Part 4 — The Mountain Base Was Besieged, and I Took the Last Rifle — the General Lost Color When He Heard My Name

The “second document” had remained from my mother and was hidden in the double bottom of the black box.

Harlan did not know that the recording device was already in Callahan’s hands and that handing it over was no longer necessary.

But Reynolds was in his hands.

Therefore I went alone toward the old medical room.

It was four hours and twenty-six minutes in the morning. Emergency lights flashed in the corridor. The smell of burned plastic came from the walls, and glass fragments crackled under my feet.

I held the copper bracelet on my right wrist.

“Breathe, Emily.”

The door was half open.

“Come in,” Harlan said.

I entered.

Reynolds sat on a chair, his hands tied behind his back. Harlan’s weapon was pressed to his temple.

A small generator growled in the corner of the room. Beside it, a bloody medical bandage lay on the floor.

“The box on the table,” Harlan told me.

“Release Reynolds first.”

“Are you giving orders again? You are a nurse here now.”

“And you are a supply officer who behaves like a child when his own crime has cornered him.”

The muscle in his jaw tightened.

“Do you remember Daniel Carter?”

Something awoke inside me, but it did not break through in my voice.

“Every day.”

“He made the wrong decision at the wrong time.”

“That is what the report said.”

“I wrote that report.”

Reynolds looked at him.

“You killed her brother?”

Harlan turned his head toward me.

“I did not kill him. I only opened the doors.”

At that moment everything became clear. Daniel’s group had not ended up in enemy territory by accident. Harlan had sold their route, then changed the report in order to hide the money and responsibility.

I put the black box on the table.

“The recording has already been sent.”

“You’re lying.”

“Callahan sent it to the command seven minutes ago. You can no longer erase your own words.”

Harlan pressed the weapon more firmly to Reynolds’s temple.

“Then you will both die anyway.”

Callahan’s voice sounded behind the door.

“Harlan, this is your last chance. Put down the weapon.”

“One step and I’ll kill the girl!”

Reynolds closed his eyes. I looked at the folded wire on his left wrist. The chair was old, and one leg was slightly loose.

“Harlan,” I said calmly, “you think you still control the room.”

“Be quiet.”

“But you already lost the moment you recorded your own voice.”

He fired at me.

I jumped aside. The bullet struck the metal cabinet. At the same moment Reynolds hit Harlan’s knee with the chair leg. The weapon fell to the floor. Callahan and Okafor burst in through the door.

Harlan fell onto his back.

“Hands on your head!” Callahan shouted.

“This will change nothing!” Harlan roared. “They still do not care about Daniel!”

I bent down in front of him.

“Now they do.”

They put handcuffs on him.

But at that same moment the radio shrieked outside. The enemy’s remaining vehicles were not retreating. They were moving toward the base’s lower tunnel.

Callahan looked toward the window.

“It is the second wave of the attack.”

I picked up the black box.

“Then it is time for the nurse to do her job.”

The next twenty minutes stayed in my memory in fragments: a soldier wrapped in snow who had shrapnel in his shoulder; Reynolds’s bloody knee; Torres kneeling beside the generator; Callahan’s voice controlling all the positions at once.

I was still firing that rifle.

But this time I was not alone.

All the base’s weapons thundered at once, and the enemy’s second wave stopped at the tunnel. At dawn their remaining units retreated. Without Krasov, the convoy turned out to be only a pile of armor.

Harlan was taken away at seven in the morning.

His lawyer came by noon and refused the case that same evening.

“My client has confessed everything,” he said to Callahan. “And the recording is so clear that denying it makes no sense.”

Several hours later Harlan was brought into the control room. Callahan turned on his recording.

Harlan’s own voice sounded in the room:

“I only opened the doors.”

He raised his head.

“Turn it off.”

Callahan did not stop it.

His laughter could be heard in the recording. The same laughter that had turned Daniel’s death into an “incorrect decision.”

Harlan heard his own words from the outside for the first time.

The color disappeared from his face.

“I did not say it like that.”

“You said exactly that,” I answered.

Several weeks later the base was almost completely emptied. The snow melted, black earth appeared on the road, and the smell of burned wires disappeared.

The command officially confirmed a reinvestigation of Daniel’s case. Harlan was charged with treason, assisting in murder, and selling classified information.

I did not ask to attend the trial.

Its results no longer had to be written by my hand.

In my mother’s house, in a small town in Vermont, Daniel’s room had remained untouched for three years. His wooden airplane stood on the shelf, and one lost glove lay by the window.

I entered there for the first time when April rain was falling outside.

I put his photograph on the bed.

Then I opened the window.

Calm air came in.

Six months later I left military service and began working at a mountain rescue center. Now I helped people with a real medical bag. In the morning I made coffee myself, and in the evening I called Reynolds, who had returned to college and claimed in every conversation that he had saved the entire base with the leg of a chair that night.

One day he sent me a drawing.

A small black dot was drawn on a white mountain, and beside it stood a woman who had a copper bracelet on her wrist.

Below it was written: “My nurse, who was actually shooting at the mountain.”

I laughed for a long time.

Then a letter came from Harlan.

“Emily, now I have lost everything. But we both know that Daniel’s death was not only my fault. Help me have my sentence reduced. You are the only one who can do this.”

I read the letter twice.

I did not answer.

Again I was not going to save someone at the price of my own truth.

Years later, during the first snow, I climbed onto the roof of the rescue center. Below, the city windows lit up one after another. My hands were warm. I no longer needed to move them by force.

I wore the copper bracelet on my wrist. The three scratches were still visible, and my mother’s words could still be read on the small plate.

“Breathe, Emily.”

I looked into the snow and realized for the first time that that night had ended not when Harlan was handcuffed, but when I no longer wanted to answer his desire to return.

The wind swept over the forgotten roof.

I breathed.

And this time no one was waiting for me in the sights.