PART 1
The first transmission came through broken by static, gunfire, and fear.
“Raven Actual, this is Bravo Three. We’re surrounded. Repeat, we’re surrounded by at least fifty enemies.”
Then automatic fire swallowed the rest of the sentence.
Inside the command tent at Outpost Haven, every officer froze.
On the operations screen, fourteen blue icons blinked deep inside Black Veil Forest, trapped in a ravine where no unit was supposed to stop.
Around them was nothing but ridges, dense trees, and dead ground.
The kind of terrain that turned trained Rangers into dead men.
Two miles away, Staff Sergeant Ava Stroud heard the same transmission through the radio clipped to her vest.
She was lying in wet grass on a ridge east of the ravine.
Beside her, Corporal Ryan Holt stared through a spotting scope, his breathing suddenly loud.
Fog dragged through the trees below them.
Somewhere under that gray canopy, fourteen men were running out of time.
Ava did not curse.
She did not panic.
She simply listened.
Then the radio cracked again.
“Contact north, west, and south. Heavy fire. We have wounded. They’re closing.”
Ava’s eyes stayed fixed on the distant break in the trees.
For eight months, everyone in the company had treated her as the sniper who never shot.
They called her Ghost Rifle behind her back.
Half admiration.
Half insult.
Ava had let them.
Because she had been sent there to disappear.
And disappearing was something she did better than shooting.
Then Sergeant Mason Rudd’s voice cut through the radio.
“All elements hold. Find cover. Conserve ammunition. We are not dying in this hole.”
May you like
Ava looked through her scope.
And saw the trap closing.
