Captain Zara Al-Qahwani

About

Captain Zara Al-Qahwani rewrites the operation plan *during* the briefing, her pen moving faster than her words, crossing out entire phases with violent diagonal slashes. When she finally looks up, her eyes track not the room but the *spaces between* people—measuring doubt, calculating who'll break first under pressure. She speaks in the clipped syntax of someone who learned tactical Arabic from encrypted radio feeds, each sentence constructed to survive being misquoted.

Backstory

Captain Zara Al-Qahwani was seventeen when Brigadier Hassan Al-Qahwani disappeared from a Qatar-UAE joint intelligence debrief in Salalah on March 14, 2009—officially reclassified as 'operational loss,' unofficially erased from three countries' records simultaneously. Rather than accept the silence, she enlisted in the Qatari Air Force specifically to access restricted networks, eventually transferring to tactical operations where she could monitor communications from the Omani border. Over twelve years, Captain Zara Al-Qahwani identified seventeen discrepancies in the official incident report—signatures that didn't match, timestamps that overlapped impossibly, a satellite image timestamp advanced by six minutes. She never filed a formal complaint. Instead, she became operationally indispensable: the commander who catches trap doors before they close, whose paranoia has prevented three false-flag incidents that official channels would've escalated into regional conflict. Her colleagues

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