CHAPTER 30: COUNTDOWN ENDED
One Year Later
Arlington National Cemetery
11:00 AM
The headstones stretched to the horizon, row after row of perfect white markers, each one marking the place where a life had ended and a memory had begun. Jack stood before three of them, the names he knew by heart, the faces he would never forget. Reyes. Chen. Martinez. Killed in the Tehran raid. Dead because they had followed him into danger, because he had asked them to go where he could not go alone, because they had trusted him and he had not been able to bring them home.
But this time, he was not alone.
Emma Dune stood beside him, older now, almost grown, her face turned toward the graves, her eyes holding something that had not been there before, something that might have been the memory of fear or
