The Key Was Already in the Mail

Garrick turned toward the main gate as the lead vehicle came into view.

Matte-black armored Suburban with steel ram bars, moving at the kind of speed that does not slow down for locked gates.

It hit the security barrier at sixty miles per hour.

The impact was not a sound so much as a physical fact — a crack that pressed against your chest before your ears processed it. Steel folded. Concrete cracked. The gate tore from its housing and flew back into the desert dust like something the base had been trying to hold onto and had finally lost its grip on.

Before anyone had finished processing the first vehicle, five more black Suburbans roared through the breach in perfect formation, tires cutting into the gravel, yellow dust exploding around them in columns as they crossed the base and came straight for the motor pool.

Garrick's hand moved toward his holster.

"Briggs! Defensive positions!"

The SUVs were already there.

They slid into position around the hollow square with the precision of people who had studied the geometry of this specific location in advance — which they had, because the man who had organized this response had not improvised a single element of it. Doors flew open simultaneously. Two dozen operators in black tactical gear stepped out without name tags, without insignia, without flags, their faces unreadable behind tinted visors. Red laser sights appeared on Garrick's chest. On Briggs's chest. On the three senior NCOs closest to both of them.

"Drop your weapons. Federal authority."

Garrick's hand stopped moving. The confidence left his face so completely that several soldiers in the platoon who had spent fourteen months watching him use that confidence as a weapon saw, for the first time, what was underneath it.

The rear door of the lead SUV opened slowly.