Chapter 20
Chapter 20
Harlan sends resupply coordinates and orders the team to hold position pending revised tasking. While waiting, Thorne studies the journal pages and identifies the olfactory disruptor formula as originating from a DARPA-adjacent program. Shadow provides critical context linking the formula to a classified briefing at Pendleton. Cole suggests the leak came from inside the original program. Harlan contacts them with an unexpected asset: Koval, who survived the farmstead evacuation and has been recovered by resistance elements. Koval relays that Greys deserters confirmed Masovich was taken to a field hospital near the border under foreign escort. Thorne makes the decision to complete the mission by pursuing Masovich to the extraction point. The team moves through the forest toward the border, where they find the field hospital abandoned except for Masovich and a single remaining guard. Thorne and Cole breach the building. Cole kills the guard. Thorne finds Masovich conscious but unable to move. The colonel reveals he received the formula from an American contact and attempts to use a vial of the disruptor, but his injuries prevent him from deploying it effectively. Thorne eliminates Masovich. The team extracts south with Shadow on a litter improvised by Cole. Harlan confirms a casevac window at the border. As they cross, Thorne reflects on the journal pages and the certainty that someone in their own chain of command enabled Masovich. The mission is complete. The investigation is just beginning.
Harlan's coordinates pinged into existence at 0614, a digital breadcrumb leading them twelve kilometers southwest to a solitary barn nestled at the fringe of a fallow field. This was their resupply and casevac waypoint, a brief respite with a noon-bound window of opportunity.
Thorne meticulously copied the numbers, his movements economical, before presenting them to Cole. A grunt was Cole's only acknowledgment, but it was enough. He immediately began the practiced ballet of breaking camp, his focus absolute.
Shadow attempted to rise, a desperate surge of will against a body that screamed surrender. Her knees buckled, betraying her. She braced herself against the rough bark of a pine, finding a precarious uprightness through sheer, unyielding stubbornness. The angry red of her palms, where blisters had bloomed, spoke of the frostbite that had darkened her fingertips. She cradled her hands against her chest, a fragile offering she seemed to believe might mend itself.
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