Alexandra Bedford stared at the steel towers, which stood like skeletal guardians over the dark waters of the Hudson River. The high beams from the two Stryker fighting vehicles behind her on Interstate 95 illuminated the first tower’s crisscrossing girders. Despite the early morning darkness, she could see the beginnings of a storm approaching from the southeast. The distant clouds brightened with a flash of lightning and then went dark. A rumble followed along with a drizzle that began pattering on her helmet and the back of her neck.

Alex’s steel blue-grey eyes scanned the bridge’s entrance ramp with nervous intensity. She had the broad shoulders of a swimmer, which she was, and a narrow waist flattened by the lines of her abdominal muscles. Four years of workouts, training exercises, survival lessons, and tenacity had brought her to the outskirts of New York City for her first mission. All of the endless hours had prepared her for this moment. She took her pulse and found it was slow and steady, about seventy, still higher than her baseline fifty-five.

Hundreds of abandoned and rusty cars waited along the ramp of the George Washington Bridge. The congestion extended out of sight toward the rooftops of Upper Manhattan. “How are we supposed to get across?” she said.

Captain Ryan Shepherd looked over from his crouched position to her left. His brown eyes mimicked the camouflage blotches across their uniforms. At twenty-six years old, he was two years her elder. His blond hair was much shorter than hers – military regulations. He was a good leader, decisive but not reckless, and his voice always remained calm and authoritative.

“Easy,” Shepherd said. “We walk.”

Shepherd wore a helmet with a sturdy microphone extending from his left earmuff to the corner of his mouth. A ballistic vest lined with pouches and other attachments encased his torso while a pair of tinted goggles covered his eyes. A small monitor stood out at the bottom of the left lens. He glanced into the readout and then surveyed the bridge.

The uniform Alex, Shepherd, and the other team members wore consisted of a blotchy pattern of dull browns and light tans. The colors blended with the trees along the bridge’s ramp but looked out of place against the interstate’s pavement. Each of the men held a bronze-colored assault rifle called the SCAR. Smooth, composite plastic made up the weapons’ lowers receivers while extruded aluminum added sturdiness to the upper halves. The optical sights atop the rifles allowed for quick and precise aiming. The lightweight weapons were always reliable even after submersion in sand or mud. They also resembled oversized fish.

Alex’s only firearm was a handgun resting in a holster on her right thigh: a black Colt 1911 with a combat light beneath the barrel. She had never fired the weapon in anger but her father insisted she carry it in the field.

She looked at Shepherd’s face, partially concealed by his goggles. He was smiling, the smug smile that said, I’m the pro and you, girl, are the amateur. She could forgive that, assuming he got all of them back home alive.

“Is it safe to walk across there?” she said.

“It’ll be fine,” Shepherd said.

“Must have been a goddamn decade since anyone's driven across the GW,” Master Sergeant Robert Murray said while ducking out of the troop compartment of the nearest Stryker. Murray was a big, red-headed Midwesterner. At thirty-five years old, he was the eldest member of the team, and everyone had grown accustomed to calling him “Pops.”

Shepherd studied the monitor in his goggles. Everyone on the team had to be wondering the same things: Was the bridge mined? Was there an ambush at the other end? Even as the least experienced member of the team, she understood they would be visible and vulnerable down the bridge’s long steel and concrete span. The New England Alliance had invited the Directorate to Manhattan to discuss a peace treaty, but more than one analyst back home feared it might be a ruse.

“Keep low,” Shepherd said. “Don’t fire unless fired upon. Keep your intervals.”

“Shit,” Murray muttered.

There were eleven members on the team excluding Alex and Shepherd – six in Alpha and five in Bravo. All around her, weapon magazines clicked into place, preceding sharp metallic cracks as each of the men drew back the charging handles of their rifles and then let go to chamber the first of their rounds.

Shepherd stood and approached the rearmost Stryker. The vehicles were armored and bulky, nine feet tall and wide and twenty-two long, each supported by eight tires as high as Alex’s waist. The dark green hulls possessed an angular shape that gave the vehicles the nickname “crocodiles.”

“Ziegler, Paul,” Shepherd said, speaking to two of the sergeants from Alpha. “You’re in the command vehicle. Set up a perimeter when we’re gone.”

“Make sure not to kiss too much ass over there, sir!” Technical Sergeant Raymond Paul grinned before ducking back into the command vehicle.

Shepherd returned and crouched beside her. “Are you ready?”

“Let’s go.” She sounded more eager than she felt.

Shepherd smiled and then started toward the bridge. “Wedge it up. Alpha in the lead, Bravo in the rear.” Shepherd motioned to the group kneeling near the wrecked cars. The team formed two groups of four and five men each. Alex and Shepherd moved between the wedges in the fifteen meters separating both formations.

This is it, she thought. Finally the real thing.

The wind picked up beyond the ramp’s clot of vehicles. Alex breathed in the salty air. The breeze was cool and refreshing under the weight of her armor. Despite the gathering storm and anemic sunlight, the city’s silhouette stood out beyond the bridge. This wasn’t how New York had looked in the old pictures. Even without all the life and light, the buildings nearest the span appeared ragged and ruined as if a wrecking ball had struck them decades earlier. Hollow-eyed windows, glass long since smashed or stolen. Green patches of roots, vines, and leaves growing around and into the vacant buildings.

Desiccated corpses lay inside the cars cluttering the bridge’s lanes. They used to be people like me, Alex thought. So much death. Places like this were once the pinnacles of civilization and life. Now, the cities were silent charnel houses of brick and steel. As they passed between the vehicles, the team’s wedges reformed into oscillating lines, weaving out and together as the space allowed. The only sounds were their boots and the wind murmuring through the cables holding up the bridge.

The drizzle sprinkled Alex’s uniform with wet blotches. There were no signs of life on the opposite shore. “Weren’t they supposed to meet us?” she said.

“Somewhere on the other side,” Shepherd said.

They continued into the middle of the span and reached a pair of trucks with grey semi-trailers occupying the middle two lanes on their side of the median. The trucks were old and rusty but in better condition than the vehicles around them. Ahead, the road on the Manhattan side of the bridge was empty save for a few dozen cars along the outer lanes.

“Shit!” Murray said from the back of the formation.

Shepherd brought his hand up in a fist. “Split up. Alpha to the left. Bravo to the right.”

The teams broke and sprinted forward, keeping low. Alex and Shepherd followed Alpha. She soon found herself breathing hard. Even after all her training, the weight of the body armor had never become comfortable. Shepherd gestured for her to crouch beside him. The ocean breeze cooled the sweat on her face although an uneasiness threatened her concentration. Keep focused. The mission. What’s important is the mission.

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Shepherd crept to the front of Alpha’s formation and extracted binoculars from his vest. He searched the road and buildings ahead. No movement as far as Alex could tell. Shepherd returned to her position and spoke into his headset. “We’ll wait here. Everyone find cover. Form a perimeter. Alex, you’re with me.”

The team spread out behind the cars near the outer railings. Alex sipped from the hydration bladder in her backpack. If only she could take off her helmet and wipe away the rain and sweat. But they were all in an exposed position. Too dangerous. She kept low beside Shepherd on the left curb and peered past him toward the city. A hairline bolt of lightning touched the earth a mile away. The rumbling crash a few seconds later made her wince.

She whispered, “Do you think—”

The explosion obliterated her voice and everything else.

The road heaved. Behind them, a volcanic fireball billowed from the middle of the bridge. Another explosion followed. The entire roadway erupted in a geyser of steel, dust, and concrete. The bridge’s giant support cables snapped. Debris rained around them. As Alex stared at the fireball, it ejected a blackened missile, the burning husk of a car, straight at her.

Shepherd pulled her back off the roadway. The car shuddered in midair twenty meters away and then imploded as its trajectory slammed backward. The vehicle’s remains joined the wreckage from the explosions and tumbled into the river.

Shepherd was shouting at her. His lips were moving but the tuning fork ring in her skull overpowered his voice. A shrill metallic groan reached from the middle of the bridge. The structure trembled as a section of roadway broke from the suspension cables and fell into the river. Through the smoke and debris, she spotted hundreds of cars sliding off the bridge into the Hudson River. The western edge of the span struggled to remain suspended but the bracings of the far tower began to snap under the pressure. The top of the tower collapsed with a shriek and then plummeted to the roadway. The tremendous weight ripped through the concrete and annihilated the bridge’s remains.

Alex heard Shepherd’s voice as the noise receded. He sounded tiny and far away even though he was standing beside her. “Report! Is everyone up?!”

Murray’s voice echoed in her eardrums, “Holy shit!”

The team clustered in a makeshift perimeter around her and Shepherd. Sergeant First Class Norm Wilson, the team leader of Alpha, counted heads and then called out, “We’re all up!”

“Good job with the car,” Shepherd said.

“What?” Alex said, still dazed.

“The car, you know… what you did with the car.”

“Was that me?”

He grinned. “Wasn’t me.”

“Shooter,” Specialist Benjamin Park said from up ahead. His eyes were the sharpest of the group, which had earned him the position as the team’s designated marksman. His rifle’s heavier barrel complemented the weapon’s longer-ranged cartridge while the magnified optic allowed for precision shots. Park’s alert caused the group to scatter and shoulder their weapons.

An armed man crouched behind a pickup truck three hundred meters ahead, kneeling beside the vehicle’s deflated front tire. He wasn’t aiming but held his rifle at the ready.

Alex and Shepherd hurried to a wrecked Toyota near the exit ramp. “There’s one— No, now there’s two of them,” Shepherd said into his microphone. “They’re armed. Not shooting… yet.”

He turned to the crouched and scattered members of the team. “Get them sighted.”

The men shifted their rifles. All of them were expert shooters. If anything happened, the two figures in front of them would become bloody streaks on the pavement.

Shepherd stepped out from behind the Toyota’s twisted body. “Hold on a sec,” he whispered.

The men were now a hundred meters away, holding their ancient-looking assault rifles at the ready but not aiming. Shepherd brought his gun to his cheek and squeezed off two shots. Both men’s heads exploded into pink clouds.

Alex was at first too shocked to speak. She stood up behind Shepherd. “You shot them.”

“Those explosions were an ambush. These two were going to clean up the survivors.”

“B-But they weren’t even aiming at us. They could see us.” She felt confused and angry.

They were out there in the open. They could have fired if they wanted to. She stared into the tinted goggles over Shepherd’s eyes and waited for a response.

“You want any of us to get killed proving you’re right?”

She glared at him, feeling the sudden desire to strike him.

Whoa. It’s your first mission. He’s been on lots of them. Calm down. He’s just being cautious.

Shepherd turned back toward the team and spoke into his microphone. “Form up on me. Let’s get the hell off this bridge. Ziegler, Paul, do you read me?”

A pause before Shepherd continued, “Good. Hold position for now. Tell command we need an aerial extraction. We’re cut off and I’ll be damned if we’re taking the tunnels out of this place.” He looked back and held eye contact with Alex. In a soft voice, he said, “We can talk about it later. Now, we need to go.”

She nodded, wondering what he had seen in her face. The team finished moving into formation. Shepherd waved his arm forward. They set off at a jog down the expressway leading off the bridge. Alex tried not to look as they passed the bodies, but she couldn’t ignore the spattered brain matter and fragments of skull on the pavement.

Shepherd directed them to an off-ramp, which they followed up to the vehicle entrance of a concrete structure raised ten meters off the streets below. A complex roof rose above the platform, forming a series of long, triangular sections that sloped upward from the row of supports running through the center of the structure.

Abandoned busses filled the building’s interior. The structure must have once served as a terminal or transportation hub. The concrete trusses lining the outer edge of the terminal reminded Alex of the steel bracings of the George Washington Bridge’s remaining tower. A parking structure, connected to the terminal by two short overpasses, occupied the adjacent block to the east. Beyond that, four dilapidated apartment buildings stood one after the other. Junk, plant life, and rusty cars littered the streets below at the same level as the main floor beneath the terminal.

Shepherd withdrew a laminated map from his vest. “We’ll stay here while we get our bearings.” He and Murray spread the map out on the ground and examined it with a penlight.

Alex stood in the middle of the terminal. This place was so large and open and yet it seemed too small. The concrete trusses, the smashed and broken windows, the sight of the abandoned cars with their desiccated bodies, and the explosion of the two heads in pink fountains all became oppressive weights on her mind. She needed fresh air but the air here was dark and stale.

She took off her helmet and wiped away the sweat on her brow. The terminal was elegant compared to the ruins around them. The fourteen triangular protrusions rising like wings from the rooftop gave her a sense she was in a church or temple. As she wandered toward the rear of the structure, she found a downward stairway marked with signs that read: “concourse,” “tickets,” “shops,” and “street level.” She hesitated and glanced back to see that Shepherd and Murray were still examining the laminated map. The other men were spreading out across the terminal. Park, however, looked her way.

Situational awareness. He does have that.

She pointed down the stairwell, but at that moment, a transmission came to Park’s headset. His gaze shifted to Murray and Shepherd. The pros are busy, she thought ironically.

She started down the steps. The light from the terminal became shadowed and then disappeared as she entered the lower concourse. She flipped her helmet back on casually, leaving the chinstrap unhooked, and then reached down and unfastened the clasp on her thigh holster.

She swung her handgun’s combat light back and forth in slow, wide arcs. Rows of empty benches and trashcans. Ticket windows with smashed or absent glass. Banks of pay telephones with metal cables hanging empty like amputated arms. Drops of water leaked from the ceiling and splashed into shallow puddles on the concrete floor.

A faded mural covered the wall. The painting showed an aged man with thinning hair and large eyes behind thick horned rim glasses. He wore a suit with a white collar and black tie. Behind him was the bridge they had crossed – the bridge that now existed as rusting debris in the Hudson River. Sic transit gloria mundi. Her father was fond of that phrase. There was precious little glory in the world now.

She was a ghost haunting the corridors through which millions of people had once moved. All of those people were gone with nothing left but fading murals. On her seventeenth birthday, her father had given her a framed oil painting depicting a small village beneath a dark blue sky filled with swirling clouds, blazing stars, and a bright crescent moon. Since there were no murals or artwork within the main cave or the sterile corridors of Cheyenne Mountain, she had hung the painting on the wall facing her bed, and the scene had filled her eyes every night before going to sleep. More abstract than the photographs, the painting seemed to her a spiritual reality, something that had once given purpose to those empty, blasted buildings. Now that reality was gone as well.

A creaking noise from behind brought her back to the dank concourse. She turned and swept her light across the walls. Nothing moved. Something’s wrong. She started back toward the staircase, hearing only her own boots splashing in the pools of stagnant water.

An impact against her helmet slammed her onto the wet floor. Her helmet toppled off and rattled uselessly beside her. She tried to raise her gun but a booted foot kicked it out of her hand, sending the light swirling off into the darkness.

A knee came down hard on her neck. Then cold and sharp metal against her throat. A man’s voice whispered, “Don’t make a sound.”