Chapter Eleven
Smoke still hung low over the flats, stirred by the chop of rotor wash and the slow drag of the wind.
The chopper came in hot, cutting through the haze, and dropped fast. Law wasn’t messing around, and Viper appreciated that. By his count, no more than thirty minutes had passed since he’d last seen Titus.
He gave the signal to set the bird down and jumped before the skids settled.
Boots hit sand hard. He ignored the throb building behind his eyes—the dull concussion pulse that wanted to split his skull. Black and Winter fell in right behind him; Law followed after killing the engines.
The sun sat high but hazed, a white disk behind the grit.
Bodies sprawled everywhere—a cartel truck on its side, smoke billowing from the crushed hood. The sight hit like a gut punch. It looked like a war zone—Titus had become a one-man wrecking crew.
“Fuck,” Winter muttered, coming to stand beside him.
Viper moved through the dead—dragging one after another onto their backs, checking faces, builds, anything that might be him.
A few moments later, another chopper swooped in low and flared hard before touching down.
Real, Rip, Crow, and the YA operatives jumped out first, weapons already slung. Ramsey and Rhett followed close behind. They’d packed the Blackhawk with as many as it could hold.
Wrath was the last to dismount. The moment his boots hit sand, he pushed through the rotor wash and charged forward, jaw tight, closing the distance fast. Rogue stayed in the bird behind him—a massive, watchful presence framed by the open door, eyes locked on Wrath’s back.
Real crossed the sand and clasped Viper’s hand. “We’ve got more on standby. Sage and Boston are in the bird, ready to launch the drone. SecDef said he’ll send the Chinook if we need it.”
Wrath stopped just shy of Viper’s face. “What the hell happened?”
Viper kept his voice low but sharp. “Step the fuck back.” He was in no mood for anyone’s bullshit.
“Hey.” Law moved in fast, cutting between them. “We had a loaner pilot.”
“Fuck!” Wrath shouted, raking a hand through his hair.
The Blackhawk thundered overhead. Rogue didn’t move from the doorway—but he shifted, broad shoulders filling the frame, ready if Wrath tipped one inch further.
Viper met Wrath’s glare head-on. “I would’ve never left him.” The words came out tight, raw.
“Word has it you two don’t like each other,” Wrath growled, squinting, taking his measure.
“Word’s wrong,” Viper bit out.
Enough said.
“Let’s move out,” Real said quietly. “We can plan as we search. We’ve got maybe two hours before sunset.”
Viper glanced at the sky—sun high but slipping, light already flattening across the sand. They had two and a half or three hours if they were lucky before sunset.
Turning away from the men, he stepped over a twisted rifle, then the edge of a burned tarp, boots sinking into sand still warm from the blast. A shape lay half-buried—a man.
His head pounded until he saw the cartel ink on his arm. He moved on. No hesitation. His job was the perimeter, the pattern, the control.
His team moved with him, fanning out, sweeping the desert floor.
Genesis didn’t falter.
But the air felt wrong. Too much silence between them. The situation was so fucked, it was almost unthinkable.
It was too quiet. A quiet that held an emptiness where his voice should’ve been.
Sectors were cleared—Viper adjusted the comm as men called in the all clear.
His eyes narrowed on the smoke drifting east.
Now, roughly forty-five minutes since they’d landed, and still no trace.
Genesis had a rule that every twenty-four hours, they made some type of contact back to base.
Erebus, however, did not. They had no fucking rules except to turn in their IDs and personal phones to avoid their bodies tracking back to the company.
He pressed the comms. “Shift north. Double the grid.”
Acknowledgments rolled through, one after another—steady voices against the silence that wanted to swallow him whole.
The team moved like a machine, methodical, unrelenting. Every callout precise. Every movement drilled.
But beneath it, something in him kept counting seconds, breaths, distance. The kind of waiting that burned.
A gust rolled through, pushing the smoke east and carrying the faint metallic tang of blood.
Viper paused, scanning the horizon through the shimmer of heat.
Drones hummed overhead. Black’s voice crackled in his ear—coordinates, movement, maybe nothing.
He started toward it anyway.
A voice broke through the static. “Colonel, we’ve got something,” Rip said this time.
Viper stopped cold. “Go ahead.”
“Northwest quadrant, maybe fifty meters out. Looks like blood. Not old.”
His pulse kicked once—sharp, immediate. “Mark it. I’m on my way.”
He took off across the sand, boots pounding through heat and grit. Wind clawed at the edges of his jacket, dust stinging his face. Black and Winter shifted course to follow, their shadows cutting through the smoke.
He wasn’t imagining a capture.
He was imagining a body in the sand.
And that fear—he couldn’t outrun.
The closer he got, the more he saw—shell casings half-buried, boot prints overlapping. Someone had fought hard here. The sand was dark in places it shouldn’t have been.
He crouched low, fingers brushing the ground. The blood was tacky, fresh. Not enough for a kill shot—enough to say someone had moved after.
Rip came up beside him. Winter and Black held position, weapons ready.
“Could be him,” Law said quietly through comms.
Viper didn’t answer. Could be wasn’t good enough.
He rose, scanning the horizon again, tracking the pattern—the pull of every grain of sand, every broken line of prints leading east.
“Have Sage send the drone that way,” he ordered. “Low and wide.”
“Copy.” Law relayed the call.
The hum deepened overhead as the feed shifted. Still nothing visible but heat shimmer.
He kept walking anyway—every step harder to justify, every second louder in his head.
The call came an hour later—movement on the edge of the drone feed. A heat bloom, faint but human-shaped. For one breath, he thought finally. Then the image sharpened: cartel, not Titus. Two bodies half-buried near the ridge, torn apart by the blast.
He stared at the feed Sage had patched through, jaw tight, pulse hammering once before he forced it down.
All that effort, all that push, for nothing.
The light was bleeding out of the sky, the desert turning the color of old steel.
“Losing daylight, we calling it?” Rhett said.
He keyed the mic, voice flat. “That’s a negative. Sweep again.”
By the time full dark settled, the wind had died, leaving the world unnervingly still.
Searchlights swung in wide arcs across the flats, catching the smoke in silver veins. Comms crackled with clipped check-ins—Law, Rip, Black—each voice steady, precise, unshaken.
Viper listened, answered, and kept moving. Law had called for rotation an hour ago; he hadn’t stopped. The others followed his lead, faces washed green under NVGs, boots dragging through powder-fine sand.
He told himself it was procedure—finish the grid, confirm the count—but every step said different.
It wasn’t duty driving him anymore.
It was the hollow silence where Titus’s voice should’ve been.
He almost missed it, but his NVGs caught it—a faint glint half-buried near the base of a dune, where the ambient light thinned out. He crouched, brushed the sand away, and found a spent .45 casing—the kind a Ruger 1911 spits out, brass dark at the mouth but cool now to the touch.
Proof Titus had been here. Fought here. Maybe bled here.
The night stretched on, long and soundless except for the faint hiss of static in his ear. The others had rotated out, voices fading one by one until it was just him and the wind. Searchlights dimmed, drones looping overhead like silent vultures.
He should’ve stood down hours ago, but stopping meant replaying the last time he’d seen Titus—flash, impact, the look in those blue eyes across the distance.
Too far to read, but he imagined resignation there.
Maybe an accusation. That they’d left him.
And if it had been the other way around—hell, he’d have felt the same.
He squeezed the casing once before pocketing it, jaw tight, and kept moving—drawn by something past reason, past duty. Each step heavier, the sand swallowed the sound until even his own footsteps disappeared.
Movement flared on the ridge—caught in the sweep of a searchlight, shadows breaking against the sand. Rip and Ramsey brought one perp down hard, dragging him in through the dust.
Up close, Viper saw the sneer, the tattoos—Morelli blood. Young, mean as sandpaper. Winter had winged the guy—blood streaked down his arm where the round tore through.
Viper didn’t waste time. He grabbed a fistful of the man’s shirt, jerking him close. “Where is he?” he growled, voice low, lethal.
The man grinned, blood on his teeth, and spat in his face. “All I see is a dead man.”
For a second, no one breathed. Then Ramsey was there—ripping the bastard out of Viper’s grip and shoving him toward the waiting chopper. The man’s laughter carried over the wind, sharp and ugly, until the rotors drowned it out.
Viper wiped the blood from his face with the rag Law passed over. He handed it back, then turned toward the cold, dark desert and the lonely howl of the wind.
“Viper, you can’t keep this up,” Law said quietly, keeping stride beside him.
Static cracked in his ear.
“Viper, Savage wants you to call him ASAP,” Real’s voice came through the comms.
This was the call he’d been putting off. Titus had reported to Savage, and Viper had no update at all to give him.
He held out a hand for Law’s phone—his was still in pieces back at the disintegrated safe house.
“Viper?” Savage answered on the first ring.
He stopped walking. “I don’t have an update. I can’t find him.” His voice came out rougher than it ever had, but he couldn’t fix it.
“You can stand down.” A pause. “Titus surfaced. He’s on his way to Erebus.”
For a second, Viper didn’t move—couldn’t. The wind shifted, dragging the last of the smoke east. He looked out across the empty flats, at the tracks already half-buried in sand.
Relief hit like a punch, made breathing hard.
“Copy,” he said finally, the word barely audible.
He handed the phone back to Law and stood there, gazing at the dark desert, until the silence swallowed everything again.