195 I walked into our anniversary party with a man my husband had never met. He laughed in front of everyone and asked, / Chapter 78 / 86

Chapter 78 - The Sky and the Steel

The scream of twin turbine engines descended from the storm clouds like a descending raptor.

"Move!" Jonah roared, throwing his body over mine as the helicopter opened fire.

A heavy rotary cannon mounted under the aircraft's nose chewed through the catwalk where we had been standing seconds before. Twenty-millimeter armor-piercing rounds shattered the steel grating into twisted ribbons, sending incandescent shards bouncing across the frozen ballast.

Jonah dragged me toward the space between the lead locomotive and the first pressurized cargo car. The heavy knuckle-coupler offered two feet of solid forged steel for cover. We slammed our backs against the cold metal, our lungs burning with sulfur, diesel fumes, and subzero air.

"He's got air superiority and thermal optics," Jonah said, slapping a fresh magazine into his sidearm, though against military gunship armor, handgun ammunition was useless. "He's going to circle around and drop high-explosive ordnance directly onto the thorium tanks."

"Not if Mack has anything to say about it," I gasped, pointing past the smoking rear trucks of the train.

From down the high iron, the massive horn of Engine 101 split the night with a terrifying, five-chime blast.

Mack wasn't retreating. The old rail veteran had opened the throttle of our Croft-built locomotive to full power. Engine 101 surged forward along the parallel siding, snow exploding off her wedge plow like an ocean wave. Mounted on her cab roof was the heavy-duty rail maintenance water cannon, repurposed and pressurized with antifreeze brine at twelve hundred pounds per square inch.

High in the cab of Engine 101, Arthur swung the remote gimbal control.

"Eat this, you Wall Street parasite!" Arthur’s voice crackled through the shortwave radio at Jonah's belt.

A high-pressure stream of subzero industrial brine shot skyward, cutting through the blizzard in a lethal crystalline spear. The pressurized jet struck the helicopter's tail rotor dead-center just as Julian Vance leaned out of the side door to line up a rocket strike.

The impact of forty gallons a second of freezing liquid destabilized the delicate aerodynamics of the tail assembly. The high-speed tail blades hit the dense water stream and buckled with a horrific screech. Instantly, the aircraft spun ninety degrees on its yaw axis.

"They're losing torque!" Jonah shouted, seizing the moment. "Get to the cab of 101!"

"Wait!" I yelled, grabbing Jonah's arm. "Look at the cargo car!"

The heavy door of the first freight container had been unlatched by the violent deceleration. Inside, illuminated by amber warning lanterns, sat three heavy reinforced shipping crates bearing the stamped crest of the Vance Family Trust. These weren't dirty bombs. These were the primary financial assets Julian had tried to smuggle out of the country before the federal net closed in: hard-drive arrays containing the encrypted clearinghouse codes for four hundred billion dollars in covert shadow-banking accounts.

The helicopter pilot fought desperately for control, managing to level the spinning bird fifty feet above the treeline. But Julian Vance wasn't looking at the controls. He was staring at those three crates. His entire empire, the leverage that kept him untouchable by international law, was sitting on that open flatcar.

With a madman’s desperation, Julian kicked free of his safety harness and dropped onto the roof of the cargo car as the helicopter drifted away, trailing smoke into the dark pines.

He landed hard, rolling onto his shoulder, but came up with a drawn tactical machine pistol.

His expensive cashmere coat was torn and soaked with slush, his aristocratic silver hair plastered to his forehead, but his face was twisted in a savage grimace.

"Nina Croft!" Julian snarled, his voice cutting through the hiss of the dying train. "You think you can dismantle seventy years of Vance supremacy with a forged ledger and a dead father's locomotive? Everything you are, everything your grandfather built, was bought with Vance money!"

Jonah stepped out from behind the coupler, placing himself squarely between Julian’s gun and my chest.

"The money was Nina's from the day your father stole her family's charter," Jonah said, his voice deadly calm, cold as the northern wind. "And your brother Sterling is currently rotting in a federal isolation cell waiting to trade your name for a lighter sentence."

Julian laughed—a high, grating, venomous sound. "Sterling? Sterling was an idiot. A show pony I put on the board to distract the regulators while I built the real network. You think I care if Sterling burns? He was weak. But you, Jonah... you were always my father’s biggest mistake. He should have buried you in that Ogden railyard twenty years ago."

Julian raised the machine pistol, aiming dead at Jonah’s heart.

"Drop it, Julian," I said, stepping out from Jonah's shadow with my grandfather’s antique gold pocket watch resting firmly in my left hand, and my service weapon locked on the hydraulic cylinder above Julian's head. "Look up."

Julian's eyes flickered toward the roof rigging.

Behind him, the heavy iron loading crane mounted on the boxcar swung free on its frozen pivot, released by the sudden shudder of Mack’s diesel engine idling beside us.

I fired a single round into the rusted retention pin.