“Relax, Jed,” she said, tightening the cummerbund of her plate-carrying vest and then slipping a Sig Sauer P229 pistol into the holster on the front. “I’m just messing with you. I get that I’m no SEAL or Green Beret, but I’ll carry my weight. If I’m to make any sense of the intelligence we uncover on the X, I need to be there. I need to . . .” She hesitated and looked over at him.

“Feel it?” he asked, fascinated by all he was learning about his teammate this week.

“Yeah,” she said, chuckling. “Sort of. It’s almost more like, I don’t know, like a residue left behind, you know?”

He did and nodded.

Outside the hangar, a pair of UH-60L Black Hawk helicopters from First Battalion, 150th Aviation regiment were spinning up. He slipped on his helmet and the Peltor noise-canceling headset and instantly the whine of their engines became background hum. He checked the frequency on his encrypted radio.

“Comms check,” he said into his boom mic, then slipped his assault rifle over his head and onto his chest. “Joshua Bravo is now Sword. This is Sword One, how copy Sword Variable?”

“Sword One, you’re five by,” came the cool voice of the watch coordinator in the TOC back in Nashville.

“One, Zero—I’ve got your back,” David’s voice added, and Jed smiled, picturing his TSL in a headset in the TOC. They’d come a long way when David’s voice brought him comfort instead of grating his nerves.

“Watcher One is with you,” came another voice, a teenage male voice, and he felt disappointed to not hear Corbin in his ear—or his head.

“Copy, Watcher One,” Jed said, nodding to Eli, then tilting his head toward the open hangar door and the helicopters spun up on the ramp just outside. Eli spun a fist over his head and chopped toward the helos, and Joshua Bravo headed out in two lines of four. “You got anything for us, Watcher?”

“No, sir,” said the young but steady voice. “It’s quiet for all of us back here—weirdly so, in fact. We’re working hard and I’ll chime in when we get something.”

“Roger.” Jed hustled to the lead of the stick of operators forming a line to the left. He did a quick comms check, listening as his team of operators checked in, then switched over to check the dedicated air channel.

“Vandal Flight, Sword One—radio check,” he said.

“Vandal One,” the first helo pilot replied.

“Vandal Two, five by. Let’s do this,” came the enthusiastic reply of the middle-aged warrant he had met earlier, a blooded veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan who was at the controls for bird two.