Chapter 5 - The Team, The Target, And The Ghost From My Past
By 0500 the next morning, the safe house was buzzing. Thorne had assembled the team. Hand-picked. Every single one of them was a Tier One operator—SEALs, Delta, a CIA paramilitary officer who’d spent more time in the Middle East than most diplomats. Men who’d worked with Thorne for decades. Men who’d never been compromised. Men who’d take a bullet for each other without a second thought.
And then there was me.
I stood at the front of the conference room, Thorne’s jacket still draped over my shoulders, a cup of black coffee in my hand, and looked at them. Six of them. All men. All staring at me like I was a ghost. Which, technically, I was.
“Morning,” I said, setting the coffee down. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Harper Sterling. Most of you were told I died in Somalia five years ago. That was a lie. I’m here because I’m the only person in this room who’s gone up against Raza Karim and his Ouroboros Group and lived to tell the tale. For the next two weeks, I’m your commanding officer. What I say goes. No questions. No egos. If you have a problem with that… the door’s right there.”
Nobody moved.
“Good,” I said, nodding at Jake. “Chief Marlow is my XO. He’s the only one besides me who knows what Karim’s men are capable of. You listen to him like you listen to me. Understood?”
A chorus of “Hoo-yah” and “Yes, ma’am” rippled around the table.
“Let’s get to it.”
The next six hours were the most intense of my life. We went through every scrap of intel Thorne had. Karim’s known associates. His businesses. His shell companies. The shipping routes he used. VIPER’s financials—the millions he’d siphoned, the properties he’d bought in Dubai and Aspen and Monaco, the trail of breadcrumbs he’d left because he’d gotten cocky.
By noon, we had a plan.
Phase One: Infiltrate Karim’s network in Los Angeles. We had a lead—one of Karim’s lieutenants, a former French Foreign Legionnaire named Luc Fournier, was running the port operation out of a nightclub in Long Beach called The Ouroboros. Fitting. Fournier was the man who’d stabbed me in the back in Mogadishu. I’d recognize that tattoo anywhere. I’d spent five years dreaming of putting a bullet in his brain.
Phase Two: Flip Fournier. Or break him. Either way, get him to give us the exact location of the warhead, the date it was arriving, and the name of VIPER.
Phase Three: Take down the shipment when it hit the port. Simultaneously, a separate team in Dubai would hit Karim’s compound and take him into custody.
Phase Four: Arrest VIPER. Expose him. End this.
Simple. Clean. Four phases. Fourteen days.
“Fournier’s creature of habit,” I said, tapping a photo of the man on the whiteboard. Mid-forties, scar across his left cheek, cold dead eyes. “Every Tuesday and Friday night, he leaves the club at 0200. Drives his custom Lamborghini to his penthouse in Malibu. Takes Pacific Coast Highway. Single lane each way. Cliffs on one side, ocean on the other. Perfect place for a carjack.”
Jake looked at me. “You wanna take him on the PCH? That’s a public road. Civilians everywhere.”
“Not at 0215 on a Tuesday,” I said. “I’ve driven that route a hundred times. Between Topanga and Malibu, there’s a stretch of about two miles where there are no houses, no streetlights, no cameras. Just the road, the cliffs, and the ocean. We box him in. Two cars. One in front, one behind. Spike strips. He stops. We take him. Bring him back here. Nobody sees a thing.”
Thorne nodded. “It’s risky. But it’s our best shot. Fournier’s the only link we’ve got between Karim and the port. If we can flip him… this whole thing unravels in forty-eight hours.”
The room erupted into discussion. Logistics. Weapons. Vehicles. Extraction routes. I let them talk, leaning back against the wall, sipping my coffee, watching. Assessing. These were good men. The best. But I could see the doubt in some of their eyes. The woman leading them. The ghost who’d come back from the dead. They’d follow orders. But they wouldn’t trust me until I proved I belonged in the front of that room.
I’d just have to prove it.
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I sat on the back porch of the safe house, staring out at the dark desert stretching toward the mountains, cleaning my old Heckler & Koch USP—the same sidearm I’d carried in Somalia, the same one Thorne had kept in storage for five years, waiting for me to come back. The metal was warm and familiar in my hands.
The screen door creaked open. Jake. He sat down next to me on the steps, two beers in his hand. He held one out to me.
“Thought you didn’t drink on the job,” he said.
“I don’t,” I said. “But tonight’s… complicated.” I took the beer. Cracked it open. Took a sip. It was cold and bitter and perfect.
We sat in silence for a while. Just listening to the crickets, watching the stars come out. It felt like old times. Like we were back in that tent in Djibouti, the night before the mission, pretending we weren’t both scared out of our minds.
“You really think we can do this?” Jake asked softly. “Fourteen days. A nuke. A mole at the top. It’s a lot, Harper. Even for us.”
I looked at him. The moonlight hit his face, turning his eyes silver.
“We have to,” I said. “Because if we don’t… everyone we love dies. And I’ve already lost enough people to Karim. I’m not losing anyone else. Not you. Not Torres. Not my family. Not those kids graduating in two weeks. Nobody.”
Jake reached over. His hand covered mine on the beer bottle. His skin was rough and warm.
“I missed you,” he said. “So goddamned much. Every day. I tried to date. Tried to move on. But nobody… nobody even came close. You’re it for me, Sterling. Always have been. Even when I thought you were dead.”
My throat tightened. I’d spent five years telling myself I didn’t deserve this. That I was too broken, too scarred, too dangerous to let anyone love me. That loving someone just meant you had something else to lose. But sitting there with him, in the dark, with the weight of the world on our shoulders… for the first time in five years, I felt like I could breathe.
“I love you too, Jake,” I whispered. “I always have. I just… I was scared. If I let myself have this… if I let myself be happy… Karim would take it from me. Like he took everything else.”
“He’s not gonna take anything else from us,” Jake said. He leaned in. His forehead rested against mine. “We’re gonna end this. Together. And then… then we’re gonna figure out the rest. Okay?”
“Okay,” I whispered.
He kissed me then. Soft. Gentle. Like I was something fragile that might break. And for a minute, just a minute, I let myself forget about the warhead, about the mole, about the man who’d stabbed me in the back and the men who’d died because of a lie. For a minute, it was just me and Jake. Alive. Together. Home.
The moment ended too soon.
My burner phone buzzed in my pocket. Thorne.
I answered it. “Sterling.”
“Harper,” Thorne said, and his voice was tight. Urgent. “We’ve got a problem. A big one. Our surveillance team on your dad’s house just picked up a car. Black SUV. No plates. It did three passes of the neighborhood an hour ago, then parked two blocks over. Two men inside. Both armed. We ran facial recognition. They’re Ouroboros. Karim sent them.”
My blood ran cold.
“VIPER knows,” I said, standing up, the beer bottle slipping from my hand and shattering on the concrete. “He knows I’m alive. He sent them to take my family. To send me a message.”
“Already dispatched the QRF,” Thorne said. “ETA eight minutes. But Harper… the SUV just moved. It’s heading toward the house. Now.”
May you like
I was already running for the door.
“Tell the QRF to step on it,” I snapped. “I’m five minutes out. And if those men so much as touch a hair on my family’s heads… I’m gonna kill every single person who works for Raza Karim. Slowly. Painfully. Starting with Fournier.”
