Chapter 2
Briggs was frozen, huddled behind a shattered Humvee, blindly firing his M4 into the dust cloud. The militia mercenaries up on the ridge had us pinned perfectly. There was no way out, no air support for miles, and the men around me were falling apart. The heavy machine gun on the ridge was tearing through our defenses, chewing up the concrete like paper.
I looked at Briggs, trembling and useless. I looked at Thorne, bleeding out against the sandbags. Then I looked at the M2010 rifle lying in the killing zone.
The timid engineer persona had kept me safe for six weeks, kept my cover intact while I quietly confirmed what three separate intelligence reports had suspected, that this "black site" was actually a staging ground for weapons being funneled to exactly the militia now shooting at us from the ridge. But right now, that persona was going to get every man on this quad killed, including me.
I reached up and pulled off my thick glasses, letting them fall and shatter on the rocks. I didn't need them anyway. I stood up, feeling my posture straighten, my muscles coiling like a predator finally allowed to move.
Briggs's eyes cut to me through the dust, and whatever he saw in my face made him stop firing blindly for half a second. "Evans, get down, you're gonna get yourself—"
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"Stop shooting at nothing and cover me," I said, and my voice had changed too, flattened out into something clipped and certain that had nothing left of the stammer I'd used for six weeks. I didn't wait for him to process it. I moved.
I crossed eleven meters of open ground at a dead sprint, low and fast, the way I'd been trained a decade earlier and had never once forgotten, and I hit the dirt beside the fallen sniper hard enough to knock the air out of me. I didn't check his pulse. There wasn't time, and the angle of his neck already told me everything I needed to know. I grabbed the M2010 instead, checked the chamber, confirmed the optic hadn't cracked in the fall, and rolled behind a chunk of collapsed concrete just as another burst of machine-gun fire stitched across the ground where I'd been standing a second earlier.
