“Copy.I see it on the camera feed.Security rotation based on the satellite patterns should put the nearest patrol on the north perimeter for another”—a pause—“forty minutes, give or take.You have a window.”
“Moving now.”
Kari climbed out of the wash and moved north across open ground, staying low, using the parked equipment as cover when she could.The ground was hard-packed earth torn up by heavy machinery—tire tracks, boot prints, the gouged scars of a drilling operation that had been running for months.She could smell diesel and churned soil and, beneath it, the sharp mineral tang of exposed ore: the lithium-rich rock her mother had traced on paper and never seen in person.
This was what her mother had died for.Not the machines, not the tire tracks—the ground itself.What was in it.Anna had spent years tracing the pattern of deaths that radiated from this land, and someone had killed her to keep her from finishing.Now Kari was walking across it in the dark, collecting the proof Anna had never lived to gather, and the symmetry of it sat in her chest like a fist.
She kept moving.The proof wouldn’t collect itself.
The first core sample site was marked by a ring of orange flagging tape around a capped bore hole.Kari knelt beside it, pulled a sample container from her backpack, and used the camera to document the site—the bore hole, the flagging tape, the GPS coordinates on her phone, the surrounding equipment.Then she uncapped the hole and extracted a handful of the compacted material below the surface, sealing it in the container and labeling it with the location and time.
She repeated the process at two more bore holes, each one documented and sampled in under three minutes.The samples were heavy in her pack—dense, mineral-rich soil that would confirm what Whitmore’s data had already shown.
The drilling rig was next.Kari photographed the equipment from multiple angles—the rig itself, the stacked core boxes beside it, the fuel tanks, the tire tracks leading north toward the airfield complex.She opened one of the core boxes and photographed the samples inside, dense cylinders of rock and clay arranged in sequence and labeled with depth markers.Professional extraction work.Not a survey.Not exploration.Active pre-production mining on land that Devco had acquired through fraud and protected with murder.
“Samples collected,” she radioed.“Documentation complete.Moving to the airfield.”
“Copy.Camera feed is solid.Stay on the east side of the access road—there’s a drainage ditch that parallels it for about two hundred yards.It’ll keep you below the sight line of the portable buildings.”
Kari shouldered her pack and moved north.The sky was lighter now, the eastern horizon warming from black to deep blue.She had maybe thirty minutes before dawn made concealment impossible.
The airfield was ahead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The airfield had grown.
Ben had described a single construction trailer at the edge of an abandoned runway, surrounded by scrub and the rusted bones of old infrastructure.What Kari saw through the predawn gray was something larger—the original trailer was still there, dwarfed now by two portable office buildings, a metal storage shed, and a chain-link enclosure around what looked like a generator and fuel tanks.Power lines ran from the generator to each building on temporary poles.A gravel pad had been laid over part of the old runway, and two vehicles were parked on it: a white pickup and a dark SUV with tinted windows.
“Ben, I’m seeing a much bigger footprint than your layout.Two new office buildings, storage shed, fenced generator.Two vehicles on a gravel pad.”
“Copy.The trailer should be the structure furthest west—the one closest to the old runway.The new buildings are east of it?”
“East and slightly north.They look like construction-site offices—the modular type, elevated on blocks.”
“That’s consistent with what the satellite showed.The documents are most likely in the newer buildings—if they’ve expanded operations, they’d need administrative space.The old trailer was bare when I was there.One room, one chair, nothing on the walls.”
Kari was crouched behind a concrete drainage culvert about a hundred yards south of the complex.The sky was lightening faster now, the eastern horizon shifting from blue to pale gold.She had maybe fifteen minutes of usable darkness left.
“Any movement?”
“Nothing on the camera feed.The vehicles could mean personnel on site, or they could be parked overnight.No way to tell from here.”
Kari assessed.Two vehicles meant at most four or five people, probably fewer for a night shift.Security contractors would be patrolling the perimeter, not sitting in offices at five in the morning.If the security rotation held to the pattern Ben had estimated from the satellite imagery, the nearest patrol was on the north side of the property, working away from her position.
She moved.
The ground between the culvert and the nearest building was open—no cover, no concealment, just flat desert hardpack.Kari crossed it at a crouching run, keeping her profile low, her boots hitting the ground heel-to-toe the way she’d been trained.Thirty yards of exposure.She counted the seconds.Eight, nine, ten—and she was against the wall of the first portable building, pressed into the shadow where the structure met its foundation blocks.
She controlled her breathing.Listened.The generator hummed.Something mechanical cycled inside one of the buildings—a heater or a ventilation unit.No voices.No footsteps.
“I’m at the east building,” she said, barely above a whisper.
“Copy.Camera feed shows the wall and the ground.Can you get to a window?”
Kari edged along the building’s south face until she reached a window.The glass was tinted but not blacked out.She cupped her hands around her eyes and looked in.
An office.Desks, computers, filing cabinets.A whiteboard on the far wall covered in what looked like a project timeline—columns, dates, colored markers.The room was dark and empty.
