He looked down at the flag in his lap, then up at the dog, and his mouth moved like he was saying something I couldn't hear.

The feedback shrieked through hundreds of speakers mounted across the entire underground facility, echoing upward through the ventilation shafts and out into the misty Appalachian hollows above.

Every single hound on the security monitors stopped.

The carbon-fiber muzzles twitched. The twenty leashed beasts turned their heads in unison away from the operators holding their cables, their dark ears pivoting toward the speaker horns mounted in the concrete ceilings.

Campbell’s PMC operators froze, their rifles lowering as they felt the terrifying shift in the air. "Sir?" a squad leader barked into his helmet comms. "The dogs aren't tracking the target. They're... they're facing the speakers."

I held the bronze MACV-SOG whistle tight in my fist, pressing the microphone close to my lips.

I remembered the photograph on the mantle. The young sergeant kneeling in the mud of the jungle, his arm around a battle-hardened shepherd whose eyes were full of absolute, unwavering devotion. And I remembered the four silent words the agent had formed with his mouth before everything fell apart.

They weren't an execution command.

They were an awakening.

I took a deep breath, letting the full weight of my father’s legacy settle into my chest.

*"Break the leash,"* I said into the microphone.

Across the monitors, twenty heads snapped backward. Twenty jaws sheared through nylon and steel cables like butter. The screaming of Campbell’s private army began before the first flare hit the concrete floor.

Rex let out a deafening, triumphant roar from beside the console, the sound vibrating through the reinforced steel walls, reverberating up the shaft to join the chorus of fifty wild, unbroken killers descending into the dark.

And then, on the central terminal, a single amber notification flashed onto the green phosphor screen that made the blood freeze in my veins:

**ALERT: SECTOR 01 CARRIER FREQUENCY SPREADING.**

**CIVILIAN CELLULAR NETWORK COMPROMISED.**