Part 2
“Clear the hangar!” Reed’s voice finally erupted, shattering the paralyzed silence of the maintenance bay. It wasn’t a command; it was a desperate, panicked roar. “Everyone out! Right damn now! MPs, secure the doors!”
The twenty-odd soldiers didn’t need to be told twice. The sheer terror radiating from a combat-hardened Colonel sent them scrambling for the exits. Ethan Brooks remained frozen, his eyes darting between my back and the Colonel’s ashen face. Reed lunged forward, grabbed Ethan by the collar of his uniform, and violently hurled him toward the door.
“Get out, Corporal! If you breathe a word of what you saw, you will spend the rest of your life in Leavenworth. Move!”
The heavy metal doors slammed shut, echoing like a gunshot. The locks engaged. It was just me, Colonel Nathan Reed, and his two military police escorts. The MPs had their hands resting on the holsters of their sidearms, their stances widened, sensing the lethal tension in the room.
I slowly turned around to face Reed. I didn’t bother pulling my coveralls back up. I let him look at me. I let him see that the ghost he buried sixteen years ago hadn’t aged a day in spirit, only in rage.
“Hello, Nathan,” I said, my voice dangerously calm.
Reed took a shaky step back, his eyes frantically scanning my face, looking for the scars. “Valkyrie Three-One-Four-Seven. The Phantom Squad. I… I read the after-action report myself. Your entire unit was wiped out in the Tora Bora cave collapse in 2010. We buried empty caskets.”
“You didn’t read the report, Nathan,” I replied, taking a slow, deliberate step forward. The MPs instantly unclipped their holsters. “You wrote it. You called the airstrike on your own black ops team because we found out you were selling off-the-books weapons to the warlords we were supposed to be hunting. You erased us to cover your tracks.”
Reed’s jaw tightened. The shock was wearing off, rapidly being replaced by the cold, calculating cruelty that had gotten him his eagles. He straightened his posture, glancing at his two guards.
“You should have stayed dead, Vance. Or whatever name you’re using now,” Reed sneered, his hand slipping into his pocket. “Shoot her. Double tap. We’ll say the contractor was caught committing espionage and resisted arrest.”
The MP on my right drew his weapon, but I was already moving. Fourteen years of hiding hadn’t dulled the Valkyrie training; it had only bottled it up.
I closed the distance in a fraction of a second. I stepped inside the MP’s guard, grabbed the barrel of his Sig Sauer with my left hand, forcefully redirecting it toward the ceiling as it fired a deafening shot. With my right hand, I drove a palm strike directly into his throat. As he choked and collapsed, I ripped the weapon from his grip, spun, and leveled it at the second MP, who had just managed to clear his holster.
“Drop it!” I roared, my finger hovering over the trigger.
The second MP froze. He looked at my eyes, looked at the gun in my hand, and slowly lowered his weapon.
“Good,” I breathed, keeping the gun trained on him while shifting my gaze back to Reed. “Now, Nathan. You’re going to walk me out of here, and you’re going to wipe my data from the base servers, or I swear to God I will finish what that airstrike started.”
Reed didn’t look scared anymore. A slow, chilling smile crept across his face.
“You think you’re the only ghost that survived the fire?” Reed asked softly. He nodded toward the MP I was holding at gunpoint. “Tell her to drop the gun, Elias.”
The MP’s head slowly rose. He reached up with his left hand and pulled down the collar of his tactical shirt.
My blood ran entirely cold. Branded into the side of his neck was a jagged, pitch-black tattoo. A downward triangle. A bird of prey. And the code V-3148.
It was Elias. My former squadmate. The man I had wept for. The man I thought burned alive in the caves next to me.
“Hello, Maya,” Elias said, his voice completely devoid of emotion. He raised his gun, pointing it directly at my chest. “Put the weapon down. The Colonel and I have a lot of work to do.”
Part 3
I stared at the black ink on Elias’s neck, my mind violently rejecting what my eyes were seeing. The gun in my hand suddenly felt a thousand pounds heavy. V-3148. The sniper who had covered my back through three hellish tours.
“Elias,” I whispered, the betrayal burning in my chest. “How? How are you standing here next to the man who tried to incinerate us?”
“He didn’t try to incinerate us, Maya,” Elias replied, his voice robotic, dead. He kept his sights locked on my heart. “He extracted me before the bombs fell. He gave me a purpose when the military was going to discharge us. We don’t exist anymore. We belong to him.”
I looked from Elias to Reed. The Colonel was beaming with sick pride. He hadn’t just covered up his treason; he had salvaged the best killers from the Valkyrie program, erased their identities, and turned them into his own personal, untraceable hit squad. Elias wasn’t just following orders; he was utterly brainwashed, bound by the trauma of his ‘death’ and the manipulation of his savior.
“He didn’t save you, Elias,” I said, my voice rising, cutting through the heavy silence of the hangar. “He enslaved you. Look at me! We took an oath to defend this country, not to be the personal attack dogs for a corrupt officer hiding behind a desk.”
“Shut up,” Reed snapped, his confidence faltering as he noticed a microscopic twitch in Elias’s gun hand. “Elias, I gave you a direct order. Shoot her!”
Elias’s finger tightened on the trigger. I didn’t raise my gun. I just held his gaze, stripping away the fourteen years of distance between us.
“Tora Bora, Elias,” I said softly, using my command voice from the old days. “You took a bullet in the shoulder dragging me out of a kill zone. You told me that no matter what happened, we never leave our own behind. Are you going to leave me behind now? Are you going to kill your commanding officer for a traitor?”
“Shoot her!” Reed screamed, drawing his own concealed sidearm from his hip.
Elias’s eyes snapped wide awake. The dead, robotic glaze fractured. In a blur of motion, Elias shifted his aim and fired a single shot.
The bullet tore through Reed’s hand, shattering his pistol and sending it spinning across the concrete. Reed shrieked in agony, clutching his bloody fingers, dropping to his knees.
Before Reed could recover, I sprinted forward, tackled him to the greasy floor, and locked my arm around his throat in a flawless, crushing chokehold. He thrashed, kicking his boots against the steel legs of a workbench, but I tightened my grip, cutting off the blood flow to his brain. Within ten seconds, his eyes rolled back, and his body went entirely limp.
I released him, panting heavily, and stood up. I looked at Elias. He was lowering his weapon, his chest heaving as if he had just woken up from a decade-long nightmare.
“You’re alive,” Elias whispered, staring at my face.
“So are you,” I said, managing a faint smile. I walked over to Reed’s unconscious body and pulled the encrypted flash drive from his breast pocket. This was his insurance—the ledger of his black ops, his illegal weapons deals, and the proof of Project Valkyrie’s survival.
I tossed the drive to Elias. “Send that to the Inspector General’s office on an encrypted channel. Reed is going to wake up to a military tribunal and a one-way ticket to federal prison.”
I reached down, grabbed the sleeves of my coveralls, and pulled the heavy fabric back over my shoulders, zipping it up to the collar. I felt the heavy fabric cover the V-3147 brand. The ghost was safely hidden in the dark once again.
“What now, Maya?” Elias asked, clipping his sidearm back into his holster.
“We walk out of this hangar before the MPs outside realize what happened,” I said, moving toward the side exit. “It’s time to be ghosts again, Elias. But this time, we do it on our terms.”
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