was the point. Morris would find the wreckage. He’d think we died there, or at least that we were disorganized, panicked, fleeing on foot like terrified prey.
He didn’t know the prey had teeth.
“Move out,” Cole ordered, his voice low. “Weston, you have the point.”
I turned away from the fire and faced the mountain. “Follow my footsteps exactly,” I whispered. “This isn’t a hike. It’s a minefield. And I don’t mean explosives. I mean the ground itself wants to kill you.”
We climbed.
The route I chose wasn’t on any map. It was a smuggler’s goat trail I’d found three months ago while tracking a bear. It bypassed the main roads, cutting straight up the spine of the ridge toward a cluster of rock formations known as the Devil’s Teeth. It was brutal. Steep, slick with ice, and terrifyingly narrow.
For the first hour, the only sound was the crunch of boots on snow and the labored breathing of men carrying eighty pounds of gear. I moved light. My ghillie suit felt like a second skin now. I could hear them behind me—the heavy, rhythmic thud of Harrison, the machine gunner; the lighter, quicker steps of Webb.
I stopped at a ridge line, raising a fist. The team froze instantly.
“What is it?” Cole asked, sliding up beside me.
“Listen,” I said.
Far below, in the valley we’d just left, engines roared. Heavy diesel. Morris’s reinforcements. I checked my watch. “Twelve minutes. Just like I said. They’re swarming the burn site now.”
Cole looked down at the distant headlights cutting through the darkness. He looked at me, and for the first time, the suspicion in his eyes cracked, replaced by a grudging respect. “You time things close, Captain.”
“Survival is about timing, Sergeant. Being early gets you seen. Being late gets you dead.”
We pushed on.
By 0300, exhaustion was setting in. These men were elite, but they’d been awake for twenty-four hours, stressed, and now marching uphill in freezing conditions. We reached a small cave system I’d used as a cache point. It wasn’t much—just a recess in the rock protected from the wind—but it was dry.
“Ten mikes,” Cole ordered. “Hydrate. Check feet. Weston… talk.”
We huddled in the darkness, the red glow of a tactical light casting long, grotesque shadows on the cave walls. Webb sat across from me. He looked wrecked. The adrenaline had faded, leaving him with the raw grief of seeing a dead woman walking.
“Start from the beginning,” Cole said. “Operation Granite Shield. Why did Thompson burn you?”
I took a sip from my canteen. The water was freezing, making my teeth ache.
“We found something we weren’t supposed to,” I began. My voice sounded hollow in the cave. “Our target wasn’t just a terrorist cell. It was a brokerage. We found a laptop in the safe house. It had ledgers. Transfers. Millions of dollars moving from Redstone Military Solutions into offshore accounts controlled by shell companies.”
“Contractor kickbacks,” Webb whispered.
“Worse,” I said. “We found communications. Thompson was feeding intel to the enemy. He was keeping the conflict hot. Ensuring casualties so Redstone could justify selling more security packages, more drones, more advisors. He was farming the war, James. And our blood was the fertilizer.”
The silence in the cave was heavier than the stone above us.
“We called it in,” I continued, staring at my boots. “We thought we were reporting a breakthrough. Instead, we were signing our death warrants. Thompson realized we had the evidence. So he sent us into an ambush and recalled the air support.”
Webb reached into his tactical vest and pulled out a photograph. It was crinkled, water-stained. He held it out to me.
It was the four of us. Me, Miller, Smith, Harris. Taken at a BBQ in Colorado two weeks before we deployed. We were laughing. Miller had a beer in one hand and his arm around my neck.
“Miller fought for eight minutes after he was hit,” I said softly, looking at the smiling face of the man who died screaming my name. “He held the rear so I could try to flank. He took seven of them with him. He didn’t die a victim, James. He died a warrior.”
Webb’s hand trembled as he took the photo back. “I carried his casket, Emily. It was heavy. I thought… I thought I was saying goodbye.”
“You were,” I said. “Whatever part of me was in that photo… she died in the snow, too. I’m just what’s left.”
“We have to stop him,” Corporal Foster said. The kid looked angry. Good. Anger keeps you warm.
“We will,” I said. “But first, we have to survive tonight. The mission you’re on? Extracting Ambassador Pierce? It’s a trap, too. Just like Granite Shield.”
Cole stiffened. “Explain.”
“Morris knows where Pierce is. He’s known for days. He hasn’t moved on him because Thompson told him to wait. They want you to go in. They want a firefight. They want eight more dead American operators to create an international incident that justifies a massive troop surge. And guess who got the contract to build the new bases?”
“Redstone,” Cole spat.
“Exactly.” I stood up. “We need to get to Kolomyia. We need to grab Pierce before Morris gets the order to execute him. And we need to do it without being seen.”
“How?” Cole asked. “The highways are crawling with mercenaries.”
I pointed to the map on his tablet. “We go under.”
The drainage tunnels under Kolomyia were built by the Soviets in the 70s to handle snowmelt. They were claustrophobic, smelling of rot and old iron, and filled with waist-deep, freezing water.
“I hate this,” Foster muttered, his voice echoing wetly off the concrete walls. “I seriously hate this.”
“Quiet,” I hissed. “Sound travels.”
We were wading single file. The water was numbing, seeping through our gear, sucking the heat right out of our bones. I was on point, my headlamp switched to a low red beam. The tunnel was a nightmare of rusted rebar and debris. Rats the size of cats scurried along the ledges, their eyes reflecting the red light.
“How much further?” Webb asked, his teeth chattering.
“Five hundred meters,” I said. “There’s an access grate that comes up in an alley two blocks from the safe house. It’s the only way into the city that isn’t watched.”
Suddenly, Foster stumbled. He splashed into the water, thrashing. “Something grabbed me! Something grabbed my leg!”
Panic is a contagion. In a dark, confined space, it spreads faster than a virus.
“Calm down!” Cole ordered, grabbing Foster by the vest and hauling him up.
“It’s wire,” I said, seeing the rusted coil snagged on Foster’s boot. “Just trash. Breathe, Corporal. Breathe.”
Foster was hyperventilating. “I can’t… the walls… they’re closing in.”
I waded back, grabbing his face with both hands. I forced him to look at me. My eyes locked onto his.
“Look at me,” I commanded. “I spent three days buried under a collapsed wall in the monastery while mercenaries walked over my head. You are not trapped. You are moving. You are a Delta operator, and you are going to put one foot in front of the other because if you don’t, Thompson wins. Do you understand?”
Foster stared at me, seeing the scar on my face, the deadness in my eyes. He nodded, gulping air. “Yes… yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Move.”
We reached the access ladder twenty minutes later. I climbed up first, pushing the heavy iron grate aside. It groaned, a sound that seemed deafening in the quiet alley. I pulled myself up, scanning the street with my pistol drawn.
Clear.
The city of Kolomyia was asleep. Or hiding. The buildings were grey concrete blocks, ghosts of the Soviet era.
“We’re up,” I whispered into the comms.
The team filtered out, dripping wet, shivering, but weapons ready. We moved through the shadows, sticking to the alleyways.
The safe house was a nondescript apartment building on the north side. We set up a perimeter. Cole signaled the breach.
“On three,” he whispered. “One. Two. Three.”
Martinez blew the door lock. The team flowed in, a symphony of violence. Flashbangs went off. Bang. Bang. Rooms were cleared. “Clear left!” “Clear right!”
I stood in the hallway, my weapon raised, waiting for the shout that they had secured the package.
Instead, silence.
“Sergeant,” Webb’s voice came over the comms, tight and angry. “You need to see this.”
I walked into the main room. It was empty. No furniture. No Ambassador. Just a chair in the center of the room with zip ties cut on the floor.
And on the wall, spray-painted in crude red letters: WELCOME TO HELL, GHOST.
My blood ran cold.
“They knew,” Cole said, staring at the message. “They knew we were coming. They knew you were with us.”
“Thompson,” I whispered. “He must have realized I survived the ambush on the highway. He warned Morris.”
“Which means we’re compromised,” Webb said, spinning around. “We need to leave. Now.”
“Too late,” I said, hearing the distinct, terrifying sound of a mortar dropping into a tube outside.
THUMP.
“INCOMING!” I screamed, tackling Webb just as the ceiling exploded.
The world turned white. Dust and debris rained down. My ears rang. I scrambled up, coughing, grabbing Webb by his drag handle.
“Go! Go! To the basement!”
We scrambled down the stairs as the building shook under another impact. Morris wasn’t trying to capture us anymore. He was leveling the city block to bury us.
We hit the basement, dust choking the air.
“Where now?” Cole yelled, wiping blood from a cut on his forehead. “We’re trapped!”
“No,” I said, checking my mental map of the city. “The drainage system connects to the old industrial sector. We go back down.”
“Back in the water?” Foster groaned.
“Better wet than dead,” I snapped. “Move!”
As we dropped back into the dark, stinking water, the building above us collapsed, sealing the exit. We were alive. But we had failed the mission. Pierce was gone. And we were rats in a maze, being hunted by an army.
PART 3: THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH
We surfaced an hour later in the ruins of an old textile factory on the outskirts of the city. We were freezing, battered, and furious.
Cole slammed his fist against a rusted loom. “We lost him. We lost the Ambassador.”
“We didn’t lose him,” I said, wringing out my gloves. “Morris took him. And I know where.”
I pulled out a waterproof map case. “Yaremche. There’s a Soviet-era bunker complex built into the side of the mountain. It’s Morris’s main base of operations. It’s a fortress. If he has Pierce, that’s where he is.”
“And that’s where he’ll kill him,” Webb said. “As soon as Thompson gives the order.”
“We have to hit it,” Cole said. He looked at his team. They were shivering, exhausted, bleeding. “We’re eight men. Low on ammo. No support. Going against a fortified bunker.”
“Seven men,” I corrected. “And one ghost.”
I looked at them. “I know a way in. But it’s insane.”
“We’re Delta,” Martinez grinned, his teeth white against his soot-covered face. “We specialize in insane.”
“Supply trucks,” I said. “Morris runs supplies up the mountain every morning at 0400. Food, ammo, fuel. They check the drivers, but they don’t check the cargo if the paperwork is right. I still have the transponder codes I stole from the mercenary I killed last month.”
“We hijack a truck,” Cole realized. “Trojan Horse.”
“Exactly. We ride it right through the front gate. Once we’re inside, we split. Team Alpha goes for the command center. We need to hack their system to get the evidence on Thompson. Team Bravo finds Pierce.”
“And then?” Foster asked.
“And then,” I said, checking the load in my magazine, “we burn it to the ground.”
The hijack was the easy part. A lone truck on a dark road. A felled tree. Two suppressed shots. We dumped the bodies in the ditch and piled into the back of the Canvas-covered Kamaz truck.
The ride up the mountain was agonizing. Every bump slammed our bruised bodies against the metal floor. I sat next to Brennan, the comms guy.
“Can you do it?” I asked him. “If I get you to the terminal, can you rip the data?”
“If it’s on a network, I can steal it,” Brennan said. He tapped a ruggedized drive in his pocket. “I’ll get everything. Thompson’s emails, the bank transfers, the kill orders. But you have to keep them off my back.”
“I will.”
The truck slowed. My heart hammered against my ribs.
Voices. Russian. The checkpoint.
The driver—Webb, wearing a dead mercenary’s jacket and hat—mumbled something in Russian. He handed over the papers.
A flashlight beam swept over the canvas back. I held my breath, gripping my knife. If the light lingered, if the guard decided to look closer…
The light moved away. The gate creaked open.
We rolled forward. We were in.
“Go,” Cole whispered.
We exploded out of the truck.
The courtyard was a hive of activity, but nobody expects an attack from inside. We caught them completely off guard.
“Martinez! The gate!” I yelled.
Martinez fired an RPG at the guard tower. The explosion rocked the compound, initiating the chaos.
“Team Alpha, with me!” I shouted, sprinting toward the main bunker doors. Brennan and Webb were on my heels. Cole and the others peeled off toward the detention block.
We hit the corridors hard. Close-quarters battle. This was what I was born for. I moved instinctively, pieing corners, double-tapping targets. My SVD was gone; I was using a captured AK-74 now. It bucked in my hands, raw and loud.
“Clear!” Webb shouted.
We reached the server room. “Brennan, get to work! Webb, watch the door!”
I stood in the center of the room, watching the corridors. Gunfire echoed through the concrete facility—the distinct bark of American weapons clashing with Russian steel.
“I’m in!” Brennan yelled, his fingers flying across the keyboard. “Holy sh*t… it’s all here. Operation Granite Shield. The Ambassador. Thompson authorized it all. He literally signed the order to ‘liquidate’ your team, Captain.”
Hearing it confirmed was like taking a bullet. It wasn’t a theory anymore. It was a documented fact.
“Download it,” I said, my voice shaking. “Download it all.”
“Captain!” Webb screamed. “Contact front!”
The corridor filled with mercenaries. Morris’s elite guard. They were heavily armored, moving behind ballistic shields.
“Grenade!” I yelled, kicking a fragmentation grenade back into the hall just as it detonated.
The blast bought us seconds.
“I need one minute!” Brennan shouted. “It’s encrypted!”
“You don’t have a minute!” I fired a burst, dropping a man trying to flank us.
Then, the lights went out.
Red emergency strobes began to flash. An alarm blared—a low, rhythmic klaxon that vibrated in my teeth.
“Morris,” I said. “He’s initializing the self-destruct. He’s going to bury the evidence. And us.”
“Data secure!” Brennan yanked the drive.
“Move! We need to link up with Cole!”
We fought our way to the detention block. The resistance was fierce. I took a graze to my shoulder, the heat of the bullet searing, but the adrenaline masked the pain.
We burst into the cell block just as Cole kicked open a heavy steel door.
Ambassador Pierce was there. He was beaten, bloody, but alive.
“We have the package!” Cole yelled. “But we’re cut off! The main exit is blocked!”
“The ventilation shaft!” I pointed to a massive intake fan on the schematics on the wall. “It leads to the surface! But we have to blow the fan!”
“Do it!”
We ran. The facility was shaking now, explosions rattling the walls. The air rushing past us was freezing, yet a wave of heat surged up from below, chasing us like a living beast.
“Go! Go! Go!” Cole screamed from below.
I hauled myself over the lip of the ventilation shaft, lungs burning, and rolled into the deep snow. I grabbed Webb’s hand and pulled him up. Then Foster. Then Cole.
We scrambled away from the vent, stumbling through the drifts, lungs gasping for the thin mountain air.
CRACK-BOOM.
The mountain shuddered. It wasn’t just a sound; it was a shift in the earth. The ventilation shaft belched a geyser of fire and black smoke a hundred feet into the air. The internal supports of the bunker gave way, and the ground behind us slumped inward, burying Morris, his mercenaries, and his corruption under a million tons of rock and ice.
We lay there in the snow, eight battered men and one resurrected woman, watching the smoke blot out the stars.
The silence that followed was heavy. Sacred.
Then, the thrum of rotors cut through the wind.
“That’s not Morris,” Cole said, looking up. “That’s Blackhawk. American.”
General Hayes. She had kept her word.
Two helicopters descended, kicking up a blinding white vortex of snow. Soldiers poured out—fresh, clean uniforms, weapons raised. But they weren’t aiming at us. They were forming a perimeter.
A woman walked toward us. General Patricia Hayes. She didn’t look like a bureaucrat. She looked like iron.
Cole stood up, helping Ambassador Pierce. “General. Package is secure.”
Hayes nodded at Pierce, then her eyes slid past him. They locked onto me.
I stood there, swaying slightly. My ghillie suit was shredded. My face was caked in blood and soot. I probably looked more like a monster than a soldier.
Hayes stopped in front of me. She looked at the scar on my face. She looked at the lack of rank insignia.
“Captain Emily Weston,” she said. Her voice was tight. “We… we were told you were KIA.”
I reached into my pocket. My fingers brushed the cold metal of the flash drive Brennan had filled with the evidence.
“I was, General,” I said, my voice cracking. “But I had unfinished business.”
I pulled out the drive and pressed it into her hand.
“Here. The kickbacks. The kill orders. Thompson’s offshore accounts. It’s all there.”
Hayes closed her fist around the drive. She looked at it, then back at me. I saw something in her eyes that I hadn’t seen in a superior officer in a long time. Honor.
“Colonel Thompson was arrested three hours ago,” she said softly. “We found discrepancies. But this… this buries him. And it clears you.”
She stepped back and snapped a salute. It wasn’t a perfunctory gesture. It was slow. Deliberate.
“Welcome home, Major.”
I stared at her. “Captain, ma’am.”
“Not anymore,” she said. “Get on the bird.”
SIX MONTHS LATER
The courtroom was quiet.
I sat in the witness stand, wearing a dress uniform that felt stiff and strange after so long in ghillie suits and rags. My chest was heavy with medals I didn’t want. The Distinguished Service Cross. The Purple Heart.
Across the room, Richard Thompson sat in an orange jumpsuit. He looked small. The arrogance was gone, replaced by the terrified realization that he was going to die in a cage.
When the judge read the verdict—Guilty on all counts of Treason, Conspiracy to Commit Murder, and War Profiteering—I didn’t feel joy. I didn’t feel triumph.
I felt relief.
I looked at the gallery. James Webb was there. Cole was there. The families of Miller, Smith, and Harris were there. Miller’s mother met my eyes and nodded, tears streaming down her face.
I had kept my promise. Their deaths meant something now.
After the trial, I drove to Fort Carson. The sun was setting, casting long, golden shadows across the cemetery.
I walked past the rows of white marble until I found it.
CPT EMILY WESTON 1994 – 2024 KIA UKRAINE
The empty grave.
Two men were already there with a stonemason’s cart. They were preparing to remove the headstone.
“Ma’am,” one of them said, pausing as I approached. “We’re just about to take it down. Replace it with a commemorative marker.”
I touched the cold stone. It felt like touching a stranger. The woman who died in that ambush was gone. I was who came back.
“Leave it for a minute,” I said.
I pulled three things from my pocket. A spent 7.62 casing from the rifle I used to save the convoy. A piece of pine bark from the tree line where I’d watched over them. And the photo Webb had given me in the cave.
I dug a small hole in the dirt in front of the headstone and buried them.
I wasn’t burying myself. I was burying the ghost.
“You can take it down now,” I told the workers.
As I walked back to my car, I saw James leaning against the hood. He had two coffees.
“It’s over,” he said, handing me one.
“Yeah,” I said, looking back at the empty space where my name used to be. “It’s over.”
“What now?” he asked. “You’re a Major. You have a blank check. You can teach. You can retire. You can disappear.”
I looked at the mountains in the distance. They weren’t the Carpathians, but they were close enough.
“I think I’ll teach,” I said. “Someone needs to teach the new kids that the most dangerous thing on the battlefield isn’t the enemy.”
“What is it?”
“Blind trust,” I said.
We got in the car. As we drove away, I looked in the rearview mirror. The sun had dipped below the horizon, but the sky was still burning with color. I was alive. It hurt. It was heavy. It was beautiful.
I was the Ghost of Highway E58. But I was also Emily. And for the first time in a year, I was going home.
