Chapter 844
Hours bled into one another. The column stretched thin. The sounds of panting turned into gasps, then into the wretched sounds of trainees vomiting onto the trail.
Instructors Sharpe and Reynolds moved along the line, their faces grim, but they did not intervene. This was Sloane’s show.
Caroline gritted her teeth, her legs moving on autopilot. She was fighting a war on two fronts: the physical battle against the ridgeline and the exhaustion, and the mental battle against the storm raging in her own mind.
Jarrod’s face. Sloane’s face. Dr. Reed’s warning. The images swirled together, a toxic cocktail of doubt and suspicion.
This hell march was more than a test of her body. It was an assault on her soul.
After what felt like an eternity of agonizing, uphill struggle, Sloane’s voice cut through the darkness. “Take ten. Hydrate.”
The command was a gift from heaven. The trainees collapsed where they stood, dropping to the ground like puppets with their strings cut. The air filled with the sounds of desperate, ragged gasping.
Caroline slumped against the rough bark of a pine tree, her lungs on fire, her thighs screaming in protest. She unscrewed the cap of her canteen with trembling fingers and let the cool water slide down her raw throat.
Brenna crawled over to her, her face pale and slick with sweat in the faint moonlight. “I’m going to die,” she wheezed. “That Hawke woman… what is her deal? It feels like she hates us personally.”
A few other trainees, drawn together by shared misery, formed a small, exhausted circle. The sentiment was unanimous.
Instructor Reynolds, who had been observing from a short distance, walked over and sat down among them, her own movements showing the strain of the march.
She took a long pull from her own canteen. “She doesn’t hate you,” Reynolds said, her voice quiet and gravelly. “She just operates on a different standard.”
“What standard is that?” a trainee asked, her voice barely a whisper.
Reynolds’s gaze grew distant, her eyes focused on a past that none of them could see. “Have any of you heard the stories about Colonel Romero’s shadow?”
Caroline’s heart gave a single, violent thud against her ribs. She forced her expression to remain neutral, but every nerve ending in her body was suddenly on high alert.
Brenna’s exhaustion was momentarily forgotten, replaced by curiosity. “Shadow? What shadow?”
And so, in the cold night air of the wooded ridgeline, Instructor Reynolds began to tell a legend.
“Years ago, back when the Colonel was still a Major, he had a number two. A shadow. They were the most lethal two-person team in the entire JSOC.”
Her voice was filled with a soldier’s reverence for battlefield greatness. “They said she knew what he was going to do before he did it. That she could anticipate his orders. It was like they shared one mind in two bodies.”
The trainees listened, captivated, their own suffering momentarily forgotten.
“They ran more than a dozen black ops missions together,” Reynolds continued. “The kind that never make the news. The kind that change the course of history. They never failed. Not once.”