The quiet before 

Colonel Max Burke had come to love the quiet rhythm of San Luis Obispo—mornings wrapped in Pacific fog, late afternoons with a glass of scotch on the back patio or in his study. His home, perched just beyond the vineyards, offered a soft kind of exile from the decades he’d spent in military intelligence. The kind you tell yourself you’ve earned, even when you know better.

But peace is a thin veil when your instincts tell you otherwise.

That night, he returned to the den, a cigar still smoldering in the ceramic ashtray, and lowered himself into the soft, worn leather of his reading chair. The folder in his lap didn’t belong in his house. It belonged in a SCIF—Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility—three levels underground at the Pentagon, inside a soundproofed vault. Where documents were logged, tagged, monitored, and shredded after review.

And, Max believed in that tidy bureaucratic chain of custody.

This particular file, however, had come through a different channel—off-book, unsanctioned, but from a source he trusted implicitly: a Quantico contact who went by the alias Rook. A former field analyst turned cyber-forensics specialist, Rook had once flagged a mole buried in NATO command before the rest of the brass had even noticed a leak.

And now, Max was staring at something worse.

Inside the file: a series of reports—standard-looking at first glance—annotated with subtle inconsistencies. Network pings from server rooms at Langley and Fort Meade that shouldn’t have existed. Modified threat assessments rerouted through obscure internal nodes. Metadata packets with time stamps just a hair off normal—tiny signs someone had opened, altered, and resealed documents before they were finalized.

Someone inside the system wasn’t just leaking—they were editing the official narrative before it ever reached decision-makers. Turning intelligence into fiction. Disguising the truth not with lies, but with omission.

Max flipped to a page titled “Revised Incident Chronology – NOR-72 Satellite Drift.” He scanned the clean, bureaucratic phrasing—perfectly typed, perfectly neutral—then glanced at the notation in red ink Rook had left in the margin.

“Compare original telemetry: drift began 19 minutes earlier than logged.”

A small change. But in intelligence, minutes mattered; seconds mattered. And the omitted 19 minutes aligned with a drone blackout in Moldova last month. Which hadn’t made the news.

He rubbed his jaw, fingers trailing over the two-day growth of stubble. The fireplace beside him crackled softly, throwing orange flickers onto the walls. Outside, the cypress trees were swaying in the cool night air.

This wasn’t sloppiness. It was too clean. Too methodical.

A casual analyst would never catch it. Rook had, and now so had he.

Max had spent his life buried in information—first in Force Recon, then as an attaché during the second Gulf surge, later embedded in Defense Intel, and finally “retired” into advisory oversight. Officially, he was just another colonel with a clearance and a retirement pension. Unofficially, he was a trusted backchannel for brass who didn’t want to get their hands dirty but needed someone who could smell bullshit through a firewall.

The logs showed the anomalies were happening across departments—NSA, DIA, and one peculiar reference to the Defense Logistics Agency. That last one gave him pause. Why would a logistics unit show up in orbital satellite realignment?

He turned the page and found a grainy still image: satellite telemetry from one of the birds stationed over Northern Europe. The raw image had been scrubbed in the final copy, blurred and reclassified. But the original image—marked DO NOT REPLICATE—showed a convoy, clearly military, moving in a sector NATO had flagged as inactive.

The time stamp? Exactly when NOR-72 had supposedly “drifted.”

Max reached for his drink. The scotch was lukewarm but welcome. He sipped slowly, letting it roll across his tongue.

This wasn’t just data drift. This was intentional. This was a campaign.

The clock ticked on the far wall—slow, deliberate. He reached for his burner phone, one of several he kept stashed around the house. It buzzed just before he could unlock it.

A message from Denton—his aide at the Pentagon.

“Just confirming your arrival for Monday, Colonel. General Stafford’s office wants your opinion on the Ryland Contract revisions.”

He typed a simple reply:

“I’ll be there.”

Then he set the phone down and pulled a second file from the bottom of the stack. This one was unmarked. A hand-stitched binding, Rook’s signature method. Inside were printouts of internal emails—nothing dramatic, but when you knew what to look for, they formed a pattern. Specific phrasing appeared across departments. The same phrases: “operational ambiguity,” “review loop pending,” and “eyes-only audit to follow.”

Codewords. Bureaucratic smokescreens.

But repeated too often to be coincidence.

In the corner of the final page, a sticky note was affixed with a single phrase in Rook’s hand:

“Eastman flagged. If he disappears, go full Echo.”

Max leaned back.

Jonathan Eastman. DIA analyst, mid-thirties, assigned to satellite threat assessments. Quiet, serious, a little socially off-kilter, but brilliant. They’d worked together once, tracking anomalous radar signatures off the Norwegian coast. Eastman had a gift for seeing beyond data. He could find the shape behind the static.

If Rook was saying Eastman was in danger… it meant the circle was closing.

Echo Protocol. That was the Cold War fallback—used only when you suspected your own house was compromised. It meant going dark. No electronic contact. No chain of command. It meant preparing for the possibility that you were next.

Max closed the file. His fingers had gone still.

He reached for a yellow notepad beside him and began making a list.

• Eastman
• NOR-72 drift
• Drone blackout—Moldova
• Ryland revisions?
• Satellite re-tasking
• DLA—logistics?

He paused, then added two more names, scrawled in smaller print at the bottom.

• Stafford
• Dodge

Both high-level. Both untouched—so far. But in this world, silence often meant complicity. Or fear.

He clicked off the desk lamp, then turned it back on again. Old habit. Clearing the field of vision, watching for shadows. He saw none.

Yet.

In the morning, he’d drive through the hills outside town. The winding roads through Paso Robles always cleared his head. But tonight, it felt too quiet. Like someone holding their breath. The silence of a room just before the flashbang. He stood and walked toward the French doors opening onto the back patio. The vineyard rolled out beneath the moonlight, still and silver.

He took one more sip of scotch and whispered to no one:

“Something’s coming.”

Behind him, the file lay open.

And somewhere in Arlington, Virginia, Jonathan Eastman didn’t answer his phone.

Read chapter 3