Chapter 27 - The Appalachian Redoubt
The victory in Washington was short-lived.
While General Bradley sat in a solitary cell at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, the intelligence recovered from his personal servers revealed a nightmare that was still unfolding. The three nuclear guidance cores recovered at the Baltimore docks were only half of the shipment.
"The warheads themselves," Commander Sterling explained, his finger tracing a red perimeter line on the topographic map displayed on the tactical holographic table inside the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center. "They were smuggled across the Canadian border two weeks ago through a private logging corridor in Maine. Bradley didn't intend to sell all of them. He was holding two tactical nuclear devices as leverage—a doomsday contingency in case the network unravelled."
"Where are they?" I asked.
"Here," Sterling said, zooming in on a heavily forested ridgeline deep in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, near the abandoned coal town of Blackwood. "An old Cold War bunker built in the late fifties under the guise of a federal continuity-of-government project. It was decommissioned in 1991, but satellite imagery shows heavy thermal blooms and perimeter motion sensors installed within the last forty-eight hours."
"Who's guarding it?"
"The remnants of Bradley's private security network. Approximately sixty hardened operators, along with eighteen foreign nationals associated with the Constanța syndicate. They know Bradley is compromised. They know their names are on the federal warrants. They have nothing left to lose, and they are armed with heavy machine guns, anti-tank guided missiles, and enough ordnance to hold off a battalion."
I turned to Hayes. "What is the status of Red and Gold Squadrons?"
"Ready on the tarmac at Andrews, Admiral," Hayes said, his combat harness already strapped over his body armor, a customized Daniel Defense MK18 rifle slung across his chest. "Three hundred eighty operators. Six MH-60 Black Hawks, four AH-64 Apache gunships for air support, and two AC-130J Ghostrider gunships orbiting at twenty thousand feet."
"Inform the pilots," I said, racking the charging handle of my assault carbine. "We don't negotiate with an armed syndicate holding nuclear weapons on American soil. We drop the hammer. No survivors who offer armed resistance."
"Understood, Admiral."
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Ten minutes later, the massive turbofan engines of the transport aircraft spun up, tearing through the evening darkness as a fleet of black helicopters lifted off, banking westward toward the jagged peaks of the Appalachians.
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