30. Rook
ROOK
The mountain dominated the screen.
Snow.
Rock.
Ice.
Death.
The operations room had gone quiet.
No one was arguing anymore.
No one was throwing out theories.
Because the truth sat in the center of the room.
Wade Parker was alive.
For now.
I stared at the satellite image.
The same mountain.
The same valley.
The same frozen wilderness where six of my brothers had died.
The memories came whether I wanted them or not.
Hammer laughing through the helicopter ride.
Tex talking about the daughter he would never see graduate.
Viking drinking coffee so strong it should have been classified as a weapon.
Shark checking his rifle and telling Bishop that the weather was about to turn.
Ridge promising we’d all be home before anyone noticed we were gone.
Then gunfire.
Blood.
Smoke.
Men screaming over the comms.
The mountain burning around us.
I shoved it all back into the locked room in my mind where I kept the dead.
There would be time for ghosts later.
Right now, we had a mission.
Sarah stood across the room with her arms folded tightly over her chest.
Her eyes hadn’t left Wade’s photograph.
The image was grainy and several years old, but it was enough.
Her brother.
Alive.
After five years of wondering.
Five years of imagining what had happened to him.
Five years of visiting a grave that should never have existed.
Her father stood beside her, but there were miles between them.
His grief was quieter.
Older.
He had spent five years trying to protect Sarah from hope because hope could destroy a person when it was taken away too many times.
Now he had proof that his son was alive.
And the knowledge might have been worse than the uncertainty.
“They’re running out of reasons to keep him alive,” he said.
Sarah flinched.
The room froze.
We had all been thinking it.
Hearing Wade’s father say it made the threat real.
I turned toward him.
“For five years, they needed something,” he continued. “Information. A location. A name. Whatever Wade’s team uncovered before they were captured.”
He pointed at Wade’s photograph.
“They thought he would talk.”
Then he touched the image of another missing operator.
“They thought one of them would break.”
His hand moved to the next photograph.
“And they never did.”
No one spoke.
Five years.
Five years of captivity.
Five years of interrogations.
Five years of men doing everything they could to force trained operators to surrender whatever secret had gotten them buried beneath that mountain.
Five years of Wade and his teammates refusing to give it to them.
Sarah’s voice was quiet.
“They kept each other alive.”
Her father looked at her.
“Yes.”
That single word held pride, pain, and fear.
Fathom leaned toward the screen.
“So what changes now?”
Wade’s father looked at me.
“They know you found the mountain.”
“How?” Cobra asked. “We haven’t contacted anyone.”
“They don’t need to know what you’ve found. They only need to see where you’re looking.”
He pointed toward the surveillance photographs we had recovered.
“They found this warehouse. They know Sarah is here. They know you captured Marcus Lane, and they know he failed to kill Shadow Division.”
His voice lowered.
“If I can put the pieces together, the people who built that prison can do the same.”
The room grew colder.
Marcus wasn’t the man moving the pieces anymore. He was locked in our holding room, stripped of his authority and waiting to discover how much pain Sniper could inflict without leaving a mark.
But the men above him were still free.
They would be destroying records.
Moving money.
Killing anyone who could expose them.
Closing every door we might use to reach the truth.
And Wade Parker was the biggest loose end of all.
Sniper leaned back in his chair.
“You think they’ll move the prisoners.”
Sarah’s father shook his head.
“No.”
The answer surprised everyone.
Then he gave us the nightmare.
“I think they’ll kill them.”
Silence.
Absolute silence.
Sarah closed her eyes.
Only for a second.
But I saw what those words did to her.
She had spent five years searching for her brother.
Five years refusing to accept a folded flag and an empty grave.
Now she had finally found him.
And she might still lose him before she could reach him.
Her father turned away, but not before I saw the guilt in his face.
He had spoken like an operator because that was what the situation required.
He was suffering like a father.
I looked at Wade’s photograph.
Then at the mountain.
Then at the men gathered around me.
My team.
We weren’t survivors anymore.
We weren’t victims.
We were hunters.
And someone had just shown us where to find our prey.
“No calls,” I said.
Everyone turned toward me.
My voice was calm.
Cold.
Certain.
“No FBI.”
No one objected.
“No CIA.”
Heads nodded.
“No Navy.”
Sarah’s father met my eyes.
“No government,” I finished.
Every road we followed led back to another powerful man.
Another trusted face.
Another name buried inside classified files.
The people responsible had operated behind badges, medals, and government seals for years.
I wasn’t handing them another chance to warn the mountain.
Fathom looked around the room.
“We’re doing this ourselves.”
Cobra grinned immediately.
Far too quickly.
“That’s my favorite kind of mission.”
Shark groaned. “That’s because you’re insane.”
“That has never been proven.”
“You tried to make explosives out of cleaning supplies before breakfast.”
“I was proving a theory.”
“You destroyed Sam’s coffee machine.”
Cobra’s grin faded.
“That was an unfortunate miscalculation.”
From the doorway, Sam Cutter lifted his mug.
“You’re buying me a new one.”
A few smiles appeared.
Brief.
Small.
Gone almost immediately.
But we needed them.
The mountain on the screen looked like a grave.
And we were preparing to walk back into it.
Falcon had been silent for nearly an hour, studying the terrain and possible approach routes.
Finally, he spoke.
“What if we’re already too late?”
The question hit the room hard.
No one answered.
Because no one knew.
Sarah stared at Wade’s photograph.
Her eyes shone, but no tears fell.
“We’re not.”
Everyone looked at her.
The determination in her face was fierce enough to cut through steel.
She stepped toward the screen and placed her fingers against the image of the mountain.
“We’re bringing him home.”
Her father closed his eyes.
The old warrior looked as if he had been waiting five years to hear those words and was terrified to believe them.
I nodded once.
A promise.
A vow.
A mission.
“We bring them all home.”
Sarah looked at me.
“Not only Wade?”
“Every prisoner still alive inside that facility,” I said. “Every operator the world was told to forget.”
Something in her expression changed.
For a moment, she wasn’t the mysterious hunter who had appeared on Sam Cutter’s cargo ship.
She wasn’t the woman who had fought mercenaries on an Alaskan street or dragged secrets out of men more powerful than either of us.
She was a sister who wanted her brother back.
“You mean that,” she whispered.
“I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
The storm hammered the warehouse.
The mountain glowed on the screen.
Waiting.
Watching.
Daring us to come.
Five years ago, the men behind Project Nightfall had buried Wade Parker alive.
Then they sent Shadow Division into an ambush and left six of my brothers dead in the snow.
They believed the mountain had kept their secrets.
They believed the survivors were too broken to come looking.
They were wrong.
Shadow Division was coming.
And this time, the mountain would remember us.