Chapter 41 #2
Shannon gritted her teeth. “One more sweep.” She caught one last flash of the convoy on IR and tagged it.
FUEL 9%
8%
“Actual, last visual transmitted,” she said.
“Break off,” Actual repeated. “Immediate RTB.”
Shannon pulled the Hawk into a hard, climbing turn, dust spiraling beneath them as the landscape swallowed the convoy whole. They lost it. They had to.
FUEL 7%
Touré blew out a breath. “Another sixty seconds and we’d be dropping out of the sky.”
Shannon didn’t answer. Her hands stayed steady. Her heartbeat did not. As Falcon Three-One turned toward base, the final ping of the IR tag blinked out, and the convoy disappeared into the desert.
THE MASSIF PASS
The mountains scraped the sky like broken teeth. Bravo Team moved in the shadows, twelve men with suppressed rifles, night-vision goggles, and the gritty silence of veterans who’d seen too much.
Dante and Ford ran ahead with Bone Messer from Bravo Team, their lungs burning in the sand and thin desert air. The nuke convoy was minutes from crossing the Massif Pass, which was a choke point. They had to get it before they reached Khalil and Krueger.
“Bravo’s two kilometers out,” Ford panted. “They’ll cut them off from behind.”
Dante nodded. “The front is ours.”
Dust plumes appeared in the distance with three trucks rumbling through the pass.
Ford lifted the binoculars. “Three vehicles. No armor. Khalil’s men are guarding the lead truck.”
“And the device?” Bone asked.
“Likely the last truck,” Ford said. “But they’re guarding the first truck too.”
Bone caught Ford’s face. “Could there be two?”
Dante steadied his breathing. “All right. We take the back one. We’re closest to that. Quiet if we can. Loud if we can’t.”
Ford smirked. “It’s always loud with you.”
Dante didn’t deny it.
As they crept closer through the rocks, gunfire cracked from above. Ford spun. “Bravo’s early!”
“No,” Dante’s eyes narrowed, “someone else is firing.”
Shouts echoed. Men screamed. Vehicles skidded.
“Khalil’s guards?” Bone called.
“No, it’s Krueger. Krueger is jumping the gun. He’s firing at the men in the trucks.” Dante felt it before he saw it. Through the dust, a silhouette emerged, rifle in hand, firing at Khalil’s men with glee. Krueger had beaten them here. “Bastard’s going for the nuke alone.”
Ford whispered, “Shit…he’s gonna blow the whole deal.”
“No.” Dante stepped forward, jaw like stone. “It’s not the deal. He wants the device. Khalil must not have given him the device we saw.”
“Why the hell would he…?”
But Dante knew. Krueger wanted leverage, power, and Shannon dead. This wasn’t just sabotage. This was obsession sharpened into a weapon.
Gunfire lit the rocks like lightning.
Ford sprinted for the rear truck, Dante covering him. Bullets sparked off stone, ricocheting wildly. Ford yanked the rear door open. There it was—a metal case. He opened it. Inside were two empty slots and one device.
“Got a device!” he shouted. “Dante, cover me!”
Dante fired precision bursts, dropping two militants advancing from the ridge. “Move!” he barked.
The convoy had moved into the pass when everything went wrong. Ford, carrying the nuclear device strapped in its shock harness, jogged behind Bravo Team as they moved down the ravine walls.
Sean Paulsen’s voice crackled once in Dante’s earpiece: “Two minutes to exfil. Move.”
WHOOSH. BOOM.
An RPG screamed in from the ridge behind them and detonated against the cliffside. The world went white. Rock exploded. Shrapnel whirled. The ground heaved.
Dante didn’t think. He moved. He slammed into Ford from behind, throwing both of them behind a jut of broken stone just as a shower of rock sheared the air where Ford’s skull had been.
Ford hit the ground with a grunt, arms still locked around the nuke case. Dante took the impact on his back. The shrapnel penetrated his skin. His ankles were buried beneath the falling rocks.
Bravo scattered, shouting through dust, “CONTACT! CONTACT! RPG FROM THE NORTH RIDGE!”
Gunfire tore through the haze. Paulsen’s team returned fire in tight, controlled bursts, trying to find the shooters through the choking dust.
Ford scrambled toward him. “You good? DANTE!”
Dante pressed up to his knees and shoved him back. “GO! MOVE! GET THAT THING OUT OF HERE!”
The dust thinned for half a second, long enough to reveal silhouettes pouring down the ravine walls. At least thirty men were coming for the device. And Dante had given Ford room to run.
“brAVO! FALL BACK TO SECONDARY!” Paulsen roared. “FORD, GO!”
Ford hesitated. Dante shoved him again, harder, freeing his first foot. “GO!” Then he freed his second foot.
He turned and fired, taking out the first militia fighter leaping off the rock. Another. A third.
But too many came. Gunfire echoed off stone, overwhelming and close.
Paulsen grabbed Ford, yanking him toward the exfil trail as Bravo laid down suppressive fire, dragging the nuke toward safety. But Dante was cut off by the collapsing pass. The blast had narrowed the gap behind him.
He was alone on the wrong side of the choke point.
He pivoted, firing until the slide locked back empty. Hands grabbed him. Two, then four, then six. He fought like a man trying to break the world in half. He broke one nose, dislocated another’s shoulder and split another’s lip with his forehead.
But they overwhelmed him. Knees, elbows, and rifle stocks struck him. His cheek smashed into stone, his arms were twisted behind him, and rope bit into his wrists.
The dust parted just enough to reveal a figure climbing down from the ridge, moving with infuriating calm. Krueger.
He wiped a smear of blood from his cheek, looking Dante over with a cruel, amused eye. “Well,” he stepped closer, “look who finally made it to my desert.”
When Dante spit blood at his boots, Krueger smiled. “You really should have stayed with the girl.”
WAR ROOM
The red-alert Klaxon pulsed low through the room, the kind of alarm that only sounded when everything had gone to hell.
Analysts were already scrambling to their stations when Ian Chase stepped in. “Put it on the main screen.”
The satellite feed bloomed across the wall: northern Niger, the jagged cut of the Massif Pass overlaid in Bravo Team’s emergency telemetry.
Martin Bailey strode in behind him, jacket unbuttoned, urgency in every line of his posture. “What do we have?”
An analyst swallowed. “Bravo’s forward element triggered an emergency signal. Code is… Omega-One-Two.”
Martin stopped cold. “That’s a capture code.”
Silence rolled across the room.
A second later, Mike Johnson entered, summoned by the alert. “What happened? Is it Shannon?”
Ian turned fast. “No.” His next words hit like a strike. “It’s Dante.”
Mike went absolutely still.
An analyst chimed in, voice tight, “Bravo reports the convoy was hit by an RPG during the extraction. They secured a nuclear device, but Dante was separated by the blast.”
Martin added, “Militia fighters overran the pass. They saw him taken alive.”
Mike braced himself on the table, knuckles whitening. “And the militia…?”
Ian’s jaw locked. “Tracking shows them routing deeper into Niger toward a known Krueger corridor.”
Mike’s breath stuttered. A sound escaped him—not words, something closer to heartbreak razor-sharpened into fury. “No,” he whispered. “Not that bastard. Not him.”
Ian placed a steady hand on Mike’s shoulder, not comforting but commanding. “We’ll move every asset we have. Ford and Bravo are already repositioning. Crescent is airborne. We’ll get Dante back.”
Mike shook his head once. “Shannon—she can’t know yet. Not until we have something actionable. I’m not giving her another ghost to carry.”
Ian nodded. “We’re moving now.”
He turned to the analysts. “Lock down all feeds. Prioritize tracking on Krueger’s militia. And patch me into Bravo and Crescent, encrypted channel six.”
The command floor erupted into motion. The moment Dante Olivetti went missing in Krueger’s desert, the mission changed.
NORTHERN NIGER – brAVO SAFEHOUSE – 20:58 LOCAL
The back of Ford’s head hit the dirt floor so hard, the impact punched the air out of him in a sound that was half rage, half agony.
Paulsen was on him immediately, both forearms braced across Ford’s shoulders, his weight locked down with cold precision.
Red and Bone dropped to either side, pinning Ford’s arms and legs.
Ford bucked like a man on fire. “GET OFF ME!” he roared, voice splintering. “LET ME GO BACK THERE!”
Paulsen grunted as Ford surged upward with terrifying strength. “Cox… STOP.”
“They took him!” Ford screamed, the words breaking apart. “They took Dante. THEY HAVE HIM!” He shook violently—not just fury, but grief so raw, it tore through him like shrapnel.
Paulsen leaned closer, pressing Ford deeper into the dirt. “Listen to me!” he barked. “You go back out there, you die. They want you too. They want the damn device. You go back now, and you hand it to them wrapped in a bow.”
Ford kicked against the ground, breath ripping out of him. “He saved my life,” he choked. “He saved all of us. And WE LEFT HIM! I LEFT HIM!”
Red’s voice went low, solid. “You secured the nuke. That was the mission. Dante knew the stakes going in. Your primary was the package. His primary was you.”
“I don’t give a damn about the mission!” Ford snarled, arching beneath their weight.
Paulsen slammed a palm to Ford’s chest. “Then give a damn about Shannon.”
Ford froze, breathing like a drowning man.
Paulsen’s voice softened, but the steel stayed. “If you die tonight, she loses Dante and you. She survives one heartbreak… maybe. Not two.”
Ford’s eyes filled with silent, brutal tears he couldn’t blink away. His head dropped back into the dirt. His whole body shuddered, then sagged under their hands, broken enough to stop fighting.
A strained, wrecked whisper: “I heard him scream.”
Paulsen closed his eyes, jaw tightening. “All of us did. He yelled, ‘Ford, go.’ If Dante’s alive, he’s fighting to stay that way. And we’re going to fight like hell to bring him home.”
Sean straightened, voice switching to command. “Bone, Twee, Rocket, Roadie.”
Four heads snapped up.
“You are wheels-up on your arrivals. Get the device to Air Base 201 and hand it directly to Crescent Command. You do NOT deviate, you do NOT wait, and you do NOT look back.”
Bone started to protest, but Sean cut him off, “I will NOT jeopardize that nuke. Not for anything. Not even this.”
Roadie nodded once. Twee placed a hand briefly on Ford’s boot as she got up, silent solidarity before she picked up the nuke in its cradle wrap.
“Eat something, hydrate, and move,” Sean ordered. “You don’t get sloppy on this handoff. We lose that device, everything Dante bled for is worthless.”
They four scattered with grief in their stares. The room quieted. Sean eased off Ford’s chest but stayed crouched beside him. Ford lay flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, tears sliding unaided into the dust.
“We’re going after him,” Sean said. “But we do it smart. We do it with a plan.”
Ford swallowed hard, voice shredded. “Then tell me what I have to do.”