Part 2
Seven. Eight. Impact.
Through the optics, I saw the massive round strike. Richard Cole jerked backward violently as the .50 caliber bullet tore through his shoulder, spinning him like a broken doll against the jagged rocks. The heavy detonator box ripped from his hands, shattering against the ice below.
“Target down,” I breathed, quickly cycling the bolt of the TAC-50. The spent brass casing ejected into the snow, melting a perfect, smoking impression.
In my earpiece, the TOC channel erupted into absolute chaos.
“Valkyrie One, what the hell did you just do?!” Commander Vance screamed, his voice distorted by fury and static. “You just fired on an undercover asset! You are compromised! Abort! Abort!”
“He was painting us for a strike, Vance!” I yelled back, keeping my eye glued to the scope. Down in the valley, the sudden thunderclap of my rifle had turned the peaceful transaction into a hornet’s nest. But the reaction below wasn’t what I expected.
Insurgents and standard mercenaries usually panic. They spray wildly, dive behind cover, and scream.
These men didn’t.
Instantly, the buyers dropped into perfect tactical wedges. They moved with absolute, terrifying precision. Suppressive fire was already walking up the mountain, chewing into the snow and rock hundreds of feet below us.
“Norah,” Hayes said, his voice dropping an octave. He was frantically twisting the dials on his signal interceptor. “Look at how they’re moving. Bounding overwatch. Peeling center. And look at their gear.”
I zoomed in on the advancing men. Underneath their winter smocks, I saw the unmistakable silhouette of Crye Precision plate carriers and high-cut ballistic helmets equipped with panoramic night vision mounts.
“They’re American,” I whispered, a cold sickness settling in my stomach.
“I just grabbed their short-range comms,” Hayes said, his hands flying across his tablet. “They aren’t terrorists. It’s a rogue US Special Forces element. Cerberus.”
“Overlord,” I said, trying to keep the rising panic out of my voice. “The buyers are American. I repeat, Cerberus is on the ground. They are advancing on our position. We need immediate air support and exfil.”
There was a long, horrifying silence on the radio. When Vance finally spoke, the frantic panic was gone. His voice was completely flat, drained of all emotion.
“Negative, Valkyrie One. Weather is too severe for air support. You are on your own.”
Then, a second radio channel crackled to life on Hayes’ interceptor. We heard Vance’s unmistakable voice broadcasting on a completely different frequency.
“Cerberus Lead, this is Overlord. The sniper team is located at Grid Alpha-Niner, elevation twelve thousand. They are rogue. Eliminate them and secure the package.”
Hayes stared at me, his face pale beneath the camouflage paint. “Overlord just burned us.”
The puzzle pieces violently snapped together. The Pentagon wasn’t trying to stop a dirty bomb from being sold. A dark faction within our own military was trying to buy it. They wanted the SADM to stage a false-flag attack—a devastating explosion in a European capital to kickstart a new Cold War, securing endless funding and relevance for the military-industrial complex. Cole was their shadow broker. Vance was their inside man at TOC. And Hayes and I were just the disposable assets meant to tie up the loose end of Victor Cretz.
By shooting Cole, I had just ruined their global stage play.
“They have our exact GPS coordinates,” I said, grabbing my rifle and ripping it off the bipod. “We have to move. Now.”
“Too late!” Hayes shouted, pointing down the ridge.
Through the swirling snow, I saw them. Six operators from Cerberus were already scaling the steep incline with terrifying speed. They had ascending gear and sheer rage on their side. A volley of suppressed 5.56 rounds snapped through the air, cracking inches above my head and throwing ice chips into my eyes.
We were pinned down. The ridge behind us was a sheer, thousand-foot drop. The mountain in front of us was swarming with elite killers who knew our exact position.
I looked frantically around the icy hellscape. Above the advancing Cerberus team, about three thousand meters up the adjacent peak, hung a massive, fractured overhang of glacial ice. It was a suspended ocean of snow, precariously clinging to the sheer rock face.
“Jackson,” I yelled over the snapping gunfire. “Give me a firing solution on that glacial shelf!”
Hayes looked up, realizing what I was planning. His eyes widened. “Norah, it’s over three kilometers! The wind is howling! You’ll never hit the fracture line!”
“Give me the DOPE!” I screamed, dropping back into a prone position and slamming the rifle into the snow.
“Three-one-zero-zero meters,” Hayes barked, instantly dropping back into spotter mode. “Wind is a gale, twenty knots right to left. Aim forty feet right of the fault line. Elevation… hold for the gods, Norah.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, breathed in the freezing air, and took aim at the mountain itself.
Part 3
I didn’t wait for the perfect breath. I didn’t wait for the wind to die down. I anchored the heavy rifle against my shoulder, calculated the violent drift of the storm, and ripped the trigger.
The recoil slammed into my collarbone. The heavy tracer round streaked across the gray sky like a dying star.
Below us, the Cerberus operators stopped their ascent, looking up in confusion at the sudden boom that echoed off the canyon walls. They thought I was shooting at them. They didn’t realize I was aiming three thousand meters above their heads.
The round struck the exact center of the glacial fault line.
For a second, nothing happened. Just a tiny puff of white powder against the massive blue ice. Then, a deep, terrifying groan reverberated through the very bedrock of the Karakoram. The sound was like a skyscraper tearing itself apart.
The entire overhang detached.
“Down! Get down!” Hayes roared, tackling me into the snow.
A million tons of ice and snow roared down the mountain in a devastating white tidal wave. The sheer force of the avalanche shook our ridge, deafening us as it swept through the gorge below. The Cerberus team didn’t even have time to scream. They were swallowed whole, buried under fifty feet of compacted, concrete-hard snow.
Silence slammed back down on the mountain, broken only by the ringing in our ears and our own ragged breathing.
I pushed myself up, shaking the snow from my gear. “Are you hit?”
“I’m good,” Hayes coughed, brushing powder from his rifle. He looked down into the devastated valley. “They’re gone. All of them.”
“Not all of them,” I said, pointing toward the original transaction site. The avalanche had wiped out the ascending strike team, but the valley floor where the bomb lay had been shielded by a massive rock outcropping.
We didn’t say another word. We clipped into our harnesses and began the brutal, treacherous descent down the icy cliff face. Every muscle in my body screamed in protest, but the adrenaline overrode the pain. We had to secure the SADM.
When our boots finally hit the valley floor, the scene was a graveyard of twisted metal and crushed ice. Cretz and his thugs were dead, buried or crushed by the outer edge of the snowfall. I kept my pistol drawn, scanning the wreckage as we approached the steel crate.
Suddenly, a mound of snow exploded upward.
Captain Finch, the leader of Cerberus, lunged out from the debris. His face was a bloody mess, his armor cracked, but he had a combat knife gripped tightly in his fist. He barrelled into Hayes, knocking the heavy battle rifle away.
“It was supposed to be a wake-up call!” Finch screamed, wildly slashing at Hayes. “A bomb in Paris! London! It would have united the West! We needed a new war to keep us strong!”
Hayes blocked a downward stab, grabbing Finch’s wrist and twisting hard. The two men crashed into the snow, locked in a brutal struggle for survival. Finch was bigger, heavily armored, and driven by fanatical desperation. He managed to pin Hayes’ arm, raising the knife high to plunge it into my spotter’s neck.
I stepped forward, raised my Sig Sauer P226, and put two rounds cleanly into the side of Finch’s helmet.
He collapsed instantly, his body going limp in the snow.
Hayes shoved the dead man off him, gasping for air. “Thanks,” he wheezed.
“Don’t mention it,” I said, walking past him to the steel crate. The SADM was intact. The green arming light was still blinking steadily, mocking us. I slammed the heavy steel lid shut and locked the latches.
Suddenly, the encrypted radio on my chest rig cracked to life. It wasn’t Vance this time. It was a deep, calm voice I recognized as the base commander, an Admiral who outranked everyone in TOC.
“Valkyrie One, this is Actual. Vance has been detained. We found the secondary transmission logs. We see the whole board now.”
I keyed my mic. “Actual, we have secured the package. We are awaiting exfil.”
There was a heavy pause on the line. “Norah… the rot goes higher than Vance. It goes all the way to the top of the Pentagon. If I send a bird for you, they will shoot it out of the sky before it crosses the border. I can’t bring you home.”
I looked at Hayes. He looked back at me, the bitter reality settling into our bones.
“You have the package?” the Admiral asked softly.
“We have it.”
“Then as of this moment, you never existed. I am erasing your operational files from the mainframe. You are officially ghosts. Keep it safe. Godspeed, Valkyrie.”
The radio clicked off, leaving nothing but the sound of the freezing wind.
I looked at the heavy steel case, then out at the endless, jagged peaks of the Karakoram range. There was no backup. No rescue. Just two burned operatives and a nuclear bomb in the middle of nowhere.
“Well,” Hayes said, managing a tired, grim smile. “It’s a nice day for a walk.”
I slung my rifle over my shoulder and grabbed one of the steel handles of the crate. “Let’s go disappear.”
Together, we walked into the blinding white snow, carrying the weight of the world into the shadows.
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