By: Aiden Ding

I walked through the empty halls, alone. I knew it must be overtime. The mission didn’t start as planned. The four of us had split up already, and were waiting for the call on our radio. Only a few more minutes passed until the radio vibrated – our first signal.

I crept through the hallway into the dark and up a ladder. From there I could see the facility.

The others would search for guards, then go to my position. So far, so good. I heard footsteps coming in my direction – it must’ve been my teammates. I looked down from the tower and saw their faces.

We had to infiltrate the facility and take out the admiral (We refused to say his name). Then we had to find a way to somehow escape. Somehow, the commander had told us. No more. Only “somehow.” We knew he didn’t expect us back alive. No one did.

The cold air swirled around our faces. No one dared to talk – we knew a single whisper would give us away. The facility was a hexagon, with many small buildings in the middle. In the center was a tall building with a pyramid on top.

Each vertex of the hexagon had a tower, one of which we were standing on. Each tower had a bridge leading to the pyramid building. We knew that the admiral was there. Krypto (we all had codenames), our ranger, scanned the other towers for guards. There were none.

Slowly, we put a device on each of the telephone wires – this made sure that any call for help was not heard. It was about dawn when we finished-in an hour, the admiral would be having his breakfast. We had to assassinate him before he went to eat.

The commander had told us our spies knew that there were six guards, each stationed on a side of the pyramid building. We crept through the bridge. I estimated it was about 500 meters long.

We readied our automatic rifles, slowly opened the door and peeked through.