Chapter 5 - What Reeves Heard
Nathaniel Reeves regained full consciousness fourteen hours later in the base medical unit.
His leg had been saved. His pride hadn’t.
When the formal debrief began, Garrett sat stiff-backed at one end of the room while Hayes and Mitchell avoided each other’s eyes. Evelyn sat opposite them in a clean uniform now, every trace of the desert gone except the bruise along her jaw and the cold precision in her expression.
The senior officer—Brigadier Lewis Kane—opened the session without ceremony.
“Master Sergeant Reeves,” he said, “state what you heard before the canyon collapse.”
Reeves looked at Garrett first. Not with hatred. That would have been easier. He looked at him with disappointment.
“I heard Major Blackwell warn command that the route was wrong,” Reeves said. “I heard her request confirmation twice. Then I heard a voice on the operations patch override her and direct us to Charlie.”
“Whose voice?”
Reeves swallowed. “Colonel Mercer.”
The room shifted.
Mercer was the operations commander overseeing logistics for the entire sector. Decorated. Politically protected. The kind of man whose signature appeared near funding approvals and commendations, not sabotage reports.
Garrett stared. “That’s impossible.”
“No,” Evelyn said quietly. “What’s impossible is how many people keep using that word when the evidence is already on the table.”
She laid out the recovered route sheets, the rogue beacon logs, and the burst transmissions. Every timestamp matched. Every discrepancy pointed upward.
Mercer had redirected Alpha Squad into exposed terrain, likely to ensure a hostile courier could escape with a separate intelligence asset. But the plan had broken when Evelyn stayed alive long enough to capture the evidence and Reeves stayed alive long enough to confirm it.
Then Kane asked the question that mattered even more.
“Captain Garrett, why did you leave two personnel behind?”
Garrett’s face hardened, then sagged. “Because I thought if I stopped, we’d all die.”
It was the closest thing to honesty he had offered all day.
“You thought Major Blackwell was expendable,” Evelyn said.
May you like
He looked at her and said nothing.
That silence was answer enough.
