The Rise Of The Forgotten King.

Chapter 4

I didn’t wait for midnight before leaving my house because rules were for people who didn't know what they wanted for themselves. 

I left the house at dusk when the sky was still yellowish and the ground still hot from a sunny day. I drove until the road turned to a path and then I turned off the engine and sat there with the windows down. I pulled the duffel from the trunk and laid everything out on the hood like I was dressing for war.

AR-15 with the suppressor I’d kept oiled all that while, the Chest rig with six mags. A suppressed Glock 19 on the drop-leg with NVGs that still had the same cracked lens from Kandahar, a trauma kit heavy in the cargo pocket: two tourniquets, QuickClot, chest seals, a decompression needle I prayed I wouldn’t need and two frags and a roll of det cord. 

Then I locked the car, pocketed the keys, and disappeared into the pines.

A mile through the pines, I had the soft sound of boots and paused to listen again. The mill rose up ahead like a corpse that forgot to fall over. It was made of brick walls that were now black with old fire, windows punched out. I’d blown past this place a hundred times on the highway and never once looked at it and tonight that I finally did, it looked like a tomb.

I found my perch on the ridge two hundred yards out, went prone behind a fallen pine, and flipped the thermal onto the rail.

I stopped mid walk but the step took a full thirty more seconds to stop and that was when I knew. I knew that I had company and I needed to think fast. 

I was already rolling on the ground when the first round took a fist-sized chunk out of the log where my head had been.

I had two shooters up close. ,

I came up running downhill, weaving through trunks. The branches clawed my face but they also protected me from the bullets. The second one flew past my ear, close enough I felt the pressure wave. I flipped the NVGs down and saw two shapes ghosting parallel, trying to pinch me and considering the angle of the shots, they knew exactly when the incident happened. 

The one on my right broke cover first and his muzzle flash bloomed white in the green. I dropped to a knee and punched him in the gut. He staggered but kept coming so I took him by the throat and hit him to the ground. 

The second one was already on me. He hit me on the chest and drove me backward into a pine. The bark exploded against my spine and I literally felt air leaving my lungs in a whoosh. He pulled out a knife and charged forward, aiming for my face but I got the Glock, jammed it under his armpit where the plates don’t cover, and pulled the trigger three times. Hot blood sprayed my neck and he froze with eyes wide behind his goggles and then fell on me. I shoved him off and he hit the ground twitching.

I stood over him taking a deep breath as I watched the blood pouring from the wound under his arm. In thirty seconds or maybe less he’d be gone for good. 

I scanned 360 searching to be sure but nothing moved but leaves. The mill was dead quiet and let the scream I had been holding in for so long erupt from my chest. 

“Motherfuckers!” I yelled. They knew I’d come early and they built the whole fucking thing around that single certainty.

The “meeting” was never real. The three assholes in my house last night weren’t selling me a location; they were selling me a reaction. Get Ghost alone, get him running to the one place he’d think he was smartest, and put him down quiet in the woods where nobody would ever find the body.

And I had blindly walked right into it. I slammed a fresh mag into the AR, racked it and let the bolt fly forward with that beautiful metallic violence. Noah wasn’t here. He had never been here. They’d played me like a fucking violin and I’d danced the whole tune.

I started walking back toward the car every step deliberate very deliberate. I am done playing this hide and seek game. I would take it to their fronts. 

As I passed the second body, I noticed he was still alive and I grabbed a fistful of his hair, and yanked his head back.

“Who sent you?” I asked, voice flat.

He tried to focus on anything but me so I gave him a dirty slap and leaned closer. “Who tf sent you to do this?”

His eyes fluttered and blood bubbled on his lips so I let him go. His head hit the dirt with a soft thud and I put a gun in his head and walked away. 

By the time I reached the car the sky was pitch dark and my rage had doubled. I threw the rifle in the trunk, picked a change of clothes and sat behind the wheel with the door open, letting the night breeze in.

I finally started the car and pulled out slowly, heading for the one place I had sworn to never go back to because it would surely have my answers. Whoever held Noah was about to learn what happens when you take the only thing I ever had worth protecting.

They were about to learn why they called me Ghost in the first place. Because when I come for you, you never see me.

You just stop breathing.