Page 171 of The ARC Unit: Breach

“Type?”

“Light twin-engine helicopter. They don’t have a tail number yet.”

Raven started pulling the broker before Keller finished speaking.

A helicopter. Kade had an exit.

Wolf checked the clock.

“We move the entry up.”

Nobody objected.

Keller called his prosecutor again while Bear changed the timing on the medical convoy. Hawk stayed on the embankment and shifted his hide before daylight began to drop. Viper moved closer to the west approach with one German vehicle and Jackal took the southern road with another officer and complained exactly once when Bear reminded him over comms that stitches were not an opinion.

Raven closed his laptop and moved for the garage.

I picked up the two photographs Keller had given me and slid them into the clear sleeve on my field clipboard. The women smiling in the pictures had no idea what was coming. We still didn’t know if any of them were inside the building ahead of us.

I hoped this was where we found them.

I hated what that meant. Finding them there would mean they had survived long enough for us to reach them. It would also mean the cold rooms were exactly what we thought they were. Keller held the garage door while I followed Raven toward the command vehicle.

Raven opened the van and the screens inside came alive one by one, replacing everything personal with maps, thermals, camera feeds and the live position of the building outside Offenburg. On the center monitor, Kade crossed the rear lot and disappeared through a steel door. Wolf’s voice came through my headset from the vehicle ahead.

“Five minutes.”

I looked at the two photographs clipped beside Raven’s screen, then at the door Kade had just vanished behind.

This time, there was no empty address waiting for us.

Chapter Sixteen

MIA

Five minutes became three before the command vehicle had fully stopped moving. Raven had the side monitors awake before Keller put the van in park, one screen holding Hawk’s overwatch feed while another showed the rear lot of the cold-storage facility through a long lens.

The building looked exactly as dead as it had in the surveillance photographs. Faded blue lettering peeled from the concrete above the loading bays, weeds grew through cracks along the service lane, while a strip of late-afternoon sunlight caught the dirty windows of the front offices without giving us anything useful through them.

The people inside knew how to make an occupied building look abandoned. I sat behind Raven with my headset pressed tight over my ears. Keller stood near the open rear doors checking his radio while two German officers waited outside in unmarked vehicles, far enough back that nothing about the industrial road had changed yet.

On the tactical display, Wolf’s team moved toward the west side of the property in separate pieces.

Viper was closest to the building, a dark shape near the low fence with his suppressed SIG held across his chest, weapon light and laser module tucked tight to the handguard. Wolf stayed several meters behind him with the HK416 while Bear carried the breaching equipment farther back. Jackal’s marker sat south of the property with two German officers, close enough to cut off the road without showing the warehouse cameras a sudden police presence. Hawk was barely a marker at all. He had been on the north embankment for hours, buried somewhere in scrub and dead grass with a clear view across the rear lot and loading bays.

Raven touched his transmit key.

“All stations, comms check.”

Viper answered first. “Good.”

Bear followed. “Good.”

Jackal’s voice came through quieter. “Good.”

Hawk said, “Good.”

Wolf came last. “Move.”