Chapter 2 #2
Alex Mercer's file opens to reveal a face I remember from Syria.
Quiet professional who could track anything through any terrain.
Lost his whole team when someone decided drone strikes were cleaner than extraction.
Someone in a clean office decided eighteen village kids were acceptable collateral damage for taking out one mid-level insurgent commander.
He refused. Disobeyed direct orders to paint the target.
"Mercer's gone dark near Glacier National Park." Cross studies her manicure like the information bores her, but I catch the tension in her shoulders, the slight tightening around her eyes. "Six months off grid after refusing that drone strike. If he's still alive, he won't be for long."
She looks up, those predator eyes moving between Kane and me like a surgeon choosing where to make the first cut. "None of you will be unless you stop running and start fighting back."
The warehouse feels smaller suddenly, the walls pressing in like a tomb. The weapons on the wall aren't enough. The reinforced doors aren't thick enough. We're three people in a concrete box, waiting for death to find us. And death, apparently, has gotten very good at finding people lately.
I catch my reflection in one of Kane's tactical monitors.
Bloodshot eyes stare back at me like accusation.
Hollow cheeks. The face of a man who's been trying to drink himself to death because it's easier than living with what he's done.
What he's failed to do. Collins died because I went off script.
Van Der Berg died because I couldn't walk away from those kids.
And now Kane's looking at me like I'm worth saving, like I'm anything more than a drunk who brings death to everyone stupid enough to trust him.
"Why?" The word comes out before I can stop it, raw and honest. "Why do you calculate I'm worth this?"
Kane's eyes don't leave mine. "Because you're asking the wrong question."
"Yeah?” asks the guy who thinks whiskey solves tactics. “What's the right one?"
"Whether those kids in Kinshasa were worth Collins's life." He lets that sink in, each word deliberate as a sniper's bullet. "Whether those eighteen children in Syria are worth Mercer's. Whether doing the right thing matters even when it costs everything we have."
My hands are shaking again, but different this time. Not withdrawal. Not fear. Something else. Something that feels almost like hope, though I'm not sure I remember what that feels like anymore.
"I'm not asking you to forget Kinshasa," Kane continues, voice steady as a rifle stock against a shoulder. "I'm asking you to make it count for something. Help me save the operators—the brothers—we can still reach."
Cross watches this exchange with the detached interest of a scientist observing lab rats. She's already calculated the odds, figured the angles. We're tools to her, nothing more. But tools she needs functional, sharp, and pointed in the right direction.
The bottle of whiskey sits on the table beside the coffee like a test. When did that appear?
Kane must have put it there. A choice. The amber liquid catches the fluorescent light, promising familiar oblivion.
No more guilt. No more faces in the dark.
No more Collins asking me why I didn't stick to the operational plan.
My hand moves toward it, stops. Kane doesn't react, just waits with the patience of someone who's made hard choices himself. Cross checks her phone, apparently unconcerned with my internal crisis, though I suspect she's watching everything through her peripheral vision.
The bottle would make it easier. Drink until the shaking stops.
Drink until Collins's face blurs into just another casualty of war.
Drink until I can't remember the sound those kids made when we breached Van Der Berg's compound and they realized someone had come for them.
Not to relocate them to another mine. Not to execute them as witnesses. But to free them.
I close my eyes, see Collins's face. Young. Eager. Believed in the mission, believed in me like I was something more than broken. ‘Make it count, Stryker,’ he said while bleeding out on Kinshasa concrete. ‘Make it mean something.’
The bottle promises silence. Collins’s voice cuts louder: ‘Make it count.’ My hand moves. I shove the whiskey away hard enough to make the table ring.
My hand moves again. This time it doesn't stop. I push the bottle away with deliberate force, hard enough that it slides across the table. The sound it makes hitting the far edge is final, like a gavel coming down.
“Guess that makes me the first drunk in history to win an argument with whiskey,” I mutter. The humor is thin, bitter, but mine. Kane doesn’t smile, but something in his eyes eases.
When I meet Kane's eyes, something's different. The drunk is still there—will always be there, whispering promises of easy escape—but something else is too. Purpose, maybe. Or just the decision to stop running from what I am and start running toward what I could be.
"If we're doing this, we do it right." My voice sounds strange, rougher but clearer than it's been in months. "No half measures. Those operators deserve better than what I've been."
Kane nods once, simple acceptance without ceremony. Cross's lips curve in what might be satisfaction or might be the expression a hawk makes before it strikes.
“Fine,” I say, flexing fingers until the tremor belongs to someone else. “Let’s stop running with paperwork and start hunting with purpose.”
"Mercer first," Kane says, spreading his hands over the tactical maps. "He's closest, most immediate threat level."
Cross doesn’t weigh in. She just watches, eyes flat and calculating, as if she’s already figured out which of us won’t survive long enough to matter. And somehow, that makes me want to prove her wrong
"He won't trust us," I point out, studying the terrain features. "Six months solo in the mountains, assassination teams hunting him. He'll shoot first, ask questions never."
"Then we make sure he doesn't get the chance." Kane pulls out a detailed tactical map of Glacier National Park, topographical lines spreading across the table like a three-dimensional puzzle. "You were in his unit in Syria. You know how he calculates."
I study the topography, elevation lines blurring slightly as my eyes struggle to focus through the lingering effects of too much whiskey and too little sleep.
But my mind is clear, clearer than it's been in months.
Mercer would go high, find a defensive position with multiple escape routes.
Water source. Natural barriers. Sight lines that let him see death coming from miles away.
"Here." I tap a section of the map where the elevation lines cluster tight. "Ridge system with cave networks. Water from snowmelt. One approach that's exposed for three hundred meters."
"Death funnel," Kane observes.
"For anyone he doesn't trust." I look up, meeting his eyes. "Which is everyone still breathing."