Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
She was gone.
Mack stood in the middle of the road, blood running from his temple, and watched Blake’s truck disappear around the curve.
The engine sound faded—growling, then humming, then nothing.
Just the wind in the pines and the tick of the SUV’s cooling engine in the ditch and the high, steady ringing in his ears that told him his brain was rattled worse than he wanted to admit.
He tried to focus. The road doubled, split, and merged again. He blinked hard, and the world stabilized, but there was a lag—a fraction of a second between seeing something and processing it—that meant the concussion was real. Mild to moderate. Manageable if he didn’t push it. Dangerous if he did.
He was going to push it.
He did the damage assessment on autopilot.
Laceration, left temple, superficial—the cut where his head had cracked against the driver’s window.
Right arm, aggravated wound—the graze from yesterday had taken a fresh hit when the SUV spun.
Pain radiated from his shoulder to his wrist. He made a fist to test his grip. Weak, but functional.
Functional. The word tasted different now than it had yesterday.
Five minutes ago, Alyssa had been sitting beside him with the sun on her face. Her voice from earlier rang in his head. I plan to start wearing it again. If you’re ready to commit.
The ring.
And he’d pulled her toward him and kissed her and told her he’d never stopped being sure.
The terror racked his body, underneath everything. A cold, screaming thing that wanted to take his knees out and leave him in the road. Not the controlled fear he’d experienced in combat—this was something older, more primal.
This was the fear of a man watching the person he loved disappear. The same half-second from the parking structure, except it wasn’t a half-second anymore. It was ongoing. It was now.
She’s alive. Blake won’t hurt her.
That delusion was only thing keeping Mack sane.
He turned toward the SUV. The vehicle was wrecked. It looked like it belonged in a salvage yard.
Mack got behind the wheel. Turned the key. The engine coughed, coughed again, and caught—rough, uneven, with a grinding sound that meant something essential was damaged and operating on borrowed time.
He didn’t care. He put it in gear, rocked the vehicle twice to build momentum, and crawled out of the snowy ditch with the rear tires spraying snow and gravel.
On the road, he grabbed the sat phone. Garrett answered on the first ring. “Hawk.”
“Blake took Alyssa.” Mack kept his voice in his trained sitrep delivery, the cadence drilled into him through a hundred after-action reports.
“He T-boned us on Route 12, approximately fifteen miles south of the compound. Dark truck, late model, headed north. I’m mobile in the damaged vehicle.
Concussion, laceration, and my arm is compromised.
I need a destination. Where would he take her? ”
A beat of silence. “He kidnapped her? Is she in imminent danger from him?”
“I think he’s running.”
“Canadian border?”
“Too many checkpoints. He’d need to cross in a remote area, and that means logging roads. It’s risky.”
“Hold on.” Mack could hear Garrett moving—keys on a keyboard, a door opening, Garrett’s voice muffled as he called for Bobcat, their tech expert.
Then he was back. “There’s a private airstrip twenty-eight miles north of your position. It’s registered to Rob Thorne’s company. Thorne keeps a Cessna there. Bobcat pulled the flight records—there have been three trips to Canadian airspace in the last six months.”
The pieces fell into place with the clarity of a bolt sliding home. Blake had access to Thorne’s business assets through his legit work for VidaCorp. The escape route was pre-built, and Blake wasn’t about to go to prison without a fight.
“That’s his exit,” Mack said. “He’s putting her on that plane.”
“I’m mobilizing now—Grizzly and I are en route in three minutes. Thirty-five to the airstrip from here. Claire’s being notified.”
“I’ll be there in twenty-five.”
“Mack.” Garrett’s commander’s voice was filled with the steady authority of a man who’d led teams through worse than this and knew the cost of sending someone in alone. “You’re concussed. Wait for backup.”
“She’s getting on a plane, Garrett.”
His silence lasted two seconds. It said everything neither of them could. “We’re right behind you.”
Mack ended the call and pressed the accelerator to the floor.
The miles of mountain road passed too slowly in a vehicle that was dying beneath him.
The grinding grew louder, a mechanical protest he ignored the way he ignored the nausea rolling through him in waves and the double vision creeping in on curves.
The throbbing in his arm had graduated from pain to a deep, hot pulse.
He drove with his left hand. His right rested on his thigh, flexing periodically to keep blood flowing. Every flex pulled the wound and sent a reminder through his nervous system that he was operating below capacity. Degraded. Compromised.
He thought about Blake.
The administrative separation board. The long table, the officers in dress uniforms, the documents spread out like evidence at a trial.
Blake’s testimony—three pages of devastating lies that painted Mack as the one who’d broken protocol, disobeyed orders, and caused the chain of events that killed David Morrison and three Syrian civilians.
Blake had delivered his testimony with steady hands and a clear voice and the kind of righteous certainty that made you believe him even if you’d been there and knew better.
Colonel Bennett had been behind the scenes. The board was supposed to be impartial, but impartiality was a theory, not a practice, and the Colonel’s influence moved through the chain of command like groundwater.
Mack had told the truth. Every word of his report was accurate, corroborated by mission data and supported by the tactical record. But the truth had been quieter than Blake’s performance, and the board had chosen the version that came with a Colonel’s implicit endorsement.
Administrative separation with OTH characterization. Career over. Reputation destroyed.
And then Alyssa. Looking at him across their apartment, the ring on her finger catching the light, saying, “Blake wouldn’t lie about this. Dad believes him.”
He’d wanted to scream. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her.
He’d repeated the truth. “I watched Morrison die. I felt the shrapnel hit my hand. I am telling you the truth, and your brother is a liar, and your father is using his rank to protect his son at my expense.”
But she’d already been crying. And the doubt in her eyes wasn’t doubt about Blake—it was doubt about him. That’s what had broken something in him so fundamentally that the words had died in his throat.
This morning, she’d told him she wanted to wear his ring again. Had it survived the fire? Didn’t matter. He’d buy her a new one if it hadn’t.
He passed a logging truck, swung wide around a snowplow, and pushed the dying SUV through a curve that made the steering shudder against his hands.
The temperature gauge was in the red. The grinding had become a rhythmic metallic scream that rose and fell with the engine RPMs. Every mile was borrowed.
David Morrison had been twenty-four years old, from a small town outside Billings that he couldn’t stop talking about.
He’d shown Mack pictures of his parents’ house, the creek behind it, and the dog that waited by the door.
He’d been Mack’s spotter for six months, and in that time, Mack had learned that Morrison ate peanut butter straight from the jar, could identify birds by their calls, slept like the dead, and had enlisted because his grandfather had served in Vietnam and Morrison wanted to live up to the name.
He’d died on a rooftop in Syria because Blake Bennett panicked.
The mission was supposed to be surveillance only. Observe and report, no engagement unless fired upon. Blake was the secondary spotter, positioned on the adjacent rooftop. Mack saw the targets—two high-value subjects meeting in a courtyard. He was tracking, recording, doing his job.
Then Blake opened fire.
No authorization. No threat to their position.
Blake saw the targets and decided to be a hero.
The gunfire drew every hostile in the sector to their location.
Morrison moved to cover Blake’s position—because that’s what teammates did, that’s what good Marines did—and the RPG hit the wall six feet from where Blake had been standing.
Morrison took the shrapnel meant for Blake. Mack took what was left.
Three civilians in the courtyard below. Dead. Morrison. Dead. Mack’s hand, shredded.
And Blake, standing in the rubble, unhurt, already composing the lie that would save him.
Mack gripped the wheel and drove.
I’m coming, Lyssa.
The SUV groaned beneath him, and he asked it for five more miles.
It gave him four and a half. Half a mile from the airstrip—he could see the gap in the tree line ahead where the terrain opened up—the engine seized.
There was a shuddering clunk, a grinding shriek, and then silence.
Steam billowed from under the hood. The SUV rolled to a stop on the shoulder, and that was it. Dead.
Mack was out before it fully stopped. He pulled his weapon, checked the magazine, and tested his grip. His right hand closed around the pistol, and the pain was immediate, sharp, and clarifying. He aimed at a tree twenty feet away. The front sight wobbled. His fine motor control was degraded.
He started running.