Hold the West Line

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You have a visitor.
Colonel Emily Beale tried to make sense of the message on her secure phone, but she’d been awake for thirty-six hours and couldn’t decipher its hidden meaning. A slow scan of the airfield at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, showed that she stood alone on the unlit tarmac. The last bird of the two companies of MH-47G Chinook Spec Ops helicopters, which had been her sole focus for the entire time, had departed less than a minute ago.
No “visitor” here. Just herself and the lingering exhaust fumes dissipating into the night. The lights of the tail helo ducked beyond the silhouette of trees against the stars, leaving only the heavy beat of the big helos’ twin rotors to fade into the waning night traffic from Route 41 along the eastern edge of the base.
A crescent moon was trying to punch through the high horsetail clouds that presaged an incoming weather system. Predicted as the first big storm of November, she’d believe it only after it showed up.
A reminder beep. Oh, right. Phone message. She definitely needed sleep soon.
In the last day and a half, she’d formulated an emergency, set up the scenario, and given the crews a scant hour’s notice to create an action plan and implement it. Both heavy assault companies of the Night Stalkers 2nd Battalion had just winged aloft headed for a simulated combat search-and-rescue crisis staged eight hundred kilometers away at Fort Bragg’s gunnery range. She added to the challenge by pre-staging their action assets down in Fort Rucker, so they’d have to go to Alabama first—though they didn’t know that’s why they were going there yet.
She’d handed off the task of setting surprise traps along their possible routes to her assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Trisha O’Malley. Not only did her red-headed sidekick possess an evil bent when it came to training, but it would also be good practice for training the commander in her—Emily had taken away half of Trisha’s counterattack forces after her plans were set. Interestingly, it hadn’t thrown her into one of her normal verbal fits of incomprehensible Boston-accented protests against God, The Army, and whatever else she worshipped. Instead, she watched Emily steadily for about five seconds, grinned evilly, then headed off while issuing a maelstrom of commands. Emily would have liked to hear what she had in mind; but Trisha moved at a warp speed beyond her own capacity at the best of times.
Now, with the twenty twin-rotor Chinooks departed, half of the entire regiment’s heavy-assault team—the rest were based in Georgia, Washington State, or currently deployed—the night’s silence unfolded enough to hear the honking of late geese headed south in the overhead darkness.
She didn’t want a visitor.
What Emily wanted to do was go home. But the Montana ranch and her family seemed impossibly far away.
Montana ranch.
Phone message.
Visitor.
She pulled out her phone, though she didn’t remember tucking it away, and checked the message again. The visitor wasn’t here; she’d already figured out that much. Nor at her Fort Campbell office. Oddly, not out on the ranch either, at least not exactly.
Oh right, someone else was telling her she had a visitor somewhere. Not someone telling her—something! The message had been a carefully nondescript alarm from her top-level security alert system.

Initial Publication: February 1, 2026
Print pages: 286
Audio length (h:mm): 7:38
Narrator: Read by Author