PART 19:

We launch in 3 hours. Get some food, get some rest if you can, and be ready. This is going to be the longest 2 minutes of your lives. The engineers dispersed to their tasks. Noah checked his phone message from Sarah’s school confirming she’d arrived safely. Another from the neighbor who’d agreed to pick her up and keep her for the afternoon.

He told Sarah he had an important work thing, that he might be late, that he loved her. She’d hugged him extra tight this morning, sensing something she was too young to articulate. You okay? Marcus appeared at his elbow. trying to be. Evelyn told me what she said to you last night about Melissa. About you punishing yourself. Marcus hesitated.

For what it’s worth, I think she was out of line, but I also think she was right. Everyone’s suddenly an expert on my mental state. No, but we’re people who care about you, which I know is uncomfortable because you’ve spent 4 years making sure nobody got close enough to care. But tough luck, Noah. You helped save this company.

You trusted us with your plan. That makes you part of the team whether you want to be or not. Noah felt something uncomfortable in his chest. I’m not staying after this. You know that, right? Once the threat is neutralized, I go back to my life. Do you? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’re finally remembering who you are.

And maybe that’s not something you walk away from. Before Noah could respond, his phone rang. Unknown number. He answered cautiously. Captain Mercer. A voice he didn’t recognize digitally modulated to disguise identity. You’re making a mistake. Noah’s entire body went rigid. He gestured to Marcus.

Trace this and kept his voice neutral. Who is this? Someone giving you a chance to walk away. The launch is going to fail. Cross is going to collapse. Accept this and protect your daughter or fight it and lose everything. Your choice. If you touch my daughter, we’re not monsters. Captain, we don’t hurt children, but we will destroy everything else you care about if you don’t step aside.

You’ve already cost us one operation. Don’t make us teach you why that was a mistake. The Covenant, right? That’s who you are. The intelligence brokers who think they’re above consequences. Silence on the line. Then you’ve been talking to Colonel Stern. Interesting. Does Evelyn Cross know exactly who she’s partnered with? Does she know about Yemen? About the operation that officially never happened but left 37 people dead? Noah’s blood ran cold? Those were enemy combatants in a war zone. Were they? Because our files tell

a different story. Tell a story about an operation that went wrong. About collateral damage that got classified to protect certain reputations. Tell a story about Captain Noah Mercer executing orders that crossed lines even in the shadow world he operated in. You don’t know what you’re talking about, don’t I? We have the unredacted reports, Captain. We have the real story.

And if you don’t walk away from CrossTech right now, if you don’t let this launch fail quietly, we’ll make sure that story becomes public. We’ll make sure Sarah grows up knowing exactly what kind of man her father really is. The line went dead. Noah stood frozen, phone in hand, feeling the past crash into the present with devastating force. Yemen.

He hadn’t thought about Yemen in 4 years. Hadn’t let himself think about it because the memory was poison. Marcus touched his shoulder. Noah, we got a partial trace, but they bounced through too many proxies. What did they say? They threatened Sarah. What? We need to call the police. Get protection. No, they’re not going to hurt her. That was a faint.

Noah’s voice was hollow. They threatened something worse. They threatened to destroy who she thinks I am. I don’t understand. You don’t need to. Noah pulled up the launch controls on his terminal. Change of plans. We’re not waiting for them to attack. We’re going in now mapping their entire network before the launch even starts. That’s not possible.

We need the launch to trigger their coordination. We need to end this before it gets worse. Before they escalate beyond corporate sabotage into something I can’t protect Sarah from. Noah’s fingers were already moving across the keyboard, pulling up access logs, tracing connection patterns. Trust me, Marcus, please. Noah, you’re not making sense.

What did they say that’s making you They said they’ll tell my daughter that her father is a monster. They said they’ll take the worst moment of my life and turn it into propaganda. They said they’ll destroy her childhood by making her afraid of me. Noah’s voice cracked slightly. I can survive a lot of things.

I can survive threats, attacks, even death, but I can’t survive Sarah looking at me with fear. I won’t let them do that to her.” Marcus was quiet for a moment. Then he pulled up a chair, sat down next to Noah, and said, “Then we stop them right now. Whatever it takes.” They worked in furious silence. Noah’s hands moving with the muscle memory of a thousand operations.

Marcus coordinating the team through encrypted channels. They traced every connection, mapped every node, followed the digital breadcrumbs back through layers of obfiscation. It was like excavating a buried network. Each discovery leading to three more questions. And then 90 minutes before launch, Noah found it. The command node hidden in plain sight within Croste’s own contracted cloud services, masquerading as a legitimate backup system.

From this single point, the entire attack was orchestrated. And more importantly, from this point, everything could be traced backward to the people actually controlling it. “Got you,” Noah breathed. He pulled up the nodes connection logs and started backward analysis. The Covenant had been careful, but they’d also been operating for months, and months of activity meant patterns.

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