Vance froze. "What?"
"The Aegis relay isn't a long-wave transmitter," I explained slowly, enjoying every agonizing second of his realization. "It doesn't bounce signals off satellites. It uses burst-transmission micro-waves. It takes less than three seconds to compress and transmit the data to a high-altitude stealth drone circling fifty thousand feet above this base."
I let out another bloody chuckle.
"That drone has been circling us for the last month, waiting for the signal. The moment my face hit the table, the data was siphoned. By the time you dragged me down here, the transmission was complete. Command already has your ledger, Vance. They have the offshore account numbers. They have the names of the insurgent buyers. They have the serial numbers of every weapon you sold."
Vance’s hand dropped. The pistol clattered to the concrete floor.
He stumbled backward, hitting the wall and sliding down until he was sitting on the floor, his head in his hands.
"No... no, no, no," he muttered, pulling at his hair. "I covered my tracks. I paid the right people off. This wasn't supposed to happen."
"Treason never ends well, Major," I said softly.
Suddenly, the harsh fluorescent light above us flickered and died. The room plunged into pitch blackness. A second later, the dull, red glow of the emergency backup lights flickered to life. The ventilation fans hummed to a halt. The air in the bunker immediately began to feel heavy and stagnant.
Miller and Graves had followed orders. They had cut the primary power.
A moment later, the base's klaxon alarms began to wail. It was a piercing, rhythmic screech that vibrated through the concrete walls. But it wasn't the alarm for a perimeter breach.
It was the alarm for an imminent aerial insertion.
"They're coming," I whispered, the blue light from my cheek illuminating the dark room. "Command didn't just want the data, Vance. They wanted you caught red-handed, surrounded by your loyalists, with no way out."
Vance scrambled to his feet, picking up his pistol. His eyes were wide with madness. "I'm not going to prison. I'll fight my way out. I have a hundred men on this base who will die for me."
"They won't die for a traitor," I replied. "Not when they realize you're the reason their friends have been dying in the field."
Heavy, muffled thuds echoed from somewhere far above us. The sound of breaching charges. The Special Forces teams had arrived. The base was being taken over.
The next ten minutes were a masterclass in psychological collapse.
Major Vance paced the bunker, muttering to himself, checking his weapon, aiming it at the door, then aiming it at me, then back to the door. He was trapped in a box of his own making.
Through the thick concrete, we could hear the distant sounds of chaos. Shouting. The occasional burst of suppressed gunfire. The thud of heavy boots running down corridors. The Special Forces teams moved with surgical precision. They weren't fighting a war; they were executing an arrest warrant on a grand scale.
"I should kill you," Vance said, standing over me again. The red emergency lights cast demonic shadows across his face. "I should put a bullet right between your eyes for what you've done to me."