Part 2
The world narrowed to the crisp edge of the reticle. The wind was a shifting beast, cutting sideways across the flat expanse of the Coronado flats, throwing up invisible walls of thermal drift. I didn’t just look at the target; I felt the rotation of the earth, calculating the Coriolis effect automatically in the back of my mind. The bullet, a .338 Lapua Magnum, would take nearly two full seconds to travel almost a mile.
“Five seconds, Avery!” Brody yelled, his binoculars glued to his eyes, his voice tight with an adrenaline spike.
I exhaled, emptying my lungs halfway, trapping the heartbeat between syllables. Squeeze.
The rifle boomed, a deafening shockwave that kicked up a localized cloud of dust from the staging mat. The recoil slammed into my shoulder like a solid punch, a familiar, comforting violence. For two agonizing seconds, there was silence. Then, a distinct, metallic CLANG echoed back across the distance. A perfect, dead-center hit on the steel silhouette.
Brody let out a breathless laugh, but the celebration lasted less than a heartbeat. Commander Vance recovered his footing, his face purple with rage, his hand unholstering his standard-issue Sig Sauer. “Security! Secure the perimeter! We have a massive breach!” he screamed into his radio. Within seconds, two military police vehicles tore around the berm, tires screeching, weapons drawn.
“Drop the weapon and get on the ground!” one of the MPs shouted, his rifle trained directly on my chest.
Brody stepped in front of me, his massive frame shielding my body. “Stand down!” he roared at the MPs. Then, he turned to Vance, pulling a highly encrypted, ruggedized military tablet from his tactical vest. He swiped his thumb across the biometric scanner and thrust the screen into Vance’s face. “Look at the screen, Richard. Look at it before you end your own career.”
Vance scoffed, glancing down carelessly, but his eyes instantly widened. The color drained from his skin, leaving him pasty under the California sun. The tablet displayed a red-bordered, top-secret file from the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). It didn’t list a janitor. It listed Lieutenant Commander Avery Vance, recipient of the Navy Cross, credited with forty-two confirmed high-value eliminations.
“She’s under administrative suspension,” Brody said, his voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. “For saving twelve American aid workers in Syria against an explicit stand-down order from bureaucrats just like you. The Pentagon parked her here to keep her out of the press. She outranks you on operational authority, Vance.”
Before Vance could process the shock, the heavy satellite phone strapped to Brody’s vest began to chime with a high-priority sequence. Brody answered, listened for five seconds, and his expression turned deadly serious. He looked at me. “Avery. The suspension just got lifted by the Joint Chiefs. Kalin Cross just surfaced.”
The name hit me like an electric shock. Kalin Cross was the rogue private military contractor who had orchestrated the Damascus ambush, the man who had tortured my teammates. He was a ghost, a black-market arms dealer selling stolen American night-vision tech to cartel factions.
“Where?” I demanded, tossing the broom aside. The civilian facade was gone; the operator had returned.
“Baja, Mexico. Forty miles south of the border,” Brody said. “He’s moving a massive shipment of anti-aircraft missiles tonight. JSOC wants us in the air five minutes ago.”
As we sprinted toward the waiting MH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, the rotors already spinning into a deafening roar, Brody leaned close. “We checked Lawson’s gear while the medics were loading him. The objective lens of his spotting scope was coated in a clear, synthetic neurotoxin. The moment he pressed his eye against the rubber casing, it absorbed into his skin.”
My mind raced as the helicopter lifted into the sky, tilting sharply toward the southern horizon. “The scope was locked in the range armory,” I muttered, the puzzle pieces slamming together with terrifying clarity. “Only two people had the biometric keys to that vault today. Lawson… and Commander Vance.”
Brody stared at me, his jaw tightening. “Vance poisoned Lawson to force my team to fail the readiness test. If we failed, our deployment to Africa would be canceled, and a different, compromised unit would take over the border sector. Vance isn’t just a bureaucrat. He’s on Cross’s payroll.”
The flight was short, tense, and silent. I stripped out of the janitorial jumpsuit, pulling on a black multicam combat uniform and strapping a customized precision rifle across my chest. By the time the chopper hovered over the rocky cliffs of Baja, night had fallen, casting the landscape in deep shades of ink. We rappelled down into the darkness, our night-vision goggles illuminating the world in a haunting, emerald green.
We moved like ghosts through the scrub brush toward an abandoned fishing village on the coast. But as we crossed a dry riverbed, the night exploded in tracer fire.
“Ambush!” Brody yelled, throwing his shoulder into me to push me behind a solid boulder as heavy machine-gun fire tore through the dirt where I had stood a millisecond prior.
They knew we were coming. The coordinates, the timing—everything had been leaked. Across the rocky beach, through the green hue of my scope, I saw a high-speed catamaran idling near the dock. A man in an expensive tactical jacket was boarding it, shouting orders. It was Kalin Cross.
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