Mack got behind the wheel. Turned the key. The engine coughed, coughed again, and caught—rough, uneven, with a grinding sound that meant something essential was damaged and operating on borrowed time.
He didn’t care. He put it in gear, rocked the vehicle twice to build momentum, and crawled out of the snowy ditch with the rear tires spraying snow and gravel.
On the road, he grabbed the sat phone. Garrett answered on the first ring. “Hawk.”
“Blake took Alyssa.” Mack kept his voice in his trained sitrep delivery, the cadence drilled into him through a hundred after-action reports. “He T-boned us on Route 12, approximately fifteen miles south of the compound. Dark truck, late model, headed north. I’m mobile in the damaged vehicle. Concussion, laceration, and my arm is compromised. I need a destination. Where would he take her?”
A beat of silence. “He kidnapped her? Is she in imminent danger from him?”
“I think he’s running.”
“Canadian border?”
“Too many checkpoints. He’d need to cross in a remote area, and that means logging roads. It’s risky.”
“Hold on.” Mack could hear Garrett moving—keys on a keyboard, a door opening, Garrett’s voice muffled as he called for Bobcat, their tech expert.
Then he was back. “There’s a private airstrip twenty-eight miles north of your position. It’s registered to Rob Thorne’s company. Thorne keeps a Cessna there. Bobcat pulled the flight records—there have been three trips to Canadian airspace in the last six months.”
The pieces fell into place with the clarity of a bolt sliding home. Blake had access to Thorne’s business assets through his legit work for VidaCorp. The escape route was pre-built, and Blake wasn’t about to go to prison without a fight.
“That’s his exit,” Mack said. “He’s putting her on that plane.”
“I’m mobilizing now—Grizzly and I are en route in three minutes. Thirty-five to the airstrip from here. Claire’s being notified.”
“I’ll be there in twenty-five.”
“Mack.” Garrett’s commander’s voice was filled with the steady authority of a man who’d led teams through worse than this and knew the cost of sending someone in alone. “You’re concussed. Wait for backup.”
“She’s getting on a plane, Garrett.”
His silence lasted two seconds. It said everything neither of them could. “We’re right behind you.”
Mack ended the call and pressed the accelerator to the floor.
The miles of mountain road passed too slowly in a vehicle that was dying beneath him. The grinding grew louder, a mechanical protest he ignored the way he ignored the nausea rolling through him in waves and the double vision creeping in on curves. The throbbing in his arm had graduated from pain to a deep, hot pulse.
He drove with his left hand. His right rested on his thigh, flexing periodically to keep blood flowing. Every flex pulled the wound and sent a reminder through his nervous system that he was operating below capacity. Degraded. Compromised.
He thought about Blake.
The administrative separation board. The long table, the officers in dress uniforms, the documents spread out like evidence at a trial. Blake’s testimony—three pages of devastating lies that painted Mack as the one who’d broken protocol, disobeyed orders, and caused the chain of events that killed David Morrison and three Syrian civilians.
Blake had delivered his testimony with steady hands and a clear voice and the kind of righteous certainty that made you believe him even if you’d been there and knew better.
Colonel Bennett had been behind the scenes. The board was supposed to be impartial, but impartiality was a theory, not a practice, and the Colonel’s influence moved through the chain of command like groundwater.
Mack had told the truth. Every word of his report was accurate, corroborated by mission data and supported by the tactical record. But the truth had been quieter than Blake’s performance, and the board had chosen the version that came with a Colonel’s implicit endorsement.
Administrative separation with OTH characterization. Career over. Reputation destroyed.
And then Alyssa. Looking at him across their apartment, the ring on her finger catching the light, saying, “Blake wouldn’t lie about this. Dad believes him.”
He’d wanted to scream. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her.
He’d repeated the truth. “I watched Morrison die. I felt the shrapnel hit my hand. I am telling you the truth, and your brother is a liar, and your father is using his rank to protect his son at my expense.”
But she’d already been crying. And the doubt in her eyes wasn’t doubt about Blake—it was doubt about him. That’s what had broken something in him so fundamentally that the words had died in his throat.