Chapter 13 - GHOSTS OF ERBIL
The subterranean room fell into a heavy, suffocating silence.
The temperature in the staging bay seemed to drop five degrees as Sterling’s words hung in the sterile air. The young female communications specialist instinctively stepped back two paces, sensing the sudden, terrifying shift in Emily Ross’s posture.
Emily did not gasp. She did not raise her voice.
Slowly, methodically, she pulled her hands out from the front pocket of her oversized hoodie.
For the first time since she had walked into the Coronado mess hall, her forearms were fully exposed beneath the bright LED panels. Her skin was pale, crisscrossed with old, thin surgical scars around her knuckles. But on the inside of her left wrist, stamped deep into the tissue with darkened thermal scarring, was the emblem that had frozen Senior Chief Rhodes in his tracks: a stylized, three-pointed dagger entwined with a strike coil—the permanent seal of Division Nine, the military’s most secretive black-budget assassination unit.
Emily turned her wrist over, her fingers curling into a tight, white-knuckled fist.
"Malik," she whispered, her voice dropping into a chilling, razor-thin tone.
"Malik," Sterling confirmed, tapping the screen to bring up a black-and-white facial recognition file. The image displayed a harsh, battle-scarred man in his late forties with a crooked jaw and a dead left eye, surrounded by Arabic and Cyrillic intelligence file notes. "He survived the strike on the Erbil bunker. He’s spent the last nine years rebuilding his network under five different aliases across Europe and the Middle East. He built Target Site Omega specifically to draw out whatever was left of Division Nine."
"He knows I'm alive?" Emily asked.
"He suspects it," Sterling replied. "The burst transmission wasn't just a threat against Coronado. It was encoded using the exact operational cipher your old squad used during Operation Archangel in two-thousand-fifteen. He’s calling you out, Emily."
Emily leaned forward over the tactical display, her eyes scanning the entry points, blind spots, and mortar pits surrounding the Syrian compound. In less than ten seconds, her mind processed sixty different tactical variables—wind speed, thermal dissipation, guard rotation schedules, and structural entry angles.
"Where is the insertion team?" she asked quietly.
"We have a primary strike element from JSOC standing by at Incirlik Air Base," Sterling said. "Two squads of Night Stalkers with fast-attack MH-60 Black Hawks. But if we launch a conventional assault, Malik will trigger a scuttle charge. He has three server drives inside that bunker containing the names of every active covert operative tied to Division Nine's former apparatus. If those drives burn, forty intelligence officers across three continents will be exposed."
"So JSOC stays on the runway," Emily said flatly.
"JSOC stays on the runway," Sterling agreed. "This requires a single-operator breach. A ghost entry. Someone who can slide past the outer perimeter sensors, secure the server room, and terminate Malik before he knows the room has been compromised."
Emily pulled down the sleeves of her oversized black hoodie, hiding her scars once more beneath the heavy cotton fabric.
"Prep the high-altitude transport," Emily said, turning her back on the tactical screen and walking toward the gear locker at the rear of the bay. "I want to be over the drop zone before zero-two-hundred local time."
"Emily," Sterling called out softly, stopping her in her tracks. "You’ve been out of the field for three years. Your physical rehabilitation files aren't cleared by medical."
May you like
Emily stopped, turning her head slightly to look back over her shoulder. A faint, icy smile touched the corner of her lips.
"Medical didn't clear me when I walked into Coronado today either, Director," she said softly. "Tell Vance to bring my kit. The old one. The one without the serial numbers."
