Chapter 6 - The Counter-Attack
By 4:00 AM, I was sitting in a dingy, twenty-four-hour diner on the outskirts of the city. The waitress looked at my scar and my muddy clothes, quietly set down a mug of black coffee, and left me alone.
I pulled out a burner phone I had purchased at a gas station along the highway and dialed a number I knew by heart. It bypassed the standard military switchboards, routing directly to a secure line at Fort Bragg.
The phone rang twice before a gruff, gravelly voice answered. "Colonel Vance."
"Colonel, it’s Captain Vale," I said clearly.
There was a long, heavy silence on the other end of the line. I could hear the rustle of papers stopping abruptly.
"Maren?" Vance’s voice dropped an octave, losing its military rigidity, replaced by sheer disbelief. "We saw the satellite footage of the crash site. We searched for weeks. We thought—"
"I know what you thought, sir," I said. "But I'm alive. I'm back in Charleston. And I have a massive problem."
Over the next thirty minutes, I detailed everything. I told him about my survival, my trek through the desert, and my arrival at my parents’ house. I explained the $3 million check, the offshore shell company, and the fact that my brother had just tried to kill me with a fireplace poker on my father's orders.
"Jesus Christ, Maren," Vance breathed, his voice laced with anger. "Your father isn't just committing insurance fraud. Vale Enterprises has been under a quiet investigation by Naval Intelligence for months. We suspect they’ve been leaking shipping manifests to maritime smugglers in East Africa to collect insurance on 'stolen' cargo. Your helicopter downing... it might not have been an accident."
The diner around me seemed to tilt. "What did you say, sir?"
"The rebel group that ambushed your extraction team—they had precise coordinates," Vance said heavily. "They knew exactly when and where your chopper would be flying low enough for an RPG strike. If your father's firm is connected to those rebels through their offshore accounts... Maren, they might have sold out your unit's flight path to clear their debts."
The world went entirely silent. The anger I had felt before was nothing compared to the absolute, white-hot vacuum of rage that filled my chest now. My father hadn't just capitalized on my death. He had orchestrated the ambush. He had killed my crew—Goodman, Miller, and Lopez—just to save his wretched shipping company from bankruptcy.
"Maren, listen to me," Vance ordered, his voice commanding. "Stay put. I am assembling a federal task force right now. We are going to secure a warrant for Vale Enterprises’ mainframes. Do not go near that house."
"With all due respect, Colonel," I said, my voice dropping to a terrifying whisper, "I'm already gone."
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I hung up the phone and smashed the burner under my heel. I didn't care about the task force. I didn't care about the warrants. My crew was dead, buried in unmarked graves across the ocean, and the man who sold them out was sitting in a mansion ten miles away.
I was going to tear his kingdom down myself.
