“A Colonel? She’s Dreaming” My Mom Laughed Before 47 Spectators—Until A 4-Star General Broke Down…

Vanguard Solutions’ global headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, did not look like a military installation.

It looked like a monument to corporate greed—a towering, thirty-story obelisk of black glass and steel that dominated the skyline.

It was 0300 hours.

The torrential rain from Pennsylvania had followed us south, hammering the Virginia pavement.

We had ‘borrowed’ a heavily armored cash-transit van from a depot outside Baltimore, stripping its trackers and painting over the logos.

I sat in the back of the van, checking the action of my HK416 assault rifle.

I wore a black tactical plate carrier over my ruined dress uniform.

The silver eagles of a Colonel gleamed sharply against the dark nylon.

“Building schematic acquired from the public architectural registry,” General Kensington said, examining a glowing tactical tablet.

“The server farm is on the 28th floor. The physical fiber-optic uplink to the Pentagon is housed in a secured sub-room. The building is heavily guarded by Vanguard private contractors. These aren’t security guards, Samantha. They are former Special Forces. Mercenaries.”

“They fight for a paycheck,” I replied coldly, slamming a thirty-round magazine into my rifle.

“We fight for the men they murdered. The psychology is in our favor.”

My father sat across from me, armed with a silenced MP5 submachine gun.

He looked like an absolute phantom, a ghost from the Cold War ready to collect his debts.

“Two minutes to the loading bay,” the JSOC operator driving the van called out.

“Listen up,” I addressed the team, projecting absolute authority.

“We hit the loading dock, breach the service elevators, and ascend to the 28th floor. Non-lethal force on the perimeter guards if possible, but once we are inside, anyone holding a weapon is designated a hostile Archangel asset. We secure the server room, General Kensington initiates the upload of the physical documents using the scanner uplink, and we hold the perimeter until the Joint Chiefs receive the broadcast.”

The van violently lurched to a halt.

We had breached the underground loading bay doors by ramming the reinforced bumper directly through the steel security gate.

“Go! Go! Go!” I shouted.

The back doors flew open.

We poured out into the sterile, fluorescent-lit concrete cavern of the loading dock.

Four Vanguard mercenaries, armed with custom carbines, immediately opened fire.

The concrete exploded around us.

I dove behind a concrete pillar, returning fire in controlled, lethal bursts.

The JSOC operators moved with terrifying precision, flanking the mercenaries and neutralizing them with surgical efficiency.

We stacked up on the heavy steel doors of the service elevator.

An operator slapped a linear shaped charge onto the locking mechanism.

“Breaching!”

The explosion was deafening.

The steel doors blew inward.

We rushed into the oversized freight elevator.

Kensington slammed the override panel, wiring his decryption module into the circuitry to bypass the floor lockout.

The elevator surged upward.

The tension in the metal box was suffocating.

We watched the digital floor indicator climb.

20.

22.

25.

27.

Ding.

The doors slid open.

The 28th floor was a sprawling labyrinth of glowing server racks, glass partitions, and polished granite floors.

It was also crawling with Vanguard’s elite response team.

The firefight was instantaneous and brutally intimate.

The roar of suppressed automatic weapons echoed through the server aisles.

Glass shattered in glittering waves.

I moved through the chaos seamlessly, my rifle tucked tight into my shoulder.

I dropped two mercenaries who tried to flank us near a cooling unit, stepping over their bodies to push the line forward.

My father was a terrifying force of nature.

Thirty years of torture had stripped away any hesitation.

He moved like a shadow, engaging targets in close-quarters combat with a viciousness that left the Vanguard operators completely broken.

We reached the heavy biometric blast doors of the primary uplink room.

“Covering fire!” I ordered, kneeling by the door panel while Kensington hooked up his hacking terminal.

Suddenly, the glass above us shattered.

A massive figure dropped from the ventilation gantry directly onto the floor between me and the JSOC operators.

It was Elias Croft.

Vanguard’s tactical director.

I recognized him from the intel dossiers.

He was a massive, heavily scarred former Navy SEAL who had sold his soul to Grayson a decade ago.

Croft didn’t use his rifle.

He kicked my HK416 out of my hands, the sheer force of the blow sending a shockwave up my arm.

He drew a massive, serrated combat knife and lunged at my throat.

I sidestepped the thrust, parrying his arm with my forearm.

He was incredibly fast, bringing his knee up to shatter my ribs.

I absorbed the blow, spinning inside his guard, and drew my own standard-issue ka-bar knife from my chest rig.

Croft slashed wildly, a brutal, overwhelming offensive designed to bleed an opponent out.

I backed up against a server rack, dodging and weaving.

“You’re a long way from the sandbox, little girl!” Croft spat, driving his knife toward my chest.

I didn’t block it.

I stepped into the strike, twisting my torso so his blade grazed off my ceramic armor plate.

Using his own forward momentum, I trapped his knife arm under my armpit, locking it in place.

I raised my right hand and drove the pommel of my ka-bar directly into his temple with the force of a sledgehammer.

Croft’s eyes rolled back.

He collapsed heavily to the floor, instantly neutralized.

“Door is open!” Kensington shouted.

We rushed into the secure uplink room, slamming the blast doors shut and engaging the magnetic locks.

The server terminal was active.

Kensington immediately laid the tungsten canister on the desk, unrolling the documents.

He placed them on the high-speed intelligence scanner, typing frantically on the keyboard to bypass Vanguard’s internal firewalls and hijack the direct line to the Pentagon Situation Room.

“Uplink established,” Kensington breathed, sweat dripping down his face.

“Bypassing DoD encryptions. Initiating broadcast to all Joint Chiefs of Staff terminals.”

A massive progress bar appeared on the primary wall monitor.

10%… 30%… 50%…

“Almost there,” my father rasped, keeping his submachine gun aimed at the locked blast doors.

Suddenly, the progress bar stopped at 92%.

The screen flickered.

The Vanguard logo disappeared.

It was replaced by a live, high-definition video feed.

Secretary of Defense Philip Grayson was sitting at a massive mahogany desk, dressed in an immaculate tuxedo.

He wasn’t in a bunker.

He wasn’t panicking.

He was smiling warmly, taking a sip from a crystal glass of bourbon.

“I have to admit, Samantha,” Grayson’s voice echoed through the server room’s speakers.

“I didn’t think you would actually breach Alexandria. You are relentlessly predictable in your aggression.”

“The documents are in the system, Grayson,” I snarled, stepping up to the camera.

“Your override won’t hold forever. We have the proof.”

“Oh, I know you do,” Grayson chuckled softly.

“But proof only matters if there is a government left to read it. And if you survive to testify.”

“What are you talking about?” Kensington demanded.

“You hacked my servers, Arthur,” Grayson smiled, leaning forward.

“Did you bother to check what the servers were currently processing? Vanguard isn’t just an intelligence firm. We manage the automated defense grids for the Eastern Seaboard.”

Grayson tapped a key on his desk.

The screen split.

On the right side, a tactical map of Washington D.C.

appeared.

Three blinking red dots materialized over the Potomac River.

“I’ve initiated a manual override of three Vanguard-contracted drone swarms,” Grayson said, his voice dropping into a chilling, absolute calm.

“They are currently armed with high-yield incendiary payloads, and they are vectoring directly toward the Capitol Building, the White House, and the Pentagon.”

The blood drained from my face.

It was a decapitation strike.

He was wiping out the entire United States leadership to seize control in the chaos.

“And as for you, Colonel Mitchell,” Grayson smiled, raising his glass.

“The 28th floor of the Alexandria building was lined with C4 explosives three years ago, specifically to prevent our servers from falling into enemy hands. The detonator is tied to my biometric pulse. And I just triggered it.”

Grayson checked his gold wristwatch.

“You have exactly sixty seconds before the building vaporizes. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”

Sixty seconds.

That is all it takes to erase a thirty-story skyscraper, a four-star general, a phantom spy, and the only squad of JSOC operators standing between a rogue Secretary of Defense and the total annihilation of the United States capital.

As the digital timer on Vanguard’s mainframe began its lethal descent, I didn’t think about my mother’s betrayal, or the eagles pinned to my collar.

I only thought about one thing: how to cheat death when the devil himself had rigged the game.

“Fifty-five seconds,” General Kensington stated, his voice devoid of panic, processing the catastrophic reality with the cold, mathematical precision of a seasoned battlefield commander.

The live feed of Secretary of Defense Philip Grayson flickered out, replaced by a massive, pulsing red digital timer ticking down on the primary wall monitor.

The 28th floor of the Vanguard Global Headquarters was rigged with C4, a localized demolition protocol designed to vaporize the server farm and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing inside it.

“The stairwells are a death trap!” one of the JSOC operators shouted over the blaring klaxons.

“Even at a full sprint, we’d barely make it to the twentieth floor before the structural charges blow the supports!”

“Windows?” another operator asked, racking his weapon.

“We’re three hundred feet in the air without parachutes,” I snapped, my eyes frantically scanning the sprawling labyrinth of glowing server racks.

“Jumping just changes the cause of death from fire to gravity. We need a hard point. We need a bunker.”

“There are no bunkers on the 28th floor of a glass high-rise, Colonel!” Kensington roared.

“Yes, there are,” my father, Jonathan, rasped.

He was already moving, his heavily scarred hands grabbing the tactical vest of the unconscious Vanguard tactical director, Elias Croft, and hauling the massive mercenary to his feet.

“Jonathan, what are you doing?” Kensington demanded.

“Corporate greed, Arthur!” my father yelled over the alarms.

“I spent thirty years memorizing how these sociopaths think! Vanguard values its proprietary data far more than it values human life. This entire floor is a decoy. The real archival data—the stuff they use to blackmail politicians and control defense grids—isn’t sitting out here behind standard glass partitions. It’s housed in an EMP-hardened, kinetic-shock-resistant Faraday vault. A black box for a skyscraper.”

“Where?” I demanded, the timer above us flashing down to thirty-eight seconds.

Jonathan dragged the unconscious Croft toward the absolute center of the floor plan, a completely unadorned, matte-black titanium wall section that looked like structural support.

“Right here. It’s a drop-safe core. Designed to survive the total collapse of the building and be excavated later from the rubble. But it requires top-tier biometric access.”

I didn’t hesitate.

I grabbed Croft’s right hand, slamming his palm against the hidden biometric scanner embedded flush in the titanium.

The scanner glowed red.

Access Denied.

“It’s dual-factor!” I shouted.

“It needs a retinal scan!”

“Hold him up!” my father ordered.

I hauled Croft up by his collar, propping his head up.

My father grabbed Croft’s jaw, prying his eyelid open and forcing his face toward the optical sensor.

The machine hummed, scanning the unconscious mercenary’s pupil.

Access Granted.

With a massive, pneumatic hiss, the titanium wall split open, revealing a claustrophobic, reinforced steel chamber no larger than a standard freight elevator.

The walls were lined with shock-absorbing hydraulic struts and isolated server banks.

“Get in!” I screamed.

Twenty-two seconds.

The JSOC operators piled into the tight space.

Kensington grabbed the tungsten canister containing the physical Archangel Protocols and dove in behind them.

I stayed on the perimeter, grabbing Croft by the tactical harness and hurling his heavy, unconscious body into the vault.

We might need him later, and I wasn’t going to let Grayson have the satisfaction of tying up all his loose ends.

Fourteen seconds.

“Sammy, come on!” my father yelled, standing inside the vault, his hand desperately gripping the manual override lever for the door.

I took one last look at the server room, at the blinking red timer on the wall displaying eleven seconds.

I leaped into the titanium core.

My father slammed the lever down.

The heavy doors slammed shut with a deafening, absolute finality.

The sound of the external alarms was instantly cut off, replaced by the dead, suffocating silence of an airtight kinetic tomb.

“Brace for impact!” Kensington ordered, pressing his back against the padded bulkhead and locking his knees.

I stood beside my father, linking my arm through his, pressing my boots flat against the floor.

We closed our eyes.

The countdown in my head reached zero.

The initial detonation wasn’t a sound; it was a physical force that violently rearranged the air inside our lungs.

The floor beneath us bucked upward with terrifying violence.

Even through two feet of reinforced titanium and acoustic dampening, the roar of the C4 ripping through the 28th floor was apocalyptic.

Then came the weightlessness.

As the structural supports of the Alexandria building were systematically vaporized, the skyscraper ceased to be a building and became a million tons of falling debris.

The titanium drop-safe core dislodged from its housing.

We were in freefall.

The sensation of plunging through the center of a collapsing skyscraper is a nightmare of violent, erratic motion.

The vault slammed against steel beams, ricocheting off falling concrete slabs.

The shock-absorbing struts screamed in protest.

We were thrown against the walls like ragdolls in a dryer.

I collided heavily with a JSOC operator, my shoulder taking a brutal impact against a server rack.

Through the chaos, my father’s hand never let go of my arm.

His grip was the only thing anchoring me to reality.

The freefall seemed to last an eternity, though physics dictated it was only seconds.

Then, we hit the ground.

The impact was cataclysmic.

The hydraulic struts blew out with a deafening crack.

The lights instantly shattered, plunging us into absolute, crushing darkness.

The sheer kinetic force of the landing drove the breath from my lungs, knocking me completely unconscious.

I woke up to the taste of copper and the sound of someone gasping for air.

My eyes snapped open, but nothing changed.

It was an absolute, suffocating blackness.

For a terrifying second, my mind flashed back to the Syrian desert, pinned beneath the burning fuselage of a Black Hawk.

“Sound off,” I rasped, my voice barely a whisper in the pitch black.

“Kensington,” a deep, groaning voice replied to my left.

“Left arm is broken. Ribs are cracked. But I’m breathing.”

“Operators one through four are up,” one of the JSOC men coughed.

“Banged up. Croft is still out cold.”

“Dad?” I called out, panic suddenly flaring in my chest.

“Jonathan?”

A narrow, blinding beam of light pierced the darkness.

My father had activated the tactical penlight attached to his chest rig.

He was sitting on the floor across from me, bleeding from a deep laceration on his cheek, but he offered me that same, unbreakable half-smile.

“Takes more than a corporate demolition to kill a ghost, Sammy,” he wheezed.

I let out a shuddering breath of relief.

I began assessing my own body.

My ribs throbbed fiercely, and my head felt like it had been split with an axe, but nothing was broken.

The ceramic trauma plates in my vest had absorbed the worst of the impact against the walls.

I looked around the vault.

The titanium core had held.

The walls were bowed slightly inward, dented and scorched, but unbreached.

We were alive.

But we were buried under thirty stories of twisted steel and concrete.

“We survived the fall,” Kensington said, struggling to a sitting position.

He shone his own flashlight toward the ceiling of the vault.

“But this core is airtight. We have maybe three hours of oxygen for seven people. And nobody knows we’re down here.”

“Grayson thinks he won,” I said, the fury reigniting in my blood, pushing the pain aside.

“He thinks he destroyed the evidence and took out the Joint Chiefs in one play.”

“The drones,” Kensington realized, his eyes widening in horror.

“The swarm heading for D.C. If Grayson’s attack succeeds, Vanguard will step in to ‘restore order.’ It’s a corporate coup d’état.”

“Not if we finish the upload,” my father said, shining his penlight on a small, recessed terminal built directly into the wall of the archival vault.

“The upload was severed when the servers outside blew,” Kensington argued.

“The external servers blew,” Jonathan corrected, moving to the terminal.

“But this core is designed to maintain a hardwired connection to the deepest fiber-optic trunks running beneath the city. It’s a localized, closed-loop network.”

Jonathan ripped the access panel off the wall, exposing a nest of wiring.

He pulled his combat knife and began stripping the ends of the cables, his hands moving with the frantic, practiced speed of a Cold War saboteur.

“Arthur, plug your decryption module into this port,” Jonathan ordered.

“We bypass the external network entirely and push the data packet straight through the subterranean line.”

Kensington gritted his teeth against the pain of his broken arm, sliding his module into the makeshift port.

The small terminal screen flickered to life, casting a sickly green glow over our battered faces.

Uplink Paused at 92%.

Awaiting Network Connection.

“I’m overriding the firewall protocols,” Kensington muttered, typing furiously with one hand.

“Come on… come on, you corporate piece of garbage, connect.”

The progress bar hung frozen for an agonizing minute.

In the silence of the buried vault, the only sound was our elevated breathing, consuming our precious, limited oxygen.

Suddenly, the green bar surged.

94%… 97%… 99%…

Upload Complete.

Broadcast Distributed.

“It’s out,” Kensington gasped, leaning his head back against the titanium wall.

“Every member of the Joint Chiefs, the Director of the CIA, and the top editors of the New York Times and Washington Post just received the Archangel Protocols, complete with Grayson’s signature and the Vanguard proxy transfers.”

“Can you intercept the Pentagon comms traffic?” I asked, my heart pounding.

“We need to know if they got it in time to stop the drones.”

Kensington tapped a few keys, routing the incoming radio signals through the fiber-optic line and broadcasting it through the vault’s small emergency speaker.

At first, it was just static.

Then, the chaotic, panicked chatter of the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center flooded the vault.

“…Vanguard override neutralized! I repeat, we have locked Vanguard out of the Eastern Seaboard grid using the override codes in the Archangel file!”

“Patriot batteries at Andrews Air Force Base are weapons hot. Target lock on the drone swarm.”

“Foxhound One, you are cleared to engage hostile UAVs over the Potomac. Splash those drones, Foxhound!”

“Multiple splashes confirmed! The Capitol is secure. The White House is secure. I repeat, decapitation strike has been thwarted.”

A cheer went up from the JSOC operators in our tiny, buried tomb.

My father let out a long, heavy sigh, his shoulders slumping slightly.

We had done it.

We had stopped a coup.

But the victory was immediately overshadowed by a harsh, grating sound from the corner of the vault.

Elias Croft, the Vanguard tactical director, was waking up.

He groaned, clutching his bloodied temple, and immediately assessed the situation.

He realized he was trapped in a box with the people who had just dismantled his employer’s empire.

With lightning speed, Croft lunged forward, grabbing a sidearm from the holster of the nearest, injured JSOC operator.

Before Croft could even level the weapon, I moved.

I kicked the gun out of his hand, the weapon clattering against the titanium wall.

I drove my knee into his chest, pinning him to the floor, and pressed the edge of my ka-bar knife directly against his carotid artery.

“Give me an excuse, Elias,” I whispered, my voice dripping with venom.

“Give me one reason to save the oxygen you’re currently stealing.”

Croft stared up at me, a defiant, bloody grin spreading across his face.

“You’re going to suffocate in here anyway, Mitchell. Grayson is gone. The drones failed, but he has extraction contingencies. He’s already halfway across the globe with billions in untraceable crypto. You die in the dark, and he lives like a king.”

“Where is he?” I demanded, pressing the blade hard enough to draw a bead of blood.

“You think he shares his flight plans with the hired help?” Croft laughed.

Suddenly, my father stepped forward.

He knelt beside me, looking down at Croft.

Jonathan’s hazel eyes were completely devoid of humanity.

They were the eyes of a man who had survived Siberian torture cells, a man who knew exactly how to break a human mind.

“Elias,” Jonathan whispered, his raspy voice sending a chill down my spine.

“This vault has a manual emergency ventilation release valve on the exterior hull. It’s designed to pop open to the surface if the core is buried. But it can only be activated from the inside via a specific sequence on the terminal. You know the sequence.”

Croft sneered.

“Why would I tell you? We all die.”

“No,” Jonathan corrected softly.

“You die. Right now. Unless you open that vent.”

“You want to torture me, old man?” Croft spat.

“I’m a SEAL. I’ve been waterboarded for fun. You have nothing in this box to break me with.”

“I don’t need tools,” Jonathan said.

“I just need to look at your biometric profile on the terminal.” He glanced up at the screen Kensington was manning.

“Arthur, pull up his personnel file from the Vanguard network before it crashes. Specifically, his familial emergency contacts.”

Croft’s arrogant smile instantly vanished.

The color drained from his face.

“You wouldn’t,” Croft breathed.

“You tried to murder my daughter,” Jonathan replied, his voice colder than the grave.

“You helped murder twelve American soldiers in Kunar. If we suffocate in this box, my last act on this earth will be transmitting the location of your wife and two daughters in San Diego to the Russian intelligence syndicate I spent thirty years manipulating. They will consider it a final favor. Your family will not just die, Elias. They will be taken to places that don’t exist on any map.”

I stared at my father, stunned by the sheer, terrifying ruthlessness of his bluff.

Croft believed it.

He saw the scars on Jonathan’s face, he saw the absolute deadness in his eyes, and the mercenary broke.

“Command override… zero-niner-echo-charlie,” Croft stammered rapidly.

“Execute.”

Kensington punched the code into the terminal.

Above us, a heavy, grinding mechanical gears shifted.

A small, reinforced panel in the ceiling slid open, revealing a ventilation pipe.

A rush of cool, dust-choked air flooded into the vault.

It wasn’t fresh, it smelled of pulverized concrete and smoke, but it was oxygen.

We were going to live.

Time loses all meaning when you are buried alive.

We sat in the dim glow of the terminal for what felt like days, rationing the water from our canteens, listening to the distant, muffled sounds of shifting rubble above us.

I spent hours talking to my father.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel the crushing weight of abandonment.

I heard the stories of his early days in JSOC, the missions he ran before I was born.

He didn’t speak of the torture in Siberia; he only spoke of how the memory of my face had kept him from losing his mind in the dark.

“I used to count the days by trying to imagine what you looked like as you grew up,” Jonathan whispered, resting his head against the titanium wall.

“I missed your graduation. I missed your commissioning ceremony. I missed everything.”

“You’re here now,” I said, gripping his hand tightly.

“That’s all that matters.”

Suddenly, a loud, rhythmic clanging echoed through the ceiling.

Clang.

Clang.

Clang.

It wasn’t shifting rubble.

It was deliberate.

Someone was striking the exterior hull of the drop-safe core.

“We have company,” Kensington said, struggling to stand.

A shower of sparks erupted from the ceiling as a plasma cutting torch sliced through the outer locking mechanism of the main hatch.

The JSOC operators raised their weapons, preparing for a Vanguard mop-up crew.

The heavy titanium hatch was violently wrenched open.

A blinding beam of daylight flooded the chamber, forcing us to shield our eyes.

A man dropped down into the vault.

He was wearing the tactical uniform of a United States Marine Force Recon element.

He looked at us, his eyes widening as he recognized General Kensington.

“General,” the Marine said, snapping a crisp salute despite the cramped quarters.

“The Joint Chiefs sent us. You have the entire Armed Forces digging through this crater looking for you.”

“Good to see you, son,” Kensington grunted, returning the salute.

They lowered a harness and hoisted us out of the tomb one by one.

When I finally breached the surface, the sight stole the breath from my lungs.

The thirty-story Vanguard Global Headquarters was completely gone, reduced to a sprawling, smoking mountain of pulverized concrete and twisted steel rebar.

Hundreds of military personnel, heavy excavators, and federal agents swarmed the wreckage.

The sun was rising over Alexandria, casting a golden light over the devastation.

“Colonel Mitchell!”

I turned.

Striding across the rubble toward us was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, flanked by heavily armed military police.

He looked at General Kensington, then at me, and finally at my father, Jonathan.

“General Kensington. Colonel,” the Chairman said, his voice thick with profound respect.

“The President has been briefed. The Archangel Protocols have been verified by the CIA. Vanguard has been officially designated a domestic terrorist organization, and all their global assets are currently being seized by allied forces.”

“What about Philip Grayson?” I asked, my voice cutting through the formalities.

The Chairman’s expression darkened.

“Grayson never made it to his designated evacuation chopper. The broadcast spooked his Vanguard pilots. They abandoned him. He vanished into the D.C. underground grid three hours ago.”

“He has no resources,” Kensington said.

“Vanguard’s accounts are frozen.”

“That’s exactly the problem,” the Chairman replied grimly.

“Grayson doesn’t have access to corporate funds anymore, but he knows where a massive pile of untraceable black money is sitting. The three million dollars Senator Mitchell routed to the Caymans for the Kunar ambush.”

My blood ran cold.

The money my mother had used to build her empire.

“The Cayman shell company requires dual authorization,” my father said suddenly, stepping forward.

“Robert Mitchell is in federal custody. The only other person who can authorize that transfer is…”

“Beatrice,” I whispered.

“We intercepted a panicked phone call from the federal holding facility in Rhode Island ten minutes ago,” the Chairman said, looking directly at me.

“A heavily armed Vanguard splinter team hit the transport convoy moving your mother to maximum security. They slaughtered the federal marshals.”

“Grayson took her,” I said, the reality hitting me like a physical blow.

Grayson didn’t take Beatrice as a hostage to bargain with the government.

He took her to an extraction point to force her to empty the offshore accounts so he could fund his disappearance into the global criminal underworld.

I hated my mother.

She had destroyed my father’s life.

She had lied to me, mocked me, and profited off the blood of my men.

A dark, vicious part of my soul wanted to let Grayson have her.

Let them destroy each other.

But I am an American soldier.

I am the commander of Task Force 141.

And I do not let rogue politicians murder American citizens, regardless of their sins.

I turned to General Kensington.

“General,” I said, my voice hardening into absolute, unyielding steel.

“I need a fully fueled MH-60, a satellite tracking uplink for Grayson’s phone, and my tactical gear reloaded.”

Kensington looked at me, a fierce, proud glint in his eye.

“You have tactical command of this operation, Colonel. What are your orders?”

I looked out over the smoking ruins of Vanguard, adjusting the silver eagles on my collar.

“We hunt the Secretary of Defense,” I said.

“And we end this war today.”