By the time the sheriff’s deputy found the shell casings in my front yard, the Sunday morning sun was already turning the Texas sky the color of old bruises.

But that was later.

The first thing I remember is the silence.

Not gunshots. Not screams. Just the quiet whine of wind along a country road outside Corpus Christi and the crunch of my truck tires on my mother’s gravel drive.

Every Sunday, 9 a.m. sharp, for as long as I’d been stateside, I was at that farmhouse for pancakes. It didn’t matter if I’d just flown back from the Middle East or crawled home from a week of training at Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, California. If I was anywhere near Texas, I was at Eliza’s table.

That morning, I had a bag of groceries on the passenger seat and a stupid little thought in my head about whether she’d cut the bacon too thin again.

I never made it to the porch before I knew something was wrong.

The front door of my mother’s farmhouse wasn’t just unlocked.

It was hanging half off one hinge, splintered inward like some giant had kicked it in. The jamb was cracked; the lock plate ripped out of the frame. The kind of damage you only see when somebody comes through hard, fast, and sure they belong there more than you do.

I killed the engine and every sound disappeared. No birds. No TV. No country music station humming in the kitchen like always.

Just the faint hiss of something inside.

I stepped out of the truck, the early Texas heat already pressing down, and the smell hit me before my boots reached the porch.

Metallic. Hot. Like pennies and iron under a summer sun.

Fresh blood.

There was another smell too—burning coffee. The scorched, bitter bite of it.

For a split second, my brain refused to connect the dots. It tried to reach for something normal: maybe she dropped the pot, maybe the door got stuck, maybe—

My training did what my emotions couldn’t.

I set the bag of groceries down.

Then I dropped it.

It hit the warped planks with a dull, heavy thud that sounded like a cannon in that quiet yard. The carton of eggs burst, yolk spreading like yellow paint. A gallon of milk rolled in a lazy circle.

I stepped over it and drew my concealed pistol—a Sig P365 in a waistband holster. One clean motion. Thumb sweep. Grip. Muzzle forward.

The door gave way with a soft creak when I touched it.

Inside, the farmhouse felt wrong. Too bright, the way Texas light slants in through old windows, catching dust in the air. Too still.

My voice didn’t work, so I didn’t bother yelling her name.

I cleared the entryway, sweeping the pistol across the living room, corners first, eyes tracking furniture, shadows, hiding places. No movement. No sound except that low hiss I’d heard outside.

The smell of coffee and blood got stronger as I moved farther in.

The kitchen was at the back of the house.

That’s where I found her.

My mother was lying on the linoleum beside the stove, half on her side, half on her back, her white hair soaked and clumped with red. A cast-iron skillet still sat on the burner, smoke curling from the blackened pancakes she’d been making for me.

The burner was still on, dial twisted all the way high.

There was blood everywhere. On the cabinets. Spattered across the refrigerator. Soaking into the little country rug she liked because it “made the place look like a real magazine kitchen.”

My throat tried to close.

Eliza was seventy-two. Five-foot-nothing on a good day, with shoulders like a sparrow and hands that never quite stopped moving. She was the woman who’d taught me to tie my boots, who wrote me letters every time I deployed, who mailed cookies to my SEAL platoon like we were still in middle school.

Now she looked like a mannequin someone had dropped.

But she wasn’t a body.

Not yet.

Her chest moved. Shallow, jagged breaths, barely there. Her eyes were half-open and glassy, staring somewhere over my shoulder.

“Mom,” I whispered, and for a second that one word almost broke me.

Then the part of my brain that had spent twenty years in war zones shoved everything else into a box and sealed it shut.

Clear the room. Secure the scene. Stop the bleeding.

I holstered the pistol and dropped to my knees beside her. My vision narrowed to a tunnel: her skin, pale and waxy; the dark bloom spreading beneath her. I scanned for wounds, counting without even meaning to.

One, two, three hits to the chest. Two more lower, in the abdomen. Three in the legs. Eight in total, small, tight impact circles torn through her dress and skin.

It wasn’t a spray-and-pray, flinch-and-fire kind of shooting.

These were controlled hits. Deliberate.

This wasn’t some junkie kicking in doors for a quick TV. This was an execution that hadn’t quite finished its job.

“Ma’am?” My own voice sounded like someone else’s. “Hey. Hey. Stay with me, okay?”

Her lips moved. A thin line of red glistened at the corner of her mouth.

“Mason,” she breathed. Her voice was barely there, a dry rasp pushed through shattered ribs.

“That’s me, Mom. Don’t talk.”

One of the rounds had torn into her thigh, high up. Blood was pulsing from that wound in sick little bursts, each one weaker than the last but still too fast.

Femoral.

Seconds, not minutes.

I tore my belt free, looped it around her leg above the wound, and yanked it tight. Her body jerked and she let out a low, animal groan that cut through me in a way bullets never had.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, tightening until the skin went white under my hands. “I’m sorry, Mom. I have to do this.”

I grabbed a dish towel off the stove handle. It smelled like pancakes and detergent. I pressed it hard into the wounds in her chest, leaning my weight on it. My hands shook. I’d slapped pressure dressings onto three continents; I’d watched teammates bleed out on dusty roads in Afghanistan, on rusty decks in the Gulf. I’d never done it on my mother’s kitchen floor, under a framed “God Bless Texas” sign she’d bought at a flea market.

My phone was in my back pocket. I fumbled it out with bloody fingers and hit 911, speaker on.

“911, what is your emergency?”

“Officer down,” I snapped automatically, the old language kicking in before I could stop it. “Civilian critical. Multiple gunshot wounds.”

“Location, sir?”

“Four-four-zero-zero Ridge Road,” I said. “Outside Corpus Christi. Farmhouse. I need an ambulance, sheriff, everyone you’ve got.”

“Sir, stay on the line. Are you in immediate danger?”

“Shooter’s gone,” I said, eyes flicking around the room anyway. “Just move.”

I stayed there, palms pressed against her chest, counting breaths and listening for sirens. Every second felt like its own lifetime.

Outside, somewhere on that long Texas county road, a siren finally began to wail. Another joined it. Then another.

“Incoming,” I muttered, more to myself than to her.

I leaned close to her ear. “You hang on. You hear me? I’m not done with you.”

“Mas…on.” It sounded like her vocal cords were made of sandpaper. Her eyes fluttered. “They… wore… masks…”

“I know. Don’t talk. Save your air.”

Her fingers twitched against my arm. Then her gaze slipped somewhere above me again.

The next ten minutes came in flashes.

Deputies yelling outside. Boots pounding the porch. Paramedics flooding into the kitchen with bags and boxes and serious faces. Hands pushing mine away, replacing my dish towel with proper gauze and pressure dressings, my belt with a tourniquet.

“BP’s in the basement,” a medic called out. “Sixty over forty and dropping.”

“Hang blood, now.”

They stripped her floral blouse away, cutting it down the middle with blunt-nosed scissors. Electrodes. IV lines. An oxygen mask that fogged in uneven little bursts.

I stood against the wall, my shoulders pressed into the faded wallpaper, useless for the first time in a long time. My palms were slick with her blood and my own sweat.

“Family?” someone asked without looking at me.

“Son,” I said.

“Okay, sir, we’re taking her to Christus Spohn in town. You can follow behind us, but don’t try to drive in front, you understand? They’re ready for us.”

They hauled the gurney up. She looked even smaller strapped to all that equipment.

I moved to follow them out the door.

A hand hit my chest, firm but not rough.

“Hold on, Mason.”

I looked down into the tired, lined face of Detective Hunter from the county sheriff’s office. We’d crossed paths once or twice over the years when I’d helped run training scenarios for local law enforcement. He was in his fifties with a coffee stain on his tie and the look of a man who’d been tired since the Bush administration.

“That’s my mother,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. It sounded like this building. Old. Dry. Ready to crack.

“I know,” he said quietly. “I am sorry. But this is an active crime scene. We need a statement from you before you go.”

“It was supposed to be pancakes,” I said.

It just fell out of my mouth. Hunter’s jaw flexed.

“We’ve had a string of break-ins out here,” he said. “Probably some strung-out kids looking for pills in the medicine cabinets. They get spooked, they start shooting. We’ll—”

He stopped talking when I walked away.

There were spent brass casings on the floor, scattered like breadcrumbs. Not just one or two—a pattern.

I picked one up before he could stop me.

“Hey!” Hunter barked. “Don’t touch evidence, Mason. You know better.”

I turned the casing between my fingers, the familiar weight of it grounding me.

“Look at this,” I said.

“It’s a casing,” he said, exasperation on his face. “We’ve got techs for—”

“Five-five-six millimeter,” I said, reading the tiny stamp on the base. “Lake City Army Ammunition Plant. Military-grade, not Walmart special. And look at how they’re grouped.”

I motioned with my chin.

“Two by the door. Two near the fridge. Four here by her body. That’s controlled pairs. Double taps. They stacked their shots and walked them in.”

Hunter frowned.

“Junkies don’t run controlled pairs, Hunter,” I said, staring him in the eye. “And they don’t spend a dollar a round on ammo.”

His eyes flicked away.

“Don’t,” I said softly. “Don’t lie to me in my mother’s kitchen.”

He shifted his weight. The years of exhaustion on his face were suddenly joined by something else.

Nerves.

“You’re seeing ghosts, Mason,” he muttered. “You spec-ops guys always see a conspiracy. Let us do our job. Go to the hospital. We’ll handle this.”

No, you won’t, something in me said.

Not because you’re evil.

Because you’re scared.

“We’re going to photograph your hands,” someone said. “Gunshot residue, standard. We know you carry.”

I barely felt it when they swabbed my fingers.

By the time I stepped back out onto the porch, the ambulance was already halfway down the gravel drive, red and white lights pulsing like a heartbeat.

I followed in my truck.

Halfway down the road, my phone buzzed in the cupholder.

I glanced down.

The name on the screen made my stomach clench harder than anything I’d seen that morning.

Morgan.

My ex-wife.

We’d been divorced six months. The ink on the decree was barely dry. Our last conversation had ended with the slamming of a door and a threat shouted over her shoulder.

You’ll regret this, Mason. You’ll regret choosing that broken-down ranch over me.

I almost let the call go to voicemail.

Almost.

Then I thought: maybe she heard the sirens on the county scanner. Maybe the divorce didn’t kill every piece of her. Maybe she still cared enough to ask if Eliza was okay.

I hit accept and put the phone on speaker so I could keep both hands on the wheel.

“Mason,” she snapped. Her voice was sharp, clipped. No hello. No are you okay.

I swallowed down the flavor of copper and gasoline in my mouth.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s me.”

“I’m sending a contractor out to the property tomorrow,” she said. “I need to know if the house is empty yet.”

My fingers tightened on the steering wheel.

“What?”

“The house,” she said, as if I were being deliberately slow. “Is the old woman out yet? Victor has buyers lined up. We need to know when they can walk through.”

The ambulance’s siren wailed ahead of me, Doppler-shifting through the heat.

I almost drove off the road.

“She’s out,” I said.

The words tasted like ash.

“Good,” Morgan said. “Don’t drag this out, Mason. Everyone has a breaking point.”

She hung up before I could answer.

The phone went dark.

So did something else in me.

There’s a switch inside every operator I’ve ever known. It separates the man from the weapon, the civilian from the combatant. Most of us come home and spend our lives trying to weld that switch permanently in the off position.

Mine flipped on so fast it made my teeth hurt.

By the time the ambulance hit the city limits and swung toward the hospital, I wasn’t thinking like a son anymore.

I was thinking like a SEAL.

Christus Spohn Hospital in Corpus Christi smelled like every hospital in America: bleach, too-strong coffee, and something underneath it all that no amount of cleaning products can hide. Not death, exactly.

Just the possibility of it.

I parked crooked in an emergency spot and jogged inside, ignoring the sign about leaving weapons in vehicles. I’d already locked my pistol in the truck safe before following EMS, more out of reflex than anything. The habit of obeying posted rules dies harder than you’d think, even when the world’s burning.

At the front desk, a nurse with tired eyes and a Disney badge reel recognized the name as soon as I gave it.

“Family of Eliza Mason?” she called.

“I’m her son,” I said.

“She’s in surgery,” the nurse said gently. “They took her straight up. The trauma team’s working on her now. There’s… a lot of damage.”

“Is she alive?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Right now, yes. You can wait in the surgical ICU family room. We’ll update you as soon as we hear anything.”

Three hours.

That’s how long the clock on the wall of that waiting room said had passed when the doors finally opened and a nurse in scrubs stepped out, pulling down her mask.

“Family for Eliza?”

I stood up so fast the plastic chair screeched backward.

“I’m her son,” I said again.

“She’s out of surgery,” the nurse said, and for a second I couldn’t hear anything else because my heartbeat was so loud. “It’s… honestly, it’s a miracle. The rounds missed most major organs. We had to remove her spleen. She lost a lot of blood. She’s in a medically induced coma, but she’s stable for now.”

The air came back into my lungs in a rush.

“Can I see her?”

“Briefly,” she said. “ICU, room three-oh-four. Two visitors at a time.”

The ICU hallways were bright and humming with machines that breathed and beeped and pumped for people who couldn’t do those things on their own.

Room 304 was at the end of the corridor.

I pushed the door open slowly, suddenly afraid that if I moved too fast, she’d vanish.

She looked small in the bed. Smaller even than she had on the kitchen floor. Tubes and lines ran from her body to blinking machines. Her face was mottled with dark bruises where she must have fallen, purple and yellow stains against her pale skin.

I pulled a chair up beside her and took her hand. It was cooler than it should’ve been.

“Hey, Mom,” I whispered. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

The monitors kept time in the background.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I sat there, watching the rise and fall of her chest, the steady climb and drop of green lines.

For the first time since I’d walked through that shattered front door, my mind had room to replay the morning.

The kicked-in door. The precise grouping of brass casings. The way Hunter’s eyes had slid away when I’d mentioned Lake City ammo. The nervous tension in his shoulders, like a man standing too close to a fire he can’t admit is burning the wrong house.

Something about this wasn’t just wrong.

It was orchestrated.

My eyes drifted from her face to the bedside table. A plastic water pitcher. A stack of folded towels. The remote for the TV bolted to the wall. And something that didn’t belong.

A greeting card I hadn’t bought.

Cheerful yellow. A cartoon bear holding balloons. Get Well Soon in bubbly letters.

My scalp prickled.

I hadn’t left the room since I walked in. The nurses barely had either. She’d been out of surgery maybe fifteen minutes.

The card hadn’t been there when I sat down.

I reached out with one finger and eased it open.

No message. No signatures. No messy handwriting from Aunt Susan or the ladies at church.

Just a single Polaroid taped inside.

It was a photo of my mother in this bed. In this room. Taken from the doorway where I was sitting.

The timestamp in the corner said 1:30 p.m.

Ten minutes ago.

The chair screeched backward as I stood. I spun, scanning the room. Air vent. Closet. Window. All clear.

I yanked the door open and looked down the hall.

Nothing but a janitor pushing a mop bucket at the far end.

No stranger.

No familiar face.

Whoever had taken that photo had walked right past the nurses’ station, into my mother’s room, snapped a picture of her unconscious body, left the card, and walked out.

Ten minutes ago.

This wasn’t just a hit.

It was a message.

We know where she is. We can get to her. Anytime we want.

I closed the card, slipped it into my pocket, and stepped back into the hall.

For the first time, I didn’t call for security.

Because the people who’d let that photographer in might be wearing security uniforms.

I left the ICU and took the stairs down two at a time. My heart hammered but my mind was cold now—stones and steel.

The paramedics had kept her alive.

The hospital could keep her stable.

But the only person who was going to keep her safe was me.

The Corpus Christi Police Department building looked like every mid-sized American city cop shop I’d ever seen: brick, flags, a memorial out front with too many names etched into marble.

I parked in a visitor spot and walked in through the glass doors, still wearing my mother’s blood.

Hunter was at a desk near the back, staring at a computer. He looked up when the doors opened. His eyes landed on my shirt and widened. His hands fumbled for paperwork like they were late to a dance.

“Mason,” he said. “Thought I told you to stay at the hospital.”

I walked straight to his desk and dropped the Get Well Soon card onto the blotter. It landed with a slap that made two other officers glance over.

The Polaroid slid halfway out.

“They were in her room, Hunter,” I said, keeping my voice low and hard. “While you were checking boxes on a computer, somebody walked into the ICU, took a photo, and left me a little souvenir.”

He picked the picture up. His hands were shaking.

“Jesus,” he muttered.

“Run the hospital cameras,” I said. “Third floor, ICU hallway. Check the parking lot. There was a black Lincoln Navigator in the fire lane when I chased out after the card. Tinted windows. Same kind of SUV my ex’s new boyfriend drives for his ‘logistics consulting.’”

Hunter rubbed his temples.

“The cameras are down,” he said finally.

I stared at him.

“What?”

“Routine maintenance,” he said. “Third floor system was offline from one to two this afternoon. IT’s working on it.”

I laughed once, a short, ugly sound.

“Of course they were,” I said. “And let me guess—traffic cams on Ridge Road are down too?”

He didn’t answer.

He didn’t have to.

“Look,” he said, lowering his voice. “You know who Victor is. You know who he works with. The captain called me in ten minutes ago. The shooting at your mom’s place is being logged as a home invasion by unknown transient suspects. Case status: closed pending new evidence.”

“They shot a seventy-two-year-old woman eight times with military-grade ammo,” I said. “You want me to believe this county’s official position is ‘probably drifters’?”

Hunter’s gaze locked on mine, and for the first time since I’d walked in, I saw what he’d been hiding.

Fear.

“They’re not just cartel muscle,” he whispered. “They’ve got money in places that matter. City hall. County commission. Maybe higher. If you push this, they won’t just come after your mom again. They’ll come after you. They’ll plant drugs in that truck. They’ll put something ugly on your hard drive. They’ll make you radioactive, and nobody in uniform will ever talk to you again.”

“They already tried to kill my mother,” I said. “We’re past worrying about my reputation, detective.”

I snatched the Polaroid back.

“You’re a good man, Hunter,” I said. “You’re just not a brave one.”

I walked out before he could answer.

The sun outside had shifted lower, turning the streets into long stripes of gold and shadow. My truck’s steering wheel was burning hot under my palms.

I drove without thinking, letting muscle memory take me where I needed to go. Not home. Not the hospital.

West.

Toward the coast.

Toward the only place I knew where thirty-five armed and dangerous young men would be grateful to be pointed at something that deserved their rage.

Naval Special Warfare Training Detachment in Coronado, California was three states and a lifetime away from that Texas farmhouse, but the culture was the same at every SEAL schoolhouse in the country.

Sand. Sweat. Salt. Young men with haunted eyes and broken knuckles trying to prove to themselves they were unbreakable.

I’d left the Teams six months earlier and taken a job running advanced training—close-quarters battle refreshers, urban warfare scenarios, the kind of labs where we turned already dangerous operators into something sharper.

The bureaucrats called it a “soft landing” after twenty years of deployments.

I thought the dangerous part of my life was over.

Turns out, I was just changing battlefields.

By the time I walked into the main classroom that night, it was after chow. The sun was sliding down over the Pacific outside the windows. The room lights were dimmed, casting everything in that washed-out fluorescent that makes bad news feel worse.

Class 402’s nameplate was on the door.

They were two weeks from graduation. Thirty-five men left out of the original one-eighty. The ones who hadn’t rung the bell. The ones who’d crawled through surf and hell and thought the worst pain was behind them.

My boots sounded loud on the linoleum as I walked up to the podium and stood there in the half-dark.

I looked down at my hands.

They were still stained with my mother’s blood.

The double doors swung open behind me, banging just once. The low roar of thirty-five candidates laughing and shoving each other cut off mid-sentence when they saw me.

I didn’t have to say a word. The room went dead silent in three seconds. They took their seats like they were being watched by God and God was in a foul mood.

They saw the dried brown on my shirt. They saw my face.

The class leader, Ryder, sat front-row center. Texas kid. Sharpshooter. The kind of man who could hit a golf ball at a thousand yards and still be humble about it.

“Training for tomorrow is canceled,” I said.

A ripple went through the room. Nobody said anything, but every eye sharpened.

“I’m resigning my position as your instructor effective immediately,” I said.

That got them.

Chairs creaked. Someone whispered something that sounded like “What the—” before clamping his mouth shut.

“Master Chief?” Ryder said. His voice was respectful, but there was steel in it. “With respect… what the hell is going on?”

I stepped away from the podium and into the harsh overhead light so they could see everything.

“My mother was shot this morning,” I said.

It wasn’t a dramatic line. It didn’t need to be. The words landed with the weight of a breaching hammer anyway.

“Eight rounds,” I continued. “She’s in a coma at a hospital in Texas right now because someone decided they wanted our family ranch more than they wanted a clean conscience.”

The temperature in the room changed. The air went heavy.

“The sheriff’s office isn’t going to do anything,” I said. “The people who ordered the hit are connected. They have a foot in bed with cartel elements moving product across the border, and another foot in the U.S. justice system. They’re insulated by the same laws you swore to uphold.”

I let that sit.

“I’m going to find them,” I said. “I’m going to stop them. But I can’t ask any of you to help me. If you get involved, you’ll lose everything you’ve bled for. Your careers. Your shot at a trident. Your future with the Navy. Maybe your freedom.”

I looked at each one of them in turn. I knew their names, their records, the way each one moved in a live-fire room.

“I’m walking out that door in ten seconds to fight a war as a private citizen,” I said. “I wanted you to hear it from me, not through the rumor mill. It’s been an honor teaching you.”

I picked up my truck keys and turned toward the door.

I made it two steps.

“Sir.”

Ryder’s voice.

I stopped.

He stood. The scrape of his chair echoed in the quiet like a rifle bolt.

He reached up, grabbed the Velcro name patch on his chest, and ripped it off. The sound—riip—hit me in a place I wasn’t ready for.

He dropped the patch on his desk.

“I’m not a candidate tonight,” Ryder said. “I’m just a guy who hates bullies.”

Another chair scraped. Then another. The sound of Velcro tearing filled the room like static.

Thirty-five name tapes landed on thirty-five desks.

They stood in unison, shoulder to shoulder, faces set.

“We’re not busy tonight, sir,” Ryder said, a grim little smile tugging at his mouth. “We were kind of hoping for a field trip.”

For the first time since that morning, something in my chest loosened.

“Gear up,” I said. “Vehicle depot in ten. No cell phones. No radios that aren’t ours. After we leave this building, we don’t exist.”

The vehicle depot on base was a cavernous hangar full of diesel fumes, grease stains, and enough paperwork to make God cry. Usually, getting a tactical van off the lot required three signatures and a blood sacrifice.

Tonight, the quartermaster on duty was a man called Tiny who weighed three hundred pounds and could deadlift a truck.

He saw my shirt. He saw the thirty-five nameless men behind me.

He didn’t ask a single question.

“I think the logs are going to show that three transport vans and one mobile command unit went down for emergency maintenance tonight,” Tiny said, sliding a fat ring of keys across the counter. “GPS trackers were ‘faulty,’ so they got pulled for repair too.”

“Appreciate it,” I said.

“Bring ’em back in one piece, Master Chief,” he said, turning away to stare very hard at a clipboard. “Or don’t bring ’em back at all. Just don’t get caught.”

The candidates moved like a hive. No shouting. No chest beating. Just silent efficiency.

They hit their personal vehicles for whatever they kept there—legal civilian rifles, pistols, body armor. They raided the training cage for flashbangs, smoke, and non-lethal rounds—the kind meant for riot control that still broke bones if you hit somebody wrong.

On paper, we took nothing more dangerous than training aids.

In reality, we were bringing a platoon’s worth of problem-solving to a cartel-backed land dispute.

I climbed into the passenger seat of the lead van. Ryder drove. Miller and Chun, our resident tech savants, set up in the back with laptops and a portable antenna array they’d technically “borrowed” from a signals lab.

“Where to, boss?” Ryder asked as the bay door rumbled up.

“My ex’s boyfriend, Victor, runs a shell company out of a warehouse complex in the industrial district,” I said. “Apex Logistics, LLC. That’s their clean front. But we don’t kick doors based on a grudge. We need to know where the shooters are.”

“In progress,” Chun said. He had a Stanford engineering degree and an unhealthy love for other people’s CCTV networks. “I’m in the city traffic system. Someone ran a black Lincoln Navigator with out-of-state plates through the hospital fire lane less than an hour ago, just like you said.”

“Track it,” I said.

“Got it,” Miller added, fingers flying. “Pulling plate reads from local cams. That vehicle just parked at a warehouse on Fourth Street. Heat maps show unusual activity.”

He flipped his screen around.

Thermal imagery glowed in shades of white and black.

“Those clusters?” he said. “Not forklifts. Not a handful of night-shift workers. That’s a defensive perimeter.”

“They’re expecting trouble,” Ryder said.

“They’re expecting me,” I said. “A grieving son with a handgun.”

I looked back at the men in the van.

“They’re not expecting a class of wolves.”

We rolled into the city as just another set of white vans from just another contractor closing up shop for the night. The industrial district was mostly dark—metal warehouses, chain-link fences, the occasional security light buzzing overhead.

The warehouse at Fourth Street fit in like it was born there. Corrugated metal. Faded APEX LOGISTICS sign. A chain-link perimeter topped with razor wire that was more for show than security.

“Drone up,” I said.

A small quadcopter lifted from the second van and climbed into the night. On the command unit’s screen, we saw the building from above.

“Four guards outside,” Chun narrated. “AR-platform rifles. Tactical vests. Not local gangbangers. Nine more heat signatures inside the main level. One more below grade in the basement. That one’s pretty still.”

“Prisoner?” Ryder guessed.

“Or boss,” I said. “We’ll find out.”

I keyed the encrypted radio.

“Alpha team, perimeter. Silent takedowns. No shots if you can help it. Bravo, cover rear exits. Charlie’s with me on the front.”

Thirty-five clicks in my ear.

We left the vans three blocks away and closed in on foot.

They moved like smoke. Using shadows, angles, cover. The kind of movement you only see from men who have had hesitation beaten out of them by surf and sand and instructors screaming in their faces.

We hit the fence. One man went low with cutters. A gap opened in the chain link big enough for a body.

Inside the perimeter, the first guard stood with his back to us, cigarette ember glowing in the dark. One of my men slipped behind him, arm snaking around his neck in a sleeper hold. Six seconds later, the guard went limp, zip-tied, and dragged out of sight.

Second guard never even got his rifle off his shoulder.

Third and fourth went the same way—silent, fast, efficient.

We stacked at the main door. Metal, reinforced steel. I checked my watch.

“Breaching in three,” I whispered. “Two. One.”

The door came off its latch under the weight of my boot.

“Flash,” Ryder called, tossing a training grenade inside.

A blinding white bloom lit the room. The concussion hit a second later, disorienting without shredding internal organs. The sound of men shouting filled the night.

“Federal agents!” someone bellowed from behind me in a thick East Coast accent he absolutely did not have. “Get down! Hands where I can see them!”

It was a lie, but it was a useful one.

Men at a card table scrambled. Rifles skidded. Some reached for them; some dove for cover.

Two tried to shoulder their weapons.

They got flattened by non-lethal slugs from shotguns—rubber rounds that slammed into their chest rigs and knocked the wind and the fight right out of them.

“Drop it!” Ryder yelled. “Down! Now!”

Most did.

The smart ones.

Within thirty seconds, the warehouse was ours.

Zip-tied men groaned on the concrete floor. Maps and blueprints and cash were scattered across the card table.

I walked past the bodies and went straight to the table.

The papers weren’t drug routes.

They weren’t banks.

They were my ranch.

Parcel maps. Survey lines. Satellite photos of my land outside Corpus Christi, printed from some government system they shouldn’t have had access to.

One thing was circled over and over again in red marker: the basement of my mother’s farmhouse.

Not the fields. Not the barn.

The basement.

The root cellar where she kept canned peaches and old tools. The place my father had poured concrete himself when he came back from Vietnam and decided his family would always have a place to ride out storms.

My stomach went cold.

“Why the basement?” I asked, grabbing one of the mercenaries under the chin and hauling his face up to mine.

He smiled, blood on his teeth from where the rubber slug had cracked his ribs.

“Victor’s not here,” he wheezed. “He’s with the buyer. Selling the payload before you sign the deed.”

“What payload?”

He laughed, a wet, broken sound.

“The stuff under your house, man. The stuff your old man hid for us. You really didn’t know? That’s funny.”

I tightened my grip.

“What stuff?” I asked.

He kept grinning.

“Check his laptop,” Chun called from a side office. “You need to see this.”

I shoved the merc to the floor and walked to the office door.

An open laptop glowed on a cheap particle-board desk. Chun had a thumb drive plugged into it, data streaming.

On the screen was a manifest.

PROJECT IRONCLAD.
ORIGIN: U.S. NAVY SUPPLY DEPOT – WEST COAST.
CONTENTS: EXPERIMENTAL GUIDANCE CHIPS – CLASSIFIED.
STATUS: MISSING, 1999.
LOCATION: 4400 RIDGE ROAD, BURIED SECTOR 4.

My father had worn a badge in our county for forty years. Sheriff’s star, clean boots, straight back. To me, he’d been the definition of an honest lawman. The guy who fixed kids’ bikes and wrote warnings instead of tickets.

Apparently, sometime around 1999, he’d also intercepted a shipment of missing Navy hardware and buried it under our basement.

Maybe he’d planned to turn it in and died before he could.

Maybe he’d done something worse.

Either way, Victor had found out.

“Sir,” Chun said, voice tight. “There’s a queued email here. Sent ten minutes ago to these guys. ‘Phase One: Mother neutralized. Phase Two: burn the hospital. No witnesses.’”

The world tilted.

“They’re not just going to kill her,” I said. “They’re going to erase everyone who saw anything. Fire that starts in the wrong oxygen line, gas explosion, whatever. A tragedy. Not a crime scene.”

“Vans, now,” I barked. “We’re done here.”

We left the zip-tied mercenaries for the local cops to find. If the locals ever saw them. If Hunter was still willing to pick up a phone.

Right then, I didn’t care.

We tore out of that industrial lot like the hounds of hell were behind us. The speedometer climbed and stayed there. We blew through yellow lights, skated through red ones. I could feel the vans’ engines protesting.

“Chun,” I said over the internal radio. “I need eyes on that hospital.”

“Trying,” he said. “The internal feeds are still down. Somebody really wanted that third floor dark. But—”

He tapped furiously.

“I can piggyback a signal from a traffic helicopter overhead,” he said. “Local TV station’s running live shots for evening news. Patching their camera feed.”

The tablet mounted to our dash flickered, then resolved into an aerial shot of the hospital. The roof. The parking lot. Everything looked normal, at least from a thousand feet up.

“See?” Ryder said. “No smoke. No fire. They’re not—”

“They’re already inside,” I said. “Victor’s not an amateur. He’s not walking in with a gas can and a lighter. He’s going to make it look like an accident. Some little tweak to the oxygen mix in a vent line. A valve turned the wrong way. Something that kills the right beds quietly.”

My phone rang.

Unknown number.

I answered and put it on speaker.

“This is Mason.”

“You’re driving very fast on a public highway, Mr. Mason,” a smooth male voice said with a hint of amusement. “The Texas Highway Patrol frowns on that.”

“Victor,” I said.

He chuckled softly.

“If you touch her,” I said, my voice dropping into a place that made everyone in the van look at me, “there is no hole deep enough for you to hide in.”

“Your mother is already gone, Mason,” Victor said, as if he were explaining a math problem to a child. “She just doesn’t know it yet. The ventilators in that ICU are delicate machines. A tiny adjustment to the oxygen-nitrogen balance and an old woman with a weak heart just… goes to sleep.”

“Why?” I asked, forcing my breathing to stay even. “You’ve got what you want. You know where the chips are. Why keep going?”

“Because of the audit,” he said. “Your father was meticulous. He kept a journal. Names. Dates. Drop locations. It’s somewhere in that house. If the feds find the chips and then find that journal, they find my partner.”

“What partner?” I asked.

“The man who signed the original search warrant for your ranch this morning,” Victor said. “The one who’s been quietly killing investigations into missing Navy gear for twenty years. The Honorable United States District Judge Oliver Hayes. He wants his loose ends tied up.”

The line went dead.

I stared at the road for two beats.

Then I shoved it all into a box.

“Chun,” I snapped. “Can you get into the hospital’s PA system?”

“That’s not just a Wi-Fi password,” he said. “That’s a secured network. I’d need twenty minutes at least to brute—”

“You’ve got two,” I said. “Spoof a fire alarm. I need that building emptied yesterday.”

He swore under his breath.

“On it.”

Ahead, the hospital’s white facade appeared through the growing dusk. Emergency vehicles still lined the bays. People went about their business like the building wasn’t a bomb.

The vans whipped around the back, away from the main entrance. No reason to drive right into whatever Victor had planned.

On the tablet, the aerial shot from the news helicopter showed the building again.

Then, blinking red.

Strobe lights started flashing at the exits. A moment later, the fire alarms went off—a faint wail even we could hear through the glass.

Crowds started to stream out of the doors. Patients in gowns. Nurses in scrubs. Doctors in white coats. Visitors clutching purses and blankets and plastic bags with half-eaten sandwiches.

“Fire alarm’s tripped,” Chun said breathlessly. “System thinks there’s smoke in a mechanical room. I’m riding that signal as far as I can.”

“Ryder,” I said. “We’re not going in the lobby. We’re going up.”

“The roof,” he said, already turning toward the service drive that led to the side of the building. “Ventilation.”

“Victor bragged about playing with the oxygen,” I said. “Central supply’s on the roof. If he rigged anything, it’ll be there.”

We bailed out of the vans. Team Alpha hit the ground floor, filtering into the crowds, quietly screening faces for weapons. Team Bravo stayed with the vehicles, creating a soft cordon around the back lot.

I headed for the metal maintenance ladder bolted to the side of the building.

Four stories doesn’t sound like much until you’re sprint-climbing a ladder in forty pounds of gear and rage. By the time we hit the top, my shoulders burned.

We swung over the lip and fanned out.

Three men stood near the big stainless steel ventilation units. They wore hospital maintenance uniforms and carried tool bags.

And pistols fitted with suppressors.

They saw us the same instant we saw them. They drew and fired. The muted thwip-thwip-thwip of suppressed rounds cut the night, concrete chips stinging my face where impacts hit close.

“Contact!” I yelled, diving behind a vent stack. “Smoke!”

Two grenades rolled across the tarpaper.

Hiss.

Gray smoke billowed, swallowing us all.

We moved into the fog.

The rooftop fight was nasty and quick. No room for fancy choreography or clean lines. Just shapes colliding in the haze, fists and knees and elbows.

I saw movement to my left, lunged, and hit something solid. A man grunted as my shoulder drove into his ribs. We slammed into the side of an air handler hard enough to make the metal ring. His pistol skittered away. He swung wild. His fist caught my jaw. Lights flared behind my eyes.

I answered with a knee to his midsection and a forearm across his face. He dropped.

“Clear left!” someone shouted.

“Clear right!”

The smoke thinned. Three bodies now lay on the gravel-strewn rooftop, zip-ties biting into their wrists.

I ran to the main oxygen manifold. A small box with a digital display was attached to the main line.

A timer on the display ticked down.

00:45. 00:44. 00:43.

“Bomb,” I said. “Everyone off the roof except EOD!”

Ryder’s boots thudded behind me.

“Sir, I was EOD before I went green,” he said, dropping to his knees beside the device. His voice was calm in a way that made the hair on my neck stand up. “Looks like a rigged detonator on the main tank. If it blows, you’re talking a big rupture. Fire, shrapnel, oxygen feeding everything.”

“Can you disable it?” I asked.

“Mercury tilt trigger by the look of it,” he said. “And a timer. If we jostle it wrong, it might pop early. I need something to bridge the contacts and freeze the circuit in place.”

“You need metal?” I asked.

“Conductive. Thin. Solid,” he said.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a coin I’d carried for two decades. A brass challenge coin engraved with the SEAL trident and too many memories.

“Use this,” I said.

He nodded once. No ceremony. No sentiment. He slid the coin between two exposed points on the device with surgeon-level care.

The numbers inside the display flickered.

00:09.

00:08.

00:07.

The timer sputtered.

Then froze at 00:06.

We all exhaled at once.

A slow clapping broke the quiet behind us.

I turned.

The figure in the stairwell doorway was the last person I expected to see on a hospital roof.

Morgan.

My ex-wife wore a tailored blazer and heels wholly unsuited for a fire escape. Her makeup was perfect, except for the way her eyes were a little too wide.

She held a phone to her ear.

“You are so stubborn, Mason,” she said into the receiver. “Yes. I’m looking at him. He stopped it.”

She lowered the phone.

“Victor says he’s impressed,” she said. “He also says you should look at the parking lot.”

I crossed the roof in three long strides and stepped up to the edge, ignoring the urge to grab her and throw the phone over the side.

The evacuation had done exactly what I needed it to: it emptied the building.

It had also done exactly what Victor wanted it to: it gathered everyone in one place.

Hundreds of patients in gowns and blankets. Nurses, techs, orderlies. Family members crying and confused. All huddled together in the main parking lot like cattle in a pen.

Surrounding them, nose-in, were five black SUVs with Texas plates and tinted windows so dark they were illegal in three states.

Men with rifles stood on the running boards, weapons angled down toward unarmed people.

If one of them opened fire, it wouldn’t be a shooting.

It would be a massacre on U.S. soil, in a hospital parking lot, live on local TV.

“He wants the journal,” Morgan said behind me, her voice shaking now that she was saying it out loud. “He says you bring it to him, he lets everyone walk away.”

I turned back.

“This isn’t a property dispute anymore, Morgan,” I said. “This is terrorism. On American ground. There’s no coming back from this for you.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” she said, the words tearing out of her like they’d been sitting on her tongue for months. “Victor owes money to people in Mexico. Real people. If he doesn’t deliver those chips, they kill him. They kill me. They kill everyone.”

“So you kill my mother instead?” I asked.

“Not kill,” she said weakly. “Just… scare. Force your hand. We weren’t supposed to—”

She broke off, the lie dying halfway out.

I looked at Ryder.

“Take the team down the back stairs,” I said. “Use the fire escapes. Flank the lot. I want shooters in the tree line, behind cars, under that overhang. Nobody fires until I give the word. If they panic and spray into that crowd, we lose everything.”

“Understood,” he said. He grabbed his radio, barked quiet commands. The men started to vanish over the far edge of the roof, slipping into the dark like they’d been born there.

I took Morgan’s phone from her without asking.

“Victor,” I said, when he picked up. “You’re playing with civilian lives on U.S. soil. This is beyond your usual smuggling games.”

“You Americans are always so dramatic about optics,” he said. I could hear the distant murmur of the crowd around him, like a hive. “You have something I want. I have something you care about. This seems very simple.”

“You said you wanted the journal,” I said. “The one that proves you and Judge Oliver have been partners since ninety-nine. The one that can bury him before he ever sees a jury.”

“I knew you’d find it,” Victor said. There was a hint of genuine admiration there that made me sick. “So. Bring it down. Or I let my men stop playing nice.”

“I’m not bringing it to you,” I said. “I have something better.”

“Oh?” he said. “What’s that?”

“I have your favorite possession,” I said. “Morgan.”

I grabbed her wrist and pulled her closer to the edge. She yelped.

I let go of the phone and let my voice carry over the side instead.

“She’s right here, Victor!” I shouted. “If one of your men pulls a trigger, she goes over!”

It was a bluff and we all knew it. Even Morgan. I wasn’t going to throw my ex-wife off a hospital roof.

But Victor wasn’t wired like me. He was wired like a man who assumed everyone else would do the ugliest possible thing to win, because that’s what he would do.

Silence.

Then, faintly from below:

“Lower your weapons,” Victor barked. “All of you. Let the civilians go. Now!”

The rifle barrels dipped.

The crowd, sensing the change, started to move. Slowly at first, then faster, like a stampede when the first animal bolts. Doctors and nurses and patients poured out of the lot, toward the street, away from the black SUVs.

“Good,” I said into the phone, bringing it back to my ear. “Now send your men away. Just you and me.”

“No,” Victor said. “You bring her down. You bring the journal. Or I start shooting the stragglers.”

I looked at Morgan.

“He doesn’t care about me,” she whispered. “He cares about the money. That’s it. That’s all.”

She was right.

He hadn’t told his men to stand down to save her. He’d done it to clear witnesses out of the way.

The lot was almost empty now. Just Victor’s SUVs. His twenty gunmen. The skeleton of a hospital staff catching their breath behind ambulances.

And my students, tucked into the shadows around the perimeter, waiting.

“I’m coming down,” I said.

We took the stairs this time. No point grandstanding.

In the lobby, I stopped.

“You’re going to walk out first,” I told Morgan quietly. “You’re going to walk straight to his car.”

“He’ll kill me,” she said.

“He might,” I said honestly. “If you stay here, the federal government will. At least with him, there’s a sliver of a chance you live long enough to testify.”

Her eyes closed. When she opened them again, there was nothing left of the woman I’d married, the one who laughed at my terrible jokes and danced barefoot in the kitchen. Just a tired stranger who’d run out of bad options.

“Okay,” she said.

We pushed through the glass doors into the bright glare of headlights.

The five SUVs formed a half-circle around the front of the hospital. Engines idling. Men posed in tactical gear like a recruitment poster for the world’s worst militia.

Victor stepped out of the center vehicle.

Tall. Expensive suit. No tie. The kind of tan you don’t get from honest work in the sun.

“The journal,” he said, holding out his hand. His other hand rested on a pistol at his hip.

“In the truck,” I said, nodding toward my pickup parked fifty yards away. “Let her go, I’ll bring it.”

He smiled, that Hollywood-villain smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“Kill him,” he said to his men.

He didn’t bother playing along anymore.

The rifles came up.

Before they could fire, the night exploded.

Not with bullets.

With roof tiles.

The guys we’d left up on the hospital roof hadn’t gone far. They’d stayed along the parapet, loading their pockets with loose chunks of roofing material.

Now they hurled them down onto the SUVs—heavy ceramic smashing into windshields, clanging off hoods.

Every gunman’s head snapped up instinctively.

That’s when the tree line erupted.

Flashbangs rolled under trucks. White fire and thunderclaps turned the lot into chaos.

“Move!” I shouted, shoving Morgan to the pavement and sprinting toward Victor.

Bullets cracked through the night. Glass showered down. Someone screamed.

I hit Victor like a linebacker, driving him backward. His pistol went flying. We hit the asphalt hard enough that I felt something in my shoulder protest.

He swung wildly. I blocked with my forearm and drove my elbow into his face. His nose crunched. Blood sprayed.

Around us, my students turned the mercenaries into a training exercise. But this time, there was no instructor yelling ceasefire. They moved in pairs, leapfrogging forward, one laying down suppressing fire while the other advanced. Controlled bursts. Center-mass hits. Violence of action, exactly like they’d been taught.

Gunmen dropped. Some threw their weapons down, hands darting up.

I grabbed Victor by the lapels and slammed him into the front tire of his own SUV.

“Call them off,” I snarled.

Before he could answer, a new sound cut through the chaos.

A low, guttural war-horn blared.

Headlights knifed through the dark from the street.

A massive black semi truck smashed through the hospital gate like it was made of matchsticks. Two of Victor’s SUVs went spinning like toys under its bumper. Metal screamed. Glass burst.

The truck’s door flew open.

A man in a dark tactical uniform with a U.S. Marshals Service patch on his shoulder jumped down, a shotgun already leveled.

“Federal Marshals!” he shouted. “Drop your weapons! Hands where I can see them!”

Behind him, unmarked sedans with red-and-blue dash lights poured in, screeching to a stop.

For the first time that night, I felt a flicker of something like relief.

The cavalry.

Then I saw where the shotgun was pointed.

Not at the gunmen.

At Ryder.

“Mason!” the lead marshal barked. He was tall, buzzcut, jaw clenched so tight it looked like his teeth might crack. The nameplate on his vest read COMMANDER GRAVES. “On your knees! Hands behind your head! You are under arrest for domestic terrorism and kidnapping!”

The world shifted sideways.

I let go of Victor.

He dusted off his suit and adjusted his cuffs, face schooled into the perfect expression of a traumatized businessman who’d just survived a horrifying ordeal.

“Commander Graves,” he called. “Thank God you’re here. These men—they’re out of control. He—” he pointed at me “—took my wife hostage. He think I’m part of some conspiracy.”

Graves didn’t look at him. He kept his shotgun level at my chest.

“On. Your. Knees,” he repeated.

Behind him, marshals were swarming my students, forcing them down, zip-tying their wrists. The mercenaries were being cuffed too, but there was a difference. My men were treated like rabid dogs. Victor’s like barking pets.

My muscles wanted to fight.

My brain did the math.

Thirty-five candidates. Maybe fifteen marshals visible. More in the cars. Unknown number of unseen shooters. No cover.

The helicopters and the real SEALs and Admiral Vance—if I tried to bluff my way through that part of the story, you wouldn’t believe me. So I won’t.

Instead, I’ll tell you what actually happened.

I knelt.

Gravel cut into my knees.

Graves stepped forward and shoved the muzzle of the shotgun into the base of my skull.

“You’re making a mistake,” I said quietly.

“I see a group of rogue Navy trainees assaulting authorized federal contractors,” he said loudly enough for a dozen body cams to capture his speech. “And I see you leading them.”

He kicked my calf. My legs gave. My face hit the asphalt hard enough that my teeth clicked.

“Victor,” Graves called. “You okay, sir?”

“I’m fine,” Victor said. “Shaken. But fine.”

He leaned down next to my ear, voice soft enough only I could hear.

“You can train all the soldiers you want,” he whispered. “But you’ll never beat the man who signs their checks.”

He straightened.

“I’ll be taking my wife now,” he said to Graves.

Morgan, hands zip-tied, was being walked toward a sedan by two marshals. She looked at me over her shoulder.

For the first time since the divorce, her eyes weren’t angry.

They were terrified.

“Load them up,” Graves ordered. “Students go to the brig at the base. Mason goes downtown to federal holding. Separate transports.”

They dragged me to an SUV and shoved me in the back seat between two marshals. My wrists were zip-tied, hands numb.

The convoy rolled out, sirens dark, headlights bright.

We merged onto the highway that cut through the scrub between the city and the ranches.

The marshal on my right stared out the window. The one on my left had his shotgun resting between his knees, the barrel angled up just enough to remind me that I wasn’t going anywhere.

“Do you guys get overtime for this?” I asked after a minute.

“Shut up,” the one on my right said.

“I’m just curious,” I said. “Because snatching a federal witness off a crime scene usually puts a wrinkle in your pension.”

“You’re not a witness,” he said. “You’re a suspect.”

“I’m a witness to treason,” I said. “Those ‘contractors’ you just “rescued” were smuggling stolen Navy tech for a cartel. Your boss knows it. His boss knows it. The man in the robe downtown who signed your warrant definitely knows it.”

The marshal shifted. His jaw tightened.

Before he could answer, the radio on the dash crackled.

“Commander Graves, this is Admiral Vance Warham, United States Navy,” a voice said. It was deep, controlled, carrying the kind of authority you feel in your bones. “Identify your location and status.”

Graves picked up the mic.

“Admiral, this is a federal operation under the Department of Justice,” he said. “We have jurisdiction. I’m transporting domestic terror suspects to a secure facility. I’ll call you when—”

“Negative,” the admiral said, the single word snapping like a flag in a storm. “You have detained active-duty naval personnel without coordination. You are to pull over immediately. Do not make me repeat myself.”

“I don’t take orders from the Navy,” Graves snapped. “Maintain speed.”

He dropped the mic and pressed his foot to the gas.

“That’s a mistake,” I said.

A low rumble started under us.

At first I thought it was just the engine.

Then it grew, a beating thump you feel in your ribs as much as hear in your ears.

The marshal on my left looked up, frowning.

Out the window, the night exploded with white light.

An MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter dropped down over the highway median like it had fallen out of space. Two more slid into formation beside it. Their rotors churned the air, whipping dust and gravel into small storms.

Searchlights lit the convoy up like midday.

“Pull over or we will engage,” Admiral Vance’s voice came over the radio again, flat and deadly.

Graves cursed and slammed on the brakes.

The entire line of vehicles screeched to a stop.

The Black Hawks hovered, their side doors already open.

Ropes fell.

Men slid down them fast, silhouettes in full kit, rifles already shouldered by the time their boots hit asphalt.

It wasn’t my ragtag class of candidates.

It was the real thing.

SEAL Team Six.

“U.S. Navy!” one of them shouted, voice booming through an amplified speaker. “Federal agents, stand down and raise your hands where we can see them!”

The marshal to my left looked at Graves.

Graves looked at the miniguns mounted on the Black Hawks.

He set the shotgun down and raised his hands.

The rear door swung open. A gloved hand grabbed me by the zip-ties and yanked me out.

The operator who cut my restraints flipped his visor up.

“Rough Sunday, Master Chief?” he said with a grin.

“Little behind schedule,” I said.

“Traffic,” he said. “Always traffic.”

He handed me a headset.

“The admiral wants a word.”

I put it on.

“Mason,” Vance said. “You took my best class and went cowboy. You know how many meetings I had to sit through to get air assets over Texas?”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Victor and Judge Oliver forced my hand. They’re trying to move stolen guidance tech overseas. They tried to kill my mother. They—”

“We’ve been watching Victor’s network for months,” Vance said. “We were waiting for them to move the chips before we rolled them up. You accelerated my timeline. Congratulations. Also, I’m very annoyed.”

“My students,” I said. “They followed me. This isn’t on them.”

“They’re heroes,” Vance said. “We’ve got them. We’re sorting jurisdictional nonsense as we speak. But Victor and the judge aren’t done, and they still have your ex-wife.”

I looked down the highway.

One of the sedans from the marshal convoy was missing.

“They peeled off,” one of the operators said. “Gray sedan. Took the exit for the private airfield ten minutes ago, before the birds dropped in.”

“If they get airborne, they’re gone,” I said. “Mexico. Somewhere without an extradition treaty.”

“We can’t put military aircraft over that airfield without enough paperwork to choke a senator,” Vance said. “Not in time. But we can give you a head start.”

From the back of the SEAL transport truck, someone rolled out a sleek black Ducati motorcycle. It gleamed under the highway lights.

“Victor’s toy,” the operator said. “We liberated it from his warehouse. Fastest thing on two wheels and it’s already gassed.”

I swung a leg over the bike.

“Get my class out of bracelets,” I told the operator. “Tell them to bring whatever wheels they can steal from the marshals. I might need a blocking force.”

“Copy that,” he said, already moving.

The engine screamed when I twisted the throttle.

The world blurred.

The highway became a black ribbon under my tires. The wind tried to rip me off the seat. The speedometer climbed, 100, 120, higher.

Ahead, the private airfield’s fence loomed, chain link and razor wire.

The gate was already smashed open.

The gray sedan Victor had taken idled near a sleek white Gulfstream jet whose engines were already spinning, turbines whining loud enough to vibrate my teeth from a hundred yards away.

Victor was halfway up the airstairs, dragging Morgan by the arm.

She was fighting him now, finally. Kicking. Swinging. He cuffed her across the face and hauled her up like luggage.

I didn’t aim for the stairs.

I aimed for the landing gear.

At the last second, I laid the bike down.

Metal screamed as it slammed into the front wheel assembly. Sparks fountained. The jet lurched, nose dipping. One of the pilots cursed and cut the engines. The whine died.

I rolled, scraped, and came up on one knee with the pistol Hayes had pressed into my hand before I left the highway.

“Victor!” I shouted.

He spun, dragging Morgan behind him as a shield, his own handgun jammed against her temple.

“You just don’t die, do you?” he yelled back over the distance.

Behind him, hangar doors were rolling up.

Thirteen men stepped out in formation. Not the sloppily dressed mercs from the warehouse. These guys wore a mix of military-surplus gear and cartel money. Better rifles. Better posture. The last line of his defense.

They raised their weapons.

“Kill him!” Victor screamed.

Before they could pull the triggers, engines roared again behind me.

Ten black SUVs swept onto the tarmac, headlights cutting through jet wash.

Not marshals, this time.

My class.

They piled out, armed with the best of whatever they’d taken off the mercenaries earlier. ARs. Pistols. A couple of shotguns. They spread out, forming a rough firing line behind me.

“Last chance!” Ryder yelled. “Drop the weapons!”

The thirteen hesitated.

They’d been paid to fight.

My men had bled to be here.

The difference was obvious.

“Fire!” Victor spat.

Gunfire ripped the night.

I dove behind a fuel truck, bullets hammering into the metal. Sparks flew.

“Left side! Push!” Ryder shouted. “Two up, two cover! Move!”

They moved like they were back in a shoot house. One element laid down fire, walking rounds into the mercs’ cover. Another advanced, using the noise and chaos as a shield. It was controlled madness.

Two mercs went down. Then three.

The others faltered. Some tried to fall back toward the jet. Some kept firing.

Victor dragged Morgan backwards up the stairs.

“Cover me!” I yelled.

Ryder and three others focused their fire on the base of the airstairs. The mercenaries nearest the plane ducked.

I sprinted.

Bullets snapped the air around me. The airstairs vibrated under my feet.

I hit the cabin door shoulder-first, bursting inside.

The interior smelled like leather and expensive whiskey. Plush seats. Soft lights.

Victor stood in the aisle.

He shoved Morgan into one of the seats and swung the gun toward me in one motion.

At that distance, pulling the trigger on my own pistol would be suicide. Too easy for him to deflect, too much chance of the shot going where I didn’t want it.

So I stepped in.

I grabbed his wrist and drove it up. His shot went into the ceiling, punching a neat hole in the expensive paneling.

We slammed into the narrow aisle walls, trading short, brutal blows. No technique. No finesse. Just two men trying to break each other.”

I got inside his reach and drove my forehead into his face.

His nose gave with a crunch. He stumbled back over a carry-on bag and went down hard on the carpet.

I stood over him, pistol now trained dead center on his chest.

“It’s over,” I said, breathing hard.

He lay there, blood pouring from his nose, teeth stained red. Then, slowly, he started to laugh. A wet, wheezing sound.

“You think stopping me fixes this?” he said. “You think a jury and some headlines scares a man like Oliver?”

I pressed the barrel to his forehead.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“The ranch,” he said, grinning now, eyes bright and mad. “You really thought we just wanted to dig up the chips and leave? We planted charges, Mason. Enough to turn that house into dust. You know what C-4 can do to old concrete?”

He glanced at his watch.

“Dead-man’s code,” he said. “If I don’t send a signal every hour, that little timer in your basement keeps counting down. Once it hits zero? Boom. No more cozy Texas homestead. No more evidence. Just a sad story on the evening news about a gas leak.”

My stomach turned to ice.

“How long?” I asked.

He licked his lips.

“Twelve minutes,” he said. “Maybe eleven now. You can shoot me. Or you can try to save the little museum your daddy built on stolen hardware. You don’t have time for both.”

Outside, the gunfire faded.

“Clear!” Ryder shouted.

I grabbed Victor by the collar and dragged him bodily down the airstairs.

“Ryder!” I yelled. “We’ve got explosives at the ranch. Dead-man switch. Get the admiral’s pilots here now.”

Right on cue, a Black Hawk’s navigation lights appeared over the horizon, growing fast. It dropped onto the tarmac, rotors beating the air into submission.

Admiral Vance stepped out, wind whipping his uniform.

“Status?” he shouted over the noise.

“Hostiles neutralized,” I said. “Primary target in custody. Secondary threat at my ranch. Remote charges with some kind of anti-tamper. We need a ride. Now.”

He looked at the blood on my shirt.

He looked at the men behind me.

He looked at Victor.

“Load him,” Vance said to his pilot. “And the girl.”

Morgan flinched.

“I’m not leaving you,” she said.

“Yes, you are,” I said. “You’re going to show us everything you know about his little side projects.”

Ryder selected two of his EOD-trained candidates and climbed in with us.

The Black Hawk’s interior was cramped and loud. Victor sat zip-tied on the floor, back pressed against the bulkhead. Morgan sat as far from him as she could, arms wrapped around herself.

The pilot pushed the bird hard and low, racing the clock.

Eight minutes.

Seven.

“Code,” I said, staring at Victor. “How do we stop it?”

He smiled faintly and stared out the open side door at the Texas scrub whipping under us.

“Morgan,” I said.

She jerked.

“You lived with him,” I said. “You saw his passwords. His tattoos. His stupid trophies. Think.”

“He’s careful,” she said, voice raw. “He changes passwords every week. He doesn’t save anything. He… he likes money. He likes the judge. He likes that stupid hotel room they always meet in. Three-fifteen. Room three-fifteen, downtown, every Tuesday.”

“He taps when he’s nervous,” she added suddenly. “Counts with his fingers like chips in a stack. Three-one-five. Over and over. It drives me insane.”

Victor’s fingers froze against his thighs.

“First code,” I said to Ryder. “Zero-three-one-five. Try that.”

“You sure?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “We’ll know if we’re wrong.”

We crested the last ridge.

The ranch lay below, quiet and dark in the moonlight. The front door still hung broken. The house looked like an old man who’d taken one punch too many.

The pilot set us down in the yard, rotors still spinning, kicking up dust.

We hit the ground running.

The front door groaned when I shoved it aside again. The smell of bleach warred with the ghost of old blood.

We cut straight through the kitchen and hit the pantry door. The stairs to the basement creaked under our weight.

Halfway down, Ryder’s flashlight beam caught a blinking red LED.

The device was strapped to the face of the floor safe my father had installed decades ago. A stack of plastic explosives, wires, and a little digital timer.

00:21. 00:20.

“Jesus,” Ryder said softly. “That’s a lot.”

“Keypad,” I said. “Enter zero-three-one-five.”

“That’s not going to—”

“Do it,” I said.

He punched the numbers.

0…3…1…5.

The timer paused.

Beep.

“Invalid code,” a tinny mechanical voice chirped.

The numbers jumped.

00:10. 00:09.

“Anti-guess protocol,” Ryder snarled. “Every wrong code shaves time. We can’t keep swinging in the dark or we’re done.”