3. Chapter 3 - Matt #3
Keene handed him a black access card bearing nothing except the silver crescent-and-blade insignia of Valker. Matt turned it over once in his hand like he still expected the thing to suddenly explain what kind of life choices had brought him here. “Still feels weird carrying one of these.”
“You’ll adapt.”
“I’m starting to think that’s Valker for ‘you’re going to hate this.’”
Keene did not deny it, which honestly felt unnecessarily rude.
A moment later a metallic screech echoed through the hangar as the helicopter blades overhead began to turn, and the entire atmosphere shifted with immediate intensity.
Conversations stopped while equipment checks accelerated around the aircraft.
The controlled movement around the aircraft tightened into something sharper and more focused as instinct moved through the room like tension pulled across a wire.
Matt felt the same shift settle into himself almost automatically.
The military had carved mission mindset into him years ago through repetition, exhaustion, and survival: the narrowing of focus, the quiet emotional compartmentalization, and the understanding that fear always became easier to carry once there was finally something to do with it.
Except this time fear was not the only thing riding beneath his ribs.
Curiosity lingered there too, restless and alive every time he thought about the thermal image buried in the mission file.
The shape had looked isolated rather than threatening, alone in the dark in a way Matt could not stop thinking about no matter how much he wanted to.
Baptiste watched him over the rim of his coffee mug. “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Thinking too loudly.”
“That is not a real thing.”
“It absolutely is for predators.”
Matt looked back toward the helicopter while operatives loaded the last equipment crates into the rear compartment beneath the growing thunder of the spinning rotors.
Around them, the hangar had settled into that familiar pre-deployment tension where everybody moved with purpose and nobody wasted energy pretending they were relaxed.
Matt kept his eyes on the aircraft when he finally spoke. “You ever get the feeling something’s waiting for you specifically?” he asked.
Baptiste was silent for a moment longer than usual.
“Yes,” he said eventually. “The important question is whether it wants you alive when it finds you.”
Matt glanced sideways. “You are spectacularly bad at reassurance.”
“I prefer honesty.”
“That feels like a design flaw.”
The helicopter engines rose into a deafening mechanical roar that vibrated through the hangar walls and drowned out nearly everything else.
Operatives moved automatically, hauling the last equipment cases into the aircraft while tension tightened across the room with the familiar certainty of a deployment finally becoming real.
Commander Vale looked toward the team. “Move.”
And with a single word, the mission stopped feeling like a briefing and became something real enough to survive or die inside.
***
The helicopter lifted through darkness.
Matt felt it before he fully saw it.
One second the aircraft vibrated against the concrete confines of the launch tunnel, and the next the weight beneath them vanished as the transport climbed sharply into open air.
The sudden transition pressed Matt back into the harness while pale morning light flashed briefly across the cabin interior before thick cloud cover swallowed the landscape beneath them.
The ascent lasted less than twenty minutes before the pilot’s voice crackled across the headset system announcing rendezvous coordinates.
Moments later, a much larger aircraft emerged through the clouds ahead of them, its dark silhouette cutting across the storm layer like something military enough to make Matt instinctively suspicious.
The transfer happened quickly and with the kind of efficiency that suggested Valker personnel did this often. By the time Matt climbed aboard the larger transport aircraft alongside the rest of the deployment team, the smaller transport had already peeled away into the clouds behind them.
The inside of the aircraft settled into the familiar rhythm of military transport almost instantly.
Engines droned through the reinforced fuselage while red cabin lights painted everyone in muted shadows.
Across from Matt, two wolf operatives checked weapons with efficient silence while a raven shifter near the rear compartment reviewed something on a tablet without ever looking up.