Two military police officers stood guard at the steel doors, and a Blackhawk helicopter sat idling on the helipad, its rotors slowly turning, whipping the evening rain into a mist.
Inside the VIP suite on the top floor—usually reserved for wealthy donors—Master Sergeant Thomas Knox lay in a bed. He was surrounded by monitoring equipment that was far more advanced than anything the ER downstairs possessed. The military had brought their own medical team.
Harper walked in. She had shed the scrubs. She was now dressed in a clean, tactical flight suit provided by Halloway’s team. She looked more like herself. The scrubs had always felt like a costume.
Knox opened his eyes. He looked rough—tubes in his nose, bruising covering half his face—but he was alive. He saw Harper, and a weak, gap-toothed grin spread through his gray beard.
“Ghost,” Knox rasped, his voice a gravelly whisper. “I thought I saw you. Thought I was dead, and you were the Angel of Death coming to collect.”
“Not today, Top,” Harper said, taking his large, calloused hand. “You had a tension pneumothorax. A collapsed lung. The local butcher nearly fried your heart trying to shock a rhythm that wasn’t there.”
“The surgeon?” Knox asked, coughing slightly.
“Taken care of,” Harper said.
General Halloway stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out at the city skyline.
“Not fully, Major. We have a problem.”
Harper turned. “Sir?”
“Sterling Preston isn’t backing down,” Halloway said grimly, turning to face the room. “He’s calling in favors. Senators. The Governor. He’s spinning a narrative to the media that you are a rogue soldier with untreated PTSD who snapped and attacked a defenseless doctor.”
“Let him,” Harper’s jaw tightened. “The truth will come out.”
“It’s not that simple,” Halloway said. “If he digs too deep, he might find out about Operation Cinder. The Syria mission.”
The room went cold.
Operation Cinder was the reason Harper had left the service. It was a classified extraction where things had gone horribly wrong. Civilians had died because of bad intel provided by the CIA. But the CIA had buried their tracks, and the blame had almost fallen entirely on Harper’s unit. It had taken General Halloway months to get the records redacted and sealed to protect her team from being scapegoated.
“If he exposes that,” Harper said quietly, the weight of the past crashing down on her, “my team gets dragged through the mud. The families of the fallen…”
“Exactly,” Halloway said. “Sterling Preston is threatening to release anonymous leaks claiming you were dishonorably discharged for war crimes unless we hand you over to the civilian authorities and issue a public apology. He’s holding your reputation, and the memory of your unit, hostage to save his son’s ego.”
