Stephenie Meyer owns Twilight. I'm borrowing her characters, dressing them up in MARPAT, and giving them some guns (again).

Unbeta'd, unedited.

Jan 10
George Bush Center for Intelligence, CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia

"Major Cullen, glad you could make it."

At the familiar clipped address, Edward angled toward the turnstile at the end of the hall and tracked the agent as he crossed the speckled tile.

Brown-eyed, brown-haired, medium build, and sporting his usual nondescript black suit, the man was the ideal operative, as forgettable as they come. Although, like the last time they met, the sharpness and efficiency of movement gave him away, just like the quick, automatic scan of his surroundings, despite standing in the center of one of the most secure buildings on the planet.

"Special Agent Dalton," Edward said, extending his hand in a curt, professional greeting. "It's been a while."

"Unfortunately, not long enough." Waving off the security detail – a pair of young, starry-eyed twenty-somethings who'd jumped at the chance to meet the near-fabled Marine – Dalton grimaced. "How's your team doing?"

With a quick nod at the departing agents, Edward checked his wrist. His eyes glinted against the pale violet of the overhead fluorescents. "Eager."

Despite the heat blasting down from the overhead vent, the hair on the back of Dalton's neck stood on end. Before he reacted and embarrassed himself, movement caught his attention, however, and his gaze trailed off to the left to follow the slim shadow slowly creeping into the major's periphery.

"Dr. Swan, it's good to see you again," Dalton said, shrugging off the eerie reminder of just how that Marine had earned his call sign. When his accompanying scientist didn't answer, Dalton's grimace melted into a small, wry smile. "We were surprised when we heard you went part-time at DARPA, even more so when we heard you'd joined…" He thumbed over to Edward. "This guy's group."

At that, Bella's head finally shot up from her tablet and its scrawled lines of notes and figures. A drily muttered, "Somehow, I doubt that," tumbled out of her mouth before she could stop it, and her eyes boggled in instant alarm. "Crap… the surprised part, that is," Bella added, forehead wrinkling as she waved a flustered hand at the center of the hall and its massive eagle, shield, and compass star stamped into the floor. "Seriously, some of your guys aren't very subtle, you know."

Despite where they were and why, Edward's lips twitched at the pale pink climbing her cheeks, then a second time when Bella fidgeted against the stiff, unfamiliar cut of her service coat.

Then again, it wasn't like he could blame her for that, never mind how well she wore it. How people wore this shit every day, he still couldn't fathom.

"I suppose they're not." Straightening his tie, Dalton let out a low chuckle. "I'll have to let Charlotte know you disapprove." When Bella just huffed in annoyance, he paused to study the scientist, and it didn't take him long to clock the tells that all the uniforms and starch in the world couldn't hide.

Dark, tired eyes rimmed in red stared back at him. Still pale and uncalloused, her knuckles stretched white around her tablet. Hanging loosely by her side, her thumb flicked across the back of the opposite hand in nervous agitation. Her nails looked chewed down and jagged, too.

But…

The slumped posture of the grieving, wide-eyed researcher he'd first met was long gone. In its place was something else, something defiant and far closer to that of the man next to her.

He wondered if she'd even noticed the change. Cullen surely did, but then again, there wasn't much that man didn't see, especially when it came to her.

Not about to wade into all that, Dalton cleared his throat and motioned to the stack of papers under Bella's arm before quietly asking, "In all seriousness, how are you holding up?"

Bella stilled, and something hard and equally defiant flashed across her delicate features. "I'm angry, Peter. I'm very… angry." The words punched out through gritted teeth. The softer, feminine line of her jaw ticked, and the hand by her side balled into a tight hammer. "How about you?"

"Very." Satisfied she wouldn't crack, Dalton ducked his head in a subtle acknowledgment. With one last knowing look at the stern, disturbingly calm Marine beside her, he motioned toward the second security point and the long hallway beyond. "Shall we? Seats will go quick for this one."

Ten minutes later, they exited the warren of gray-on-gray hallways and filed into a windowless room deep in the heart of the building. As they stepped inside, Bella's eyes wandered, and the grip on her tablet tightened.

Stretching the length of the room, an impressive, modern conference table occupied the center. Sleek, black leather chairs ringed the thing, flanked by a dozen or more positioned against the left-hand wall. High-tech, razor-thin flat screens papered the other walls, sitting on top of shiny, burled wood panels reminiscent of another era. Framed portraits of austere men in plain dark suits hung between the screens, almost as if specters waiting to preside over the proceedings.

"Best I can do," Dalton murmured, gesturing to the row of chairs against the wall. His gaze surreptitiously cut over to the grouping of sharply dressed, salt-and-pepper men across the room. "Full house today, I'm sure you can guess why."

"Understood." Edward issued in a clipped affirmative, and without another word, the agent spun on his heel and paced across the room to join the petite strawberry blonde at the opposite end.

Hands clasped behind his back in a loose at ease, Edward angled toward the woman next to him, ever so slightly, and tipped his chin at the group across the table. "The tall one in blue standing next to Carlisle is Alistair Perry, Rear Admiral over WARCOM."

"Who?"

"Navy War Command."

Bella's lips parted in a silent ah, and then she eyed the profusion of colorful ribbons, stars, and insignia on display. Like the blond Marine with ash at his temples standing in the middle, every one of them was lean beneath the uniform, tough as nails, and they all possessed a kind of innate, rigid comportment and bearing that commanded the room. "Are they all… generals… or admirals or whatever?"

When Bella's nose crinkled, something warm and familiar hit him square in the chest, but all Edward said was a quiet, "Pretty much," and then he gestured to the dark-eyed, rangy sentinel in olive drab on Carlisle's right. "That one's Garrett Marshall. He's Army, Strategic Command." He motioned toward a third, another tall, chiseled dirty blond, and then at the striking, trim woman with warm, umber skin beside him. "Mark Charles, Army, Force Command. And Makenna Kimani. She's Air Force, Vice Chief of Staff."

Bella slowly nodded, like all that meant something. "What about that guy?"

As soon as Edward followed her line of sight, he stiffened. His mouth flattened into a hard, unforgiving line as the older man standing in the doorway paused. Almost on cue, his gaze swung their way, sharp and cutting, and the two acknowledged each other in a beat of tense, silent conversation, broken only by a pair of CIA agents walking in between them. "Sam Uley."

"And?"

"SOCOM… Special Operations Command," Edward said, scowling as he tracked the barrel-chested general stalking across the carpet. A pair of stressed-out junior officers followed hot on his heels.

Head tilted in study, Bella examined the newest arrival bark out an order to one of his assistants. Much like the rest of them, the general was stern and imposing, with strong, angular features that looked like they'd been carved from some richly colored hardwood. He also looked familiar. "He looks…"

"Like an asshole."

Bella choked back a laugh, covering it with a poorly disguised cough. "Okay, not the direction I was going. Care to elaborate?"

One brow climbed to Edward's hairline, and his reply was as dry as they come. "Where do you think Black learned it?"

"So…" Bella said, drawing it out. "You ever going to tell me why you punched him?"

Warm, tanned skin pulled taut across Edward's cheekbones, and when he stole a peek down, Bella almost smiled. "Wasn't planning on it… Not exactly one of my finer moments."

Now, she really wanted to know. "Well, did he deserve it?"

Edward leveled her a flat, unamused glare that would have made most run and duck for cover. "What do you think?"

Before Bella could answer or, worse, laugh, a long line of men and women filed into the room, a veritable parade of monochromatic charcoal and black, with an occasional splash of midnight blue. And just like their colleagues positioned at the front, they all moved with briskness and purpose, reminding her yet again why they were here to start with.

A lone, out-of-place sixty-something with a civilian paunch and a receding hairline trailed in at the very end. All lingering amusement instantly vanished, and Bella frowned at the deep lines of stress and fatigue.

"You know him?" Edward whispered as they took their seats.

"William Berty," she whispered back as her fingers cinched around her armrest. "He's the director at DARPA." Grimacing, Bella shoved a non-existent stray hair out of her face. "That presentation I was working on was for him… He's also the one who hired me out of grad school."

The door thumped shut a second later, and an electrified silence filled the room. At the front, Special Agent Charlotte Calahan glanced around and then tapped an LED glass panel. Before Bella could blink, the overhead lights dimmed, and half the screens lining the walls flared to life.

"Let's get started," she said, simultaneously signaling a junior agent manning one of the laptops. "I'm assuming you've all been briefed?"

Seated next to Carlisle, Garrett Marshall leaned forward in his chair and flipped open an inch-thick manila file bearing the stamps of a half dozen agencies. "I think we've all read the reports, but where are we right now? What's the current count?"

The blonde didn't even flinch, and as she stepped to the side, a checkerboard of photos and satellite shots appeared on the screens. In the background, keys clicked a mile a minute. "The latest update puts it up at 887 confirmed dead, including Ambassador Cope, his wife, Shelly, and their two children."

Low murmurs rumbled in the room. "Ambassador Schwartz?"

Another array of photos scrolled across. "Confirmed, along with her family as well. We're coordinating with the Israelis."

Marshall nodded and eyed General Uley across the table before looking back to the agent. "Do we know if they were the targets, or was the ambassadors' attendance a coincidence?"

"We don't believe in coincidences, General," Calahan said, motioning again to the red-headed agent on the keyboard. "This was a coordinated attack, designed and executed by a sophisticated organization."

High-resolution pre-attack satellite images filled the screens, so detailed that Bella could count the cobblestones in the adjacent plaza. A beat later, a second set of images overlaid the first, highlighting the dark, concentric blasts from where they took out every exit and point of egress. A final set of images appeared, outlining the wider contamination radius.

Even though she'd seen them all before, Bella's heart climbed up her throat as she stared at the scale of the destruction. Blood rushed in her ears, loud and whining, and her eyes slid shut against the onslaught. It was no more than a second, but in that heartbeat of time, fabric rustled beside her, and then Bella registered the warm, reassuring weight of Edward's thigh pressed against her own.

Nothing overt, nothing obvious, but she felt that warmth and quiet strength down to the bone.

"We expect hospitals to continue reporting over the next few days," Calahan went on, directing a laser pointer to a set of tabular graphics scrolling down the side of the screen directly behind her. "Conservative estimates place the final toll north of 950. Overall casualties, unclear until we know the extent of contamination."

"Goddamn." Marshall spat out the curse and glared at the entire room."And we didn't see this coming?"

"No, sir. This was not on our radar."

As weary as Edward had seen him in a long while, Carlisle leaned back in his chair, kicked an ankle over the opposite knee, and studied the screens over steepled fingers. His gaze flitted across the table to his nephew for a split-second before he calmly asked, "Are there any leads?"

Dalton chimed in. "No one's claiming credit, and all the usual channels are silent."

At the far end, the diminutive Air Force commander tutted. "You didn't answer Carlisle's question, Agent Dalton." Before the agent could argue, she chuffed and flicked a slender hand in obvious irritation. "I, for one, don't have the patience for the CIA's usual games today, so let me ask the question we're all thinking…" Piercing and dark, she glanced over to Edward, lingering on the light blue ribbon with its six white stars at the top of his ribbon bar. "Is this the same faction Major Cullen's team took down last summer?"

Nothing but silence answered her, turning the room quiet enough that the faint tick of someone's analog watch sounded loud and intrusive.

"General, we don't know," Calahan said as the screens blinked behind her. "The French are chasing down about five thousand tips right now." She gestured to the screen behind her. "So far, all we have is what you see here… It was taken by a doorbell camera two days before."

On cue, a short, blurry video, taken sometime after dark, filled the screens. It'd been slowed down and likely doctored, but when she squinted, Bella could make out two individuals – a man and a woman, judging by their heights and shapes – emerging from the shadows of the cathedral. Even to her untrained eye, they moved with purpose, cutting straight across the plaza toward a nondescript white van. The shorter one paused at the midway point, peered over her shoulder, and lifted a phone to her ear. When she turned, Bella caught a flash of skin, almost cadaver white in the moonlight. A long, blonde ponytail swung behind her.

It wasn't the image she expected, and when Bella looked over at Edward, a muscle jumped in his cheek, a barely-there break in the otherwise stone façade.

A palm slapped on the table, startling the room, and General Uley let out a pissed-off growl. "A fucking doorbell cam picked up a fucking van in the middle of motherfucking Paris… That's all you've got?"

"Don't be an asshole, Sam," Carlisle said, cutting the other man a hard, irritated look before turning back to the woman at the front. "What else?"

Calahan's laser pointer flew to the screen right as the video winked out, replaced by a series of complex graphs and chemical formulas. "Preliminary sample analyses confirm it's ours. It's XR-5"

At that, Bella went ramrod stiff. Her fingers curled tightly around her armrest, and her knee bobbed in nervous agitation. That little movement grabbed every bit of Carlisle's attention, and the two made eye contact across the room. When he watched her cheek suck in between her teeth, he peered over to Edward, who ducked his chin once in a single, succinct acknowledgment, and back over to Bella. "Dr. Swan, do you have different information?"

Every eye in the room swung toward her.

Licking her lips, Bella's chest expanded with a slow, deep breath, and she did her damnedest to keep her voice steady. "It's not… exactly XR-5," she said and then paused before adding an uncertain, belated, "sir," at the end.

"What the fuck does that mean?" Uley's palm cracked against the table again.

It took everything Edward had not to step in between them. Instead, knowing his scientist could and would hold her own just fine, he called on every bit of rigid discipline and forced calm the Marines had drilled into him and quietly motioned for her to stand and take the floor. "Go ahead, Doctor."

Following his direction, Bella stood and took another slow breath. "The chemical signature is near identical," she said, signaling the agent at the keyboard to expand one of the graphs on the left-hand side. Plucking a thin pen out of her pocket, Bella flicked on her own laser line and pointed at the overlapping lines of spectroscopic data. "But look here. See the heavy tail at the end? At first, I thought it was a contaminated sample. It's not."

Dr. Berty's slumped posture straightened as if coming to life out of a long sleep. Leaning forward, he scratched at three-day stubble and squinted at the jagged lines of data. "What are you thinking?"

Bella's shoulders rose and fell. "My best guess is it's been modified by someone… someone who knew what they were doing. It's not dissimilar to some of the subvariants Dr. Biers and I worked on last year before his abduction and death."

A low hum filled the silence before General Marshall piped in. "Modified… how?"

"The structure is larger, and the molar mass is higher with marginal negative impact to percutaneous absorption and subsequent acetylcholinesterase inhibition." She hesitated, thinking. "In other words, they've traded off a small amount of toxicity for persistence."

Marshall grunted. "How about giving me that in English?"

Bella smiled at the general's gruff tone. "Theoretically, it's less toxic, but we're talking a difference of seconds. Lethality is practically the same, still far and away above VX, which says… a lot." Her laser line flew to the chicken-wire-like structure on the right and then back to the histogram. "But this variant is… stickier. And they've designed it to penetrate the skin more slowly, to linger longer."

In the back, General Kimani whistled. "Area denial?"

"Likely." Nodding, Bella examined the layered satellite images, noting how the streets arrowed toward the cathedral and plaza at its center. When she blinked, she saw the same pretty twenty-something, bloodied, blistered, her mouth still frozen open in a macabre silent scream. "This kind of modification would enable secondary, maybe even tertiary exposure… first responders, family, anyone unprepared and rushing in to help."

Dr. Berty's fingers drummed a hard, fast rhythm against the tabletop. "Are you sure?"

Easing back down to her chair, Bella swallowed. "Not 100%, but it's the logical conclusion."

Scowling at both the DARPA director and the CIA agents at the front, Uley huffed in aggravation. "Why are we hearing this now?"

"We're missing two of our scientists," Dr. Berty said, staring off into the distance. "One of them was meant to take over for Dr. Swan."

Bella swayed in her chair. In the background, voices hummed, coming in and out of focus until she again felt the warm, sure press of Edward's thigh against her own. Audience be damned, his hand slid over hers and squeezed, grounding her in the here and now.

"I hadn't heard that," she said, barely above a whisper.

"They were supposed to be on vacation." Dalton peeked over at Agent Calahan. The blonde's features pinched, but then she waved a haphazard hand, gesturing for him to proceed. "But they've disappeared, and our agents on the ground can't locate them."

"In other words, you lost them. Again," Uley said, drawling and dripping disdain. "Or… did they lose you this time around?"

"Dr. Stanley would have had access to all our files," Bella murmured, flat and lifeless. When she looked over at Edward, her gut sank. Dark and churning, his eyes bored into hers, and she just knew. He'd already made the leap, just like the stone-faced SOCOM commander at the table. "She would have known Riley and I looked at those other potential variants."

"Wait," General Kimani cut in. Her brows slammed down. "Are you suggesting someone infiltrated DARPA, that this isn't another abduction scenario?"

At the front, Agent Calahan threaded her hands together and let out a reluctant sigh. "Dr. Stanley passed every background check imaginable… but the evidence – or lack of – indicates that it's possible."

"Why didn't you say that at the beginning?"

"At this point, it's purely hypothetical," Calahan said, signaling a second dark-suited agent. "Dr. Swan's assessment lends it more credence."

"That's why the usual suspects aren't claiming credit," Marshall muttered, scrubbing his face as he stared down at the open file in front of him. He flipped it shut with a harrumph and then chucked it onto the middle of the table. "Because it's not them."

On the other side of Carlisle, Alistair Perry tipped back in his chair. "Who else has the means and sophistication to pull something like this off? North Korea? Russians?"

"Possible, but it would be a strategic catastrophe considering current events." Dalton shook his head and grabbed one of the water bottles off the table. "NATO would be forced to engage directly, and despite all the bluster coming out of Moscow, we don't think the Kremlin is interested in that kind of escalation right now."

Edward studied the man across the room, noting the lines of fatigue and the sheen of sweat dotting his forehead. "But?"

Dalton – along with the rest of the room – spun toward him and nodded. "But… it could be an individual acting on their own. There are a few who might fit the bill."

"Like who?"

With a quick stroke of the keyboard, a row of photos scrolled across the screen, stopping on an almost-familiar face hidden behind a neatly trimmed beard. Tall, dark, and somewhere around fifty, the man had a distinctly monied look about him, the kind of aristocratic features and bearing that would stick out even without the fine Italian wool suit and Patek Philippe circling his wrist.

"Mikhail Aronov, oligarch, industrialist, and founder of Mirprom, a conglomerate that manages various holdings, including his VolTerra mining assets, as well as his expansive portfolio of weapons and arms manufacturing."

Edward frowned. "Motive?"

"He's been sanctioned heavily, and the Italians seized several of his assets a few months ago, including his compound in Tuscany and his company's headquarters in Florence. He's not a happy camper," Dalton explained, flipping to an overhead image of a vast Tuscan villa and vineyard before moving to a headshot of another man.

Maybe a few years older and with piercing silver-gray eyes, this guy was the real deal, and Edward would have bet his paycheck he was ex-Spetsnaz.

"His brother-in-law, Aleksandr Markovsky, is another matter. That one has an intimate knowledge of sarin, granted it was decades ago."

The air in the room turned staticky. "Sarin?"

Dalton slugged back a third of his bottle. "In the 90s, Markovsky commanded a spec ops team in the Caucasus. By all accounts, he was extremely… effective. He's now a senior official in the FSB," he said before draining another third. "But Aronov's ultimately a hardware guy, not chemical, and nowadays, Markovsky mostly runs interference for his brother-in-law. This kind of thing would be out of scope for them, even considering some of their activities in Central Africa."

Standing, Edward stepped closer to the screens. "Who else?"

"Tarkhan Ali-Basayev," Calahan replied. Ignoring the half-dozen grumbles from the table, she gestured at the far rougher-looking man on Aronov's left.

Wider, muscled, and sporting an unkempt wiry beard, ink, and a scruffy wool papakha, this one looked right at home in his fatigues and desert surroundings. "He runs Borz Group. He has the finances and connections, not to mention the kind of anarchist tendencies to pull off something like this."

Edward eyed the banged-up Kalashnikov slung over the man's shoulder. "His mercs are a little busy right now. Does he really have the capacity for this?"

"Doubtful." Calahan shoved a strawberry blonde curl behind her ear. "From what we can tell, he's already had to pull back most of his groups from Africa to meet his contracts with Moscow. He's even recruiting prisoners. Let's just say the Kremlin is not pleased with their performance."

From the table, Carlisle asked, "Others?"

"We've looked at the oligarchs and all the main players linked to the defense, equipment, and heavy chemicals industries." She shook her head. "Most, like Aronov, are under sanctions. As best we can tell, they're just trying to hold onto what they have and stay below the radar. Obviously, we'll continue to watch, but we think this is someone else, someone who likes playing in the shadows. We should have more soon, hopefully before they strike again."

"Fine," Edward said as Carlisle stood to join them. "Get us to the Med. We'll coordinate as intel comes in, but that'll put us close enough to deploy wherever we need to go."

Sky blue eyes met those of a forest at twilight. "Done."

"Hold on one fucking minute," Uley snapped. "We have no idea what's going on. We don't who's behind this shit. We don't even know if they're planning something else." He spat out another curse. "Regardless, this is a SOCOM job."

As Edward glanced over at Bella, where she sat small, quiet, and defiant, that fist in his gut – absent these last few months – came roaring back. Nonetheless, he pivoted toward the general, wearing a cut-from-granite expression that had no exact name. As they stared at each other across the room, his muscles uncoiled, like an apex predator stretching before the hunt.

"With all due respect, General, you're wrong," Edward said, low and cold. "Paris was only the beginning, and there is no one in this building – on this planet – who knows more about that weapon than that woman right there." Bella's head jerked up. "And wherever she goes, I go."

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Notes:

To all of you The Cleaner readers, calm down, lol! I promise Aronov won't make an appearance in this fic. But like El'azar in The Cleaner, a version of my favorite villain exists in this universe, too. I just couldn't resist. ;)

Also, as I mentioned before, I've pulled this universe forward to an unspecified year but approximately present day. There will be vague references to the horrific war currently going on in Ukraine, and in Chap 1, you can see there are Russian-speaking characters. This story does not take place in Ukraine, however, nor does it use the war as a setting.

Glossary:

Acetylcholinesterase inhibition: is the real mechanism for VX and other organophosphate nerve agents (e.g., sarin), as well as some beneficial medicines used to treat conditions like Parkinson's and glaucoma. It's is a complex biochemical process that winds up blocking organ function. In the case of chemical weapons, this is severe and results in eventual death from asphyxiation.

Alphas: or service uniforms, are one of the primary uniforms worn by Marines. They're the equivalent of a business suit and the most recognizable variant consists of green trousers with a khaki belt, a green jacket, a khaki long-sleeved button-up, a khaki tie, black shoes, and a hard-framed Barracks cover. Women's service uniforms are similar to men's but with a differently cut jacket, a necktab instead of a tie, and may specify either a garrison cap or a hard frame Barrack's cover depending on the event. Women also have the option of a skirt instead of trousers if preferred

Area denial: in military-speak, is a defensive device used to prevent an adversary from occupying or traversing an area of land, sea, or air. Mines and IEDs are common area denial weapons. Some CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive) weapons can be used for area denial, as long as the agent is long-lasting

Caucasus: is a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, mainly comprising Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia (including Chechnya, Dagestan, etc). In the 90s and early '00s, it was the center of multiple wars between republics vying for independence, various ethnic groups, and the Russian Federation

Kalashnikov: or AK-47, or just AK, is a gas-operated assault rifle that is chambered for the 7.62×39mm cartridge. It was designed back in the late 40s and remains one of the most popular rifles in the world due to its reliability under harsh conditions, low production cost (compared to contemporary weapons), availability in virtually every geographic region, and ease of use. It's manufactured by Kalashnikov Concern and others

Papakha: this is a type of wool hat worn by men throughout the Caucasus and also in uniformed regiments in the region and beyond

Ribbon: aka medal ribbon, service ribbon, or ribbon bar, is a small rectangular ribbon mounted on a small metal bar equipped with an attaching device and worn on the left-hand side of the service coat (US). Service ribbons are worn in place of medals when it is not appropriate to wear the actual medals. Generally, the longer one is in service and/or higher the rank, the more medals one will have received, hence the ribbon bars for generals and such often occupy several rows. The "light blue ribbon with its six white stars" referenced above is the ribbon for the Medal of Honor, which is the highest military honor awarded, and which Edward received in the epilogue of OPERATION: Break the Dawn

Sarin: another nerve agent used in chemical warfare, less toxic than VX

SEALs: aka United States Navy Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) Teams, are the U.S. Navy's primary special operations force and a component of WARCOM. Note: SEAL Team Six, aka DEVGRU, which is one of the military's Tier 1 special mission units, is a bit different. While administratively under WARCOM, like SFOD-D (Delta Force), they are functionally housed under JSOC, which is the joint operations component of SOCOM

SOCOM: or the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), is the unified combatant command charged with overseeing the various special operations component commands of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force of the United States Armed Forces. The command is part of the Department of Defense and is the only unified combatant command created by an Act of Congress

WARCOM: or the United States Naval Special Warfare Command (USNSWC), is the naval component of the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM)

XR-5: recall from OPERATION: Break the Dawn, this is the (made-up) nerve agent that was developed by DARPA, with Bella and her late lab partner being project leads. It was said to be significantly more toxic than VX, an actual nerve agent and one of the most toxic created. VX was developed for military use in chemical warfare.