This morning, she’d told him she wanted to wear his ring again. Had it survived the fire? Didn’t matter. He’d buy her a new one if it hadn’t.
He passed a logging truck, swung wide around a snowplow, and pushed the dying SUV through a curve that made the steering shudder against his hands. The temperature gauge was in the red. The grinding had become a rhythmic metallic scream that rose and fell with the engine RPMs. Every mile was borrowed.
David Morrison had been twenty-four years old, from a small town outside Billings that he couldn’t stop talking about. He’d shown Mack pictures of his parents’ house, the creek behind it, and the dog that waited by the door. He’d been Mack’s spotter for six months, and in that time, Mack had learned that Morrison ate peanut butter straight from the jar, could identify birds by their calls, slept like the dead, and had enlisted because his grandfather had served in Vietnam and Morrison wanted to live up to the name.
He’d died on a rooftop in Syria because Blake Bennett panicked.
The mission was supposed to be surveillance only. Observe and report, no engagement unless fired upon. Blake was the secondary spotter, positioned on the adjacent rooftop. Mack saw the targets—two high-value subjects meeting in a courtyard. He was tracking, recording, doing his job.
Then Blake opened fire.
No authorization. No threat to their position. Blake saw the targets and decided to be a hero. The gunfire drew every hostile in the sector to their location. Morrison moved to cover Blake’s position—because that’s what teammates did, that’s what good Marines did—and the RPG hit the wall six feet from where Blake had been standing. Morrison took the shrapnel meant for Blake. Mack took what was left.
Three civilians in the courtyard below. Dead. Morrison. Dead. Mack’s hand, shredded.
And Blake, standing in the rubble, unhurt, already composing the lie that would save him.
Mack gripped the wheel and drove.
I’m coming, Lyssa.
The SUV groaned beneath him, and he asked it for five more miles.
It gave him four and a half. Half a mile from the airstrip—he could see the gap in the tree line ahead where the terrain opened up—the engine seized. There was a shuddering clunk, a grinding shriek, and then silence. Steam billowed from under the hood. The SUV rolled to a stop on the shoulder, and that was it. Dead.
Mack was out before it fully stopped. He pulled his weapon, checked the magazine, and tested his grip. His right hand closed around the pistol, and the pain was immediate, sharp, and clarifying. He aimed at a tree twenty feet away. The front sight wobbled. His fine motor control was degraded.
He started running.
Snow on the ground, uneven footing, pine branches slapping at his arms. The cold air burned his lungs and cut through the nausea, which was the only mercy the morning had offered so far. His balance betrayed him once on a patch of ice—his foot went sideways, and he caught himself on a tree trunk, hard, the impact jolting up his injured arm like an electric current. He gritted his teeth and kept moving.
His vision doubled, the trees splitting and merging. He focused on a fixed point ahead—the gap in the tree line where the terrain flattened—and used it as an anchor. One foot in front of the other. The oldest tactical maneuver in the world.
He was a mess, and he knew it. A sniper was only as good as his body, and his body was a catalog of failures right now—concussed brain, lacerated temple, aggravated bullet graze, degraded fine motor control. If he’d submitted this self-assessment to Garrett before a mission, Garrett would have benched him without discussion.
But Garrett wasn’t here. And Alyssa was now less than a quarter mile ahead.
Through the trees, the landscape opened. The airstrip was small—a single paved runway, maybe three thousand feet, cut into a flat expanse between forested ridges. A metal hangar stood at the near end, its wide door rolled open. A prefab building served as a terminal. The white Cessna sat on the tarmac, fueled and waiting.
Blake’s truck was parked near the hangar.
Alyssa was inside.
His heart stopped. Then restarted, violent and loud. Through the windshield, he saw her sitting upright, chin raised. Not slumped, not unconscious. Not defeated. The set of her shoulders was defiance itself.
She’s okay.
The relief almost dropped him. He braced against a tree, let the wave pass, and continued forward.
Blake was outside the truck, near the open driver’s door, in a heated exchange with a man in black pants and jacket—the pilot. Blake was gesturing at the plane, his voice carrying across the tarmac in fragments. The pilot had his arms crossed and was shaking his head. Something had gone wrong. The pilot wasn’t willing to take off.
Was the plan unraveling?
Mack broke from the tree line. He covered the open ground at the best run his body could manage—not fast, not smooth, but relentless. His weapon was up, his eyes on Blake. Everything else—the hangar, the plane, the ridges, the trees—was peripheral. His world had narrowed to one target.
Blake saw him coming, his jaw dropping, body going rigid. He abandoned the argument with the pilot.
He’d underestimated Mack. He’s always underestimated me.