The satellite phone crackled at 0347 hours. I knew before I answered that something was wrong, because Lisa never called during operations unless the house was burning down or our kid was bleeding. She understood the rules, understood the stakes.
Every transmission could be intercepted, traced, turned into a breadcrumb for the wrong people. But the phone kept buzzing against my chest plate like it had its own pulse. I was three hundred meters inside hostile territory, pressed into the shadow of a crumbling building that smelled like dust, old smoke, and the kind of violence that sinks into concrete and never leaves.
My team was fifty meters ahead, securing the extraction point. We’d been on the ground eight days—protein bars, four-hour sleep cycles, and a high-value target who kept slipping through our fingers like smoke. I’d left home twenty-three days ago.
Ryan had cried when I got on the transport. Not because he didn’t understand, but because he understood too well. At six years old, my boy had lived through four deployments, watching his dad load a go-bag and disappear into a job he couldn’t explain to teachers or neighbors or the other dads at soccer practice.
I pulled the phone free, keeping my body small, reducing my silhouette. “Go for Morrison.”
Static. Then Lisa’s voice came through broken and thin, like it had traveled a thousand miles through broken glass.
“Jake.”
She’d been crying. I could hear it in the way her breath caught, in the wet thickness of her words. My stomach dropped.
“Lisa, what— Is Ryan okay? Are you hurt?”
“We’re fine. Physically.” The word physically hit like a warning flare.
“But Jake, they called him a pathological liar.”
For a second, I didn’t process it. My brain was still in operation mode—coordinates, timing, extraction windows. “They called who a liar?”
“Ryan.
At school. In front of the entire class.”
The building around me felt suddenly smaller. My team’s radio murmured softly in my earpiece, but my heart had gone loud.
I pressed deeper into the shadow. “What happened?”
“The science fair. He wrote on his project that you couldn’t come because you were hunting bad guys overseas.
He told the truth, the way we’ve always told him to say it.” Her voice shook. “And his teacher—Mrs. Patterson—made him stand up in class.
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