Page 21 of Echo: Line
"Tell me." Sitting back, still close enough to monitor his breathing, his color. "Tell me everything. From the beginning."
"That's a long story."
"We're not going anywhere."
Alex studies me for a moment, then nods. "Where do you want me to start?"
"Protocol Seven. The inauguration. Why they captured you."
He takes a breath, winces from the pain it causes, then begins. "I was Delta Force. Syria, about a year ago. Got orders to paint a target for a drone strike—school building where insurgents might be hiding weapons. Emphasis on might." His voice flattens. "Eighteen kids inside. I could see them through my scope. Playing. Learning. Living."
Listening, not interrupting, letting him tell it his way.
"Command wanted me to call in the strike anyway. Acceptable collateral damage for one mid-level commander who might have been there." He shifts, trying to find a position thatdoesn't pull at his wound. "I refused. Disobeyed a direct order. Let the target walk rather than vaporize kids on a maybe."
His words make the cabin feel colder. "What happened?"
"They burned me. Disavowed. Labeled me compromised, unstable, a liability. Had teams hunting me before I even made it out of country." His voice stays steady despite the exhaustion. "Spent eight months hiding in the Montana wilderness. Alone. Waiting for someone to find me and finish what command started."
"Until Kane."
"Yeah. Kane." He closes his eyes briefly. "He found me. Said he'd been burned too—his handler sold him out in Crete, got half his team killed. He was building something new. Echo Ridge. Operators who'd been betrayed by the system, fighting against the people who'd tried to eliminate them."
"The Committee."
"Shadow organization embedded everywhere—DoD, CIA, NSA. Running illegal operations, eliminating anyone who knew too much." His jaw tightens. "Kane recruited me. Gave me purpose again. A team. A mission that mattered."
Processing the implications. "So you joined Echo Ridge."
"Became part of something bigger than survival. We started gathering intel on Committee operations, building cases, finding evidence." He pauses, and something dark crosses his face. "Then we got word about Whitefish. A facility in Montana producing binary chemical weapons—two compounds harmless separately but lethal when combined."
"For the inauguration."
"They were staging it for deployment at the inauguration. Tens of thousands of casualties if they succeeded."
"You raided it."
"Kane's team hit the facility. Got samples, documentation, production schedules—everything we needed to prove what theywere planning. Our contact leaked it all immediately. WikiLeaks, New York Times, Washington Post, every major outlet. The evidence went public before the Committee could stop it."
"So the inauguration was secured."
"Secret Service implemented Level One protocols. Screened every person, every package. The chemical attack never happened. Democracy proceeded exactly as it should." His voice flattens. "But that's when they came for us. After the leak went public, Protocol Seven escalated. Every asset on their termination list became kill-on-sight priority. They hit our staging facility with forty-plus operatives. Full assault. They wanted revenge and they wanted to eliminate everyone who knew the truth."
The weight of that settles between us. "That's when they took you."
"During the battle. Kessler—their field commander—made himself look like a fleeing target. Wounded, vulnerable. Classic bait." His jaw tightens. "I went after him. Walked right into the trap. He captured me while my team was defending the facility. Loaded me onto a helicopter and disappeared before they could intercept."
"And then four days of torture but you didn't break."
"No." Statement of fact. "SERE training plus years in the field. I know how to compartmentalize. How to hold out long enough for extraction."
"Your team leader."
He nods. "Kane. Best operator I've ever known. He spent those four days planning my rescue while watching the inauguration proceed safely on every news channel. Knowing they'd stopped the attack but lost me in the process." He laughs, bitter and sharp. "Victory and failure wrapped up together. That's the kind of math nobody teaches you in training."
The cabin walls seem closer suddenly. Like they're pressing in with the weight of what he's telling me.
"You're saying the government I serve is executing its own soldiers?" My voice sounds distant even to me.
