Chapter 23
TOMMY
I step off the transport onto ground that isn't Echo Base and feel the absence of my mountain like a missing limb.
My laptop bag weighs eleven pounds. I know because I weighed it, because weighing things is controllable and controllable things are comforting when you're about to walk into a compound full of people who would prefer you dead.
The tactical vest Stryker fitted me with weighs more. Stryker adjusted the straps himself, checking each one twice with hands that were steady and sure, and he said, "Vest stops most rounds at distance. Don't give anyone a reason to test it up close."
Helpful. Very helpful.
I'll add it to the list of reassuring things people say before you walk into a building full of armed hostiles for the first time in your life.
Webb’s compound is in Virginia. Rural property, fenced, guarded, and unremarkable enough to pass as a private estate if you didn't know what the man who owned it had done.
This is where he orchestrated bombings, assassinations, and an international network of corruption that had shadowed this team for years. He chose his hiding place well.
Victoria chose her intelligence better.
The Virginia air is cool, carrying the scent of pine and damp earth. Crickets. Actual crickets. I've spent so long inside a mountain that the sound of insects feels exotic, like a nature documentary playing through speakers I forgot I owned.
"Comms check." Kane's voice is quiet in my earpiece, and the sound of it steadies something in my chest because Kane's voice in my ear is the most familiar sound in my professional life.
I've heard it through hundreds of missions. Always from the other side. Always from behind screens. Always safe.
Not this time.
"Copy," I say, and my voice is steady, and I'm grateful for every hour I spent running comms under pressure, training my vocal cords to sound calm when the rest of me is running calculations on survival probability.
"Copy," Dar says beside me.
She's wearing a tactical vest that looks absurd over her black hoodie. Her rainbow hair is tucked under a dark cap, and the only visible concession to the operation is the equipment bag slung across her chest containing hardware worth more than the transport that brought us here.
She looks like a hacker playing as a soldier, which is essentially what we both are, and the absurdity of it would be funny if the compound two hundred meters ahead of us weren't full of people with guns.
It would also be funny if the vest weren't pulling the hoodie tight across her shoulders in a way that reminds me, unhelpfully, that I know the exact topography beneath the fabric.
The curve of her collarbone. The sharp angle of her hip where my thumb fits like it was designed for the purpose. The way her spine arches when I press my mouth to the small of her back.
Not the time. Emphatically not the time.
"Assault team, check in." Kane runs through the roster. Stryker. Dylan. Mercer. Micah. Each one answers with the clipped efficiency of men who have done this before.
Roman answers last, his voice carrying the particular calm of someone for whom violence is a language he speaks fluently and without accent.
"Intelligence, check." Victoria's voice from the mobile operations center, parked with Sarah managing comms beside her.
"Tech team, check." That's me. The words feel different when I say them standing in a field instead of sitting at my desk. Different weight. Different cost.
Dar's hand brushes mine. Brief. Deliberate. Her fingers tap three characters against my knuckle. The same code from last night, from the mattress, from the commented-out line in a subroutine that said everything words couldn't.
Then her hand is back on her equipment bag, and her face is focused, and the contact lasted less than a second, and it was enough.
Kane gives the order.
The assault team moves like water through a cracked dam. Fast, silent, each one flowing into the space the others create. Stryker on point with Dylan at his shoulder. Mercer and Micah flanking wide.
Roman detaches, because Roman always detaches, sliding into the compound's perimeter with the particular absence of presence that makes him invisible even when you know where to look.
Dar and I wait.
The waiting is the worst part. I've known this from the other side of screens for years, watched operators hold position while clock hands moved like they were dragging through wet concrete.
I never understood the physical reality of it until now.
My heartbeat is audible inside the vest. My palms are damp inside the thin tactical gloves. My knees ache from crouching, and my lower back is reminding me that yoga is not, in fact, an adequate substitute for field training.
"Perimeter secure. Moving to breach point." Stryker's voice.
"Copy." Kane.
"Tech team, you're go in ninety seconds."
Ninety seconds. I count them. Each one lands in my chest with the weight of a metronome set to the tempo of controlled violence.
Dar doesn't count. She crouches beside me with her bag open, hardware prepped, her fingers tapping a sequence on her thigh that isn't anxiety. It's code. She's running through the infiltration protocol in her head, kinetically, the way musicians finger scales before a performance.
"You're doing the thing with your leg," I tell her.
"You're doing the thing with your glasses."
My hand freezes halfway to the bridge of my nose. I lower it.
She smiles, quick and gone, a flash of teeth in the darkness that I tuck away in the part of my mind reserved for things I want to remember when the rest of this night is something I'd rather forget.
"For the record," she whispers, "your tactical vest is on backwards."
"It is not."
"It's not. But the look on your face was worth the lie."
"I'm going to remember this when we're back at base."
"Counting on it."
"Breach." The word comes through the comms, followed by the sound of controlled entry. The difference from hearing it through screens is the concussive feel of it in my chest, a pressure wave that has no business reaching this distance but does because physics doesn't care about expectations.
Gunfire. Short, controlled bursts.
The sound is sharp and flat and carries none of the cinematic quality that movies suggest. It sounds like exactly what it is: metal moving through air at lethal velocity.
"Contact, ground floor. Two hostiles down." Dylan's voice, flat and certain.
"Copy. Assault team, clear to the second floor. Tech team, move to insertion point." Kane.
Dar and I move.
Running in a tactical vest with a laptop bag while gunfire echoes through a building is an experience I will never adequately describe and never want to repeat.
My boot catches something — a cable, a threshold strip, the universe's editorial commentary on my fitness for field operations — and my knee hits the floor hard enough to send a shock up my thigh into my hip.
The laptop bag swings forward on its strap, the momentum pulling me off-balance, and for one terrible second I'm on all fours in a corridor full of tactical operators with a computer bouncing against my ribs and the taste of adrenaline and humiliation metallic in the back of my throat.
Dar's hand closes on my arm. Not gentle. She hauls me upright with a grip that doesn't care about my dignity and cares very much about my velocity, and I'm running again before my brain finishes cataloging the embarrassment.
"Don't mention it," she says, already ahead of me.
"I wasn't going to."
"Your face was going to."
My knee aches. My pride aches worse. But my legs are moving and the bag is secure and the bypass kit didn't spill and the corridor ahead is clear, and the difference between a man who falls and a man who stays down has never been more relevant than right now.
Legs pumping and my breathing stays controlled and my body knows how to move because I've trained it, alone, at midnight, in a gym nobody watched.
The irony that the discipline I hid from my team is the thing keeping me functional right now is the kind of cosmic joke I'd appreciate more if I weren't sprinting toward armed hostiles.
Dar runs beside me. Lighter, faster, her equipment bag clutched against her chest with both hands.
Her cap has shifted, and a streak of rainbow hair escapes along her temple, vivid against the darkness.
She runs the way she types. In bursts. Efficient, precise, conserving energy between accelerations.
I know the mechanics of her body well enough now to read the rhythm, and the intimacy of that knowledge in this context, recognizing her movement patterns in a combat zone because I learned them in a bed, is a cognitive dissonance I'll unpack later.
We enter through the ground floor. The assault team has already swept it. Two Committee operatives are down, zip-tied by Mercer, and their weapons collected.
The corridor smells like burnt powder and sweat and the particular metallic scent that adrenaline leaves in enclosed spaces.
"Digital nerve center, second floor, east wing." Victoria's voice guides us through the layout. "Third door on the right. Air-gapped server room with independent power supply. Expect electronic locks and possibly a manual failsafe."
Mercer straightens from securing the second operative and sees me. His eyebrows rise a fraction.
"Hale. I want you to know." He keeps his voice low, but the edge of his mouth twitches. "Stryker owes me twenty bucks. I bet you'd make it all the way."
"Your faith is overwhelming."
The bet registers a beat late. Mercer watched my gym sessions on the security feed. Stryker knows about the midnight training. The information settles into the corridor like a puzzle piece clicking into a picture I didn't know was being assembled.