PART 1: THE SILENCE BETWEEN HEARTBEATS
The morning mist rolled off Puget Sound like the lingering smoke of a battlefield long since abandoned by the living. I stood at the jagged edge of the cliff, my boots finding purchase on the slick basalt, my small frame silhouetted against the relentless gray of the Washington sky. In my hands, I held the instrument of my salvation and my damnation. It wasn’t a rifle. It wasn’t a pistol. It was a weapon that had killed more men than most soldiers would ever see in a lifetime of war.
A crossbow.
But to call it just a crossbow was like calling a hurricane a breeze. This machine was a phantom, a nightmare that had haunted the sleep of men in twelve different countries. It was a device that delivered death in absolute, terrifying silence, leaving behind only the mystery of how the end had arrived so completely, so precisely, so impossibly.
I drew the string back. Four hundred and twenty pounds of draw weight—enough to snap a normal man’s arm like a dry twig. My muscles didn’t scream; they hummed with the tension, a familiar vibration that traveled from my fingertips to the base of my spine. I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second, letting the world fall away until there was nothing but the rhythm my father had drilled into me before I was old enough to ride a bike. It’s in that hold—between the heartbeats, between the breaths—that perfection lives. That is where I exist.
I opened my eyes. The target was a silhouette at two hundred and seventy yards. To the uninitiated, it was a speck. To me, it was the only thing in the universe.
The bolt released with a whisper. Thwip.
Eighteen hundred feet per second. It sliced through the heavy air, invisible, subsonic, inevitable.
Thwack.
Center mass. Even from this distance, the sound of the impact was solid, clean. It was exactly where I had intended it to be. But as I lowered the weapon, the familiar coldness settled in my chest. There was no satisfaction in the bullseye. There hadn’t been for a long time. It was just mechanical repetition now, the maintenance of a skill I could never unlearn.
Eight months.
Eight months since Syria. Eight months since I watched three of my teammates—my brothers—die in the dirt because someone, somewhere, had sold us out. Eight months since I walked away from SEAL Team 3, tossed my trident into the bottom of a drawer, and told myself I was done. Done with the killing. Done with the missions. Done with the crushing weight of carrying a weapon that made my father a legend and me a ghost.
I turned my back on the target and began the long walk back to the cabin. The sun finally broke through the overcast sky, casting pale shafts of light onto the pine needles, but it brought no warmth. Nothing did anymore.
My cabin sat three miles from the nearest paved road, accessible only by a hiking trail that most weekend warriors gave up on after the first steep mile. That’s how I wanted it. Isolation wasn’t loneliness when you had seen what I had seen. Isolation was mercy.
Inside, the space was Spartan. A bed, a table, a single chair, and the gun safe that dominated the corner of the room like a steel monolith. It held three weapons: my father’s Remington 700, the Sig Sauer P226 that had saved my life in seven countries, and the crossbow. Always the crossbow.
I made coffee in the French press—the one luxury I allowed myself—and sat at the table with the leather-bound notebook. The pages were yellowed with age, smelling of old paper and gun oil, filled with calculations and diagrams that looked like the unholy offspring of a physics textbook and a medieval manuscript.
Master Chief Nathaniel Cross had been many things. A Tier One operator, a weapons innovator, a single father to a daughter who learned to calculate ballistic trajectories before she learned long division. But mostly, he was a man who understood a fundamental truth about violence: Warfare wasn’t about who had the biggest gun. It was about who had the gun nobody expected.
I traced my finger over his notes from 1992. Panama Operation. Six hostile targets eliminated in eleven seconds. Zero gunshots. Zero muzzle flash. Zero warning. Just silence, and then death.
“The crossbow isn’t obsolete,” he had written in his sharp, angular script. “It’s evolved beyond obsolete into invisible.”
He was right.
I closed the notebook.
My father died in Helmand Province in 2009 using this exact weapon to cover his team’s retreat. Eight confirmed kills before the wave overwhelmed him. The after-action report said he saved eleven American lives that day.
It didn’t say that one of those lives belonged to Ethan “Doc” Harper.
Doc. My father’s best friend.
PART 2: THE GHOST ON THE RIDGE
Six hours. That’s how long it took to climb four hundred vertical feet of crumbling rock.
By the time my gloved hand slapped the flat stone of the ridge’s summit, the sun was dipping below the jagged horizon, painting the Hindu Kush in bruised shades of purple and blood-orange. My fingers were raw, bleeding inside the Nomex fabric. My shoulders burned with a fire that felt permanent. But we were there.
We were in the thermal dead zone.
One hundred and ninety-five yards below us, the compound was a geometry of shadows and concrete. It looked less like a military installation and more like a scar on the valley floor. I slithered into position, my movements slow, deliberate, reptilian. I was no longer Evelyn Cross. I was part of the mountain.
Captain Lucas Ward set up fifty yards behind me, his beloved Barrett .50 caliber rifle resting on a bipod, the muzzle wrapped in burlap to break up its outline. Rachel O’Neill established her comms nest in a crevice, unfolding a directional antenna like a metallic flower. Ethan “Doc” Harper, looking gray-faced and grim, unpacked the medical kit and the breaching charges.
“We’re ghost,” Rachel whispered, checking her monitor. “No spikes on their thermal. They don’t know we’re here.”
Then began the hardest part of sniper warfare.
Not the shooting.
The waiting.
Thirty-six hours.
Thirty-six hours of absolute stillness. No fires. No movement during daylight. We pissed into bottles and ate cold MREs that tasted like chalk and preservatives. We slept in two-hour shifts, huddled under ghillie netting, while the wind howled through the peaks like a mourning choir.
During the long stretches of the second night, I lay behind my scope, watching the patrol patterns, memorizing the rhythm of the enemy. Doc crawled up beside me, moving quietly for a man with a bad knee.
“You awake?” he whispered.
“Never sleep,” I lied.
He handed me a protein bar. “Your dad used to hate this part. The sitting. He was a man of action. Sitting still made him itch.”
“He was patient when it mattered,” I said, eyes glued to the green-tinted world of the night vision scope.
“He was,” Doc agreed. He paused, and the silence between us grew heavy. “Evelyn, about what Director Samuel Knox said… about the ambush.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“We have to. If Ivan Morozov really has the same source that burned your team in Syria… that means we’re not just fighting an arms dealer. We’re fighting a ghost in our own machine.”
I lowered the binoculars and looked at him. In the pale moonlight, he looked fragile, his mortality hanging off him like a loose coat.
“Why did you come, Doc? You’re retired. You’re safe.”
He smiled, that sad, crooked smile. “Because you’re here. And because I promised Nathaniel Cross. He saved my life four times. Panama. Somalia. Twice in Afghanistan. Every time he put himself between me and death, he never hesitated. I’m on borrowed time. I figured… it was time to pay some interest on the loan.”
I looked back at the compound. “We’re going to kill him, Doc. For both of them.”
“Just make sure you don’t die trying,” he said, squeezing my shoulder. “I can’t bury another Cross.”
2100 Hours. Day Five.
The window was approaching.
The wind had settled to a steady seven miles per hour from the west. I adjusted the windage on my scope: eleven inches of drift. Elevation: fifty-two inches of drop. The angle was steep, thirty-five degrees downward. The math was complex, a calculus of death, but to me, it was poetry.
“Activity at the main building,” Rachel’s voice crackled in my earpiece. “Multiple heat signatures.”
I pressed my cheek against the stock of the crossbow. My heart rate was fifty-eight beats per minute.
Inhale four.
Exhale eight.
Hold.
2200 Hours.
The heavy steel door of the main building groaned open.
Ivan Morozov stepped into the courtyard.
He was flanked by four security personnel, big men moving with the synchronized lethality of former Spetsnaz. They wore heavy body armor and carried AK-74s. They scanned the perimeter, their heads swiveling, hunting for threats.
But Morozov walked with the arrogance of a king in his castle.
“Target identified,” I whispered.
“Copy,” Ward replied. “You are clear to engage.”
I tracked him. Straight line. Predictable.
And then the universe shifted.
Morozov stopped.
He didn’t just pause—he froze. Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head and looked up.
Straight at the ridge.
Straight at me.
It was impossible. But paranoia is its own sensor system.
Through my scope, I saw his eyes widen. His mouth opened.
He recognized the silhouette.
He screamed. I couldn’t hear it, but I saw his lips form the name.
Cross.
“He made us!” Rachel hissed. “Take the shot!”
Morozov turned to run.
I didn’t think.
I felt.
I adjusted, not by math, but by instinct.
Release.
The crossbow limb snapped forward. The bolt left the rail at four hundred and ten feet per second.
It flew in absolute silence.
Morozov was five feet from the safety of an armored vehicle when judgment arrived.
The bolt took him in the center of the back.
The shaped charge detonated on impact.
There was no scream.
One moment, Ivan Morozov was a running man.
The next, he was red ruin on the dirt.
The four bodyguards froze.
Reload.
My hands moved in a blur.
1.4 seconds.
The first guard stood frozen, staring at the body.
Thwip.
Explosion.
Panic erupted.
Reload.
“Thermal just lit you up like a Christmas tree!” Ward shouted. “They know where it’s coming from!”
Sirens wailed. Floodlights snapped toward the ridge.
I tracked the second guard.
Led him.
Fired into empty space.
He ran into it.
Two left.
The third made cover behind a low concrete wall, shouting into his radio.
“Don’t miss,” I whispered.
Release.
The bolt skimmed the wall and detonated inches from his face.
One left.
The last guard fumbled with the SUV door.
Thwip.
The bolt punched through the window and detonated inside.
Five shots.
Eighteen seconds.
Five kills.
“Clear!” I shouted. “Courtyard is clear!”
“Negative!” Rachel yelled. “They’re moving the hostages!”
Human shields.
Too much clutter.
“Doc!” I keyed the mic. “Breach now!”
“On it!”
The west wall exploded.
Gunfire erupted.
Chaos.
I switched to kinetic bolts.
A guard grabbed a hostage.
“Kira, do you have the shot?” Doc shouted.
“Stand by.”
I became the wind.
Release.
The bolt struck the guard’s temple.
“Hostages secure!”
I packed the crossbow, hands finally trembling.
We rappelled down the ridge.
The courtyard stank of cordite and burning rubber.
“We did it,” Doc wheezed.
Rachel was already on Morozov’s body.
“Kira… he wasn’t the top,” she whispered. “Project Nightfall.”
Thirty-five days.
Twelve bases.
Thousands dead.
The name glowed on the screen.
THE CARDINAL.
PART 3: THE SILENCE OF A SOLDIER
The helicopter ride to the safe house was a funeral procession for the living.
We had won. We had the hostages. We had the intel. But the silence in the cargo bay was heavy with the knowledge of what was coming next.
Rachel O’Neill sat with the tablet, her face illuminated by the blue glow of the screen. “I’ve decrypted the coordinates,” she said, her voice barely audible over the rotors. “Peshawar. An abandoned Soviet garrison. Four days from now. 1400 hours.”
“That’s forty klicks inside the Pakistani border,” Captain Lucas Ward grunted, cleaning a smudge of blood off his rifle receiver. “Hostile territory. No air support. No extraction. If we get caught, the U.S. government will deny we even exist.”
“We’re not going to get caught,” I said.
Ethan “Doc” Harper looked at me. He was holding his knee, his face gray with exhaustion. “Evelyn, look at your quiver.”
I looked. It was empty.
“You used all twelve bolts,” Doc said. “That weapon is just a twelve-pound club now.”
“Then we make more.”
Doc laughed, a dry, hacking sound. “Make more? These aren’t arrows you whittle by a campfire, kid. These are precision-engineered shaped charges with impact detonators. Your father spent two years perfecting the weight distribution. You think I can replicate that in a cave with a rusty lathe and some prayers?”
“I think you’re the best combat engineer I’ve ever met,” I said. “And I think you know what happens if we don’t go back.”
Doc held my gaze. Then he looked at the tablet. At Project Nightfall.
“I’ll need RDX,” he muttered. “And detonators. And I can probably only give you six bolts. Maybe seventy percent reliability.”
“I’ll take those odds.”
Seventy-two hours later, we were in a safe house that smelled of cumin and stale fear.
Doc had spent three days hunched over a workbench, machining warheads out of salvaged RPGs. He looked like a mad alchemist.
“Old drainage tunnels,” Rachel said, pointing at a map. “They run under the border and come out inside the garrison perimeter.”
“Perfect,” I said.
On the morning of the fourth day, Doc handed me six bolts. They were rougher than the originals.
“They’ll fly true,” he said. “Just… don’t miss.”
We crossed the border at midnight.
Two kilometers of claustrophobic hell.
“I hate this,” Ward whispered. “I hate the dark.”
“Keep moving,” I whispered back.
We emerged at dawn near the garrison. The water tower loomed above us.
We climbed.
We waited.
Six hours.
1330 hours.
“Movement,” Rachel whispered.
1355 hours.
A white helicopter landed in the courtyard.
Six men waited by a table.
A seventh stepped out.
Tan suit. Panama hat. Aviator sunglasses. Cane.
“Target acquired,” I whispered.
The man removed his hat.
Rachel gasped.
“No,” she breathed. “That’s impossible.”
“Who is it?” Ward demanded.
“Facial rec is a hundred percent match,” Rachel said. “Evelyn… The Cardinal… it’s General Richard Halbrook.”
The four-star general.
The man who pinned the Silver Star on my father.
“He’s a traitor,” Ward growled.
“Hawk,” I hissed into the sat-phone. “Target is General Richard Halbrook.”
There was a pause.
“Abort,” Director Samuel Knox ordered. “You cannot engage. Stand down. That is a direct order.”
I looked through the scope.
Folders. Death warrants.
“Kira,” Knox barked. “Stand down!”
I remembered my father’s letter.
Real honor isn’t about following rules. It’s about doing what’s right when it costs you everything.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said softly. “Signal’s breaking up.”
I turned off the radio.
Range: 280 yards.
I aimed six feet high. Three feet right.
Inhale four.
Exhale eight.
Hold.
Between the heartbeats.
Twang.
The bolt arced.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then—BOOM.
General Richard Halbrook vanished in red mist.
“Target eliminated!” Ward shouted.
Machine-gun fire hammered the tower.
“We’re pinned!” Rachel screamed.
“To the tunnels!” Doc yelled.
We ran.
Halfway, an RPG hit the tower.
We dove.
At the tunnel entrance, Doc stopped.
“Doc, get in!” I screamed.
He smiled.
“Tell your dad we’re even.”
He pulled the pin.
WHUMP.
The entrance collapsed.
Doc was gone.
We crawled for two kilometers.
When we emerged, the sun was setting.
I pulled the last bolt from my pocket.
“We got him, Doc,” I whispered.
SIX MONTHS LATER
Arlington National Cemetery.
A white headstone.
ETHAN “DOC” HARPER
PO1 US NAVY SEALS
1962 – 2025
THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE
Officially, Doc died in a training accident.
Officially, General Halbrook died of a heart attack.
Unofficially, the truth leaked.
“You did good,” Knox said behind me. “Project Nightfall is dead.”
“It cost enough.”
He handed me a velvet box.
Inside was my father’s Trident.
“I’m done,” I said.
“I know.”
“What will you do with the crossbow?”
“Hang it on the wall,” I said. “And hope I never have to take it down again.”
I walked away.
Inhale four.
Exhale eight.
The silence was finally mine.
