Page 6 of Echo: Spark
My hands are shaking again, but different this time. Not withdrawal. Not fear. Something else. Something that feels almost like hope, though I'm not sure I remember what that feels like anymore.
"I'm not asking you to forget Kinshasa," Kane continues, voice steady as a rifle stock against a shoulder. "I'm asking you to make it count for something. Help me save the operators—the brothers—we can still reach."
Cross watches this exchange with the detached interest of a scientist observing lab rats. She's already calculated the odds, figured the angles. We're tools to her, nothing more. But tools she needs functional, sharp, and pointed in the right direction.
The bottle of whiskey sits on the table beside the coffee like a test. When did that appear? Kane must have put it there. A choice. The amber liquid catches the fluorescent light, promising familiar oblivion. No more guilt. No more faces in the dark. No more Collins asking me why I didn't stick to the operational plan.
My hand moves toward it, stops. Kane doesn't react, just waits with the patience of someone who's made hard choices himself. Cross checks her phone, apparently unconcerned with my internal crisis, though I suspect she's watching everything through her peripheral vision.
The bottle would make it easier. Drink until the shaking stops. Drink until Collins's face blurs into just another casualty of war. Drink until I can't remember the sound those kids made when we breached Van Der Berg's compound and they realized someone had come for them. Not to relocate them to another mine. Not to execute them as witnesses. But to free them.
I close my eyes, see Collins's face. Young. Eager. Believed in the mission, believed in me like I was something more than broken.‘Make it count, Stryker,’he said while bleeding out on Kinshasa concrete.‘Make it mean something.’
The bottle promises silence. Collins’s voice cuts louder:‘Make it count.’My hand moves. I shove the whiskey away hard enough to make the table ring.
My hand moves again. This time it doesn't stop. I push the bottle away with deliberate force, hard enough that it slides across the table. The sound it makes hitting the far edge is final, like a gavel coming down.
“Guess that makes me the first drunk in history to win an argument with whiskey,” I mutter. The humor is thin, bitter, but mine. Kane doesn’t smile, but something in his eyes eases.
When I meet Kane's eyes, something's different. The drunk is still there—will always be there, whispering promises of easy escape—but something else is too. Purpose, maybe. Or just the decision to stop running from what I am and start running toward what I could be.
"If we're doing this, we do it right." My voice sounds strange, rougher but clearer than it's been in months. "No half measures. Those operators deserve better than what I've been."
Kane nods once, simple acceptance without ceremony. Cross's lips curve in what might be satisfaction or might be the expression a hawk makes before it strikes.
“Fine,” I say, flexing fingers until the tremor belongs to someone else. “Let’s stop running with paperwork and start hunting with purpose.”
"Mercer first," Kane says, spreading his hands over the tactical maps. "He's closest, most immediate threat level."
Cross doesn’t weigh in. She just watches, eyes flat and calculating, as if she’s already figured out which of us won’t survive long enough to matter. And somehow, that makes me want to prove her wrong
"He won't trust us," I point out, studying the terrain features. "Six months solo in the mountains, assassination teams hunting him. He'll shoot first, ask questions never."
"Then we make sure he doesn't get the chance." Kane pulls out a detailed tactical map of Glacier National Park, topographical lines spreading across the table like a three-dimensional puzzle. "You were in his unit in Syria. You know how he calculates."
I study the topography, elevation lines blurring slightly as my eyes struggle to focus through the lingering effects of too much whiskey and too little sleep. But my mind is clear, clearer than it's been in months. Mercer would go high, find a defensive position with multiple escape routes. Water source. Natural barriers. Sight lines that let him see death coming from miles away.
"Here." I tap a section of the map where the elevation lines cluster tight. "Ridge system with cave networks. Water from snowmelt. One approach that's exposed for three hundred meters."
"Death funnel," Kane observes.
"For anyone he doesn't trust." I look up, meeting his eyes. "Which is everyone still breathing."
3
ALEX MERCER
The wind shifts. Wrong direction for this time of day, carrying scents that shouldn't exist in my carefully mapped territory. My finger finds the detonator's safety, thumb sliding it off with practiced silence that's become second nature after eight months of paranoid solitude. Two figures moving through the trees below, three hundred meters out, their shapes barely visible through the dense Montana pine. They're good—using natural cover, checking corners with methodical precision, maintaining proper tactical spacing. Military trained, no question, but they're not trying to hide that fact. That's what makes my teeth itch, what sends ice through my veins despite the warm morning sun.
Nobody walks into my kill zone like that unless they want me to see them. Unless they want me to know they're coming.
Eight months I've held this ridge like a fortress built from obsession, suspicion and necessity. Eight months of trip wires stretched between innocent-looking saplings, deadfalls balanced with the precision of a watchmaker, pressure plates packed with homemade explosives I've perfected through trial and bloody error. Crossbow bolts poisoned with hemlock root I harvest myself, their tips filed to surgical sharpness. This mountain hasbecome my weapon, every tree and stone positioned with deadly intent.
Five teams have tried to take me down. Five teams of former brothers-in-arms turned hunters, their bodies now feeding the ravens and wolves that have learned to associate human scent with easy meals. But these two move differently. They're not hunting with that predatory focus I've come to recognize. They're not approaching with the careful aggression of killers. They're... approaching. Like they want to talk.
The lead man stops at my first marker—a broken branch I placed yesterday morning as part of my daily perimeter refresh. He studies it with the kind of attention that makes my scalp prickle, then deliberately steps around my concealed pit trap. Not lucky guesswork. Deliberate avoidance. My breathing stops entirely, lungs locked as realization hits like a physical blow. He knows. Somehow, impossibly, he knows my patterns, my methods, my carefully constructed maze of death.
"Alex Mercer, Delta Force, burned in Syria for refusing a drone strike on civilians." The voice carries clear through the thin mountain air, no attempt at stealth or concealment. Professional, calm, with the kind of authority that suggests command experience. "My name is Rhett Kane. We need to talk."
