26
NICK
The Eastern Ridge is quiet in the morning light.
Not the quiet of peace. The quiet of aftermath. The specific silence of a mountain that held a war last night and has not yet decided what to do with the vacancy. The pine trees are the same. The snow is the same. The cold air tastes the same. But the men who guarded this ridge for Dominic Costa are gone and the infrastructure they built is sitting undefended on a mountainside above Pine Valley like a body with no pulse.
I lead the breach team through the access road at first light. Six Broken Halos brothers. Standard formation. Efficient, silent movement from men who have trained together long enough to communicate in hand signals and breathing patterns.
The excavation site is abandoned. Dominic’s people cleared out fast. Equipment left running. Generators humming to nothing. Personal items scattered across workstations. Coffee cups still half-full. The command structure dissolved the moment Dominic’s jet cleared the mountain. Without the head, the body scattered. Mercenaries do not fight for abandoned paychecks.
We secure the perimeter in four minutes. Every tunnel entrance. Every access point. Every line of sight from the ridge to the valley below. Standard. Fast. Clean.
The morning light cuts through the pines and throws long shadows across the excavation entrance. The air smells like diesel from the abandoned generators and pine sap and the cold mineral scent of exposed earth. The mountain has been opened. Dominic spent months carving into it.
What he put inside is the next question.
I take point into the main shaft. Rifle up. Headlamp on. The passage is reinforced. Steel beams. Poured concrete. Professional-grade excavation. Dominic did not cut corners because Dominic has never cut a corner in his life. Even his underground operations are architectural.
The shaft opens into a junction. Three corridors branching from a central hub. Standard mining layout adapted for operational use. Storage in one. Comms infrastructure in another. The third corridor is sealed. Heavy steel door. Digital lock.
The comms corridor first. I clear it with two brothers. Empty. Stripped. The hardware is gone. Dominic’s people took the digital infrastructure when they ran. Professional. Even in retreat they followed protocol.
The storage corridor next. Crates. Sealed containers. The inventory will take days. I radio it in and move on.
The sealed third corridor.
Blake handles the door. Three minutes with a cutting torch. The steel gives. The lock melts. The door swings inward and the air that comes out is cold and dry and untouched.
Daniel is beside me in the corridor. He has been quiet since the bakery. Quiet in a different register than his usual operational silence. He has unfinished business in this mountain and everyone in the team knows it. The man who rigged the mine explosives two years ago. The Costa lieutenant who put Daniel’s wife in the blast radius of a detonation that should have killed her. The man who disappeared before the accounting came due.
He did not disappear far enough.
The sealed corridor opens into a network of smaller tunnels. Excavation equipment. Lighting rigs still powered by the generators above. And at the end of the third branch, a figure.
Sitting. Against the wall. A rifle across his lap. Scarred face visible in the work lights. He stayed when everyone else ran. Not out of loyalty to Dominic. Out of the calculation that running in the open was more dangerous than hiding underground.
Wrong calculation.
Daniel looks at me. I step aside. This is not my accounting. I hold position at the junction and let the distance close between two men who have been heading toward this intersection since a detonation in a mine two years ago.
The sounds from the tunnel are brief. Three suppressed shots. Then a heavier, unsuppressed crack of a cartel sidearm.
I surge forward, rifle raised.
Daniel stumbles out of the shadows. His face is chalk white, his hand clamped hard over his right shoulder, directly over the subclavian artery. Bright red arterial blood pulses violently between his fingers, painting the concrete floor. He hits the wall and slides down.
“Surgeon. Now.” I roar into the comms.
Jude is there in three seconds. He hits his knees beside Daniel, his tactical med kit already open. For a fraction of a second I see it. The ghost of the tremor. The hesitation of a man who has not operated on a massive trauma since a child died on his table five years ago.
“Jude,” Daniel gasps, his eyes losing focus. “Tell Kaila?—”
“You can tell her yourself,” Jude snaps.
The tremor vanishes. The surgeon takes over.
Jude’s hands dive directly into the wound, his long fingers finding and clamping the severed artery with pure, mechanical precision. He works in the dirt and the dust, packing hemostatic gauze and barking coordinates to Blake to prep the medevac. His hands are coated in blood but they are absolute rock. They do not shake. He pulls Daniel back from the edge with the cold, relentless authority of a man who refuses to lose another life.