I fired once.
He dropped.
The second grabbed Keane by the shoulder and raised a pistol toward his head.
I didn’t shoot.
Keane was too close.
So I crossed the room in three strides, slammed the rifle barrel into the man’s wrist, heard bone crack, then drove my knee into his ribs and threw him into the camera tripod.
The camera smashed against the floor.
Colonel Keane sat tied to a chair beneath a hanging bulb.
His face was swollen. Blood darkened one side of his uniform. His hands were bound behind him, but his eyes were still his eyes.
Clear.
Angry.
He blinked at me like I was a hallucination.
“Cross?”
“Evening, sir.”
“It’s morning.”
“Then I’m late.”
A sound escaped him that might have been a laugh if he hadn’t been in so much pain.
I cut the ropes from his wrists.
His hands fell forward, shaking.
“You came alone?” he rasped.
“Seemed rude to bring guests.”
“Captain—”
“No lecture until we’re outside.”
The room shook as gunfire erupted across the courtyard.
Men were shooting at the breached wall, at shadows, at each other’s confusion.
Keane tried to stand and nearly collapsed.
I caught him under the arm.
He was heavier than I expected, or maybe I was more tired than I admitted.
“You hit?” I asked.
“Shoulder. Ribs. Pride.”
“Can you walk?”
He looked at me through one swollen eye.
“For you? Yes.”
I pulled his arm across my shoulders and guided him toward the rear door.
We made it three steps before a voice behind us said, “Drop the weapon.”
English.
Clean.
American.
I froze.
Colonel Keane did too.
Slowly, I turned.
A man stood in the doorway with a pistol aimed at my chest.
He wasn’t one of them.
He wore desert clothing, but his boots were American issue. His beard was too neatly shaped. His rifle sling was ours.
And on his wrist was a black comms band marked with a tiny silver stripe.
I knew that stripe.
I had seen it once on Major Willis’s desk.
The kind used by covert liaison teams.
The man smiled.
“Captain Cross,” he said. “You were not supposed to survive the approach.”
The words landed harder than a bullet.
Keane’s weight shifted beside me.
“What the hell is this?” he whispered.
The man kept smiling.
“You should have waited for protocol.”
Outside, the compound roared with gunfire, shouting, engines failing, metal screaming.
Inside that doorway, the real war finally showed its face.
I raised my rifle a fraction.
His pistol tightened.
“Don’t,” he said. “You’re tired. He’s wounded. And I already told them where you’d enter.”
My stomach turned to ice.
The ambush.
The delayed response.
Willis ordering everyone to wait.
The movement logs.
The gate.
Someone hadn’t simply failed Colonel Keane. Someone had sold him.
Keane’s voice was low and dangerous.
“Who sent you?”
The man glanced at him.
“You were about to expose a supply chain, Colonel. Weapons moving through approved channels into enemy hands. Names. Accounts. Officers.”
His eyes returned to me.
“And she was supposed to die trying to save you. A tragic story. Very inspiring. Very clean.”
The man lifted his pistol higher.
“Now put the rifle down.”
I looked at Keane.
For one second, he looked exactly like the commander who had once asked me if I could lead soldiers in combat.
No fear.
No doubt.
Just a question.
Can you?
I let my rifle lower.
The man relaxed.
A mistake.
I dropped, pulled Keane down with me, and fired through the lower edge of the doorway.
The shot hit the man’s knee.
He screamed and fell sideways.
Keane ripped the pistol from his hand before I could reach it.
Then the colonel, wounded and shaking, pressed the muzzle under the traitor’s chin.
“Name,” Keane growled.
The man’s face twisted in pain.
“Willis,” he gasped. “Major Willis gave the location. He said Keane had to disappear.”
The room seemed to tilt.
Major Willis.
Back at the post.
Commanding the rescue that was never meant to come.
Keane looked at me.
And in his eyes I saw the same thing I felt.
We had not walked into enemy territory.
We had walked into a cover-up.
PART 3 — Dawn Belonged to the Guilty
We couldn’t take the traitor with us.
Not alive.
Not moving.
Not while half the compound hunted us.
So Keane did the one thing commanders do when the battlefield gives them only ugly choices.
He made the cleanest one left.
He ripped the black comms band from the man’s wrist and shoved it into my vest.
“Evidence,” he said.
The traitor grabbed at his bleeding leg. “You’ll never make it back.”
I leaned close enough for him to smell the mud and smoke on me.
“Then you should pray I don’t.”
Keane and I slipped out through the rear door as the generator finally died.