Chapter 6 - THE SEVEN THEY WANTED DEADWe didn’t go to Washington.
General Grant pretended we were going.
That distinction probably saved our lives.
Within an hour of General Rourke’s call, official orders arrived directing Grant, Nathan, and me to board a military aircraft at Peterson Space Force Base.
The orders were perfectly formatted.
Correct signatures.
Correct authentication codes.
Correct chain of command.
Dylan looked at them and laughed.
“What?”
Grant asked.
“Lantern.”
“How can you tell?”
“You can’t.”
That was the point.
If Project Lantern could clone credentials, no digital order could be trusted completely.
Grant made one phone call to a retired judge advocate he trusted from twenty years earlier.
Then we disappeared.
Not literally.
Officially, a convoy carrying us left Fort Carson at 7:10 p.m.
Three identical vehicles departed through different gates.
The one listed on movement logs headed toward Peterson.
We were in a civilian pickup driving west.
Marcus came too.
Grant initially refused.
Dylan changed his mind.
“If they’re watching my family, Marcus is already involved.”
Marcus looked at me from the back seat.
“I can stay out of your way.”
Nathan muttered, “That would be a refreshing change.”
Marcus ignored him.
I didn’t.
“You two are not doing this.”
“Doing what?”
“Whatever macho nonsense is developing.”
Nathan raised both hands.
“I’ve been technically dead for eighteen months. I’m too tired for macho nonsense.”
Marcus looked out the window.
“Good.”
For the first time, I realized how absurd my life had become.
Twelve hours earlier, Marcus was the man humiliating me in front of two hundred recruits.
Now we were traveling together with a supposedly dead captain, his fugitive brother, and a lieutenant general hiding from his own superior officer.
We drove to a ranch outside Salida owned by Grant’s former operations sergeant, Walter Briggs.
Briggs was seventy, built like an old refrigerator, and asked exactly one question when Grant arrived.
“How illegal is this?”
Grant considered.
“Potentially very.”
Briggs opened the door wider.
“Guest room’s upstairs.”
That was military friendship.
Dylan plugged the Lantern archive into a disconnected laptop.
No internet.
No network.
Nothing Voss could reach.
The archive was enormous.
Financial records.
Message logs.
Audio files.
Access credentials.
Names.
Dates.
Photographs.
Grant spent two hours examining the client list.
His face grew darker with every page.
“This can’t all be real.”
Dylan sat wrapped in a blanket near the fireplace.
“It is.”
“Senators?”
“Yes.”
“Corporate executives?”
“Yes.”
“Foreign intelligence?”
“Yes.”
“Rourke?”
Dylan nodded.
Grant shut the laptop.
For a while, nobody spoke.
Finally Nathan asked, “What did Rourke buy?”
Dylan reopened the archive.
“Searching by client identifier.”
Thousands of entries appeared.
Then one folder.
PROJECT SABLE.
My hands went cold.
I knew that word.
Sable had been written on the final mission map at Hollow Ridge.
We were told it referred to a hostile commander.
Dylan opened the first file.
Seven names appeared.
I recognized every one.
Sergeant Luis Reyes.
Sergeant Major Daniel Brooks.
Lieutenant Aaron Mitchell.
Specialist Noah Trent.
Corporal Michael Ellis.
Warrant Officer David Kim.
Staff Sergeant Emily Carter.
Me.
The seven soldiers I had refused to abandon.
Nathan leaned closer.
“What is this?”
Dylan opened the attached directive.
The document used sanitized language.
“Compromised operational assets.”
“Containment required.”
“Prevent post-operation debrief.”
Marcus frowned.
“What does that mean?”
Grant answered.
“It means kill them.”
Silence filled the room.
Nathan looked at me.
“Why those seven?”
I stared at the names.
Think.
What did we have in common?
Different units.
Different specialties.
Different ages.
Different responsibilities.
But all seven had been inside the same building during the first night at Hollow Ridge.
A damaged communications station.
We sheltered there during a mortar attack.
I remembered Reyes finding old equipment.
Brooks joking about terrible coffee.
Kim repairing our radio.
Then something surfaced.
A conversation.
A voice coming through a speaker.
Not ours.
I stood so fast the chair fell behind me.
“The relay.”
Nathan followed.
“What?”
“We heard something.”
“When?”
“First night.”
I closed my eyes.
Memory returned in fragments.
Static.
Foreign language.
Then English.
Someone saying numbers.
Someone else saying, “The transfer is confirmed.”
Reyes joked that we had intercepted someone’s bank transaction.
Kim recorded it automatically because intelligence wanted all intercepted traffic.
“Kim.”
Grant understood.
“Where is Warrant Officer Kim now?”
“Virginia.”
“Alive?”
“Yes.”
“The others?”
We checked.
All six survivors had experienced strange incidents since Hollow Ridge.
Reyes survived a vehicle accident caused by cut brake lines.
Brooks’s house burned while he was away.
Mitchell was attacked during a robbery in which nothing was stolen.
Trent nearly died from contaminated medication.
Ellis reported an attempted home invasion.
Kim disappeared from active duty records six months earlier.
Nobody had connected the incidents.
They looked random.
They weren’t.
“Voss has been trying to eliminate everyone who heard that transmission,” Nathan said.
Grant nodded.
“And Carter?”
Marcus looked at me.
“She disappeared into a training assignment under a reduced-access file.”
I looked toward Grant.
“Was that you?”
He hesitated.
“Yes.”
I had believed my transfer was part of medical recovery.
In reality, Grant had buried me.
“You knew.”
“I suspected you remained a target.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t know who I could trust.”
I almost laughed.
That sentence was becoming the anthem of our lives.
Nathan examined Project Sable’s payments.
“Here.”
A transaction made forty-eight hours before the Raven ambush.
Twelve million dollars.
Recipient hidden behind several shell companies.
Dylan traced the account chain.
Eventually a name appeared.
Voss Strategic Solutions.
Payment origin?
A foreign energy conglomerate competing for access to mineral rights in a politically unstable region.
Grant understood first.
“Raven Team wasn’t the objective.”
“No,” I said.
“We were witnesses.”
The intercepted conversation had documented a bribe.
Voss had sold classified operational information to facilitate a private commercial deal.
Rourke had apparently provided military movement data.
Nathan discovered the Hollow Ridge relay logs and began asking questions.
So Voss arranged the ambush.
Nathan was framed.
The seven of us who heard the transmission were marked for elimination.
The rest of Raven Team were collateral damage.
Marcus looked disgusted.
“All of this for money?”
Dylan shook his head.
“Money became leverage. Once Voss had proof that powerful people had committed crimes, he owned them.”
Blackmail.
That explained how his network grew.
Every compromised official became another shield.
Another tool.
Another person forced to protect him.
Nathan pointed at a file.
“What’s this?”
An audio recording.
Date: the night at Hollow Ridge.
Grant played it.
Static filled the speakers.
Then voices.
One belonged to Voss.
The other belonged unmistakably to General Rourke.
“Raven is compromised,” Voss said.
Rourke answered, “Then burn the entire nest.”
My skin prickled.
Voss continued.
“Seven heard the relay.”
“Names?”
A list followed.
Including mine.
Then Rourke said:
“Leave no witnesses.”
Marcus whispered, “Jesus.”
Nathan’s face became stone.
I couldn’t move.
For eighteen months, I had carried guilt because seven members of Raven Team died.
I questioned every decision.
Every route.
Every command.
Every person I couldn’t save.
Now I learned that the ambush hadn’t been an accident caused by Nathan’s carelessness.
We had been deliberately sacrificed.
My friends had died because powerful men wanted to protect themselves.
Grant stopped the recording.
“That’s enough to trigger a federal investigation.”
“Only if we can get it to someone Voss doesn’t control,” Dylan said.
Briggs spoke from the doorway.
“You folks might want to solve that quickly.”
He turned on the television.
Breaking news.
My photograph appeared.
Not the training-yard photograph.
An old military portrait.
The headline beneath it read:
ARMED SOLDIER SOUGHT AFTER DEADLY FORT CARSON INCIDENT.
The report claimed I had attacked Marcus during training, assaulted military personnel, stolen classified material, and fled with Captain Nathan Cole—described as an “impostor believed to be using the identity of a deceased officer.”
Grant’s face went red.
“They’re framing Carter.”
Nathan read the ticker.
“It gets worse.”
General Rourke appeared live before reporters.
His expression was grave.
“We are deeply concerned about Staff Sergeant Carter’s condition following years of trauma associated with her service.”
I stared at the screen.
He was making me unstable.
Dangerous.
Unreliable.
Exactly the kind of person nobody would believe.
Rourke continued.
“We urge Staff Sergeant Carter to surrender peacefully.”
Then a reporter asked if Carter possessed classified information.
Rourke paused dramatically.
“We have reason to believe she may have stolen materials that could endanger American personnel.”
Nathan turned off the television.
Marcus looked at me.
“What do we do?”
I looked at the Lantern archive.
For years Voss survived because truth moved through private rooms, classified channels, sealed investigations, and officials he controlled.
So maybe the answer wasn’t another private room.
Maybe the answer was daylight.
“We stop trying to prove this quietly.”
Grant understood immediately.
“You want to release the files.”
“Not everything. There are names in there that could get innocent people killed.”
“Then what?”
“We make them come to us.”
Nathan smiled slowly.
He knew that expression.
“What are you thinking?”
“Rourke says I stole classified material.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
I picked up my phone.
“Then let’s tell him I’m ready to give it back.”
Three hours later, General Rourke received a message from me.
ONE COPY. ONE MEETING. YOU AND VOSS. NO ONE ELSE.
His answer came six minutes later.
WHERE?
I sent him coordinates.
An abandoned aircraft hangar outside Colorado Springs.
Nathan stared at the screen.
“You know they’ll try to kill us.”
“Yes.”
“And we’re going anyway?”
“No.”
I looked at Grant.
“They are.”
The meeting was bait.
May you like
Our real target was whatever they said when they believed no one else was listening.
And thanks to Dylan, for the first time, Project Lantern was about to work against the men who created it.
Related Stories
