Chapter Fifteen
Rena adjusted the strap of her vest as she followed the others out into the night. The air was hot, humid, and humming with quiet tension.
Boots scuffed against the concrete as Team One—Rena, Gage, Cal, Garrett, Isla, and Sheriff Chase—made their way toward the Crossfire Ops van parked near the hangar.
The vehicle was blacked out, armored, and outfitted with a portable command station for Isla, who was already muttering under her breath about satellite links and signal integrity as she climbed in.
Noah peeled away toward the helicopter pad, his silhouette cutting across the floodlights.
The rotor blades began to spin, slicing through the stillness, and Rena felt that familiar pulse of adrenaline start to build, the pre-mission charge that always hit right before they stepped into uncertainty.
Gage handed her a comm earpiece, their fingers brushing. “Ready?” he asked.
“Ready,” she said, even if her gut twisted in quiet contradiction.
Outside, the world was painted in silver and shadow. The full moon hung high above them, bright enough to light every ridge and bend of the surrounding hills. Normally, she’d have appreciated a sky that clear, but not tonight. Tonight, it meant exposure.
Rena could feel the tension humming in the van like a live wire. No one spoke. The air was thick with nerves, quiet focus, and that shared current of anticipation that came before every operation. No op was ever routine, she’d learned that the hard way, but this one carried a different weight.
They might finally know who’d launched the attacks on them. Who’d tried to slaughter kids at a birthday party.
Who’d turned Crossfire Ops from a fortress to a target.
Garrett double-checked his primary handgun, the metallic click of the chamber breaking the silence.
Cal watched the perimeter through the windshield, his expression unreadable, his jaw tight.
Isla’s fingers flew over her portable keyboard, setting up her field link, muttering bits of code and tech jargon under her breath like a mantra.
Sheriff Chase, calm as a seasoned soldier, her eyes sharp but steady.
Across from them, Team Two was loading up. Harlan, Colt, Eli, Delaney, Jace, and Deputy Sanchez. They moved with quiet precision, their gear catching the moonlight as they fell into place.
This was it.
The hunt wasn’t over yet, but tonight, it might finally turn in their favor.
Cal took the driver’s seat, Sheriff Chase sliding in beside him up front. The rest of them filed into the back, settling along the benches that lined the van’s sides.
Rena ended up shoulder to shoulder with Gage. The contact wasn’t intentional, but she didn’t move away either. There was something grounding about his solid presence. Steady, controlled, the kind of calm you could anchor to when everything else was unknown.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Isla murmured as Cal started the drive. She was already typing, multiple windows blooming to life across the van’s built-in monitors.
Live drone feed from Site Alpha filled the main screen, a wide, overhead view of the facility tucked deep in the woods. The hangar roofs gleamed faintly under the moonlight, ghostly pale in the dark. No movement. No vehicles.
Nothing but stillness.
“Infrared sweep running,” Isla let them know, and she tapped a key. Another monitor blinked red, then blue, then stabilized into a wash of muted tones.
Rena leaned forward, studying it. The screen had no heat signatures. No bodies. No engines.
“Could mean it’s still shielded,” Sheriff Chase remarked.
True, and if so, that meant their attacker likely wanted them there. Wanted to draw them in and have another chance to kill them.
The van’s headlights cut through the darkness, twin beams slicing across the narrow, winding road.
It was just after one in the morning, and the world outside felt hollowed out.
No traffic, no lights, not even the faint glow of a farmhouse in the distance.
Just stretches of oak and cedar crowding in on either side.
Thick with shadows.
Team Two had taken a separate route to reach their own target, which made the emptiness feel even more absolute. No backup in sight. Just them and the night.
On one of the monitors, the GPS tracked their slow progress toward Site Alpha.
The glowing line crawled inch by inch, the miles and minutes dragging like molasses.
Every turn Cal took seemed to twist them deeper into nowhere, unpaved roads narrowing into dirt paths, hills rising and dropping away again.
“Feels like we’re driving straight into the dark side of the map,” Garrett muttered from across the van, his tone low but not joking.
It did indeed. Rena’s pulse had settled into the rhythm of the road, steady, contained, coiled. Every bend brought them closer to whatever waited out there.
After what seemed an eternity, Cal turned off the road and onto a narrow trail that barely qualified as a lane.
Ruts gouged into the clay, fresh tire tracks cutting through the brush.
The no-trespassing signs sagged on warped posts, half-hidden by thornbushes.
Moonlight skinned the edges of the trees, but the undergrowth drank the light and threw everything into pockets of black.
“We’re about a third of a mile out,” Isla informed them. “Get ready.” Her fingers were already dancing across the keyboard on the console beside her, and the glow lit her face in the rearview like a ghost.
Cal stopped and killed the engine. The sudden quiet felt enormous, only the hiss of a cooling radiator. They all stayed seated for a beat, checking kit, sliding magazines home, listening to one another breathe.
“On foot from here,” Cal said. “Isla’s staying with the van. She’ll run overwatch and comms. You all have trackers and helmet cams.”
Rena felt the now familiar calibration—strap, check, click—moving through muscle memory.
Gage was beside her, close enough she could feel the heat off his shoulder.
He tapped the side of his vest and nodded toward the pouch where he kept a set of smoke bombs and a couple of flashbangs.
She checked hers and felt the reassuring weight of the hardware under her palm.
Garrett hauled a small, hard case forward and cracked it open with the efficiency of someone who’d done this too many times. Inside, the portable jammer glinted like an insect trapped in light.
“If comms go weird,” Garrett said, his voice low, “we’ve got a local shield. Won’t stop everything, but it’ll buy us a second or two if someone’s listening.” He clipped the jammer to his belt with a practiced motion.
Cal’s eyes swept the group. “Grab extra smoke and stun. Better to have more than less. We move slow, silent, and tight. No hero moves. If Isla calls it hot, we back out.”
Isla fed them one last burst of details. Camera angles she’d left running, thermal sweep windows, the drone’s ETA back to orbit if they needed more eyes.
They stepped out of the van together into the night, boots sinking slightly in the soft dirt. Every footfall was careful, deliberate.
Rena’s chest tightened, adrenaline threading through her limbs, but the presence of the team around her steadied the edge. They moved like a single unit, each person an element of a plan that could go sideways in a heartbeat.
The woods quickly swallowed them whole. Branches snagged on their gear, the scent of cedar and damp earth thick in the air. Every sound—the soft crunch of boots on leaves, the faint rustle of wind through brush—felt amplified in the dark.
“Drone’s doing another sweep,” Isla’s voice murmured in Rena’s ear, crisp through the comms. “Altitude three hundred feet. No movement detected.”
Rena tipped her head, searching for the faint hum of the drone, but there was nothing. Good. That meant it was flying high enough not to give away their position. She couldn’t hear the helicopter either, though she had no doubts that Noah was nearby and ready if needed.
They pressed on, moving in staggered formation through the dense undergrowth.
Gage took point beside Cal, Sheriff Chase just behind them, Garrett near the middle with the jammer pulsing a low, green light at his hip.
Rena brought up the rear, watching their six.
The deeper they went, the thicker the shadows became, until even the moonlight struggled to find them.
“Eyes up,” Cal murmured over comms. “We’re close.”
Rena saw it a moment later, the faint gleam of metal through the trees. The facility. A chain-link fence rose out of the darkness, topped with concertina wire that caught flashes of moonlight like tiny knives. Beyond it lay a helipad and two hangars, just as Isla’s feed had shown.
They crouched low, taking cover behind a cluster of scrub. Garrett slid forward, a compact scanner already in his hand. The device pulsed once, twice, and the screen flickered red.
“Fence is hot,” he whispered. “Motion sensors and a live alarm circuit.”
Rena’s pulse jumped, but Garrett was already flipping open a panel on his jammer, fingers quick and sure. “Give me ten seconds.”
The device gave a soft electronic hum, then a green blink. “Sensors jammed. You’re clear.”
Cal nodded, then moved forward with his wire cutters. The sound was barely audible, a slow, methodical snip, snip, until a man-sized opening gaped in the fence. He pushed the section aside, glancing back at the team.
“Move,” he whispered.
Rena went through last, the metal edges brushing against her sleeve.
They advanced in silence, the kind of silence that made her pulse sound too loud in her own ears.
The ground here was gravel and hard-packed dirt.
No grass, no brush to muffle their steps.
Every movement was deliberate, calculated.
The hangars loomed ahead, two hulking shapes in the darkness, their metal siding dull under the moon. A windsock flapped lazily near the helipad. No light. No motion. Too quiet.
“Twenty yards out,” Cal murmured into comms. “Garrett, give me another scan.”
“Still cold,” Garrett whispered back, glancing at his handheld device. “No heat. Nothing moving.”
Rena’s gut didn’t buy it. The air felt wrong, too still, too heavy. The kind of stillness that came before chaos.
Then Isla’s voice came through the comms, sharp and a little too fast. “Hold up. I’ve got something.”
Everyone froze mid-step. Even the night seemed to pause.
“Talk to me, Isla,” Cal whispered.
Her voice crackled through their earpieces, tense now. “Drone just picked up heat signatures. Multiple. They weren’t there ten seconds ago.”
Rena turned her head slightly, scanning the trees to their flank. Nothing but darkness. The hair on her arms stood up.
“How many?” Cal asked.
“Can’t tell. At least four…” Isla’s tone spiked, and a second later her voice came through again, louder now, strained. “Oh, hell—” a pause, a quick intake of breath—“they’re behind you.”