Chapter 20 Jackson
TWENTY
Jackson
brOKEN ARROW
Darkness.
Absolute. Weighty. A physical substance pressing against my eyes.
The cold is worse than the dark. It isn’t the biting wind of a Chicago winter; it’s a chemical void.
The liquid nitrogen dump dropped the ambient temperature well below freezing in seconds.
The floor tiles leech the heat straight out of my skin, sucking the energy from my core.
My sweat freezes on my face, a tight, cracking mask.
My lungs seize. They spasm, trying to drag oxygen out of the air, but there is nothing to find. The atmosphere is thick with Halon and nitrogen fog—a metallic, suffocating soup that tastes like scorched circuitry and old pennies.
Talia’s hand falls into mine.
Her knuckles tremble against my palm, fluttering against my skin—fast, uneven, frantic. Like a bird hitting a windowpane.
She’s alive.
That’s the only data point that matters. The rest is noise.
I try to push up. My muscles refuse the command. They are cement—rigid, locked, starved of oxygen. The hypoxia is setting in fast. My vision isn’t just dark; it’s graying out at the edges of my consciousness, a static fuzz that drowns out thought.
The room feels like a coffin closing in—dizziness, nausea, the world tilting on its axis. My heart hammers against my ribs, a desperate, thudding rhythm trying to pump sludge through my veins.
Get up, I tell myself. Move.
I can’t. The connection between will and action is severed.
We are going to die here. In the dark. Beside a frozen computer.
Thump.
A vibration shivers through the floor. Faint. Just a tremor in the concrete.
Thump-thump.
Charges. Linear cutting tape. Someone is laying explosives on the other side of the fused door.
I squeeze Talia’s hand. I try to speak, but my throat is raw meat.
She curls into me, burying her face in my tactical vest. Her hair is damp with the chemical fog, freezing into stiff strands. I angle my body over hers, curling around her like a shell. Shielding as much of her as I can from the overpressure.
CRACK.
The door doesn’t open—it disintegrates.
A white-hot eruption punches through the freezing fog. The blast wave slams into us, a physical hammer of heat and pressure. It rolls over my back, hot enough to singe, pushing the heavy Halon fog away for a microsecond.
Bringing fresh oxygen to my lungs.
I gasp.
Breathe.
A ringing fills my ears, high and electric, drowning out the world.
Then—light.
Blinding, searing white tactical beams carve through the smoke. They cut the darkness into slices. My pupils contract painfully, tears leaking from my eyes.
Silhouettes flood the breach. Large. Armored. Moving with the aggression of a pack. They don’t walk; they flow into the room, weapons up, scanning sectors.
“Clear left.”
“Clear right.”
I know those voices. Even through the ringing distortion in my ears, I know the cadence.
“Ghost,” I manage. It’s more of a wheeze than a word, a bubble of air forcing its way up a collapsed throat.
A beam slices across my face, blinding me, then snaps away instantly to preserve my night vision.
“I got him,” Ghost snaps.
He drops to a knee beside me, hooking an arm under my shoulder. He hauls me up with the strength of someone operating on adrenaline and fury. My legs drag, useless for a second, before the blood rushes back into them.
Brass is right behind him, scooping Talia into his arms in one sweeping motion like she weighs nothing. He checks her pupils, his face grim behind his ballistic glasses.
“Can you move?” Ghost demands, his face inches from mine.
“Functional,” I grit out. The lie tastes like blood.
“Liar.” He jerks me forward, taking my weight. “Torque’s at the dock. Sixty-second window before the cavalry gets reinforced.”
We spill out into the corridor.
The air here is warmer. Richer. I suck it in greedily, choking as my lungs try to reboot. It burns like fire, but it clears the gray static from my vision.
I cough so hard my ribs scream, doubling over.
“Weapon,” I croak.
Brass doesn’t break stride. He slaps my Glock into my palm. “One in the chamber. Mags full. Don’t miss.”
Ghost takes point, his carbine raised, moving with a fluid lethality. “Move out. Standard diamond formation.”
We run.
The corridor stutters between light and dark. The main power is gone. Emergency strobes flicker like a dying heartbeat, painting the walls in flashes of red and black. Shadows twist and stretch, looking like enemies in the gaps between the light.
My boots slap the concrete, each stride jarring my left arm until white-hot pain spikes up to my shoulder.
The wound tears wider with every movement, warm blood sliding in a slow, relentless trail down my ribs, soaking into the waistband of my pants.
The Glock threatens to slip in my grip, slick with sweat and the smear of my own blood.
“Contact front.” Ghost fires.
The muzzle flash bleaches the world white.
Three Phoenix operatives choke the junction ahead. They are silhouettes in the strobe light, bulky with armor. Their Night Vision Goggles glow like hungry green eyes in the dark. They have the advantage. They can see us. We are just shapes in the gloom.
Rounds snap past us, cracking the air. Sparks shower from the conduit on the wall.
“Blind them,” I snap.
Brass yanks a flashbang from his vest, pulls the pin, and rolls it forward.
“Frag out.”
BANG.
A concussive pop detonates inside my skull. The hallway turns pure white for a second. Optics fry, and men shout in pain.
We surge through the breach.
Shapes blur in the fog. Not people—targets. I fire twice. Center mass. My trigger finger moves on muscle memory. The first shape collapses.
Ghost takes the second with a controlled burst. Brass puts the third into the wall with a shoulder check. He sets Talia down and aims point-blank.
We step over the bodies. I don’t look at faces. I look for threats.
My left arm is dead weight. A useless pendulum. But my right arm is rock steady.
Talia is back on her feet, at my flank. I glance at her. She isn’t stumbling. She isn’t crying. She’s running. Her weapon is up, a two-handed grip, scanning the rear angles. Her movements are crisp, mimicking the team.
Partners.
“Stairwell is burned,” Whisper’s voice murmurs over comms—smooth, clinical, detached from the violence. “Heavy gunner on the landing. No viable push. You’ll get shredded in the fatal funnel.”
“Loading dock,” I reply, gasping for air. “Direct route. Through the warehouse.”
“That puts us in the open,” Brass grunts, swapping mags mid-stride. “We lose cover.”
“It puts us by the van.”
Ghost doesn’t argue. “Do it. Brass, take rear guard. Fuse, keep her moving.”
We slam through the double doors onto the warehouse floor.
Chaos hits like a fist.
The cavernous space is a twisting labyrinth of shipping containers, forklifts, and stacked pallets towering twenty feet high. Machinery hums somewhere in the dark. Boots scrape on concrete. Shadows move with predatory intent on the catwalks above.
We are exposed.
Bullets snap in the air immediately. The crack is sharp, slicing through my eardrum. Sparks burst from a steel beam inches from Talia’s head, showering amber flecks across her hair.
I grab her vest and yank her behind a pallet stack. “Stay low.”
“I see them.” She points up. “Catwalk—two o’clock. High angle.”
I follow her gaze. High-level shooter. Elevated. He has the angle on our cover. He’s lining up a shot on Brass.
I lift my weapon, but the angle is bad. My arm shakes.
Crack.
A single shot rings out from outside the building.
The shooter on the catwalk jerks backward. His head snaps. He topples over the railing, plummeting twenty feet and slamming onto the floor with a wet, final thud.
“You’re welcome,” Whisper murmurs in my ear.
“Move up,” Ghost orders, laying down suppressive fire with his carbine. “Bounding overwatch. I move, you cover.”
Ghost sprints to the next stack of crates. He turns, firing at a group of operatives advancing from the north. “Move.”
I tap Talia. “Go.”
We break cover.
My legs are lead weights. The Halon exposure turned my muscles into stone. Every footstep feels like lifting a cinder block. My chest burns. My throat tastes like metal and fire. My vision flickers at the edges—gray spots dancing in the dark.
I stumble.
Talia grabs my vest. She hauls me forward. She doesn’t need protection. In this moment, she’s protecting me.
“Stay with me, Jackson,” she pants. “We’re almost there.”
We dive behind a forklift just as a spray of automatic fire chews up the concrete where we were standing.
“They’re flanking,” Brass yells. “Left side. Three tangos.”
“I got them.” I lean out, firing one-handed.
The recoil hurts, jarring my shoulder, but I drop one. Brass takes the other two.
“Clear left.”
“Loading dock is ahead,” Ghost shouts. “Fifty meters.”
The wide doors have been blown outward; Torque’s signature chaos stamped across the twisted hinges. The extraction van waits like salvation, engine snarling, back doors thrown open.
It looks like a mile away.
“Contact rear,” Brass snaps.
The door behind us detonates inward, a spray of splintered metal. A kill squad pours through—armored, disciplined, the kind of unit that doesn’t panic and doesn’t miss.
Gunfire erupts, a brutal, choking roar.
Before Ghost can issue the order, Halo appears in the back of the van, one knee down on the metal floor, rifle braced against his shoulder. His body is terrifyingly still in the chaos, the kind of stillness that comes from instinct, not training.
He fires.
One round—clean, sharp.
A visor cracks. A head snaps sideways. A body drops.
Halo shifts by millimeters, tracking another operator weaving for position.
Another shot. Another collapse.
Surgical. Unhurried. Absolute.
A third kill squad member breaks off to flank—
Halo cuts him down mid-stride, a perfect shot sliding through the gap in his side armor.
No wasted movement.
No panic.
He’s not firing a rifle—he’s executing a checklist.