CHAPTER 1: THE HUNTER BECOMES THE PREY

The transition from silence to chaos was instantaneous.

To the men of the Sonora Cartel, the desert had been empty. A vast, unoccupied oven, baking the red earth until it cracked. When I gave the order, the desert floor itself seemed to stand up and open fire.

“Contact front! Contact left!” I heard the screams over their unencrypted radio frequencies. We had tapped their comms hours ago, listening to their arrogant chatter as they approached the ‘helpless’ convoy.

My first shot wasn’t at a person. It was at the engine block of their escape vehicle, a modified technical truck sitting on the ridge, mounted with a .50 cal machine gun. The .338 Lapua round cracked through the dry air, covering the 800 yards in a heartbeat. It smashed into the engine block, shattering cast iron and turning the truck into a smoking paperweight.

“Escape route denied,” I muttered, cycling the bolt.

Down in the valley, ‘Tank’—my heavy weapons specialist—opened up with the SAW. The rhythmic thump-thump-thump was the heartbeat of the ambush. He wasn’t shooting to kill indiscriminately; he was herding them. We needed them confused. We needed them terrified.

The cartel gunmen, who just seconds ago were high-fiving over a successful hijack, froze. They were taking fire from three different elevations. They couldn’t see us. Our ghillie suits were dusted with the same red earth we were lying in. To them, the bullets were coming from the mountains themselves.

“They’re panicking,” Lt. Torres reported from her overwatch position, her voice cool and detached. “Formation is breaking. They’re trying to push toward the convoy trucks for cover.”

“Let them,” I said. “That’s where we want them. Box them in.”

I watched El Coyote through my scope. The confidence was gone, replaced by a frantic, animalistic fear. He was shouting orders, waving a gold-plated pistol that glinted in the harsh sun, but his men weren’t listening. They were realizing that the prey they had stalked was actually a predator they couldn’t comprehend.

This wasn’t a law enforcement operation. This wasn’t a warning shot. This was a reckoning.

We had watched them for weeks. We knew their names. We knew their tactics. We knew that El Coyote liked to hit convoys at exactly 1400 hours when the sun glare was worst for the drivers. We used the sun against him today, positioning ourselves so they were looking directly into the glare to find us.

“Morrison, I’ve got three tangos trying to flank right,” Rodriguez, our medic and close-quarters specialist, called out over the team net.

“Drop them,” I ordered.

Three distinct shots rang out. Three threats neutralized.

“Clear,” Rodriguez said.

The gunfire from the cartel slowed. They were running out of ammo, and more importantly, they were running out of morale. They were pinned behind the very trucks they came to steal—trucks that were empty of the medical tech they wanted, filled instead with sandbags to mimic the weight.

I keyed the mic, my voice calm but carrying the weight of finality. “Cease fire. Cease fire.”

The silence that rushed back into the valley was heavier than the noise. The dust hung in the air like a curtain, filtering the sunlight into a hazy orange glow.

“El Coyote!” I shouted, my voice amplified by the canyon walls. I didn’t need a megaphone. “You have ten seconds to throw out your weapons and walk out with your hands on your heads. Or the next rounds go through the armor.”

I watched him hesitate through my optics. He looked at his men—hardened killers who were now cowering in the dirt. He looked at the burning wreck of his escape truck. He looked at the empty desert hills that were currently aiming six high-powered rifles at his chest.

He dropped the gold pistol. It hit the rocks with a clatter that sounded like surrender.

“Move in,” I told the team. “Secure the site. And somebody get me that laptop he’s trying to hide in his jacket.”

We moved down the slopes, weapons raised, sliding on the loose scree. As I approached El Coyote, I pulled down my face wrap. I wanted him to see me. I wanted him to know this wasn’t random chance.

He looked at me, dust coating his expensive suit, sweat tracking through the grime on his face. He smelled of fear and expensive cologne.

“Who are you?” he spat in Spanish, trying to muster some dignity. “Federales? DEA?”

I kicked his legs apart and zip-tied his hands, pulling them tight enough to remind him who was in charge.

“We’re the guys you don’t read about in the papers,” I said, hauling him to his feet.

I grabbed the ruggedized laptop from his tactical vest. This was the real prize. The cargo in the trucks was just bait. The real payload was whatever data El Coyote was using to hit our convoys with such impossible precision.

“Tech, you’re up,” I yelled.

Tech, our cyber-warfare specialist, sat on the bumper of a Humvee and cracked the laptop open. He plugged in a decryption drive that cost more than the truck he was sitting on.

“Give me two minutes, Boss,” Tech said, his fingers flying across the keys. “Encryption is heavy. Military grade.”

“Cartels don’t use military-grade encryption,” I said, a cold feeling settling in my stomach despite the 110-degree heat.

“They do when someone gives it to them,” Tech replied, his face illuminated by the screen’s glow. “I’m in. Boss… you need to see this.”

I walked over, leaving El Coyote under the watchful eye of Tank’s machine gun.

“What is it?”

“These aren’t just convoy routes,” Tech said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “This is a live feed of our border defense grid. Satellite positioning, drone rotations, shift changes for Border Patrol.”

He scrolled down, revealing a map of the entire southwest defense network.

“And Boss? The access codes… they didn’t hack them. These codes were authorized by a user with Pentagon-level clearance.”

I looked back at the desert. The heat was still oppressive, but suddenly, I felt cold.

“This wasn’t a theft,” I whispered. “This is a supply line. Someone on our side is building an army down here.”

CHAPTER 2: THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

The revelation hit me harder than a physical blow. We weren’t just fighting drug runners. We were fighting a traitor. A ghost in our own machine.

“Secure everything,” I barked, the mission parameters shifting instantly in my head. “We’re not just extraction anymore. This is now a containment operation. Nobody leaves this valley until I know who authorized those codes.”

El Coyote was laughing. It was a low, dry sound, like dry leaves scraping over concrete.

“You think you won, Commander?” he sneered, leaning against the tire of the truck. “You think stopping me stops the flow? I am just a delivery boy. I am a symptom.”

I walked back to him, grabbed him by the collar of his jacket, and slammed him against the side of the armored truck.

“Who gave you the access keys?” I demanded, my face inches from his.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he hissed, his eyes darting around. “Protocol Black. Do you know what that is?”

I didn’t. And that terrified me. In twenty years of service, I thought I knew every black operation on the books.

“Boss,” Lt. Torres called out, pressing her headset to her ear. Her face had gone pale. “We have a problem. I’m picking up a signal. Low frequency. Coming from the laptop.”

“Kill it,” I ordered.

“I can’t. It’s a dead-man switch. It triggered when we cracked the encryption. It just broadcasted our GPS coordinates.”

“To who?” I asked, scanning the horizon.

“Not to the Cartel,” Torres said, looking up at me, her eyes wide with disbelief. “To the U.S. airbase at Creech. I’m reading a flight plan filed two minutes ago. Drone strike inbound. Danger close. Authorization code: Omega.”

“They’re cleaning up loose ends,” I realized, the betrayal stinging worse than the sweat in my eyes. “And we’re the loose ends.”

“Time to impact?”

“Four minutes. Maybe less.”

“Cut the prisoners loose!” I shouted. “We leave them water, but we are leaving. Now! Move, move, move!”

“We can’t just leave him!” Tank argued, gesturing to El Coyote with the barrel of his SAW. “He’s the only lead we have!”

“Then throw him in the truck! Let’s go!”

We scrambled. The discipline of the ambush turned into the frantic speed of survival. We threw our gear into our extraction vehicles—two heavy-duty off-road SUVs hidden in a ravine fifty yards away. I dragged El Coyote into the back of my vehicle, ignoring his protests.

“You’re lucky day,” I told him as I shoved him into the backseat. “You get to live long enough to talk.”

We peeled out of the canyon, tires spinning on the loose rock, engines screaming as we pushed the RPMs into the red. We were bouncing violently over the uneven terrain, heading for the cover of a rock archway about a mile out.

We were barely under the shadow of the rocks when the sky tore open.

It wasn’t a sound; it was a concussion. A Hellfire missile slammed into the spot where we had just been standing. The explosion rocked our SUVs, dust and shrapnel peppering the rear windows. The shockwave rattled my teeth.

I looked in the rearview mirror. A pillar of black smoke and fire rose into the blue sky, marking the spot where the cartel soldiers—and our evidence—had been.

“That was American ordnance,” Ghost said from the passenger seat, his voice hollow. He stared at the smoke. “They just tried to vaporize a SEAL team.”

“Not ‘they’,” I corrected, gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. “Him. The traitor.”

I looked at El Coyote in the backseat. He wasn’t laughing anymore. He looked pale, trembling. He knew that missile was meant for him just as much as it was for us. He realized he was disposable.

“Protocol Black,” I said to him, meeting his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Talk. Now.”

He swallowed hard. “It’s a coup, Commander. It’s not about drugs. It’s about destabilization. They are moving equipment to staging grounds in Texas and Arizona. They want chaos on the border so they can declare martial law. Your ‘Pentagon clearance’ is Colonel Richard Hayes.”

The name froze the air in the car. Hayes was a war hero. A man I had served under in Fallujah. A man who was currently in charge of Border Tactical Operations. A man I trusted.

“Hayes is a patriot,” Ghost said, defending the name instinctively.

“Hayes is a businessman,” El Coyote corrected, his voice shaking. “And business is good.”

Tech spoke up from the backseat, his laptop open on his knees as we bounced over the terrain. “Boss, he might be right. I’m tracing the authorization signature for the drone strike. It came from a mobile command center… Hayes’ personal command center. It’s located forty miles north of here. In the Sierra Madre foothills.”

I looked at the map on my dashboard. We were rogue now. Dead men walking. If we went back to base, we’d be arrested or killed before we could present the evidence. The chain of command was broken.

“We’re not going back to base,” I said into the team comms.

“Where are we going, Boss?” Tank asked from the second vehicle.

I looked at the pillar of smoke behind us, then at the mountains ahead where the traitor was hiding.

“We’re going to pay Colonel Hayes a visit,” I said, shifting the SUV into gear. “And we’re going to ask him why he just tried to kill his own men.”

This wasn’t a mission anymore. It was a war for the soul of the country. And we were the only ones who knew it had started.

CHAPTER 3: THE UNLIKELY ALLIANCE

The desert night had settled over us, turning the burning red landscape into a world of deep blues and charcoal shadows. We were driving dark—lights off, navigating by night vision and the pale wash of the moon.

I watched the digital map on the dashboard. We were twenty miles from the coordinates Tech had pulled from the laptop. The Sierra Madre mountains loomed ahead, a jagged black wall against the stars.

“Commander,” Tech said from the back seat, his face glowing blue from his screen. “I’m picking up a signal. Friendly tag. It’s moving fast on an intercept course.”

“Friendly?” I scoffed. “We don’t have friends anymore, Tech. We’re ghosts.”

“It’s DEA, Boss,” Tech insisted. “Digital signature matches Agent Maria Reyes. She’s… she’s hailing us on a secure channel.”

I hesitated. If Hayes had the codes, he could spoof a DEA signal. But we needed intel, and we were running blind.

“Put her through,” I ordered.

A sharp, clear female voice cut through the static in my earpiece. “Commander Morrison, if you keep heading north on that ridge, you’re going to drive right into a kill box. Hayes has thermal drones circling the pass.”

I slammed on the brakes, the SUV skidding in the dust. “Who is this?”

“Someone who wants Hayes just as dead as you do,” the voice replied. “Turn east. There’s an old smuggler’s wash three clicks back. I’m waiting there.”

I looked at Ghost in the passenger seat. He nodded once. We turned the vehicles around.

Ten minutes later, we pulled into a narrow, dried-out riverbed hidden by overhanging rock. A black, unmarked tactical SUV was waiting. A woman stepped out, her hands visible, empty of weapons but clearly ready for a fight. She wore tactical gear, not a suit. This was Agent Reyes.

I stepped out, my rifle lowered but ready. “You have thirty seconds to explain why I shouldn’t treat you like another one of Hayes’ trap doors.”

“Because I brought you this,” she said, tossing a thick file folder onto the hood of my truck.

I opened it under the red glow of my tactical light. Photos. Surveillance logs. Shipping manifests.

“I’ve been tracking these ‘lost’ shipments for months,” Reyes said, crossing her arms. “The official reports say cartel hijackings. My reports said it was too clean. Too organized. I tried to push it up the chain, and my supervisor told me to stand down. Two days later, he bought a vacation home in the Caymans.”

“Hayes,” I said.

“He’s building a private army,” Reyes confirmed. “The facility you’re heading to? It’s not a cartel hideout. It’s a Forward Operating Base. He’s using cartel labor to build it, and U.S. tax dollars to fund it. And now that you have El Coyote…” She looked at the prisoner in my backseat. “…Hayes is going to burn everything to the ground to keep it secret.”

El Coyote leaned forward against the window, his eyes narrowing as he recognized Reyes. “Agent Reyes. You are the one who raided my distribution center in Juarez.”

“And you’re the scumbag who killed three of my agents,” she shot back, her hand drifting toward her sidearm.

“Stow it,” I ordered, stepping between them. “We have a bigger problem. Reyes, you said the pass is a kill box. How do we get in?”

“We don’t go through the pass,” Reyes said, pulling a map from her vest. “We go under it. There are old silver mines that honeycomb these mountains. The cartel—” she glared at El Coyote “—used them for years. Hayes sealed the main entrances, but there’s a ventilation shaft on the south face. It drops us right into their sublevels.”

“It’s a suicide mission,” Ghost muttered, looking at the map. “We’ll be outnumbered ten to one.”

“We’re Navy SEALs,” I said, a grim smile touching my lips. “We prefer forty to one. It’s a fairer fight.”

I turned to the team. “Gear up. We’re going mountain climbing.”

CHAPTER 4: INTO THE LION’S DEN

The climb was brutal. 8,000 feet of elevation, navigating loose shale and razor-sharp rock in pitch darkness. We moved in silence, a line of shadows creeping up the spine of the world.

Reyes held her own. She moved with the fluid economy of someone who had spent time in the field, not behind a desk. Even El Coyote, hands zip-tied in front of him, scrambled up the rocks with a desperate energy. He knew Hayes considered him a loose end. His only chance of survival was sticking close to the men he hated.

“Ventilation shaft ahead,” Ghost whispered over the comms, seeing it through his thermal scope. “Heat signature. It’s venting active air. Someone’s home.”

We approached the grate. It was welded shut, heavy steel set into concrete.

“Tank,” I signaled.

Tank moved up with the hydraulic cutters. With a low groan of metal, the grate sheared off. The air rushing out smelled of ozone, recycled oxygen, and gun oil. It smelled like a military bunker.

We rappelled down, fifty feet into the dark. We landed on a steel catwalk in a massive, cavernous room carved out of the mountain’s heart.

I scanned the area. Rows of vehicles. Not technicals with welded machine guns, but brand new, up-armored Humvees. Crates of munitions stacked to the ceiling.

“My God,” Tech whispered, looking at a stack of crates. “These are Javelin missiles. Anti-air systems. This isn’t a base, Boss. This is an invasion force.”

“Clear left,” Rodriguez reported.

We moved through the shadows of the motor pool, heading toward the central command structure. It was too quiet. No mechanics working on the trucks. No guards patrolling the catwalks.

“I don’t like this,” Reyes murmured. “Where is everyone?”

“They’re consolidating,” I said, checking my corners. “Hayes knows we’re coming. He’s pulled his perimeter in.”

We breached the main corridor. The aesthetics changed instantly—from rough-hewn rock to clean, sterile military hallway. Fluorescent lights hummed.

“Contact front!” Ghost yelled.

A door at the end of the hall kicked open. A squad of men in black tactical gear poured out. They weren’t wearing cartel rags. They moved in a tight stack, weapons high. Professional mercenaries.

“Engage!”

The hallway erupted. The deafening roar of automatic fire in the enclosed space was disorienting. Bullets sparked off the steel walls and concrete floor.

I dropped to a knee, putting two rounds into the chest of the lead merc. He staggered but didn’t fall—body armor. High grade.

“Headshots!” I yelled. “They’re armored up!”

Tank laid down suppressive fire with the SAW, chewing through the door frame and forcing the mercs back. We advanced under his cover, moving room to room. It was a brutal, close-quarters slog. Flashbangs dulled our senses; dust choked the air.

We reached a heavy blast door marked “Command Operations.”

“Tech, get this door open!” I ordered, reloading my rifle.

“Working on it!” Tech slapped a decoding puck onto the keypad. “Electronic lock… rotating cipher… got it!”

The heavy steel door hissed and slid open.

We stormed in, weapons ready to sweep the room.

It was empty.

Banks of monitors lined the walls, showing views of the entire facility. Maps of the US border were projected on the main screen with red strike zones highlighted. But the chairs were empty.

“He’s not here,” I said, the realization sinking in.

Suddenly, the main screen flickered. The face of Colonel Richard Hayes appeared. He looked calm, sitting in a leather chair in a room that was definitely not this one.

“Jack,” Hayes said, his voice amplified through the room’s speakers. “I expected you sooner. You were always tenacious.”

“Turn it off, Hayes,” I growled at the screen. “It’s over. We have the data. We have El Coyote.”

Hayes smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Vicente was a useful tool, but tools break. As for the data… you have nothing, Jack. Because you’re standing in the middle of a kiln.”

“Tech?” I looked at our cyber specialist.

Tech’s face was white. He was looking at a countdown timer that had just appeared on every screen in the room.

“Boss,” Tech stammered. “Protocol Omega. It’s not a data wipe. It’s a facility scuttle.”

“Thermobaric charges,” Reyes realized, horror in her voice. “They’re going to burn the oxygen out of the entire mountain.”

“You have two minutes, Jack,” Hayes said, reaching for a drink on his desk. “Die well.”

The screen went black.

CHAPTER 5: PROTOCOL OMEGA

“Run!” I screamed.

The discipline of the SEAL teams is legendary, but there is no tactical response to being inside a bomb. There is only survival.

We sprinted back the way we came. The facility was waking up—not with people, but with alarms. A mechanical voice droned over the PA system: “Sanitization sequence initiated. T-minus ninety seconds.”

“The ventilation shaft is too far!” Rodriguez yelled as we hit the hallway. “We’ll never climb out in time!”

“The motor pool!” I shouted. “The main bay doors! We blow them!”

We burst back into the cavernous vehicle bay. The heavy blast doors at the far end were sealed tight.

“Tank! The Javelins!” I pointed to the crates we had seen earlier.

Tank didn’t hesitate. He ripped the lid off a crate, hefting the heavy anti-tank missile launcher onto his shoulder.

“Clear the backblast!” he roared.

We dove behind a row of Humvees.

WHOOSH.

The missile screamed across the bay. It slammed into the center of the massive bay doors. The explosion was deafening, a shockwave of heat and pressure that rattled my teeth. When the smoke cleared, there was a jagged, twisting hole in the steel—daylight pouring through.

“T-minus thirty seconds.”

“Go! Go! Go!”

We scrambled through the wreckage. El Coyote tripped, falling hard on the concrete. I grabbed him by his zip-tie vest and hauled him up.

“You don’t get to die yet!” I yelled at him.

We burst out of the tunnel and onto a rocky access road just as the mountain behind us inhaled.

That’s the only way to describe it. A thermobaric explosion sucks the air in before it pushes the fire out. There was a terrifying thump, like the heartbeat of a giant, and then the entrance to the mine vomited a plume of fire three hundred feet long.

The shockwave caught us, throwing us off our feet and tumbling us down the scree slope.

I hit the dirt hard, rolling to absorb the impact. I lay there for a second, gasping for air, watching the flames lick the sky where we had been standing seconds ago.

Slowly, I sat up. My team was scattered around me, coughing, battered, but alive. Reyes was wiping blood from her forehead. El Coyote was curled in a ball, muttering prayers in Spanish.

“Is everyone up?” I croaked.

“We’re good, Boss,” Ghost said, dusting off his rifle. “Just a little singed.”

I stood up and looked at the burning mountain. Hayes had sacrificed hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment just to kill us. That meant whatever he was protecting at his real location was worth infinitely more.

“Tech,” I said. “Did you get it?”

Tech sat up, pulling a hard drive from his vest pocket. He grinned, his teeth white against his soot-covered face.

“Before the feed cut,” Tech said. “I traced Hayes’ broadcast signal. He wasn’t bouncing it through a satellite. It was a hardline connection.”

“Where?”

“About sixty miles west,” Tech said. “A place called ‘Punto Negro.’ Old mining complex. But the power grid readings are off the charts. He’s running something massive there.”

“Punto Negro,” El Coyote whispered, looking up. “The Black Point. That is where the shipments were going. Not to the Sierra Madre. Here… this was just storage. Punto Negro is the factory.”

“Factory for what?” Reyes asked.

“Chaos,” I said, checking the action on my rifle. It was still functional.

I looked at the smoking ruin behind us, then turned to the west. The sun was setting, casting long, bloody shadows across the desert.

“Hayes thinks we’re ash,” I told the team. “He thinks he won. That gives us the one thing we haven’t had this entire mission.”

“What’s that, Boss?” Tank asked.

“The element of surprise.”

I walked toward the access road where a few cartel vehicles—the ones that hadn’t been inside—were parked.

“Let’s go steal a ride,” I said. “We have a war to stop.”

CHAPTER 6: THE FACTORY OF CHAOS

We drove west in a stolen cartel pickup, a rusted Toyota that rattled every time we hit a pothole. It was the perfect camouflage. To anyone watching, we were just another group of smugglers navigating the backroads of the borderlands.

Punto Negro wasn’t on any civilian maps. It was a relic of the silver boom, an industrial scar carved into the side of a jagged canyon. As we crested the final ridge, killing the headlights, we saw it.

It looked like a city of the dead.

Rusted conveyor belts stretched like skeleton ribs across the canyon floor. Dilapidated corrugated tin shacks clustered around the massive, dark maw of the mine entrance. But amidst the decay, there was something new. Something wrong.

Massive, brand-new power transformers hummed with a low, menacing vibration that I could feel in my chest from half a mile away. Thick black cables snaked across the ground like arteries, feeding power into the depths of the earth.

“Look at the perimeter,” Ghost whispered, peering through his thermal optics. “No cartel patrols. These are automated sentries.”

He handed me the scope. I looked. Standing rigid at key intervals were quadrupedal robots—military-grade ‘dogs’ mounted with sensor arrays and what looked like 7.62mm miniguns.

“Hayes isn’t trusting humans with the perimeter anymore,” I said, handing the scope back. “He’s gone fully automated. That means no bribes, no distractions, and no mistakes.”

“How do we get past a kill-grid of robot dogs?” Reyes asked, checking the magazine on her pistol. She was running low on ammo. We all were.

“We don’t sneak past them,” I said. “We blind them.”

I turned to Tech. “Can you access their local network?”

Tech was already typing on El Coyote’s ruggedized laptop, tapping into the unsecured wifi of the stolen truck to boost his signal. “These units run on a hive mind protocol. If I can inject a logic loop into one, it should propagate to the others. But I need to be close. Like, ‘petting the dog’ close.”

“We’ll get you close,” I said.

We moved down the ridge on foot, using the shadows of the rusted mining equipment for cover. The hum of the transformers grew louder, masking the sound of our boots on the gravel.

We reached the outer fence. Thirty yards away, one of the robotic sentries paced mechanically, its optical sensors sweeping the darkness with green lasers.

“Go,” I signaled.

We moved in a diamond formation, Tech in the center. We were exposed. If that machine turned its head five degrees to the left, we would be cut down before we could raise our rifles.

The robot paused. Its head swiveled. The green laser swept over us.

I froze. My heart hammered against my ribs. I waited for the whine of the minigun spinning up.

Nothing happened.

“I’m in!” Tech whispered frantically, sweat dripping onto his keyboard. “I’m looping its visual feed. As far as it knows, it’s looking at empty desert.”

The robot turned away, resuming its patrol.

We breached the fence and moved toward the main mine entrance. The air coming out of the tunnel was cold and smelled of ozone and something chemical.

“Masks up if you have them,” I ordered, pulling my shemagh over my face.

We descended into the mine. This wasn’t like the storage facility. This was a factory.

The main cavern opened up into a space the size of a football field. And what I saw made my blood run cold.

It wasn’t drugs. It wasn’t just guns.

Rows of unmarked, black drones sat on assembly lines. But these weren’t surveillance drones. They were heavy-lift hexacopters, each fitted with a canister underneath.

“Bio-weapons?” Tank asked, his voice hushed.

“Worse,” Reyes said, walking up to a workstation and picking up a schematic. “Look at the targeting parameters. ‘Water Treatment.’ ‘Power Grid.’ ‘Communications Hubs.'”

She looked at me, her face pale.

“Hayes isn’t planning to attack the border, Jack. He’s planning to attack American cities. He’s going to use these drones to drop chemical dispersants into water supplies and power stations across the Southwest. He’s going to turn the lights off and poison the water, then blame it on a cartel invasion.”

“He creates the crisis,” I realized, looking at the endless rows of drones. “Then he rides in with his private army to save the day. He gets martial law, unlimited funding, and total control.”

“It’s a false flag,” El Coyote said, standing behind us. He looked disgusted. “I sell poison to people who want to buy it. This… this is slaughter.”

“We have to burn it down,” Tank said, hefting his SAW. “All of it.”

“Not yet,” I said. “If we destroy it now, Hayes escapes and spins the story. He’ll say we were the terrorists. We need him on record. We need the head of the snake.”

CHAPTER 7: THE FACE OF TREASON

We moved deeper into the complex, following the thick power cables. They led to a reinforced command bunker suspended above the assembly floor. It was a glass-walled office overlooking the factory of death.

Through the glass, I saw him. Colonel Richard Hayes. He was standing over a tactical map, pointing at locations while three technicians typed furiously at consoles.

“Ghost, get high,” I ordered. “Find a vantage point. If this goes south, I want a dot on his forehead.”

“Copy,” Ghost peeled off, climbing a maintenance ladder into the shadows of the ceiling.

“The rest of you, stack up,” I whispered.

We moved up the metal stairs, silent as smoke. I reached the door. It was unlocked. Hayes was so arrogant, so sure that we were vaporized ash in the Sierra Madre, that he hadn’t even locked his front door.

I kicked it open.

“Colonel!” I roared, leveling my rifle at his chest. “Step away from the console!”

The technicians froze, hands hovering over their keyboards. Hayes didn’t flinch. He slowly turned around, a glass of scotch in his hand. He looked at me, then at Reyes, then at the dirty, exhausted team behind me.

A slow smile spread across his face.

“Jack,” he said, sounding genuinely impressed. “You really are hard to kill. I suppose I should have used two missiles.”

“It’s over, Richard,” I said, keeping my aim steady. “We know about the drones. We know about the false flag. You’re done.”

“Done?” Hayes laughed, taking a sip of his drink. “Jack, look at this country. It’s weak. Fractured. People arguing over pronouns while the world burns. We need discipline. We need a common enemy to unite us. I’m not destroying America. I’m saving it.”

“By poisoning American citizens?” Reyes shouted, stepping forward. “You’re a monster.”

“I’m a visionary!” Hayes slammed his glass down, the liquid splashing. “Sacrifices have to be made! When the lights go out in Phoenix and Dallas, when people are scared, they will beg for order. And I will give it to them.”

He looked at the clock on the wall.

“And you’re too late. The launch sequence has already begun.”

On the screens behind him, the status bars turned green. LAUNCH INITIATED.

Below us, in the main cavern, the sound of hundreds of rotors spinning up filled the air like a swarm of angry hornets.

“Tech, stop it!” I yelled.

Tech lunged for the main console, shoving a technician out of the way. “He’s locked it out! It’s a hardwired sequence! I can’t stop the lift-off from here!”

“Then we stop it the hard way,” I said.

Hayes reached under his desk.

“Drop it!” I shouted.

He pulled a sidearm.

CRACK.

A single shot rang out from the shadows of the ceiling. Ghost.

The bullet slammed into Hayes’ shoulder, spinning him around. He dropped the gun, clutching his arm, screaming.

“Secure him!” I ordered Reyes.

“Tank, Rodriguez! Get to the railings! Open fire on those drones! Do not let them leave the tunnel!”

The team rushed to the windows overlooking the factory floor. The drones were lifting off, hovering in formation, preparing to stream out of the mine entrance.

“There’s too many of them!” Tank yelled, opening up with his machine gun. He shredded three drones, chemicals splashing down onto the concrete, but fifty more took their place.

“We need a bigger boom,” I said, looking at the control panels.

I grabbed El Coyote, who was cowering near the door.

“You know explosives,” I said. “The mining charges. Where are they?”

El Coyote looked at the chaos, then at Hayes bleeding on the floor, then at me.

“The main structural supports,” he said quickly. “They kept emergency demolition charges in place in case of a cave-in. To seal the mine.”

“Where is the trigger?”

“It’s manual,” El Coyote said. “Down on the floor. Near the crusher.”

“Tech, stay here, keep trying to hack the guidance!” I ordered. “Reyes, watch Hayes. Tank, cover me. I’m going down.”

CHAPTER 8: THE RECKONING

I vaulted over the railing, sliding down a support cable to the factory floor. The air was filled with the deafening buzz of the drones. They were starting to move toward the tunnel exit.

“Tank, clear a path!” I screamed into my comms.

Above me, Tank and Ghost unleashed a torrent of fire. Bullets rained down, sparking off the machinery. Drones exploded mid-air, showering the ground with toxic fluid.

I sprinted toward the massive rock crusher at the far end of the cavern. The air was thick with smoke and the chemical stench of the payload. My lungs burned.

A door opened to my right. Hayes’ security team—the ones who had been guarding the perimeter—rushed in.

“Contact right!” I yelled, dropping into a slide and firing.

I took down two, but three more pinned me behind a conveyor belt. Bullets chipped away at the concrete inches from my head.

“I can’t get an angle, Boss!” Ghost called out from the ceiling. “You’re on your own!”

I checked my mag. Six rounds left.

Suddenly, a massive loader truck roared out from the shadows. It smashed into the security team’s position, crushing their cover.

Driving it was El Coyote.

He jumped out of the cab, holding an AK-47 he’d scavenged from a fallen guard.

“Go, Gringo!” he shouted at me, laying down suppression fire. “Blow this hellhole up!”

I didn’t ask questions. I ran.

I reached the structural support pillar. There was a yellow box marked EMERGENCY SEAL. I smashed the glass with the butt of my rifle and yanked the heavy lever down.

Nothing happened.

“Tech! The charges aren’t firing!”

“Hayes cut the electronic detonators!” Tech’s voice screamed in my ear. “You have to short the circuit! Use the main breaker!”

The breaker panel was ten feet away, sparks showering from it where a stray bullet had hit.

I ran to it. The drones were entering the tunnel. If they got out, thousands of innocent people would die within the hour.

I looked at the breaker. It was fried. I needed to bridge the connection.

I slung my rifle, grabbed two live cables—thick as my wrist—and looked at the rubber soles of my boots.

“This is going to hurt,” I gritted out.

I jammed the cables together.

FLASH.

The world turned white. The electrical surge kicked me backward like a mule, throwing me ten feet through the air.

But above the ringing in my ears, I heard the boom.

The charges on the ceiling detonated in a perfect sequence. The roof of the mine—millions of tons of rock—groaned and gave way.

I watched as the tunnel exit collapsed. The lead drones smashed into the falling rock. The ones behind them piled up, exploding in a chain reaction of fire and chemicals. The rockfall continued, burying the assembly line, the drones, and the factory of death under a mountain of stone.

Dust billowed out, choking and thick.

I lay on my back, staring up at the catwalks. The command office was still intact, protected by the rock overhang, but the factory was gone.

Silence slowly returned to the cavern, broken only by the settling of rocks.

I limped up the stairs to the command office. My body felt like it had been run over by a tank.

Inside, Reyes had Hayes handcuffed to a pipe. He was pale from blood loss, staring blankly at the ruined factory below.

“You destroyed it,” Hayes whispered. “You destroyed the future.”

“I saved it,” I said, leaning against the doorframe, fighting to stay upright.

Tech looked up from the console. “Boss… I got it all. The launch orders, the financial trails, the communications with the rogue units. It’s all uploaded to the cloud. I sent it to the FBI, the Joint Chiefs, and the New York Times. It’s over.”

Hayes closed his eyes, defeated.

El Coyote walked in, dusting off his suit. He looked at Hayes, then at me.

“You are crazy,” El Coyote said, shaking his head. “You Americans… you fight harder for your country than anyone I have ever seen. Even when your country tries to kill you.”

“That’s the job,” I said.

“So,” El Coyote said, gesturing to the exit. “Do you arrest me now?”

I looked at Reyes. She looked at the file of evidence on the desk—evidence that would bring down a conspiracy reaching the highest levels of the Pentagon. Then she looked at the man who had helped us save thousands of lives.

“I don’t see El Coyote,” Reyes said, turning her back. “I just see a confused informant who escaped during the firefight.”

I nodded at the door. “Get out of here, Vicente. Before we change our minds.”

El Coyote didn’t waste a second. He nodded once, a gesture of respect, and vanished into the shadows of the mine.

I walked over to the window and looked out at the ruin. The sun was fully down now. We were battered, bleeding, and exhausted. We were officially rogue agents who had just destroyed a multi-million dollar facility and assaulted a high-ranking officer.

“What now, Boss?” Ghost asked, coming down from the ceiling.

I looked at my team. The best warriors on earth.

“Now?” I said. “Now we wait for the cavalry. And we tell them the truth.”

The sound of helicopters thumped in the distance—standard US military transport. Not mercenaries. The real deal.

We had crossed the line. We had walked through fire. And we had held the line when it mattered most.

“Mission accomplished,” I whispered.

THE END