Chapter 43 - The Wreckage on Blackwood Ridge
Smoke rose thick and sulfurous into the damp night air. My head pounded with a dull, rhythmic throb, and when I touched my forehead, my fingers came away slick with warm blood—the same sensation I had felt twenty-four hours earlier when Vance’s birthday cake had concealed shards of tempered industrial glass.
"Harris?" I whispered, my voice cracked and raspy.
Beside me, the tactical investigator groaned. He was hanging awkwardly in his harness, blood dripping from a gash along his jawline where his headset had snapped off. The pilot and co-pilot were slumped forward over the shattered instrument panel, unresponsive, though the pilot’s chest rose and fell in shallow, ragged intervals.
"Harris, wake up," I hissed, unbuckling my five-point harness and falling heavily onto the crumpled aluminum of the interior bulkhead.
I scrambled to my feet inside the tilted cabin. The smell of aviation fuel was overwhelming. One spark from an exposed wire would incinerate the entire wreckage in seconds. I reached up and hauled Harris down by the tactical vest, his dead weight nearly knocking me flat onto the jagged metal floor. He coughed violently, his eyes fluttering open, clearing the fog of a concussion.
"The radio..." he muttered, grasping blindly at his chest. "Thomas... he’s on this side of the ridge..."
"He’s not alone," I said, pointing through the shattered windscreen.
Down the riverbank, barely two hundred yards away through the swirling river fog, three pairs of high-intensity halogen headlights were cutting through the gloom. The low rumble of diesel engines echoed off the stone bluffs of the gorge. Thomas Sterling hadn't just survived his dive into the rapids; he had pre-staged a recovery team along the abandoned logging road on Route 9.
"Take this," Harris grunted, unclipping his secondary sidearm—a compact Glock 19—and shoving it into my trembling hands. He reached down to his duty belt, producing a ruggedized black flash drive that had slipped out of the co-pilot's console during the roll. "The serial numbers on the Sterling offshore accounts. Your mother's power of attorney didn't just move forty million dollars, Rachel. It unlocked the entire logistics network Vance had built into the foundation of that garage."
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"I did what she told me to do before she died," I said coldly, tucking the drive into my jacket pocket and racking the slide of the Glock. "She knew what they were building down there. She knew Vance was never the mastermind—he was just the executioner."
"Then we move now," Harris said, pushing himself up against the crumpled frame of the door. "Before Thomas realizes his own extraction team isn't the only thing waiting in the dark."
