Chapter 87 - The Ghost Flight to Aberdeen
At 03:00 hours, an unmarked Gulfstream G650 sliced through the violent turbulence over the Scottish Highlands, flying barely five hundred feet above the jagged peaks to avoid military radar interception.
Inside the cabin, the atmosphere was dead silent, broken only by the rhythmic hum of the twin Rolls-Royce engines.
Alexander sat across from me, stripping and cleaning a sound-suppressed tactical carbine. Every few seconds, his eyes would flick toward me, filled with an unspoken tension that had been building since we left London.
"You have something to say, Alexander?" I asked without looking up from my tactical tablet.
Alexander paused, his fingers resting on the bolt carrier of the rifle.
"Ten years ago, before I founded Vanguard Security," Alexander said quietly, "I was a captain in the Special Air Service. My unit was contracted by a private holding company to carry out a black-ops extraction in the Balkans. It went wrong. My entire team was ambushed, captured, and scheduled for execution."
I raised my eyes to meet his. "Arthur Vance intervened."
"Arthur Vance owned the holding company," Alexander confessed, his voice heavy with an old shame. "He bought our freedom with three million dollars in unmarked diamonds. But he didn't do it out of charity. He made me sign an oath of debt. He told me that one day, he would call upon me to protect his empire from the inside."
"And when I took Vanguard Tower... you were torn between your oath to him and your contract with me?"
Alexander looked straight into my eyes, unblinking. "When I met you, Katherine... when I saw what you were willing to endure, what you were willing to sacrifice to protect your children from the corruption of this family... I realized Arthur Vance was a plague. My oath died the day he pointed that cane at your sons."
I studied him for a long moment. There was no deceit in his gaze. Only the lethal, unwavering loyalty of a soldier who had chosen his sovereign.
"Good," I said, sliding a fresh magazine into my sidearm. "Because before dawn, we are going to bury Arthur Vance in the icy waters of the North Sea."
From the back of the cabin, Liam walked forward, holding a tablet displaying a complex three-dimensional wireframe of Citadel Alpha.
"Mom," Liam said, leaning over my shoulder. "Lucas cracked the encryption on Tristan's silver key. It's not just a maintenance bay code. It’s an automated bypass for the rig’s primary cooling system."
"Meaning?" Alexander asked.
"Meaning," Lucas called out from the communications station, "if we can insert this hardware key directly into the central terminal beneath the drilling deck, we can freeze the platform’s primary stabilizer gyroscopes. In high seas, without gyroscopes, the entire twenty-thousand-ton platform will begin to list fifteen degrees to the port side within ten minutes."
"A manufactured catastrophe," I whispered, a dark smile touching my lips. "Forcing his guards to abandon their posts to secure the survival pods."
"And leaving Arthur completely isolated in the sovereign vault," Liam finished, his eyes gleaming with cold intellect.
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The pilot’s voice crackled through the cabin intercom: *"Five minutes to drop point. Sea state eight. Thirty-foot swells below. Prepare for low-altitude extraction."*
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