Chapter 5 - The Atlanta Connection
The voice on the phone belonged to Colonel Arthur Sterling, the man who had signed my medical retention waiver back in 2014 and the very officer who had overseen the classified aftermath of the Sangin extraction.
My hand tightened around the phone until my knuckles turned white.
"If you ever go near my brother's home again, Colonel, you won't need an audit team to find out what happened in Helmand," I said, my voice dropping into a cold, flat cadence that made Nico and Barrett instantly snap to attention. "I'll walk into the Pentagon and lay out every unredacted transcript on the Secretary's desk myself."
Sterling chuckled softly on the other end of the line—a dry, humorless sound.
"You always were too protective of your infantry attachments, Elena. But you're missing the bigger picture. You think this is about punishment. It's not. It's an invitation."
"An invitation to what?"
"A conversation," Sterling replied smoothly. "About the missing flight recorder data from your 2013 bird. The data that was supposed to be destroyed under standard operational protocol, but somehow ended up in a private archive in Savannah last week. Your brother's promotion board just happened to flag his background file during a routine security clearance upgrade. Odd coincidence, isn't it?"
The trap was complete. They hadn't just planted a fake USB drive; they were dangling a real piece of missing evidence—evidence that could either clear my name entirely or blow open a classified scandal that the Air Force had spent a decade burying.
"Where?" I asked.
"Flight 402 to Atlanta departs Jacksonville at 0615 tomorrow morning," Sterling said. "Come alone. Leave the Marines at home. If you want to keep your brother's chevrons on his collar, let's talk face-to-face."
The line clicked dead.
I slowly lowered the phone, the screen dark against my palm.
Nico was watching me intently, his eyes burning with frustration and demand. "Who was that? What did they want?"
"That was Colonel Sterling," I said, looking across the kitchen at my brother, then at Master Gunny Vance and Barrett. "The man who oversaw my classification review after Sangin."
"And?" Nico demanded, taking a step forward. "What does he have to do with my apartment?"
"He has the flight recorder data from the bird I crashed thirteen years ago," I said, the words heavy in the quiet room. "And he's using your career as leverage to get me to hand over whatever he thinks I kept."
Nico's expression hardened into pure, unadulterated defiance. He reached up, unpinned one of his silver sergeant chevrons from his collar, and slammed it down onto the kitchen counter next to the plastic evidence bag.
May you like
"Then we go to Atlanta together," Nico said, his voice ringing with absolute finality. "End of story."
I looked at the silver chevron resting beside the encrypted drive, knowing that the door to my past was finally kicked wide open—and there was no turning back.
