CHAPTER SIXTEEN #2
His remaining operatives—Zmarai Karwan, Wakil Tariq, Zubair Waziri, and Hamza Afridi—were pressed against the damp concrete walls beside him.
They were exhausted, cornered, and rapidly running out of options.
The military grid sweeps were tightening like a noose.
Every thirty minutes, heavily armed kinetic strike teams marched past the grates above them.
"We cannot stay here, Zahar," Zubair Waziri hissed, the logistics coordinator wiping sweat from his brow. "The thermal drones will initiate a sub-surface scan by nightfall. They will find us."
Dagha, a man who had orchestrated ambushes across the most hostile terrains in the world, ground his teeth. He had underestimated the sheer speed of the Major General’s response. The Cantonment was a fortress, and he was trapped inside it.
He needed leverage. He needed a hostage valuable enough to force the Major General to open the gates.
"We do not hide," Dagha whispered, his cold, calculating eyes scanning the faces of his men. "We strike a soft target. We secure an asset they cannot afford to lose."
"Every barrack is heavily armed," Karwan, the weapons specialist, grunted, checking the action on his suppressed submachine gun. "There are no soft targets."
"There is one," Dagha replied, a cruel, desperate smile pulling at his lips.
He pulled a crumpled piece of intel from his tactical vest—a scrap of civilian base chatter they had intercepted before the lockdown had severed their comms.
"The Major General's bungalow," Dagha stated, pointing upward toward the elite officer enclave. "It sits isolated from the main barracks. More importantly, the chatter confirms the General's wife is currently residing there. She is pregnant."
Hamza Afridi, the youngest and most reckless of the group, let out a low, dark chuckle. "A cornered, pregnant woman. That is no threat. We breach the house, we take her, and we walk out the front gates while the General watches."
Dagha nodded. "Saaya, you take the rear perimeter. Koh, Wahshi, you breach the southern access point. We move in five minutes. We secure the wife, and we buy our lives."
It was a brilliant, ruthless tactical maneuver.
There was only one problem: Imran Dagha had absolutely no idea who the General's wife was.
Inside the quiet, sunlit expanse of the bungalow, Serena Ashmehr-Vohn was sitting comfortably on the plush living room sofa.
A steaming cup of chamomile tea rested on the glass coffee table, and a classified encrypted datapad was balanced on her lap.
She was cross-referencing logistical supply drops, her mind focused.
The house was dead silent.
And then, a bird stopped singing.
It was a microscopic shift in the environment.
To a civilian, or even a standard infantry soldier, it would have been imperceptible.
But Serena’s spatial awareness was legendary.
She had survived jungles, deserts, and urban warzones by reading the invisible, atmospheric ripples of a hostile presence.
She didn't look up from her datapad. Her heart rate did not elevate. But the tactical, Amazon warrior instantly overrode the relaxed, pregnant wife.
She listened.
Thirty seconds later, she heard it. A faint, nearly silent click of a specialized climbing carabiner engaging against the southern perimeter wall, bypassing the automated electronic tripwires.
Her dark eyes went flat, devoid of any warmth.
Five hostiles, her mind instantly calculated, cross-referencing the ambient noise.
A cold fury ignited in her chest. They had dared to bring their war to her front door. They had dared to infiltrate her sanctuary, the home where she slept beside her husband, the place where she was carrying their child. She was profoundly infuriated.
But Serena Ashmehr-Vohn was exceptionally good at her job. She did not act on anger; she acted on strategy.
She reached for the small, encrypted comms unit resting beside her tea, tapping a silent sequence that connected directly to the earpieces of Aditya and Vivaan, who were stationed on the outer perimeter.
"Talon. Ignition," Serena whispered, her voice a chilling, zero. "Do not engage. I repeat, do not engage the hostiles currently breaching the southern wall."
“Bhabhi?!” Vivaan’s shocked, frantic whisper crackled in her ear. “We have visual on five heavily armed tangos! We have to intercept—”
"If you engage them outside, you initiate a chaotic firefight," Serena commanded, her tactical brilliance taking complete control. "They have a weapons specialist and an overwatch sniper. If you engage, you will take casualties. I will not allow my detail to get hurt because of a perimeter breach."
“Major, we cannot let them into the house!” Aditya argued, his sniper’s discipline warring with his protective orders.
"You are not letting them in, Talon. I am inviting them in," Serena stated coldly. "Fall back. Pull the secondary guards. Reposition yourselves in the blind spots of the central hallway, adjacent to the living room. Create a path of least resistance. Funnel them directly to me."
There was a terrified pause on the comms. But they were operatives of the Monarch’s intelligence team. They recognized a tactical kill-box when they heard one. And they knew better than to disobey Major Ashmehr-Vohn.
“Moving to reposition,” Aditya confirmed grimly.
Serena set the comms unit down. Without breaking a sweat, she reached beneath the cushions of the sofa and retrieved the suppressed, matte-black sidearm she always kept hidden there.
She checked the chamber with a smooth, silent motion, leaving the safety off, and slid the weapon casually beneath the folds of the cashmere throw resting on the cushion beside her.
Finally, she picked up her encrypted datapad. She didn't call the command center. She didn't want to trigger the Cantonment alarms and alert Dagha that he was walking into a trap.
She typed a single, silent, priority-one encrypted message directly to Rudraksh’s personal terminal.
GUESTS IN THE LIVING ROOM. brING THE TEAM. NO SIRENS.
She hit send, leaned back into the plush sofa, picked up her chamomile tea, and waited.
In the Command Center, Rudraksh was staring at the holographic map when a sharp, red alert flashed across his personal console.
He looked down. He read the twelve words.
For a fraction of a second, the universe stopped. The blood drained from Rudraksh’s face. He knew exactly what it meant. Dagha had breached the bungalow. The mercenaries were inside the house with his pregnant wife.
The overwhelming terror that spiked in his chest was instantly, violently incinerated by a murderous, apocalyptic rage.
"Vantage. Suture. Phantom," Rudraksh roared, his voice shaking the reinforced glass of the command center, abandoning all military decorum. He drew his sidearm, racking the slide with a deafening clack. "My house. Now!"
The team didn't ask questions. They saw the madness in the Monarch’s eyes and they sprinted, heavily armed and moving with blinding speed, straight toward the elite enclave.
Imran Dagha, Zmarai Karwan, Zubair Waziri, and Hamza Afridi slipped through the sliding glass doors of the southern veranda. Wakil Tariq had remained on the outer wall, securing their exit, unaware that Aditya had already silently neutralized him from a blind spot in the garden.
The mercenaries moved through the quiet, sunlit corridors of the bungalow with their weapons raised. Dagha frowned slightly. It was too easy. The perimeter guards were absent.
But as they rounded the corner into the expansive, sunken living room, Dagha’s tactical paranoia vanished, replaced by a surge of arrogant victory.
Sitting in the center of the room, on a plush velvet sofa, was the Major General’s wife.
She looked exactly as he had hoped. She was dressed in soft, civilian clothing, clearly pregnant, sipping a cup of tea, alone and seemingly oblivious to the heavily armed men who had just surrounded her.
"Do not move a single muscle, Mrs. Ashmehr-Vohn," Dagha commanded, his voice dripping with cruel authority as he stepped into the room, leveling his assault rifle directly at her chest. Karwan, Waziri, and Afridi fanned out, securing the exits of the room, their weapons trained on the woman on the sofa.
Serena did not scream. She did not drop her teacup. She did not even flinch.
Slowly, deliberately, she took a sip of her chamomile tea, her dark eyes rising to meet Imran Dagha’s.
Dagha felt a sudden, inexplicable chill run down his spine. The woman sitting before him did not have the wide, terrified eyes of a civilian. Her gaze was flat, cold, and calculated—the eyes of an apex predator assessing its prey.