Chapter 21

At the target farmhouse.

The east wall erupted inward with a hollow whump, bricks and wood blasted into the corridor beyond. Nadia peeled back first, her gloved hand lifting to signal clear, eyes already scanning through rising dust. Olivia surged in next, sweeping her MP7 left to right with practised speed. Mai-Loan followed close behind, her combat blade already slicked with the silence of previous kills, while Darya brought up the rear, steady and sharp, her eyes laser-focused.

The interior was dimly lit, the corridor stretching like a throat into the belly of the farmhouse. They moved fast, clearing rooms as they went—no words, only hand signals and muscle memory. A guard burst from a doorway ahead, rifle half-raised—Olivia fired twice, center mass, before the man could cry out. He dropped. Mai-Loan stepped over him without pause, checking the corner.

“Left room,” Darya whispered into her mic. “Two heat signatures.”

They stacked on the frame. Darya kicked the door open. Nadia rolled a flash-bang into the room. The double “bang-bang” of the twin closely placed explosions erupted. The double bright flashes of the grenade stunning the scenes of whoever was inside and glass shards from the shattered single light bulb hanging from the ceiling, added mayhem to the chaos.

Breach, followed by gunfire — a wild burst from a startled defender. Nadia dropped him with a clean double-tap, then took out the second with ruthless precision. The room fell silent.

Meanwhile, on the south side, another boom rocked the farmhouse as Boomer’s charge punched through. Splinters and smoke filled the air. Major TC led his team in first, rifle up, eyes cold.

“Go!”

Eight Rangers flowed in behind him like water under pressure, sweeping the lower hall with deadly efficiency. The first room held three guards playing cards. They didn’t even rise. Controlled shots dropped each one before a chair could scrape the floor.
A fourth stepped into the hallway with an AK-47. Bushy nailed him with a close-range blast from his 12-gauge assault shotgun.

Nine double-aught buckshot pellets, each .33 calibre, tunnelled through his chest. The force slammed him against the far wall, where he left a thick, bloody smear before collapsing in a crumpled heap beside his dropped AK. He was going nowhere.

Nadia stooped and picked up the rifle.

Bushy gave her a look.

“Spoils of war,” she whispered. “It’s a Black Snake. Fully tricked out — red-dot scope, suppressor. Now mine. I always wanted one.”

Bushy chuckled. “Be my guest, Flames.”

They moved deeper, methodically. Stairs loomed ahead, leading to the second floor.

“Team Echo converging on central chamber,” TC radioed. “Meet at 3-Alpha.”

“Copy. Five meters out,” Mai-Loan replied.

Both squads advanced now toward the same point. Heartbeats elevated. Inside room 3-Alpha was the target: Nadir Khassoun.

TC reached the central corridor first. Outside the heavy oak door, he signalled for breach. From the east corridor, Mai-Loan’s team emerged at the same time, weapons ready, nodding silently.

Boomer moved forward. Charge placed. Timer set. Three seconds.

Two.

One.

Kaboom! A wall of sound and light roared through the room as the door blew inwards. Then TC rolled a flash-bang into the room. Double detention – double light flash.

TC and Mai-Loan entered as one.

Khassoun stumbled as the flash-bang disoriented him, fumbling for the pistol on the bedside table. TC moved fast — two long strides, then brought his boot down hard, sending the weapon skittering across the floor.

“Wala ḥaraka!” Mai-Loan barked in Palestinian Arabic, rifle trained on the man’s chest. (Translation: “Not a single move.”)

Khassoun froze — eyes wide, blinking wildly, hands twitching, still caught in the moment before action. But there was still fight in him. No woman speaks to him like that. In fact, no woman dare look him in the eye.

He spat: “Kil ziʾ!” (Translation: “Eat shit.”)

Mai-Loan didn’t flinch. Her eyes narrowed, her face carved from fire and fury.
“Jarribnī.” One word — calm, sharp — but to Khassoun, it said everything. (Translation: “Try me.”)

Khassoun flinched, and thought: “Israeli Mossad, Aman, or Shin Bet? They speak Palestinian fluently. How did they trace me here? How did they know?”

Mai-Loan rushed past to secure the room’s windows while Olivia covered the door. Darya moved in, zip ties ready, her expression unreadable. With a swift jerk, she locked Khassoun’s wrists behind him.

“Package wrapped,” TC said into his mic, his voice steady.

Silence settled like dust. No more shots. No more surprises. The house was theirs.

“Exfil in three,” TC ordered, signalling for regroup. The clock was still ticking.

Over the Trees, 03:04 – Somewhere South of the Farmhouse

I could smell the salt on the air even at this altitude — Muizenberg wasn’t far. Below us, the trees rolled like black waves. I kept the bird low, nose tilted slightly down, just a whisper above the canopy. The turbines purred smoothly. I had her tuned to ghost mode — quiet, lean, invisible.

Leah was silent for a long beat in the seat beside me. That meant she was focused. Her night vision goggles pulsed faintly green in my periphery.

The radio broke squelch in my headset. “Eagle, this is Reaper One. Package secured. Proceed to pick-up point Delta. Repeat — Delta. Window is three mikes.”

A crackle of static.

I depressed the transmit button on the cyclic, calm and clipped I answered.
“Copy, Reaper One. We’re inbound. Skies are still clean. ETA ninety seconds.”

“Roger.” Came TC’s reply.

“Visual on Landing Zone,” Leah reported. “No lights. No movement — wait...”

Her tone shifted.

“Roy, eleven o’clock low. There’s—”

Then the night lit up. A spark. A hiss. That unmistakable roar of something old and pissed-off punching skyward. Missile.

“Got one up!” I shouted, instincts slamming into action. My hand jammed the cyclic forward and hard to the left, meeting the missile head-on, thus lowering our heat-signature, my body straining against the harness.

It worked — barely was it not for Leah to grab the emergency flare box and fire a bright white flare out of her side window.

The missile was fast, but dumb. An old Russian Strela. Good for museum displays and suicide shots. It locked onto the flare, not us, and arced away like a confused firework. I watched it spin wide, trailing smoke like a dying comet, and vanish off over the over the ridge towards the sea.

A few seconds later, a distant ploomph from the sea. Somewhere off Muizenberg shore, a fish just got vaporised.

“Still think the perimeter sweep was clean?” Leah muttered, voice sharp and steady. I scanned my instruments, readjusted our course.

“Someone missed a sleeper. He’s still breathing,” she said. “East slope. Rocks. Looks like he’s loading up another tube.”

Of course he was. I adjusted pitch, dropped a few meters.

“Tag him.”

Overhead our recon drone locked onto the target and a stream of orange-white tracers flashed past. On the ground half obscured by the trees, one figure flailed, launcher flying from his hands like a stick toy.

“Threat down,” she confirmed. I grunted.

“Guy just tried to shoot us down with tech from retired Brezhnev’s garage. I suspect that was an old 9K32 Strela-2 heat-seeking Russian relic — fast but dumb — late ‘60s tech that never aged well. What else is waiting out here?” It didn’t matter. The clock was ticking.

I refocused, lining up for approach. “Let’s get them out of here before something modern shows up.”

I dipped the bird low again, rotors scything mist as we angled toward the LZ.

Nose high to slow us down, I levelled us out, lined up the LZ.

“Coming in fast. Get ready. We’re not hanging around for round two.”

I could see their flashes through the dust already — Reaper team was ready to go. All we had to do was not die in the next three minutes.

No pressure.

At 03:06, I set the EC-145 down in the farmyard, just holding her on the ground with the collective and not going to flight idle. This was a hot pick-up.

As the skids touched, raising dust that got blown away by the rotor-wash, Mai-Loan and Olivia slid open the right-side rear door and bundled a confused body inside. First Olivia, then the target, then Mai-Loan jumped in, sealing the door shut behind them.

Both of them grabbed headsets from the overhead rack and slipped them on.

“Roger, Skipper! Get us out of here,” Mai-Loan’s voice crackled in my ears over the intercom.

At 03:07, I lifted the EC off the ground to thirty feet AGL and dropped the nose. The bird surged forward, climbing as we left the LZ behind.

In front of us, the Cape Flats slept on ... Unaware, unconcerned, at peace in their slumber.

On the ground TC’s squad and the remaining Angels regroup.

TC stood motionless, watching his Rangers load into the battered convoy. Diesel engines grumbled to life, casting long, stuttering shadows across the wreckage-strewn farmyard. The walls were half-collapsed, torn apart by breaching charges, but the silence that followed was worse than the blast — thick, waiting, as if the earth itself was holding its breath.

Then — a voice, low and unnervingly close: “I need to show you something.”

TC jumped. Nadia was suddenly beside him, calm and spectral, like she’d risen from the smoke. No footfalls. No warning.

“Shit, woman!” He snapped his head toward her. “Do you have to do that?”

“Do what?” she asked, utterly unfazed. A half-smile tugged at her lips — not smug, but almost ... curious, like she genuinely didn’t understand what the fuss was about.

“That thing. Where you materialise. You’re like—” He flapped a hand at her, frustrated. “—some damn forest spirit.”

She blinked, mock-offended. “I walked up like a normal person.”

“Yeah, normal people make noise.”

She giggled — soft, quick, conspiratorial. The kind of sound that didn’t belong in a place still stained with blood.

“What do you want?” he asked, eyes narrowing. “This better be good.”

“I told you,” she said, turning slightly toward a nearby shed, its roof sagging, its door half-blown inward. “Something vital.”

TC followed her gaze, wary. “We’ve got maybe four minutes before this place is crawling with reinforcements.”

Nadia gave him a look. A serious one this time. “I found the nuke.”

Everything in TC’s body froze.

“You found what?”

She nodded, already walking. “The nuke. Or ... what’s left of it.”

He caught up to her in two strides, adrenaline flaring. “Nadia. What the hell do you mean ‘what’s left of it’?”

“It’s been stripped,” she said over her shoulder, voice unnervingly light. “Core’s gone. Neat little surgery. Nothing sloppy. Someone knew exactly what they were doing.”

“Holy shit,” TC muttered, scanning the perimeter as if the core might still be lurking in the shadows.

“I know, right?” she chirped, throwing him a glance. “Whoever took it didn’t want a boom — just the juice.”

She stopped at the shed, resting a hand on the frame. The air around them was still heavy with gunpowder and heat. TC stared at her. The look in her eyes was different now — no more teasing, no giggle lurking behind her words. She was dead serious.

“This isn’t just clean-up, TC,” she said. “This was precision. Extraction. And if someone’s walking around with that core, they’ve got plans.”

He stared at her, the weight of it landing hard. She wasn’t just the weird one who showed up without a sound. She noticed things. Saw around corners. And right now, she was probably the most dangerous person in the yard — not because of what she could do, but because of what she understood.

“You’re sure?” he asked, quieter now.

“Come see for yourself.” She stepped into the shed. “Oh — and try not to freak out this time, yeah?”

TC followed her in, muttering, “Only if you try acting like a human being for once.”

Behind him, she giggled again — the sharp, knowing kind that said — she wouldn’t.

Back to the crew in the helicopter.

I didn’t have far to fly. Twelve minutes, maybe less. The night had lost some of its bite, just enough to draw out the faintest hue on the horizon. Daylight was still a couple of hours away, but in these southern latitudes — where Cape Town slumbers between mountain and sea — the sun doesn’t bother to show its face until close to 08:00 in winter. Even first light only arrives forty, maybe fifty minutes earlier.

The town of Macassar drifted beneath us like a ghost — silent and still. I banked slightly, angling the nose towards Somerset West, its flickering streetlights spreading out like a glowing net below. I shifted course east-south-east, veering for the Strand, and moments later the unmistakable gray ribbon of the N2 highway slid into view, curving south like a lazy serpent toward Sir Lowry’s Pass.

I kept us low. Terrain-following at just over 800 feet AGL, skimming the flat expanse of Helderberg’s rural farmland. The main rotors sliced through the damp winter air with a muted thump-thump-thump, each beat a warning to anyone listening too closely. My eyes scanned ahead, quick and focused.

Then I saw it. A single orange light, flickering like a candle caught in the wind. It pulsed near the intersection of the N2 and the M165 leading to Gordon’s Bay — just where it was supposed to be. Out in the open field, away from any structures, but close enough to the road for a quick exit. I dropped down to 300 feet, circled left in a slow orbit, Leah and I both scanning the ground. Silent coordination. No need for words.

Two black 7-series BMWs sat side-by-side near the road, their presence more intimidating than subtle. No headlights. Just shadows.

I checked the wind with a flick of the wrist and brought us in from the north-north-east, flaring hard. This was going to be fast and dirty. No time for finesse. The skids kissed the ground, the chopper sat stable. I dumped the collective, centered the cyclic, and let the rotors chew the air above us while the team went to work. This was another hot transfer.

Mai-Loan and Olivia were already out, dragging our PAX — Nadir Khassoun — between them. The man stumbled a bit but kept pace. Three figures emerged from the darkness, approaching with a calm that only confidence — or the backing of a very powerful organisation — could buy. Another trio stayed by the cars, watching, probably armed.

The exchange was clean. No words. Just a transfer. Olivia gave a quick nod — confirmation after checking identification — and they turned back. No fuss, no mess.

Seconds later, my crew was strapping back in, the doors slammed shut, and I yanked the collective. We clawed back into the sky like a hawk escaping a trap. Mission done.

I set our heading for Wolvenkopft Manor, slicing through the chill of early morning with the lights of Eerste River and Blue Downs unfurling below like a glittering runway.

“Well?” I asked over the headset, eyes still on the flight instruments.

“Well, what?” Mai-Loan replied, her voice tight but lighter than before. The tension had begun to seep out of the cabin, replaced by something almost resembling relief.

“That guy ... Was it really him?”

“Yes,” she said. “It was him.”

“So the mission —”

“Mission accomplished,” Olivia cut in. “We’ll break out the Castle Lagers once you get us on the ground in one piece and not smeared across a pine tree forest.”

“I don’t drink beer,” I said flatly.

There was a pause.

“WHAT!” three voices exploded in unison, loud enough to make my ears ring despite the headset.

“It bloats me,” I replied with a shrug, nudging the stick gently to compensate for a gust. “I drink for pleasure, not for pain.”

A moment of stunned silence.

Then Mai-Loan chuckled. “Fine, no beer. We’ll make you one of those green health smoothies when we hit home base.”