Chapter 6
DAR
The supply run goes wrong at the gas station.
I'm not supposed to be on it. I'm supposed to be at my workstation analyzing the Committee weapon's outer encryption layers, but the analysis hit a wall at three in the morning and by dawn my eyes were refusing to focus on anything smaller than a corridor, and when Stryker mentioned a supply run to the nearest town, I asked to go because forty-five minutes in a vehicle with windows sounded like the closest thing to a system reboot my brain was going to get.
Stryker said yes. Tommy said nothing, but the look he gave me over his coffee mug when I walked toward the vehicle bay carried enough data to fill a diagnostic report. Concern wrapped in professional neutrality wrapped in something he wasn't willing to name in front of Stryker.
I filed it and kept walking.
The town is small. Montana small, which means a gas station, a general store, a post office, and a bar that looks like it's been settling into its foundation since before the interstate was built.
Stryker fills the vehicle while I stand beside it stretching muscles that have been desk-shaped for days and breathing air that tastes like pine and gasoline and the particular freedom of being outside a mountain.
The SUV at the far pump is wrong.
I don't process why for several seconds.
The vehicle itself is unremarkable — dark, late model, tinted windows, the kind of anonymous SUV that populates rental lots and government motor pools in equal measure.
It's the plates. Montana plates, but the dealer frame is from a Virginia lot, and the mismatch registers the same way the surveillance team in my neighborhood registered: a detail that doesn't belong, noticed by a brain that can't stop pattern-matching even when it's supposed to be resting.
Virginia. The same state that registered the gray sedan that followed me through four blocks of urban grid before I lost it in a parking garage.
"Stryker." I keep my voice low. Casual. The tone of someone making conversation while their peripheral vision tracks the two men who just exited the convenience store and are walking toward the Virginia-plated SUV with the controlled pace of people who aren't in a hurry because they're exactly where they intended to be.
"I see them." Stryker's voice doesn't change.
His posture doesn't shift. The fuel nozzle stays in his hand, and his eyes stay on the pump display, and nothing about his body language communicates that he's identified a potential threat, except that his left hand has moved from the vehicle roof to a position below the window line where his jacket falls open over whatever is holstered beneath it.
The two men reach their SUV. One opens the driver's door. The other doesn't get in. He leans against the passenger side, arms crossed, eyes scanning the gas station with the systematic attention of someone running a threat assessment in real time.
His scan reaches me. Holds. Moves on.
Except it doesn't move on. It slides past me and then returns, the double-take of someone who has been given a photograph to memorize and is now comparing the photograph to a face at a gas pump.
"We need to leave," I say.
"Fuel's not finished."
"Leave it."
Stryker pulls the nozzle. Doesn't rush. Replaces it in the pump with the deliberate care of a man who does everything at the same speed regardless of whether someone is watching because changing speed is the first thing that confirms you know you're being watched.
He moves to the driver's side. I move to the passenger side.
We get in simultaneously, and the doors close, and Stryker starts the engine with the unhurried competence of a man who has extracted from worse situations than a Montana gas station and whose heart rate has probably not increased by a single beat.
The Virginia SUV starts its engine at the same time.
Stryker pulls out of the gas station. Left onto the road, toward the highway that leads to the forest roads that lead to the concealed approach that leads to Echo Base. The Virginia SUV follows. Not close. Not aggressive. Just present, maintaining the distance, matching the speed.
"Two of them," Stryker says. His voice is conversational.
Relaxed. The voice of a man discussing weather rather than a vehicle pursuit.
"The driver's competent. Passenger's the spotter.
They've been here at least two hours — that SUV's engine was cold when they started it, which means they were parked and waiting. "
"Waiting for what?"
"For one of us to show up. The town's the nearest supply point. Anyone watching the approach roads long enough would figure out we resupply here." He checks the mirror. "They're not trying to follow us home. They're trying to confirm our operating radius."
"How do you know?"
"Because if they wanted to follow us home, they'd be better at this.
" He takes a turn onto the highway without signaling, and the Virginia SUV follows four seconds later.
"I've been running counter-surveillance on these supply runs for years.
Usually it's nothing. Sometimes it's curious locals.
This is the first time it's been Committee. "
He says it the way Tommy says diagnostic anomaly. A data point that changes the risk calculation, registered and filed.
Stryker drives. The Virginia SUV follows for eleven miles, then takes an exit. The tail breaks clean, which confirms Stryker's assessment: mapping, not following. They wanted to know how far we travel, in what direction, on what schedule.
"Don't mention this to Tommy," Stryker says as we turn onto the unmarked forest road.
"Why not?"
"Because he'll spend the next forty-eight hours redesigning the supply run security protocol instead of working on the countermeasures that actually matter. The man can't resist a system to optimize." He pauses. Glances at me. "You can tell him after. When there's less on his plate."
The words carry the particular protectiveness of a man shielding a teammate from a distraction he doesn't need, and the casual authority of someone who has been managing Tommy Hale's threat-awareness for long enough to know that the man processes threats by building defenses, and right now his defense-building capacity needs to stay focused on the weapon that could kill all of them rather than the surveillance team that's studying their grocery habits.
I file Stryker's request under pending rather than agreed because withholding operational intelligence from the person responsible for facility security is a decision I'm not comfortable making on someone else's authority.
But I understand the logic. And the logic is an act of care from a man who shows it through tactical decisions rather than words, which is a form of affection I'm beginning to recognize as the native language of this mountain.
The barriers open. The tunnel swallows the vehicle. The mountain closes behind us, and the hum reaches me through the floorboards before we reach the vehicle bay.
I'm back inside. The air is recycled. The light is artificial. And the facility that felt like a cage a few days ago feels, for the first time, like the thing that's keeping me alive.
Days blur when you work inside a mountain and the working rhythm Tommy and I have established feels like some weird combination of hostility and collaboration. I'm aware of his body in a way that's becoming operationally inconvenient.
He arrives at the workspace before dawn, which I know because I'm already there.
He drops into his chair with a travel mug trailing steam and a candy bar wedged between his teeth.
He doesn't say good morning because we've moved past the pretense that either of us slept.
His screens wake in sequence, a cascade of system checks scrolling faster than anyone should be able to read, and his fingers hit the keyboard before the candy bar is finished.
The rhythm starts, rapid and even and relentless.
I've been listening to it for days, and my brain has started treating it the same as the server hum: baseline noise that means the system is running.
What my brain hasn't treated as baseline is the way he rolls his sleeves up when he works.
Forearms. Tendons shifting under skin as his fingers move.
The musculature of someone who does more with his hands than type, though I'm not supposed to know that yet.
I stare at my own screen and force the observation into a box marked irrelevant, but the box won't close.
My rhythm is different, coming in bursts with long pauses where my hands hover and my mind runs three layers ahead, mapping pathways before I commit a single keystroke.
Then a flurry of input so fast my wrists ache from the angle.
Tommy noticed the pattern on day two. I caught him glancing sideways during one of my pauses, the kind of look that wanted to ask what I was doing but didn't want to admit he couldn't figure it out on his own.
Good. Let him wonder.
Kane's ground rules sit between us like a demilitarized zone.
Shared access to specific sectors. Mutual transparency on methodology.
No unauthorized operations. The terms are reasonable, and I understand why Kane set them for both of us instead of just me, because making me the only one under restriction would've confirmed what everyone in this mountain already thinks: that I'm the variable, the unknown, the problem that walked in wearing fingerless gloves and a bad attitude.
Tommy pulls his headphones down around his neck. "I rebuilt the tertiary relay."
"I know. I checked it at four."
His jaw works. "Of course you did."