PART 2: THE GHOSTS OF ROMANI

Chapter 1: The Echo of Silence

The coin hit the dirt with a sound that was far too loud for something so small. It was a heavy, dull thud—the sound of a gavel striking a judge’s bench, sentencing everyone present to a reality they weren’t ready to accept.

For a heartbeat, the world suspended its motion. The Nevada wind, which had been whipping sand against our fatigues all morning, seemed to die down instantly. Brigadier General Harlon Blackwood stared at the object in the sand. Lieutenant Commander Zephyr, the leader of the visiting SEAL team, stared at it. I stared at it.

It was a jagged piece of black metal, heavier than standard issue, scarred by fire and time. On one face, it bore the standard medical Caduceus—the staff and the serpents. But on this coin, the serpents were skeletal, stripping the flesh from the staff, and the staff itself was not a wooden rod, but the barrel of a suppressed sniper rifle.

It was the insignia of a unit that, according to every official record in the Pentagon, had never existed.

Zephyr broke the paralysis first. He stepped forward, his boots crunching on the gravel with deliberate slowness, and reached down. His movements were not those of a subordinate reaching for a trinket; they were the movements of an archeologist discovering a bone that disproved history.

“Don’t touch it,” Blackwood snapped. His voice was high, brittle. The arrogance that had filled the firing range moments ago was gone, replaced by a flash of sheer, unadulterated panic.

Zephyr ignored him. He picked up the coin, dusting off the Nevada sand with a slow, deliberate thumb. He looked at the General, studying the sweat that had suddenly beaded on Blackwood’s forehead. Then, he turned his gaze to me. The look wasn’t one of suspicion anymore. It was recognition. It was the look a soldier gives when they realize they are standing in the presence of a myth.

“Wraith,” Zephyr whispered. The word hung in the hot air like smoke. “Romani Province. November 2019.”

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. My heart was hammering against my ribs, not from fear, but from the sudden, violent exposure of a secret I had carried for five years. That coin wasn’t just metal; it was the tombstone of six people.

“Give that to me, Commander,” Blackwood demanded, stepping into Zephyr’s personal space. He snatched the coin from the SEAL’s hand with a violence that betrayed his trembling fingers. He shoved it into his pocket, his face flushing a deep, mottled crimson. “This demonstration is over. Dismissed! All of you, back to your posts!”

He spun on his heel and marched toward his Humvee, his aides scrambling to keep up like frightened children. But he didn’t look like a conquering general anymore. He looked like a man fleeing the scene of a crime.

I stood there, the desert sun beating down on my neck. The adrenaline from the shooting demonstration—where I had dismantled his pistol and his ego—was fading, replaced by a cold, calculating dread. I had just exposed the one thing I was sworn to keep buried.

Zephyr didn’t leave immediately. He signaled his team to stand down, then walked over to me. He stood close enough that our conversation would be masked by the noise of the departing vehicles.

“I was in the valley that night,” Zephyr said, his voice a low rumble. “Talent Team provided the perimeter support. We heard the radio chatter. We heard the screaming. And then we heard… silence. Until a ghost unit came in and pulled three men out of hell.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” I lied. It was a reflex, a defense mechanism honed over years of hiding in plain sight.

“The official report says Blackwood went back in,” Zephyr continued, his intensity rising. “It says he carried his men out. That he earned that Silver Star with his own sweat. But we never saw him leave the command tent. We saw the drone feed, though. We saw a single operator, moving faster than anything I’ve ever seen, dragging bodies through the kill zone.”

He paused, glancing at the dust where the bullets had landed around my feet moments ago.

“You’re not just a medic, are you, Thorne?”

“I’m whatever the paperwork says I am, Commander.”

“Paperwork burns,” Zephyr said grimly. “Memories don’t. Watch your six, Thorne. Blackwood isn’t just angry. He’s scared. And a scared General with three stars on his collar is the most dangerous thing on this base. He built a castle on a foundation of lies, and you just pulled out the cornerstone.”

He turned and walked away, joining his team. But the damage was done. The way the other soldiers looked at me had changed. I wasn’t the “little medic” anymore. I was an anomaly. A variable they couldn’t solve. And in the military, variables get eliminated.

Chapter 2: The Art of Isolation

The rest of the day was a study in psychological warfare. General Blackwood didn’t order my arrest immediately—that would be too obvious, too messy with foreign dignitaries watching. Instead, he chose to strangle me slowly.

Usually, a training base like Maverick buzzes with a predictable rhythm. Chow, drills, maintenance, sleep. But as I walked back to the medical bay, the rhythm had broken. Conversations died as I passed. Heads turned. Eyes followed me.

It wasn’t admiration. Not yet. It was confusion mixed with the instinctual fear of being near someone who is marked for destruction.

I entered the main medical tent. It was cool inside, smelling of antiseptic and canvas. Dr. Pharaoh, the Chief Medical Officer, was at his desk. He looked up, his face pale.

“Sergeant Thorne,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “I’ve just received orders from Command.”

“Am I being transferred, sir?”

“No,” Pharaoh said, handing me a digital tablet. “You’ve been reassigned. Effective immediately, you are relieved of all clinical duties. You are grounded from the range. Your access to the barracks is restricted.”

I looked at the orders. Reassignment to Perimeter Security. Sector 4. Night Rotation. Solo Detail.

Sector 4 was the “Boneyard”—a remote stretch of the facility where they stored rusted-out vehicle hulks, decommissioned artillery, and shipping containers full of scrap. It was unlit, miles from the main barracks, and completely isolated. It was a punishment detail reserved for soldiers on the verge of dishonorable discharge.

“Perimeter security is an MP duty, sir,” I said calmly. “I’m a medic.”

“The order comes from General Blackwood’s office,” Pharaoh whispered, looking around as if the tent walls had ears. “He cited ‘gross insubordination’ and ‘safety violations’ at the range. Briar… listen to me. This isn’t a guard duty assignment. This is a setup.”

“I know.”

“Then refuse it. Request a formal inquiry.”

“If I refuse, he courts-martial me for disobeying a direct order. He puts me in the brig. I can’t fight from a cell, Doctor.”

Pharaoh sighed, defeated. “He’s removed your weapon privileges. You’re to report to the Boneyard unarmed.”

Of course he did. He wanted me vulnerable. He wanted me afraid.

“Understood, sir,” I said.

I went to my locker. I stripped off my medical insignia. I packed my gear. But before I left, I made a detour to the secured supply cache at the back of the tent. I didn’t take a firearm—that would trigger alarms. Instead, I grabbed a high-intensity tactical strobe, a coil of chemically treated tripwire, two heavy-duty trauma shears, and a pouch of saline solution.

Blackwood thought stripping me of a rifle made me defenseless. He forgot that a medic knows exactly how the human body works—and exactly how to shut it down.

Chapter 3: The Boneyard

The Nevada desert at night is a void. The temperature drops thirty degrees, shifting from a scorching oven to a freezing refrigerator. The silence is absolute, heavy enough to crush you.

I parked the jeep at the edge of Sector 4 and walked in. The moon was obscured by heavy cloud cover, plunging the world into a suffocating darkness. The Boneyard loomed ahead, a graveyard of steel skeletons. Tank turrets poked out of the sand like broken fingers. The wind whistled through the empty hulls of old transport trucks, creating a mournful, metallic song.

I began walking the perimeter fence. My senses were dialed up to maximum. Every crunch of gravel, every shift in the wind was analyzed, categorized, and dismissed or flagged.

I wasn’t alone. I could feel it.

It wasn’t a spiritual feeling. It was biological. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. The air pressure shifted slightly.

Crunch.

It was faint. Fifty yards back. The sound of a boot rolling over a loose rock.

I didn’t turn around. I kept my pace steady, counting my steps. One, two, three…

Crunch.

Closer. Two contacts. Maybe three. They weren’t trying to be perfectly silent; they were trying to be fast. They wanted to jump me.

This wasn’t an official MP patrol. MPs would have announced themselves, flashed lights, demanded identification. These were Blackwood’s goons—likely loyalists he’d brought from his personal detail. The kind of men who did dirty work for a promotion. They weren’t here to arrest me. They were here to send a message. A message written in broken bones.

I reached a cluster of rusted shipping containers stacked two high. I turned the corner and immediately broke into a sprint.

“She’s running! Go! Go!” a voice hissed behind me.

I dove into the maze of metal. I didn’t hide. Hiding is for prey. I began to hunt.

I slid between two crushed Humvees, pulling the tripwire from my pocket. My hands moved with muscle memory honed in the mountains of Afghanistan. I strung the wire across the gap, ankle height, tying it off with a tension knot in seconds. Then I scrambled up the side of the shipping container, flattening myself against the rusted roof.

Three shadows emerged from the darkness. They were wearing black fatigues, no insignia, and balaclavas. They carried telescoping batons, not rifles. They wanted this to be physical. Personal.

“Where did she go?” the lead shadow whispered. He was big, moving with the heavy grace of a weightlifter, not a runner.

“Check the alley. Flank her.”

The point man rushed forward, eager to corner me. His boot caught the wire.

Physics took over. His forward momentum slammed his upper body down while his feet stayed planted. He hit the gravel face-first with a sickening crunch. As his partners turned, distracted by his groan, I dropped.

I didn’t land on the ground. I landed on the second man. My boots impacted his shoulders, driving him into the dirt. The air left his lungs in a wheezing explosion. I rolled, coming up in a crouch.

The third man—the big one—swung his baton. It was a clumsy, angry swing, powered by adrenaline rather than technique.

I stepped inside the arc. A rifle is a tool of distance. But trauma shears? Trauma shears are intimate.

I jammed the heavy, blunt handle of the shears into the soft nerve cluster just above his collarbone—the brachial plexus.

He gasped, dropping the baton as his entire arm went instantly numb. Before he could recover, I swept his leg, driving him to his knees. I moved behind him, applying a sleeper hold. Not enough to kill, just enough to dim the lights.

“Tell the General,” I whispered into his ear as he struggled, “that his training standards are slipping.”

He went limp. I let him drop.

I stood over the three groaning men. I could have finished them. I could have ensured they never walked again. But that was the old me. That was Wraith. The Phoenix had to be different.

I vanished back into the shadows, circling wide, watching them drag themselves up and limp away. They wouldn’t report this. They couldn’t. You don’t report that three grown men got taken apart by an unarmed female medic in the dark.

But now, the stakes had changed. It wasn’t just a rivalry. It was war.

Chapter 4: The Shadow Council

I didn’t go back to my barracks. It wasn’t safe. Blackwood would be expecting his men to return with news of my hospitalization. When they returned empty-handed, he would escalate.

I made my way to the flight line, to the massive hangars where the visiting units stored their gear. I needed a place that Blackwood didn’t control, a sovereign territory within the base.

I found Lieutenant Commander Zephyr in Hangar 3. He was sitting on the lowered ramp of a C-130 Hercules, cleaning a rifle under the harsh glow of a halogen work light. He didn’t look up when I approached, but I knew he heard me.

“You look like you’ve been rolling in the dirt, Thorne,” he said, oiling the bolt carrier group.

“Sector 4 has a pest problem,” I replied, leaning against the landing gear. “I did some exterminating.”

Zephyr chuckled darkly. He set the rifle down and stood up. “I bet you did. Blackwood is getting desperate.”

From the shadows of the cargo hold, another figure emerged. It was Major Reeves. He looked tired, the scar on his neck standing out in the stark lighting.

“I told you she’d handle it,” Reeves said to Zephyr.

“I didn’t doubt her capability,” Zephyr replied, wiping his hands on a rag. “I doubted her willingness to hurt Americans.”

“They weren’t acting like Americans tonight,” I said. “They were acting like mercenaries.”

Reeves stepped into the light. He held a thick folder in his hand. “We’ve been busy while you were dancing in the Boneyard. Zephyr has friends in Naval Intelligence. I have contacts in Records. We tried to find the after-action report for Romani.”

“And?”

“It’s gone,” Zephyr said. “Not redacted. Not classified. Gone. The file numbers skip. It’s like November 12th, 2019, never happened. The Pentagon servers have a hole where that night should be.”

“But we found something else,” Reeves said, opening the folder. He pulled out a photocopy of an old citation. “Blackwood’s citation for the Silver Star. It includes witness statements. Three of them.”

He handed me the paper. I scanned the names. Sergeant Miller. Corporal Hayes. Private First Class Vane.

“I know these men,” I said quietly. “They were Blackwood’s radio operators. They were in the TOC (Tactical Operations Center) five miles away from the ambush. They never fired a shot.”

“Exactly,” Reeves said. “He used men who weren’t even on the battlefield to verify his story. And here’s the kicker—all three of them were fast-tracked for promotions and transferred to cushy postings in Germany and Hawaii within months of the incident.”

“Bribery,” I said.

“And loose ends tied up,” Zephyr added. “Blackwood built a fortress of lies, but he used cheap mortar. The problem is, proof is just paper. Unless we can prove he’s a coward now, in the present, he’ll spin this. He’ll say we forged the documents. He’ll say I’m a jealous SEAL and you’re a disgruntled NCO. He’ll bury us.”

“He tried to have me beaten tonight,” I said. “He’s escalating.”

“He’s going to try again tomorrow,” Reeves warned. “The Joint Capabilities Exercise. The ‘Grand Finale’ for the foreign delegates. Blackwood has rewritten the script.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “I’m the casualty.”

“Worse,” Zephyr said. “You’re the Squad Leader. Of a phantom unit. He’s assigning you a team of washouts—administrative clerks, a cook, a mechanic—soldiers with zero combat experience. And he’s putting you in the ‘Kill House’ against a live Op-For (Opposing Force) unit composed of his best Rangers.”

“He wants me to fail publicly,” I realized. “He wants to show the world that I’m incompetent. That I couldn’t possibly be Wraith 7.”

“He wants to humiliate you,” Reeves corrected. “And in the chaos of a live-fire drill… accidents happen. Stray rounds. Faulty charges. If you die in a training accident, it’s a tragedy, not a murder.”

I looked at the two officers. They were risking their careers just by talking to me.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “You could walk away. You have pensions, careers.”

Reeves touched his scar again, his eyes distant. “Because you carried me two miles with shrapnel in my neck while Blackwood was screaming over the radio to leave me behind. I remember the pain, Thorne. But I also remember your voice. ‘Not your time, soldier. Keep fighting.’ I owe you a life. I intend to pay the debt.”

Zephyr picked up his rifle again, snapping the bolt forward. “And because I hate bullies. Especially the ones with stars on their shoulders who think they own the truth.”

“So, what’s the plan?” I asked.

Zephyr smiled, a predatory showing of teeth. “The plan is simple. He wants to give you a broken team? We fix them. He wants to give you an impossible scenario? We change the rules. If Blackwood wants a show, let’s give him the greatest show on earth.”

Chapter 5: The Misfits

The next morning, the heat was oppressive. The air shimmered off the tarmac like a mirage.

I met my “team” behind the supply sheds at 0600. It was exactly as Zephyr had predicted. Five soldiers. They looked like they had been dragged out of bed and told they were going to their execution.

There was Private First Class Miller, a payroll clerk who looked like a strong wind would blow him over. Specialist Rodriguez, a motor pool mechanic with grease permanently under his fingernails. “Big Tony” Valenzuela, a cook who was built like a refrigerator but moved with the grace of one. Private Lewis, a dental assistant. And Corporal Jenks, a supply coordinator who hadn’t passed a physical fitness test in two years.

They were terrified. They were holding their rifles like they were foreign objects, fingers hovering dangerously close to triggers, muzzles sweeping the ground.

“Sergeant Thorne?” Miller asked, adjusting his helmet which was two sizes too big and slid over his eyes. “They said we’re going into the Kill House? I… I haven’t fired a weapon since basic training. I just do spreadsheets.”

I looked at them. Blackwood had hand-picked them for their lack of combat skills. He wanted them to panic. He wanted them to freeze.

“Listen to me,” I said, my voice low and steady. I didn’t yell. Yelling creates panic. Calm creates focus. “General Blackwood put you here because he thinks you are weak. He thinks you are cannon fodder. He thinks that when the shooting starts, you will run.”

I walked down the line, looking each of them in the eye.

“But he forgot one thing. Today, you are not fighting for him. You are fighting for me. And I do not lose.”

I spent the next two hours drilling them. I didn’t try to turn them into SEALs; there wasn’t time. I drilled them on chaos.

“Rodriguez!” I barked. “You fix engines, right?”

“Yes, Sergeant!”

“Good. The Kill House is just a big engine. It has parts. Doors. Windows. Walls. You’re my breacher. You don’t knock. You take the door off its hinges. Can you do that?”

Rodriguez grinned, a spark of confidence lighting up his eyes. “I can break anything, Sergeant.”

“Valenzuela,” I turned to the massive cook. “You’re my shield. You carry the ballistic shield. You don’t shoot. You just walk forward. Nothing gets past you. You protect Miller. Can you do that?”

“Yes, Sergeant. Like a meat locker door.”

“Miller,” I said to the shaking clerk. “You have eyes. That’s your only weapon. You watch our six (behind). If you see a shadow move, you scream. You don’t need to aim. You just need to be loud.”

I stripped away the complex military doctrine they had failed to learn and replaced it with primal survival instincts. Wraith tactics. Speed. Violence of action. Unpredictability.

“We don’t play by their rules,” I told them as we practiced stacking up on a wall. “The Op-For expects us to use the doors. We use the walls. They expect us to clear rooms. We bypass them. We are not here to kill everyone. We are here to survive the mission.”

As we prepped, Zephyr walked by, ostensibly just checking equipment. He slipped a small data drive into my hand and winked.

“Override codes for the range’s automated defenses,” he whispered. “And… I swapped your team’s blank adapters. You’re running hot on the distraction devices. Flashbangs are real. Smoke is real. Give ’em hell.”

Chapter 6: The Kill House

The observation deck was full. Every general, every attaché, every curious soldier on the base was watching the massive screens. The tension was palpable.

Blackwood stood at the podium, microphone in hand. He looked composed, rested, the perfect picture of authority. He smiled as he addressed the crowd, playing the benevolent commander.

“For our final demonstration,” Blackwood announced, his voice booming over the speakers, “Staff Sergeant Thorne will lead a provisional squad through a Hostage Rescue simulation in Sector Alpha. This scenario is designed to test adaptability under extreme duress. Note that the Opposing Force is composed of elite Rangers.”

He looked down at me from the tower. I stood at the breach point with my ragtag team. My heart was slow, steady. The Ghost was awake.

“Begin!”

The buzzer sounded—a harsh, electronic shriek.

“Move!” I ordered.

We didn’t go for the front door. The Op-For would have fatal funnels set up there—kill zones where they could spray us without aiming.

“Rodriguez! The wall! Now!”

The mechanic slapped a breaching charge on the side wall of the structure. It wasn’t standard protocol. It was messy. It was beautiful.

BOOM.

The explosion rocked the compound. Dust filled the air. We poured through the jagged hole, bypassing the main hallway entirely.

On the screens above, I knew the crowd was gasping. We weren’t following the lane. We were rewriting the map.

“Contact left!” Miller screamed, his voice cracking.

Three Op-For Rangers appeared in the hallway, confused by our entry point. They were expecting us to be terrified mice. Instead, they were met with a wall of suppression fire. Jenks and Lewis were hammering their triggers, screaming war cries that sounded terrified but were effective. They weren’t hitting much, but the volume of fire forced the Rangers back.

“Push!” I yelled. “Valenzuela, shield up!”

The cook stepped forward, the heavy ballistic shield absorbing the simulation rounds with dull thuds. He moved like a tank. We flowed behind him.

We moved deeper into the structure. The scenario was rigged against us. The automated turrets—machine guns mounted on rails meant to simulate heavy enemy fire—swiveled toward us. They were programmed to pin us down, to force a stalemate so Blackwood could mock our lack of progress.

I pulled the data drive Zephyr had given me and jammed it into the control panel on the wall near the stairwell.

“Override accepted,” the automated voice chirped.

The turrets spun around. They didn’t fire at the Op-For—that would be dangerous—but they locked into ‘Safe Mode’ and powered down, their barrels drooping. The suppression fire stopped.

“How did she do that?” Blackwood’s voice crackled over the PA system, forgetting to mute his mic. Panic was seeping back into his tone.

We reached the hostage room on the second floor. But it wasn’t a dummy inside. It was a live soldier. And sitting next to him was a timer. A bomb simulation.

“Sergeant!” Miller yelled. “Two minutes!”

“Set up perimeter!” I ordered.

The door burst open. The main Op-For force—six heavy hitters, the best Blackwood had—stormed in from the adjoining room. This was the moment we were supposed to die. This was the execution.

“Flash out!” I screamed.

I threw a flashbang. A real one.

BANG.

The sound was deafening, a physical punch to the chest. The light was blinding white. In the confusion, I didn’t shoot. I charged.

I hit the lead Op-For soldier with a tackle that sent him flying back into his squad mates. It was a domino effect of bodies. I was a whirlwind of elbows and knees. I disarmed one, used him as a human shield against the others, and fired my simulation rounds over his shoulder.

My team, emboldened by the chaos, joined in. They weren’t using tactics; they were using pure, desperate aggression. Valenzuela slammed his shield into a Ranger, knocking him flat. Rodriguez was throwing smoke grenades like they were baseballs.

“Clear!” I yelled, dropping the last Ranger with a leg sweep and a simulated shot to the chest.

The room was silent, save for the heavy breathing of my team. The Op-For was down. My “misfits” were bruised, terrified, but standing.

I walked over to the camera mounted in the corner of the room. I wiped the dust from the lens and looked directly into it, knowing Blackwood was staring at his monitor, knowing the world was watching.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the coin—the one he had tried to take, the one Zephyr had returned to me. I held it up to the lens.

“Mission accomplished,” I said.

Chapter 7: The Resurrection

We marched out of the Kill House into the blinding sunlight. The silence from the stands was deafening. It felt like the air had been sucked out of the valley.

And then, it started.

A single clap. Then another. Then a roar.

The enlisted men, the grunts, the Marines, the foreign soldiers—they were on their feet. They had just watched a cook and a clerk take down a Ranger squad under the command of a medic. They saw the impossible. They saw leadership.

Blackwood came running down the stairs of the tower, his face a mask of purple fury. He was followed by four MPs.

“Arrest her!” he screamed, pointing a trembling finger at me. Spittle flew from his mouth. “She rigged the exercise! She used unauthorized equipment! She compromised safety protocols! I want her in irons!”

The MPs hesitated. They looked at the cheering crowd. They looked at the defeated Rangers stumbling out of the Kill House. They looked at me.

“I said arrest her!” Blackwood lunged at me, grabbing my shoulder.

Wham.

I didn’t strike him. I simply pivoted, grabbed his wrist, and used his own momentum against him. I applied a joint lock that forced him to his knees in the dirt. The famous General, the “Undertaker,” was kneeling before me.

“Get your hands off me!” he shrieked.

“Sir,” I said, my voice calm, loud enough for the first rows to hear. “You are displaying signs of acute aggression and instability. As medical staff, I am assessing you for a psychological break.”

“Let him go, Staff Sergeant.”

The voice was calm, authoritative, and it didn’t belong to anyone on the base.

I released Blackwood and snapped to attention. Walking across the field was a man in a simple dress uniform, but the four stars on his shoulders shone like suns.

It was General Maxwell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was flanked by Zephyr and Reeves.

Blackwood scrambled to his feet, dusting himself off, trying to regain his dignity. “General Maxwell! Thank God. This soldier is out of control. I want her court-martialed immediately for insubordination and-“

“Quiet, Harlon,” Maxwell said. He didn’t shout. He just spoke, and the command in his voice silenced the entire range.

Maxwell stopped in front of me. He looked me up and down, his eyes crinkling with a mixture of amusement and respect.

“Staff Sergeant Thorne,” he said. “Or should I say, Wraith 7?”

Blackwood froze. His face drained of color, leaving him looking grey and old. “Sir… that unit… it doesn’t exist. You signed the order yourself to sanitize the records. It’s classified.”

“I did,” Maxwell admitted, his voice hardening. “I authorized the sanitation of the Wraith files to protect the identity of operatives who were doing work the world wasn’t ready to see. I did not do it to provide cover for a coward to steal their valor and build a career on their blood.”

Maxwell gestured to the massive screens above the range.

“Play it,” he ordered.

The screen flickered. The footage wasn’t from today. It was grainy, green-tinted night vision. The timestamp read: Nov 12, 2019. Romani Province.

The crowd went silent.

On the screen, tracers lit up the night sky like fireworks. A voice—Blackwood’s voice, unmistakable in its panic—could be heard screaming over the radio.

“Fall back! Leave them! That’s an order! Get the bird in the air! I am not dying in this hole!”

Then, the camera view shifted. It was a helmet cam feed. It showed a pair of small hands working frantically on a gaping neck wound—Reeves’s neck wound.

“Not your time, soldier. Keep fighting,” a female voice whispered on the recording.

The figure on the screen stood up, lifted the wounded man who was twice her size, and began to drag him. Bullets kicked up dirt around them. The figure didn’t flinch. She moved with the same fluid, lethal grace the crowd had just witnessed in the Kill House. She dragged him, then went back for another. And another.

The video ended.

Maxwell turned to Blackwood. “We recovered the encrypted drive from your personal safe, Harlon. You kept the original footage. Insurance, I suppose? Or a trophy? It doesn’t matter. It proves everything.”

Blackwood looked around. He looked at the foreign delegates, who were whispering furiously. He looked at his own men, who were staring at him with open disgust.

“I… I did what was necessary for the mission,” Blackwood stammered, backing away. “I preserved the command structure! I was the ranking officer!”

“You ran,” Major Reeves said, stepping forward, his hand resting on the scar on his neck. “And you left us to die. She came back.”

Maxwell nodded to the MPs. “General Blackwood, you are relieved of command effective immediately. You will be escorted to Washington to face a court of inquiry. You will be charged with dereliction of duty, falsifying official records, and conduct unbecoming an officer.”

The MPs moved in. This time, they didn’t hesitate. They took Blackwood’s arms firmly. As they dragged him away, he didn’t scream. He just stared at me, his eyes hollow. He knew. He hadn’t been defeated by an army. He had been taken down by the truth he tried to bury.

Chapter 8: The Phoenix Rises

The sunset that evening was spectacular, painting the desert in hues of violent orange and purple. The base was quiet, but it was a different kind of quiet. It was the peace that comes after a storm.

I stood on the roof of the command center, looking out over the base.

“Quite a view,” General Maxwell said, joining me at the railing. He held two cups of coffee, handing one to me.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m sorry it took five years, Thorne,” Maxwell said softly. “Politics is a messy business. Sometimes good soldiers get buried in the paperwork. We thought… we thought it was better to let the legend of Wraith die so the operators could live.”

“I didn’t do it for the recognition, sir.”

“I know. That’s why you’re the only one I trust with this.”

He placed a folder on the railing between us.

“What is this?”

“Authorization,” Maxwell said. “The Pentagon realizes we made a mistake disbanding the specialized extraction capability. We need it back. We need operators who can go where no one else can, who value the life of their teammates above the mission parameters. But we can’t call it Wraith anymore. That name is burned.”

He tapped the folder.

“We’re calling it Project Phoenix. And we need a commander.”

I laughed, a dry sound. “Sir, I’m an E-6. I can’t command a special operations unit.”

“You can if I promote you,” Maxwell smiled. “Chief Warrant Officer Thorne has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? You’ll have autonomy. You pick your team. You train them your way.”

I looked at the folder. It was a chance to stop hiding. A chance to ensure that there were no more Blackwoods. A chance to honor the five graves I visited every year in my mind.

I looked down at the courtyard. My “team” from the morning—Miller, Rodriguez, Valenzuela—were sitting together near the barracks. They weren’t slouched anymore. They were laughing, cleaning their gear, walking with a new confidence. They had been tested in the fire and came out steel.

I turned back to Maxwell.

“Phoenix,” I said, testing the word. “I like it.”

“Good,” Maxwell said. “Your transport leaves for Fort Bragg at 0800. Don’t be late, Chief.”

He walked away, leaving me alone with the sunset.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the coin one last time. The skeletal serpent. The suppressed rifle. The weight of the past.

I walked to the edge of the roof. Below me, a patch of wet cement was drying where engineers were repairing the walkway.

I flipped the coin. It spun in the air, catching the last dying light of the sun, flashing gold and black. It landed in the wet cement with a soft plop.

I watched it sink, just a little, until the concrete began to settle over it.

Wraith was dead. Buried in the desert where it belonged.

But tomorrow? Tomorrow, the Phoenix would rise. And God help anyone who tried to leave a soldier behind on my watch.