Chapter 5 - The Price of a Secret
The barrel of an assault rifle glinted in the dim kerosene light as the figure stepped slowly down from the upper loft.
He looked less like a living man and more like a corpse dragged out of a shipwreck. His face was gaunt, carved deep with hollow cheeks and a thick, unkempt gray beard. His left arm hung awkwardly at his side, wrapped in a stained military bandage, but his eyes—bright, frantic, and burning with a terrifying intensity—were locked directly onto my face.
"Rebecca," Henderson whispered, his voice cracking like dry timber. "You actually came."
"Henderson," I breathed, lowering my weapon an inch, though my muscles remained coiled like steel springs. "We thought you were dead. We watched your chopper burn."
"My chopper didn't burn, Hayes," Henderson laughed—a dry, bitter sound that rattled in his chest. "It was shot down. Not by the enemy. By our side. Command knew we were bringing back classified cargo that didn't fit their clean political narrative, so they tried to erase the entire flight manifest in one clean sweep."
Cole stepped forward, his face hardening. "That's insane. We completed the extraction under direct orders—"
"You completed a suicide mission they never expected you to survive!" Henderson shouted, stepping down onto the main floor, his rifle shaking slightly in his grip. "They didn't want the intel we recovered from that deep-sea trench, Cole. They wanted it buried at the bottom of the Atlantic forever. And when I crawled out of the wreckage twenty years ago and realized what they did... I went into the dark to stay alive."
"Then why call us now?" I demanded, taking a step toward him, ignoring the warning tilt of his rifle barrel. "Why send the coordinates? You didn't just invite us here to reminisce about a war thirty years ago, Henderson."
Henderson stopped ten feet away, his chest heaving as he stared at me with eyes full of desperate urgency. He pointed a trembling finger toward the back room of the weather station.
"Because I didn't pull those files out of the trench alone, Rebecca," Henderson whispered, his voice dropping to a terrified pitch. "There was a sixth person on that manifest. Someone command erased before the flight even took off. And they aren't hiding anymore."
Before Henderson could say another word, a heavy, synchronized thrum of helicopter rotor blades suddenly tore through the howling wind above the weather station.
The entire structure shook violently as high-intensity searchlights cut through the rotting roof, painting the interior in blinding, violent white light.
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Henderson’s eyes went wide with pure panic.
"They found us," he choked out, raising his rifle toward the ceiling. "They're here."
