Chapter 5 - Hunted in the ShadowsFor forty-eight hours, I became a ghost.
The Pentagon issued a nationwide Blue Alert. My face was plastered across every television screen across the nation: "ROGUE ARMY COLONEL SARAH HART CONSIDERED ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS."
They claimed I had suffered a mental breakdown, assaulted my fellow officers, and stolen top-secret intelligence. Margaret Prescott even went on national television, weeping fake tears, claiming that I was a unhinged mother who had fabricated allegations against her innocent family to cover up my own military corruption.
"She is a danger to society," Margaret sobbed into the news cameras during a prime-time broadcast. "She tore my family apart, lied about my son Ethan, and now she is running from the law."
I watched the broadcast from a tiny, hidden safehouse in the dense forest outside Raleigh—a forgotten military bunker built during the Cold War that only Marcus Vance and I knew existed.
Marcus sat across from me, a laptop illuminated against his weathered face. "They've locked down Emily," he reported softly. "General Vance had her transferred to a high-security medical facility inside Fort Bragg. You can't get near her without starting a firefight."
"He's using my daughter as bait," I said, cleaning the slide of my 9mm pistol with methodical, icy precision. "He knows I won't leave North Carolina without her."
"So what's the play, Colonel?" Marcus asked, looking up at me. "We're two people against the U.S. Army and a billionaire treason syndicate. We have no authority, no badges, and every law enforcement officer in America is hunting us."
I slotted the magazine back into my pistol with a sharp, heavy click.
"Authority is just a piece of paper, Marcus," I said, looking him dead in the eye. "We still have the truth. And General Vance made one fatal mistake when he picked this fight."
"What's that?"
"He forgot who trained him."
I stood up and pulled a tactical map across the table. "General Vance is holding a secret summit tonight at midnight. He’s meeting with Margaret Prescott and foreign buyers at the Prescott family’s private mountain retreat in Asheville to finalize the transfer of the stolen DOD files. They think they’ve won. They think I’m hiding in a hole, scared for my life."
May you like
"Are we crashing the party?" Marcus grinned, a dark, dangerous spark igniting in his eyes.
"We aren't just crashing it," I corrected, pulling a tactical vest over my shoulders. "We are burning it to the ground. Gather the old team. The ones who served with us in Kandahar. It's time to show these traitors what real soldiers do when their family is threatened."
