« Pourquoi êtes-vous ici ? » Elle subissait un examen médical de routine — jusqu’à ce que l’amiral des SEAL voie ce qu’il y avait sur son dos. Elle pouvait entendre des cris

Le médecin-chef, le commandant Hayes, a failli trébucher en se précipitant pour saluer le colonel.

« Colonel Drummond, monsieur, nous ne nous attendions pas à une inspection ce matin. »

« C’est le principe des inspections surprises, Commandant », dit Drummond d’une voix rauque et autoritaire. « Y a-t-il une raison pour laquelle je ne devrais pas inspecter l’état de santé de mes Marines ? »

« Non, monsieur. Bien sûr que non, monsieur. Tout est dans les limites des paramètres opérationnels. Le niveau de préparation est à 96 %, bien au-dessus de… »

« J’en jugerai. »

Drummond traversa la baie avec la grâce prédatrice d’un homme qui avait appris depuis longtemps que montrer de la faiblesse revenait à être faible. Son regard balaya les Marines en attente, les évaluant, les jugeant, les trouvant défaillants sur des points précis et d’autres plus généraux. Il prit une tablette sur une console voisine et fit défiler la liste des hommes avec une rapidité méprisante.

Son pouce cessa de bouger. Ses yeux se plissèrent légèrement.

« Blackwood, Kira. Sergent-chef. »

Il leva les yeux, son regard parcourant les Marines qui attendaient, jusqu’à ce qu’il se pose sur elle.

« Transfert du service de sécurité de l’ambassade à Rome. »

Kira soutint son regard droit dans les yeux. « Oui, monsieur. »

« Levez-vous quand je m’adresse à vous, sergent-chef. »

She stood, coming to attention. Even at attention, she was unremarkable. Five-six, 130 pounds, the kind of person who could disappear in a crowd of three. The silver streak in her dark hair was the only thing that distinguished her from a dozen other female Marines.

Drummond walked closer, studying her with the intensity of a man who had spent his life evaluating Marines and finding most of them insufficient.

“Embassy duty,” he said it like it was a disease. “That’s where we send Marines to stand around looking pretty and checking invitation lists. That’s where careers go to die slowly while pretending to be alive.”

Several of the waiting Marines shifted uncomfortably. No one spoke.

“We’re fighting a war, Staff Sergeant Blackwood. A real war with real enemies who want real Americans dead. And the Marine Corps sends me a security guard who spent the last three years making sure Italian diplomats didn’t steal the canapés.”

Kira said nothing. There was nothing to say. Men like Drummond had already made up their minds before they opened their mouths. Contradicting them only made it worse.

“Standards have fallen, Commander Hayes,” Drummond continued, his voice carrying easily through the now silent bay. “When I was a young lieutenant, Marines who got sent to combat zones had to earn it. Now we’re taking anyone who can fog a mirror and spell Marine with only two mistakes.”

“Staff Sergeant Blackwood meets all physical requirements, sir,” Hayes offered weakly.

“The physical requirements are the bare minimum, Commander. The bare minimum doesn’t win wars. The bare minimum gets Marines killed.”

He looked back at Kira.

“Tell me, Staff Sergeant, what’s your specialty? Checking IDs? Making sure visiting senators don’t trip over their own egos?”

“Small arms maintenance, sir. Advanced marksmanship. Combat life-saving.”

“Ah, a shooter.” His tone made it clear what he thought of that claim. “Let me guess—expert qualification on the range back at Quantico, where the targets don’t shoot back and the biggest danger is sunburn.”

“Yes, sir.” It was easier to agree. Always easier to agree. The alternative was explaining things that no one would believe and that she had spent twenty years trying to forget.

Drummond turned to Hayes. “Continue with your physicals, Commander. Let’s see if the rest of your Marines are at least up to the minimum standards.”

He didn’t leave. That was the problem. He stood there with his arms crossed, a silent and intimidating presence, while the corpsman nervously gestured for Kira to approach the bioscanner.

The scanner was a large arch of chrome and sensors designed to detect everything from micro-fractures in bones to the early stages of cancer. Standard medical technology, nothing invasive. Just remove your shirt, step through the arch, and let the machines catalog everything about your body that you might prefer to keep private.

Kira had known this moment was coming. She had been dreading it for three years, ever since she had requested transfer out of Rome and back to a combat zone. Embassy duty had been safe, anonymous, a place where no one looked too closely at anyone because everyone had secrets they preferred to keep buried.

But safety was also its own kind of death. And she had decided three years ago that she was tired of dying slowly.

“Staff Sergeant,” the corpsman said, “your tunic, please.”

She could feel every eye in the bay on her. Could feel the weight of Drummond’s judgment. Could feel the past pressing up against the present like a fist against glass, waiting for the moment when the pressure would become too much and everything would shatter.

Her hands went to the high collar of her uniform. The fabric rustled in the quiet room. She pulled the tunic over her head, folded it with mechanical precision, and placed it on the edge of the diagnostic bed. Then she turned to face the scanner.

For one suspended moment, there was only the low hum of the medical equipment and the soft whisper of the air conditioning. Then came the sharp intake of breath from the corpsman, the muttered curse from somewhere behind her, the absolute crushing silence that followed as every person in the medical bay processed what they were seeing.

Kira’s back was a road map of violence.

The scars started at her shoulders and didn’t stop until they reached her waistline. They were not the clean surgical lines of medical intervention. These were the scars of survival. The scars of lessons learned in blood and agony and the kind of darkness that most people only saw in nightmares.

A starburst pattern of melted, puckered flesh bloomed over her left shoulder blade—shrapnel burns from an IED that had detonated close enough to feel the heat of the explosion on her skin, close enough to smell her own flesh cooking.

Three parallel gouges ran diagonally across her spine, each one as wide as a finger, the tissue raised and discolored. They looked like claw marks, which in a way they were—the kind of marks left by a human hand holding a piece of jagged metal, dragging it slowly across skin while asking questions in a language that turned pain into a vocabulary.

Cigarette burns dotted her lower back in a deliberate pattern—small, round, precise, the kind of burns that were applied methodically one after another while someone counted in Russian and waited for screams that never came.

Rope burns circled both wrists, visible even now as pale bands of scar tissue where skin had rubbed raw against restraints. Days of hanging from ceiling pipes while gravity and time did their work.

A long puckered scar ran along her ribs on the right side. A bullet, grazed close enough to crack a rib, close enough to make breathing agony for weeks afterward. Another inch to the left and it would have punctured her lung and ended everything in an Iraqi bunker twenty years ago.

But it was the tattoo that made Drummond’s blood run cold.

Small, black, barely visible among the chaos of healed wounds. On the nape of her neck, just below her hairline where a uniform collar would normally hide it, the number 91. And below that, two letters: TS.

Task Force Sandstorm.

Drummond had seen that insignia exactly once in his career, twenty years ago, in a classified briefing that was supposed to stay classified until everyone involved was dead. A briefing about a reconnaissance team that had gone deep behind enemy lines during Desert Storm. Eight operators, mission: locate mobile Scud missile launchers before they could strike coalition forces or Israeli cities.

Insertion successful. Mission accomplished. Entire team lost.

Or so the official record stated.

But there had been rumors. Whispers in the halls of the Pentagon. Late-night conversations between intelligence officers who had seen the after-action reports that never made it into the official files. Stories about a survivor, a single operator who had walked out of the Iraqi desert after six days of evasion and pursuit carrying intelligence that had enabled the final phase of coalition air strikes.

They called her the Reaper of Baghdad. A ghost story, a legend that no one quite believed but everyone wanted to be true.

Drummond’s voice, when he finally found it, was stripped of all its earlier condescension. It was the voice of a man who had just seen something that shouldn’t exist.

“Where did you get those marks, Staff Sergeant?”

Kira didn’t turn around. She stood perfectly still, her scarred back a testament to a life that her service record claimed she had never lived.

“Iraq, sir. Long time ago.”

“How long ago?”

“Desert Storm. 1991.”

The math was immediate and damning. If she had been in Desert Storm, she would have been, what, eighteen at the oldest—a teenager. But Task Force Sandstorm had been special operations. Tier One assets. The kind of operators who had a decade of experience minimum. The kind of people who didn’t officially exist.

Drummond pulled out his data pad with hands that weren’t quite steady. His fingers moved across the screen, accessing classified personnel files that required authorization he technically didn’t have but had stopped caring about thirty seconds ago.

He found her file, found the dates, found the service record that was simultaneously too detailed and not detailed enough, and then he found the flag.

Blackwood, Kira M. SSgt. Status: KIA. Date of death: 26 February 1991. Operation: redacted. Remains not recovered.

Killed in action twenty years ago. This woman standing in front of him had been legally dead longer than some of the Marines in this room had been alive.

“You’re listed as killed in action, Staff Sergeant.” His voice was barely above a whisper, but it carried through the silent medical bay like a gunshot. “You’ve been dead for twenty years.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Those markings, that tattoo—those are Task Force Sandstorm identifiers.”

“Yes, sir.”

« La falsification d’insignes d’unité classifiés est un délit passible d’une cour martiale. L’usurpation d’identité d’un militaire décédé est un crime fédéral. Comprenez-vous la situation dans laquelle vous vous trouvez ? »

Finalement, Kira se retourna. Leurs regards se croisèrent et Drummond y lut quelque chose qui le fit reculer malgré lui. Ni défi, ni peur, mais quelque chose de plus froid, de plus ancien. Le regard de quelqu’un qui avait traversé le feu et découvert que le feu n’était qu’une autre forme de météo.

« Je comprends parfaitement, Colonel. Et vous ? »

Avant même que Drummond puisse formuler une réponse, avant même qu’il puisse décider s’il fallait faire arrêter cette femme, l’interroger ou les deux, l’univers a tranché pour lui.

Tout a commencé par un son. Pas une explosion, pas encore. Juste une vibration profonde et résonnante qui remontait à travers le pont. Un grondement subsonique à faire mal aux dents, qui déclenchait chez tout vétéran la reconnaissance instantanée d’un tir imminent.

Puis les sirènes d’alerte. Le hurlement glaçant de l’alarme d’attaque : « Attention, attaque imminente ! Mettez-vous à couvert, immédiatement ! » Ceci n’est pas un exercice.

Puis l’impact.

Le lance-roquettes a percuté le mur sud de l’infirmerie avec la force d’un train de marchandises transportant uniquement de la violence. L’ogive, conçue pour pénétrer les blindages légers, a transformé le béton armé en éclats, et les barres d’armature en encore plus d’éclats.

L’explosion fut tout à la fois : lumière, son, pression, chaleur. Les forces fondamentales de la physique se sont concentrées en un instant de fureur cinétique qui a bouleversé les règles de base du fonctionnement des murs.

L’onde de choc frappa Kira comme un poing. L’entraînement et l’instinct prirent le dessus avant même qu’elle ait le temps de réfléchir. Elle était déjà en mouvement, se contorsionnant déjà en plein vol, calculant déjà les angles et les points d’impact, et comment absorber un maximum d’énergie sans se blesser.

Elle atterrit sur le sol en roulant sur elle-même, se releva sur un genou, les mains déjà prêtes à saisir des armes qui n’étaient pas là, car il s’agissait d’une infirmerie. L’endroit était censé être sûr.

Rien n’était sûr.

Autour d’elle, le chaos se peignait en cris, en fumée et dans le silence terrible des Marines qui, une seconde auparavant, hurlaient des ordres et, la suivante, ne crieraient plus jamais rien.

Le bioscanner s’effondra dans un crissement de métal torturé, son arc chromé se tordant dans sa chute, manquant de peu la tête du caporal Sutton qui fut projeté contre l’armoire à provisions. Sa tête heurta le bord avec un bruit qui fit se nouer l’estomac de Kira. Inconscient, le cuir chevelu ensanglanté, vivant mais fragile.

Le commandant Strand fut projetée à l’autre bout de la pièce, sa tablette se brisant contre un mur. Son corps heurta violemment un chariot de diagnostic qui s’effondra aussitôt sous elle. Elle resta immobile, du sang coulant de son nez – possible commotion cérébrale.

Évaluer et trier.

Le colonel Drummond était le plus proche du point d’impact. L’explosion l’avait soulevé comme un jouet et projeté contre le mur du fond. Le choc fut violent, son épaule encaissant le plus gros du mouvement, sa tête basculant en avant puis en arrière. Le coup du lapin caractéristique de quelqu’un dont le cerveau venait de heurter violemment la paroi interne du crâne.

Il a glissé le long du mur, laissant une traînée de sang, son bras gauche pendant dans une position anormale. Épaule déboîtée. Commotion cérébrale possible. Étourdi mais conscient. Toujours dans le combat.

Les autres Marines présents dans la baie étaient à terre. Certains hurlaient, d’autres restaient silencieux, deux étaient manifestement morts, leurs corps placés exactement au mauvais endroit au mauvais moment.

L’infirmier tentait de se relever, les mains couvertes de sang, peut-être le sien, peut-être celui de quelqu’un d’autre. Ses yeux étaient écarquillés par un choc qui ne s’était pas encore traduit par une action.

Dehors, dans les couloirs au-delà du mur effondré, Kira entendait des bruits qui lui donnaient la chair de poule : des pas, des chocs répétés, des mouvements d’une précision tactique. Pas de course, pas de panique, une progression maîtrisée, l’agressivité assurée de ceux qui savaient exactement ce qu’ils faisaient.

Il ne s’agissait pas d’une attaque aléatoire des talibans. C’était un raid professionnel et coordonné. Le lance-roquettes avait été placé avec une précision chirurgicale afin de pénétrer dans l’infirmerie, de semer le chaos et de préparer le terrain pour la suite des opérations.

Kira était debout, son esprit passant de celle qu’elle avait prétendu être ces trois dernières années à quelque chose de beaucoup plus ancien et d’infiniment plus dangereux.

Le masque était tombé. L’anonymat soigneusement cultivé avait disparu. Il ne restait plus que la chose qui avait surgi du désert irakien vingt ans auparavant.

Et cette chose avait des idées très précises sur la survie.

Priorisez le triage. Sauvez ceux que vous pouvez sauver. Acceptez ceux que vous ne pouvez pas sauver.

Elle se jeta sur Sutton, ses doigts se portant aussitôt à son cou, trouvant son pouls. Fort. Rapide, mais fort. La blessure à la tête paraissait plus grave qu’elle ne l’était ; c’était toujours le cas pour les blessures au cuir chevelu. Mais il était inconscient et serait hors d’usage pendant au moins les prochaines minutes.

Elle attrapa un bandage propre dans une trousse de secours éparpillée, lui banda la tête avec une efficacité brutale et exerça une pression directe pour ralentir le saignement. Sans délicatesse. Fonctionnel. Il était désormais un atout, rien de plus : un secouriste dont on pourrait avoir besoin.

Le major Strand ensuite. Kira vérifia ses pupilles, sa respiration, sa position. Commotion cérébrale confirmée. Possibles lésions internes, mais elle était consciente, les yeux suivant les mouvements, ses mains essayant de se redresser.

« Restez à terre », ordonna Kira d’une voix impérieuse, empreinte d’une certitude absolue et dénuée de toute notion de grade. « Ne bougez pas tant que je ne vous ai pas donné le feu vert. »

Le regard de Strand se fixa sur elle, un mélange de confusion et d’entraînement se lisant sur son visage. L’entraînement l’emporta. Elle resta au sol.

Drummond was trying to stand, his working hand pressed against the wall, his face gray with pain and shock. His left arm hung uselessly at his side, the shoulder clearly dislocated, the joint separated and screaming. He was trying to speak, trying to issue orders, but all that came out was a strangled gasp.

Kira crossed to him in three strides. No warning, no preparation. She grabbed his dislocated arm and his opposite shoulder, set her stance, and yanked with precisely measured force.

The shoulder popped back into its socket with a sound like a pistol shot.

Drummond’s scream was involuntary, bitten off almost immediately, his teeth clenching against the white-hot agony of nerve endings that had just been introduced to the concept of relocated anatomy. His eyes went wide, then focused—the shock of the pain actually clearing some of the concussion fog from his brain.

“Functional,” Kira said flatly. “You’ll be useless for fine motor skills, but you can shoot. Can you shoot, Colonel?”

Drummond stared at her like he was seeing her for the first time, which in a way he was. The woman who had stood quietly taking his abuse twenty minutes ago was gone. What stood in front of him now was someone who had just field-triaged four casualties, relocated a shoulder without anesthetic, and done it all with the calm efficiency of someone who had done it before—many times before.

“I can shoot,” he managed.

“Good, because they’re coming through that wall in about thirty seconds.”

The bootsteps were closer now. Kira could hear voices—low and proficient, Russian, speaking Russian.

Her blood turned to ice water.

She moved to the shattered wall, staying low, staying in the shadows and the smoke. Through the gap, she could see figures moving in the corridor beyond—not Afghan insurgents. These men wore body armor, carried modern weapons, moved with the tactical discipline of professional soldiers.

Black fatigues. No insignia. No identifying marks. Contractors. Mercenaries. The kind of people who fought for money and asked no questions about who was paying or why.

But the weapons they carried were Russian—AK-104s, VSS Vintorez—and the way they moved, the way they cleared corners and covered each other’s advances, that was Spetsnaz doctrine. Soviet special operations. The kind of training that only came from one place.

Kira felt something cold and sharp settle into her chest. A feeling she thought she had buried twenty years ago in an Iraqi bunker.

They weren’t here for the FOB. They were here for her.

She grabbed an M4 rifle from a dead Marine, checked the magazine, charged the weapon. Muscle memory from another life. She moved to where Drummond was trying to stand and pressed the rifle into his working hand.

“Can you use this?”

“I’m a Marine. Of course I can.”

“Then use it. They’re breaching in ten seconds. When they come through that wall, you fire on anything that isn’t us. Don’t aim for headshots. Aim center mass. Keep firing until they stop moving.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Later. Right now, we survive. Questions come after.”

She scanned the ruined medical bay, her eyes cataloging resources with the speed of pure desperation. Overturned medical carts. Scattered supplies. Oxygen tanks. Exposed wiring from severed power conduits. A ruptured coolant line hissing faintly in the corner.

An idea formed. Terrible, desperate, likely to kill them all if she miscalculated by even a fraction.

Perfect.

She grabbed an armful of supplies, moving with purpose, ignoring Drummond’s questions, ignoring the screaming alarms and the smoke and the approaching sound of men who carried the same weapons that had killed her team twenty years ago.

IV bags full of flammable anesthetic. Oxygen tank, the small portable kind. Medical tape. Exposed electrical wiring. A length of surgical tubing.

She worked fast, her hands moving with the kind of precision that came from having done something similar before in different circumstances, with different materials, but always with the same goal: make the enemy die faster than they can make you die.

The device she constructed would have made any explosives expert either proud or horrified—and possibly both. It was crude, unstable, the kind of improvised explosive that had no business working and every chance of killing the person who built it.

But Kira had learned long ago that desperation was the mother of very specific kinds of innovation.

She positioned the device near the breached wall, used the bodies of the dead Marines to obscure it, armed it with a simple electrical trigger wired to a piece of exposed conduit. Not complex. Complexity was the enemy of reliability, and she needed this to be very, very reliable.

“What are you doing?” Drummond demanded.

“Building a very warm welcome.”

She turned to face him, and he saw her eyes again. Those cold, ancient eyes that belonged to someone who had made peace with death a long time ago.

“When they breach, you fire three rounds at the ceiling. Aim at the lights. Make them think you’re panicking. Make them think you’re a target.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to understand. You need to trust me. Two kinds of people in a crisis, Colonel—those who make plans and those who get in the way of plans. Decide which one you are right now.”

Drummond looked at her. Really looked at her. Saw the scars. Saw the tattoo. Saw the absolute certainty in her eyes. Made his decision.

“I’m with you, Staff Sergeant.”

“Good. Then get behind that overturned bed and don’t move until I tell you to move.”

The sound of the breaching charge was unmistakable—a flat, hard crack that punched through what remained of the wall like a fist through wet paper. The explosion cleared the opening, widening the breach, turning it from a crack into a doorway.

The first contractor through was professional. Weapon up, eyes scanning, looking for targets. He found Drummond instead.

The colonel fired three rounds just like Kira had told him. All of them went wild, hitting the ceiling, the walls—anywhere but the enemy. Making noise. Drawing attention.

Perfect.

Two more contractors poured through the breach, their weapons tracking toward Drummond’s position, their training telling them to suppress the threat, to overwhelm with firepower, to end this quickly. They moved past the pile of bodies, past the improvised device hidden in the shadows and the smoke.

Exactly where Kira had known they would go, because she understood how men like this thought. She understood it because she had been taught by men just like them.

She waited. Patience, learned in a sniper’s nest, in a desert hide, in an Iraqi bunker where patience was the difference between living and dying. Waited until all three were in the kill zone. Waited until they were committed. Waited until there was no retreat.

Then she pressed the trigger.

The oxygen tank ruptured first, releasing its contents in a violent, instantaneous expansion. Pure oxygen flooded into a space filled with aerosolized anesthetic from the IV bags, mixing with the ruptured coolant that had been leaking for the last sixty seconds.

The electrical spark from the exposed wiring ignited it all at once.

What happened next wasn’t an explosion in the traditional sense. It was a fuel-air detonation. The air itself caught fire. A wave of white-hot pressure erupted from the center of the room, expanding in a sphere of pure kinetic fury that turned atmosphere into a weapon.

For a split second, the medical bay was illuminated with light brighter than the sun. Then the pressure wave hit.

The three contractors never knew what killed them. One moment, they were advancing on a target. The next moment, they ceased to exist as anything recognizable. The heat was so intense that their body armor melted before their bodies did. The pressure so extreme that their internal organs ruptured before the flames could reach them.

The wave slammed into Kira and Drummond, even behind cover. It felt like being hit by a truck made of solid air. Kira’s lungs compressed, the breath driven from her body. Her ears popped. Her vision went white. Heat seared exposed skin, the temperature in the room spiking to levels that would have been fatal if sustained for more than a fraction of a second.

Then it was over.

The vacuum came next—air rushing back in to fill the space that had been temporarily emptied. The roar of the detonation was replaced by a high-pitched ringing that told Kira her eardrums had been damaged but not destroyed.

She pushed herself up, her body screaming protest that she ignored. Drummond was doing the same, his face a mask of shock and pain and something that might have been respect or might have been terror.

The breach in the wall was now a smoking crater. What remained of the three contractors was scattered across the walls in patterns that would give forensic analysts nightmares for weeks. The fire had consumed most of the available oxygen and was now dying, leaving behind only thick black smoke and the smell of things that should never be burned.

Kira grabbed her rifle, moved to the crater, and scanned the corridor beyond.

More voices. More movement. The first breach had failed, but there would be others. Men like this didn’t stop because of one setback. They adapted. They learned. They came back harder.

She could hear them regrouping, calling out in Russian, changing tactics.

And then she heard a voice that made twenty years of carefully constructed distance collapse into nothing.

A voice she remembered from a bunker in Iraq. A voice that had asked her questions while applying lit cigarettes to her skin. A voice that had promised her she would die slowly, painfully, and alone in a place where no one would ever find her body.

Colonel Victor Ashenko.

And he was calling her name.

Not her real name. Her old name. The name that had died in that bunker.

“Reaper,” the voice called out in English, heavily accented but clear. “I know you are there. I know you are alive. Twenty years I have waited for this moment.”

Kira’s hands tightened on her rifle until her knuckles went white.

Drummond was staring at her. “Who is Reaper?”

She turned to face him, and the look on her face told him everything he needed to know.

“That was my call sign,” she said quietly. “Twenty years ago. Task Force Sandstorm. Desert Storm. Eight operators sent to locate Scud launchers. We found them. We called in the strikes. Then we got caught. The official record says…”

She took a breath.

“The official record says we all died. Seven of us did. I didn’t. But the man out there in that corridor—Colonel Victor Ashenko—he’s the reason the other seven are dead. He ran the interrogation. He killed my team, and I’ve been waiting twenty years to return the favor.”

She moved toward the breach, toward the smoke, and the voices in the past that had finally caught up with her.

Drummond grabbed her arm with his good hand. “Wait, we need a plan. We need support. We need—”

“We need to survive the next five minutes, Colonel. Everything else is academic.”

She pulled free, her eyes never leaving the corridor.

“You want to know who I am? You want to know if I’m really the Reaper of Baghdad? You’re about to find out. Stay behind me. Do what I tell you. And if you have any prayers, now would be a good time.”

She stepped through the breach and into the smoke.

And Colonel Garrett Drummond, who had spent forty years thinking he understood Marines and warfare and courage, followed her into the darkness and realized he had never understood any of it at all.

The hunt was on.

The smoke hung in the corridor like a living thing, thick and black and tasting of chemicals that were never meant to burn together. Kira moved through it like she had been born in darkness, her rifle up, her breathing controlled, every sense extended beyond her body to map the space around her through sound and air pressure and the subtle shifts in temperature that told her where walls ended and enemies began.

Behind her, Drummond followed with the awkward caution of a man who had spent the last fifteen years commanding from behind desks and tactical displays rather than moving through kill zones. He was good, his training still solid despite the years, but he moved like someone relearning a language they had once spoken fluently.

Kira moved like someone who had never stopped speaking it.

The corridor opened into what had been a supply room before the attack. Now it was a maze of overturned shelving units and scattered equipment, creating natural choke points and blind corners that would be suicide to rush through.

Perfect ambush terrain.

Which meant the enemy would either avoid it entirely or use it themselves.

Kira held up a closed fist.

Stop.

Drummond froze instantly, his good hand tight on his rifle, his injured shoulder held carefully against his body.

She pointed two fingers at her eyes, then at a gap between two fallen shelves.

Movement. She had seen movement.

She signaled for Drummond to cover left, then dropped to a crouch and flowed right, using the shadows and the debris as concealment. Her rifle tracked smoothly across potential firing positions, her finger resting alongside the trigger guard—ready, but not committed.

Shooting was loud. Loud drew attention. Attention brought numbers, and numbers were the one resource the enemy had in abundance.

The contractor was good. He had positioned himself behind an overturned desk, his weapon covering the main approach, his body armor making him a hard target from the front. But he had made one critical mistake.

He was focused on where he expected the threat to come from, not where it actually was.

Kira came at him from the side, moving with the silence that came from having learned stealth from people who would kill you if you failed to learn it properly. She was within arm’s reach before he realized she was there.

His head started to turn, his weapon beginning to swing toward her. But momentum and physics were already committed to his original position.

Her rifle butt slammed into the gap between his helmet and his body armor—that vulnerable point at the base of the skull where the spine met the brain stem. The impact was precisely measured. Hard enough to shut down his central nervous system. Not hard enough to shatter vertebrae.

He dropped without a sound, his weapon clattering to the floor, his body going limp like someone had cut his strings. Not dead. Unconscious. The distinction mattered to Kira in ways she could never quite explain to people who had never made similar choices.

Elle s’empara de son arme, un AK-104 équipé d’un silencieux et d’un chargeur plein – bien meilleur que le M4 qu’elle portait. Elle rendit le M4 à Drummond et garda l’AK pour elle, vérifiant son fonctionnement avec l’aisance de quelqu’un qui avait passé des centaines d’heures à s’entraîner au maniement des armes soviétiques.

L’ironie ne lui avait pas échappé.

Ils continuèrent d’avancer, s’enfonçant plus profondément dans l’enceinte, et à chaque pas, Kira sentait les années s’effacer.

Trois ans de service à l’ambassade. Cinq ans auparavant, en formation. Sept ans avant cela, dans des missions logistiques qui la tenaient à l’écart de tout combat réel. Tout cela n’était que camouflage, couleurs protectrices.

Ce qu’elle avait été dans le désert irakien — ce qui lui avait permis de tuer six gardes avec des armes improvisées et de parcourir cent trente kilomètres en territoire ennemi —, ce truc n’avait jamais vraiment disparu. Il était simplement là, tapi dans l’ombre.

Les voix étaient plus distinctes à présent. Du russe mêlé d’anglais, des ordres fusaient, des positions se mettaient en place. Elle compta au moins huit voix différentes, peut-être plus. Ils établissaient un périmètre, créant des champs de tir croisés, transformant la partie endommagée de la FOB en une forteresse imprenable, un véritable enfer à attaquer de front.

C’est pourquoi elle n’avait aucune intention de l’attaquer directement.

Kira s’agenouilla près d’un panneau mural endommagé et fit signe à Drummond de s’approcher. Lorsqu’il fut à portée, elle lui murmura à l’oreille.

« Ils sont en train d’établir une position fortifiée, probablement pour y retenir les otages. La procédure standard serait d’appeler des renforts et de les encercler, mais nous n’avons ni le temps ni les effectifs nécessaires. »

« Et alors, que fait-on ? » murmura Drummond, une pointe de frustration dans la voix. C’était sa base, ses Marines, sa responsabilité, et il était réduit à suivre les ordres d’un sergent-chef mort depuis vingt ans.

« On fait le tour. » Elle désigna le plafond du doigt. « Ces bâtiments ont des vides techniques entre les étages : ventilation, gaines électriques, structures porteuses. Les talibans y cachaient des armes et du matériel. On monte, on se place au-dessus, et on redescend là où ils ne s’y attendent pas. »

« C’est insensé. »

« C’est pourquoi ça va marcher. »

Elle était déjà en mouvement, se dirigeant vers une portion de mur endommagée où l’explosion avait ouvert l’accès à l’infrastructure située au-dessus. Drummond la suivit, car à ce stade, il s’était engagé dans cette folie et il n’y avait rien d’autre à faire que d’aller jusqu’au bout.

Le vide sanitaire était tout aussi misérable que dans les souvenirs de Kira, après l’avoir vu dans des dizaines d’autres bâtiments, dans des dizaines d’autres pays. Chaud, exigu, rempli de poussière qui rendait la respiration extrêmement difficile. Les espaces entre les poutres de soutien étaient à peine assez larges pour un corps humain, et par endroits, il fallait se faufiler dans des ouvertures si étroites que les épaules de Drummond frottaient contre les parois simultanément.

Mais ça a fonctionné.

Ils se trouvaient désormais au-dessus de l’ennemi, progressant parallèlement aux voix qui résonnaient en contrebas. Et personne ne levait les yeux, car personne ne levait jamais les yeux avant qu’il ne soit trop tard.

Kira se repérait grâce aux sons et aux subtiles variations de courant d’air qui lui indiquaient l’emplacement des pièces, les zones de concentration ennemie et les espaces suffisamment vastes pour être significatifs. Elle l’avait déjà fait dans un autre bâtiment, lors d’une autre guerre, à dix-huit ans, lorsqu’elle s’était échappée d’un centre d’interrogatoire soviétique, animée par la seule rage et la détermination.

Le souvenir la frappa sans prévenir, brutalement, viscéralement. Non pas la distance confortable du souvenir, mais la surcharge sensorielle immédiate d’y être.

Puis, à cet instant précis, l’odeur du bunker en Irak avait changé. Un mélange d’huile, de sueur et d’une odeur métallique qu’elle reconnut plus tard comme étant celle du sang. Son sang. Le sang de son équipe. L’air en était saturé, lui emprisonnant la gorge et donnant à chaque respiration un goût de cuivre et de mort.

Elle pouvait voir le visage du capitaine Harrison. Trente-six ans, le visage buriné, professionnel et imperturbable, même lorsqu’Ashenko lui avait pointé le pistolet sur la tempe. Ses dernières paroles lui avaient été adressées.

Accomplis la mission, Faucheur. C’est un ordre.

Puis le coup de feu.

Puis, le sanglot étouffé de Lucas Bennett avant qu’il ne se reprenne, avant que sa propre mort ne survienne vingt minutes plus tard.

Cole Briggs était celui qui avait tenu le plus longtemps — l’expert en démolition qui lui avait appris à fabriquer des bombes à partir de rien, à transformer des matériaux du quotidien en armes, à anticiper les actions de l’ennemi car c’était le seul moyen de survivre face à un ennemi en surnombre.

Il avait créé la diversion qui lui avait permis de s’échapper, chargeant les gardes de ses mains brisées, lui offrant des secondes qui s’étaient transformées en minutes, puis en vie.

Le souvenir la libéra aussi soudainement qu’il l’avait emportée, la laissant accroupie dans le vide sanitaire, les larmes aux yeux qu’elle essuya avec une efficacité rageuse.

Pas maintenant. Pas ici.

Le deuil était un luxe pour ceux qui avaient le temps de s’y adonner, et elle n’avait jamais eu ce temps.

Drummond lui toucha doucement l’épaule, un geste empreint d’interrogation.

Elle secoua la tête une fois.

«Continuez à avancer.»

Ils ont continué à avancer.

Le vide sanitaire donnait sur une gaine technique plus large qui traversait le bâtiment verticalement. Une échelle de service était encastrée dans le mur, et un éclairage de secours fournissait une faible illumination.

Kira s’arrêta au début, à l’écoute.

Ci-dessous.

Deux étages plus bas, elle pouvait peut-être entendre l’ennemi. Au-dessus, le silence.

Il leur fallait descendre plus bas. Il leur fallait trouver où étaient détenus les otages. Il leur fallait agir avant qu’Ashenko ne perde patience et ne commence à exécuter des Marines pour prouver qu’il était sérieux.

Elle commença à descendre l’échelle, progressant avec précaution et silence, testant chaque barreau avant de s’y asseoir. Drummond la suivit, son épaule blessée le rendant maladroit ; le moindre faux mouvement lui causait une douleur fulgurante à l’articulation, accompagnée de sifflements aigus.

Ils étaient un étage plus bas lorsque Kira l’a entendue : une voix, jeune, effrayée, parlant anglais avec un accent texan.

Caporal Sutton.