My plane landed after eighteen months overseas, but instead of my wife waiting with open arms, I found her collapsed barefoot in the snow outside my own house, shielding our six-month-old son with her freezing body. “Your parents said we weren’t family anymore,” she whispered through blue lips. In that instant, I stopped feeling like a soldier returning home and became a husband ready to reclaim everything they had stolen from us… – Page 7

I didn’t respond. I didn’t need to. I reached into my tactical vest and pulled out a small, ruggedized satellite phone—a piece of hardware the military didn’t know I still had, and one that Richard’s jamming signal couldn’t touch.

I dialed a direct line to Major Lena Ortiz, a JAG attorney and a woman who owed me her life after a botched extraction in the Balikh River valley.

“Ortiz,” she answered on the second ring.

“Lena. It’s Hale. I’m at my home coordinates. I have a Code Black domestic situation. Identity theft, fraud, and aggravated assault on a nursing mother. My family has forged a deed and a custody petition while I was downrange.”

There was a sharp intake of breath on the other end. “Ethan, are you safe?”

“For now. They’ve jammed the local cell towers. They think they’ve won. They don’t know about the Phoenix Protocol.”