I've seen people torn apart in alleys with their mouth still open in prayer.

I've pulled children from buildings where the ceiling came down before the rest of the world could blink.

I've been shot at, bombed, hunted through mountains and dragged through the mud and corners of the world where diplomacy meant nothing.

I've seen what men do when they're starving and have nothing left to lose.

I've watched my team get picked off by camouflaged enemies.

I've held friends as they bled out and made promises I couldn't keep.

War doesn't change you.

That's a lie people tell themselves to explain what they've become.

War shows you what you already were.

If there was fear inside you, it pulls it out. If there was rage, it makes it louder.

I stopped being surprised a long time ago.

And that's exactly why they picked me.

They called us Phantom Echo.

On paper, it doesn't exist. We weren't Navy or Rangers, we weren't

recon or Delta. We were the ones who got sent when all the regular tools broke,

when whatever needed to be handled wasn't the sort of thing anyone could know about. I didn't ask too many questions.

I'd been in Phantom Echo for three years when it happened.

We'd seen some strange operations before.

Chemical labs buried under deserts, tunnels that weren't on any maps, places soaked in blood but

scrubbed clean of names. But nothing came close to what we walked into that night.

We got the briefing in a hangar outside Quantico. There had been a string of killings over the past two months.

Isolated, rural stretch in the northeast, dense forestry, minimal cell coverage, maybe

...