Chapter 27 Calder
CALDER
The first cigarette butts Buck and Weston found were too soggy from melted snow to tell us much. When I find two clean ones outside the station, faint Cyrillic lettering stands out near the filters.
By now, we know Tyler is at the center of this. The vandalized team photo in Elena’s house made sure of that. The cigarettes don’t change the why, but they give us a where. The lettering doesn’t prove anything by itself, but it points in a direction we’ve all been avoiding.
It’s enough to make me stop putting off a call I should’ve made sooner.
Bruce Noland was on my team before Tyler’s platoon, back when his knee was still intact, and mine hurt less in the cold. He got out a few years before us and landed in Naval Intelligence, where he does the kind of analysis work that still puts blood on his hands, just from farther away.
I send him photos of the cigarette butts and a short message telling him what I can without putting names in writing. Three hours later, I’m wiping down tools in the apparatus bay when my phone buzzes in my back pocket.
“Got something,” Noland sends. “Heard chatter a while back about a former Spetsnaz operative asking about members of a disbanded SEAL team. Didn’t have names then. Dug deeper after your text.”
The air coming through the open bay door feels a few degrees colder.
“Which team?” I type back.
There’s a long pause before he replies. “Tyler Ramirez’s name came up.”
The line has been bending this way for days. The certainty of it still hits hard.
My thumbs hover over the screen before I force them to move. “Who?”
“Anton Kozlov.”
Kozlov. The name punches through me so hard I have to brace a hand against the engine.
Not Anton. Arseny. A black Hummer fishtailing across wet pavement. Tires screaming. Radio chatter, clipped and overlapping. Headlights smearing in the mirror. Then the impossible orange bloom. Fire where there should have been only dark road and metal and motion—
I shut my eyes and stop it there. I’ve learned how to do that, but not well. Not every time. Well enough to keep from drowning in it in the middle of the station. Usually.
When I open my eyes, the phone is still in my hand, and the concrete is still solid under my boots. My breathing isn’t great, but I’m getting it under control.
I type with deliberate precision. “How’s he connected to Arseny Kozlov?”
“Brother,” Noland says. “Former Russian Special Forces. After that, he moved through intelligence circles and private networks. Not a desk guy. Not just a threat on paper.”
I look up at the ceiling for one hard second before I answer. “What does he want?”
“No clue. All I know is he was asking about your old team and Tyler specifically. Quietly, but enough that it tripped notice.”
Tyler specifically. Not Buck, who’d been our officer, or me or Weston.
Noland sends another message before I can answer. “Take it seriously.”
I let out a humorless laugh. No shit.
I spot Weston near the medic cabinet and jerk my chin at him. He drops whatever he’s doing and follows me to Buck’s office.
“What’d you get?” Buck asks, instantly reading my face.
“The Russian angle is real. Noland had old intel on a former Spetsnaz operative looking into our old team. My text gave him enough to connect it.”
Both of them go still.
“Tyler’s name came up,” I say. “The man asking questions is Anton Kozlov.”
Buck’s expression hardens. Weston swipes a hand over his jaw.
“Kozlov,” Buck says. “As in Arseny.”
I nod once. “Brother.”
None of us says anything for a second. It’s the mission that haunts us. The one the Navy called a success and filed away, while we never could do either of those things. Not when four didn’t come home.
Weston is the one who breaks the silence. “What else?”
“Former Russian Special Forces, same as Arseny. Noland didn’t have a full file on him, but enough to say this isn’t some random asshole with an old grudge and a passport.”
“He’s been working this since San Diego,” Buck reminds us. “Looks like revenge.”
Weston looks out the window, where the sky is darkening. “We thought the worst of it stayed behind us, but it tracked her here.”
I follow his gaze to where he’s staring out at nothing, and a moment later, headlights appear. Elena’s SUV slows at the corner, then turns into our lot.
“I nearly forgot,” Weston says. “That’ll be Elena and T.J. She texted earlier about a school project.”
Buck nods. “The career interview. I heard about that. Hell of a time for it, though.”
What stings almost as much as the timing is the fact that both of them knew about it, and I didn’t. It shouldn’t matter, but it does.