Page 76 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

Kandahar.

The remaining hostile raises his weapon. The muzzle swings toward my chest. The time dilation of extreme stress stretches the moment into an eternity of micro-decisions—the distance between us (four meters), the trajectory of his barrel (rising), the weight of the empty rifle (seven pounds of useless steel).

My Ka-Bar clears its ankle sheath before the decision to draw it registers.

Four meters. Two strides. The hostile fires. The round punches into my plate carrier at the shoulder—the ceramic absorbs the energy, but the impact spins me forty-five degrees. The pain is a white-hot wire threaded through the meat of my deltoid, but the pain is also a door, and I walk through it.

The Ka-Bar enters below his body armor, angled upward. The seven-inch blade finds the gap between the ballistic plates and the soft tissue beneath. The resistance is brief.

The man folds.

I catch him by the collar of his vest, lower him to the floor, and withdraw the blade. Then I pick up his weapon. A SIG. Fifteen rounds. Last magazine.

The corridor is silent.

Boots behind me. Hammer, coming up out of the smoke with the satchel already open.

I stand in front of the reinforced door. The empty M4 hangs on its sling, the bolt locked back, the magazine well gaping.

Behind the door: voices. Thai and English. The sound of zip ties being tightened. The shuffle of bodies being moved. And beneath it all, barely audible through the reinforced steel⁠—

A voice.

Not screaming. Not pleading. Not begging. Steady. Clear.

She's talking to someone. Calm. Controlled. Holding ground with nothing but the quiet strength of a dancer who learned to weaponize her grace.

I press my palm flat against the reinforced door. The steel is cold. The blood from my knuckles leaves a dark smear on the gray surface.

I'm here.

The magazine is empty.

The man is not.

18

The Execution Block

LILY

The canvas hood is ripped off my head, and artificial light hits my eyes like a slap.

Flickering fluorescent tubes line the ceiling of a cavernous room—a converted storage bay buried deep in a fortress of poured concrete. The walls are thick and scarred, exposing jagged veins of rusted rebar. A single vibrating ventilation duct snakes across the ceiling, pumping stale recycled air that tastes of diesel, copper, and sweat. The floor beneath my bare feet is rough concrete, stained dark in irregular patches my brain refuses to identify.

My eyes adjust to the glare, and the reality of the room sharpens into focus.

Women. Young girls. Fifteen, maybe twenty of them, huddled together against the far wall in a ragged line. Some have their hands secured with industrial zip ties. Some are still blinded by canvas hoods identical to the one pulled from my head. The ones without hoods stare at the stained floor with the depthless gaze of human beings who have been warehoused as product—inventoried, sorted, and staged for delivery to the highest bidder.

They sit shivering on the bare concrete. No blankets. No water. The youngest girl in the corner, her knees pulled to her chest, can't possibly be older than sixteen.

The man who pulled the hood off shoves me toward the wall. The zip tie bites into the skin of my wrists as I stumble forward, catching my balance on mud-caked bare feet.

Three armed guards. I count them the way I count the other dancers in a stage formation—automatically, by position, spacing, and potential movement. One stands at the reinforced steel door we entered through. One stands at a second, smaller door on the far wall, labeled in peeling Cyrillic script. One stands beside a dented metal desk in the center of the room, bodyguard to the fourth man seated behind it.

The fourth man is not a guard.

He sits behind the desk with the posture of a middle manager reviewing quarterly reports. Fifties. Thin. Wire-rimmed glasses. A neatly pressed linen shirt, sleeves rolled to the forearms. A tablet and a satellite phone arranged on the desk beside a ceramic coffee cup.