Chapter Seventeen #2
"Trooper." His earpiece crackled. Ghost. "Main floor secured. Eight contacts down. We've got the weapons cache—it's bigger than we thought. Crates stacked to the ceiling."
"Casualties?"
"Forge took a graze. Nothing serious. Everyone else is clean."
"Copy." Trooper looked at Vance's body one more time. At the logistics charts and shipping schedules surrounding him like a shrine to efficiency. "Primary target eliminated. Warehouse is ours."
"Copy that." A pause. "Clean work, brother."
Trooper crossed to the desk. The monitor still glowed—Vance's deletion program halfway through destroying files he'd never finish erasing. Trooper pulled the hard drive. Evidence. Cargo would want it for tracking any weapons that had already shipped.
He checked the desk drawer Vance had been reaching for. A Sig Sauer, loaded, safety off. Close. If Trooper had hesitated—if he'd let Vance talk for another thirty seconds, let the negotiation play out the way the man had planned—that gun would have been in play.
But Trooper didn't hesitate. Not tonight.
He pocketed the hard drive and walked out of the office without looking back.
The warehouse floor was controlled chaos.
Ghost's team had swept it clean—bodies scattered between crates, the brotherhood moving through the space with the efficiency of men who'd done this in countries that didn't appear on maps.
Forge was sitting on a crate, pressing a bandage to his arm with one hand and directing brothers with the other.
"That's a lot of hardware," Static said, staring at rows of military containers stacked floor to ceiling. "Cargo's going to need a week to inventory all of this."
"He'll need Jessica," Trooper said.
Static grinned. "Yeah, he will."
Recon appeared from the north side, weapon slung, moving with the unhurried gait of a man whose overwatch position had given him nothing to do. "North exit stayed clear. Nobody ran."
"Nobody could." Ghost materialized beside Trooper, barely winded. "Your plan boxed them in. Every exit covered, every escape route cut. They had nowhere to go."
"That was the idea."
Ghost studied him. That assessing look—the one that saw through walls and classified silences.
"Vance?"
"In his office. Surrounded by spreadsheets."
"Fitting."
"I thought so."
Legion's voice came through the earpiece. "Sitrep."
"Warehouse secured," Trooper reported. "All hostile contacts eliminated. Weapons cache intact. Hard drive recovered with partial logistics data." He paused. "Vance is dead."
Silence on the channel. Then: "Casualties?"
"One minor. Forge caught a round across the arm. Everyone else walks out."
"Clean extraction. Standard protocol. I want that building dark in thirty minutes." Legion's voice carried something Trooper hadn't heard before. Pride, maybe. Or relief. "Good work, Trooper. All of you. Good work."
The brothers moved.
Thirty minutes. Standard protocol meant clearing evidence, sanitizing the scene, making sure nothing led back to the compound. Trooper directed the operation on autopilot—his body going through the motions while his mind was already somewhere else.
The planning room. Channel six. A woman with dark hair and steel in her jaw, waiting for a radio update she'd been promised every fifteen minutes.
He keyed his personal channel.
"Jessica."
Static. Then a click, and her voice—tight, controlled, holding it together the way she always did.
"I'm here."
Two words. But he heard everything underneath them. The fear she'd been swallowing for the past hour. The determination not to fall apart on an open channel. The trust she'd placed in his plan, in his promise, in him.
"It's done," he said. "Vance is dead. Warehouse is secured. We're extracting now."
He heard her exhale. Long, shaking, the sound of something breaking loose.
"Forge?"
"Grazed. He's complaining about it, which means he's fine."
A laugh. Wet. Almost a sob. "And you?"
Trooper looked at his hands. Steady. No blood this time—just gunpowder residue and the faint tremor of adrenaline beginning its slow withdrawal.
"I'm coming home," he said.
The silence on the channel stretched. He could hear her breathing. Could picture her in the planning room, hand pressed to the table where they'd first come together, radio clutched in white-knuckled fingers.
"I'll be here," she said.
He killed the channel and turned back to the warehouse.
Twenty-eight minutes later, the brotherhood rolled out. Single file through the industrial district, engines low, headlights cutting through Carolina darkness. Behind them, the warehouse sat dark and silent—stripped clean, evidence removed, nothing left but bodies and concrete.
Vance's empire, reduced to an empty building and a dead man in an office full of spreadsheets.
Trooper rode point.
The night air hit his face—warm, thick with pine and the distant smell of red clay. The road unspooled ahead of him, familiar territory, Carolina back roads he'd planned a thousand routes through.
But tonight the road felt different.
Lighter.
The dead Rangers were quiet in his head. Not gone—they'd never be gone—but settled. Resting. Like they'd been waiting for something, and whatever it was had finally arrived.
He twisted the throttle and let the engine carry him home.