Chapter 10 - Midnight Sweep
The rotor wash flattened the tall pine branches above the clearing, sending a whirlwind of dry pine needles and debris rattling against the shed’s tin roof. The sound was deafening, rattling Marcus’s teeth in his skull.
Through a slit in the rotting window boards, Marcus saw the aircraft: an MH-60 Black Hawk, painted matte black with no visible national insignia or unit tail codes. It hovered fifty feet above the logging road, its forward searchlight dark, using forward-looking infrared to paint the tree line.
Two ropes dropped from the open cabin doors. Four men in full night-vision gear descended rapidly, their boots hitting the gravel without a sound. They moved in standard tactical formation—two high, two low—clearing the perimeter of the logging spur with suppressors raised.
""Special Operations Group,"" Marcus murmured, his breath steadying into the familiar icy rhythm of combat. ""They brought in the strike teams from Fort Bragg. They aren't trying to recover files anymore. They're here to sanitize the site.""
Sarah huddled in the corner behind an old cast-iron boiler, covering Lily’s ears with both hands. The child was awake, terrified by the overwhelming noise, her wide eyes reflecting the faint green luminescence of Marcus’s optic sight.
""What do we do?"" Sarah asked, her lips moving against the roar of the helicopter overhead. ""We can't outrun them in the woods.""
""No,"" Marcus said. ""We can't outrun them. But they don't know my tactical signature. They think they're clearing a disoriented sergeant who spent nine months behind an operations desk.""
He looked at the tablet resting on the crate. The file transfer was stalled at seventy-four percent. The encrypted uplink required another six minutes to push the data from the micro-SD card to an independent legal repository maintained by a federal whistleblower protection group in Washington.
Six minutes. In tactical terms, an eternity.
""Sarah,"" Marcus said, grabbing her gaze with absolute intensity. ""No matter what happens out there, you do not move from behind this boiler until you see my face or hear sirens. If someone other than me steps through that door, you take this.""
He pulled a small, silver .38 revolver from his ankle holster and pressed the wooden grip into her trembling hand.
""Marcus, no—""
May you like
""Six minutes,"" he whispered, kissing her forehead briefly. ""Keep Lily quiet.""
He slipped out through the broken rear window of the maintenance shed, melting into the pitch-black shadows of the hemlock trees just as the first operator approached the rusted chain-link gate.
