Chapter 36 - The Iron Redoubt of Tartus
"You're lying," Eleanor whispered, her voice losing its icy composure. "Dmitri would never talk."
"Dmitri was intercepted at Larnaca International Airport by MI6 forty minutes before we stepped foot on this pier," Hayes's voice crackled through my tactical earpiece, piped directly into the bunker's open radio speaker. "The biometric kill-switch on your chest was cloned and bypassed twelve minutes ago, Eleanor. Admiral, you are green to terminate."
Eleanor sprang from the folding chair with shocking speed, reaching inside her cashmere coat for a nickel-plated automatic pistol.
She was fast, but she wasn't a Navy SEAL.
Miller lunged forward like a striking viper. His tactical boot caught Eleanor's wrist, sending the gun clattering across the concrete floor. Before she could scream, Jackson had her arms pinned behind her back, driving her down onto her knees, while Ramirez swept the titanium casks with a radiation detection wand.
"Casks are cold," Ramirez called out. "Detonators disarmed. No telemetry signal transmitting. The bird is dead."
Eleanor struggled against Jackson’s iron grip, her manicured fingers clawing at the concrete, her silver hair coming undone in wild, straggly locks. She looked up at me, breathing heavily, the facade of aristocratic majesty completely shattered.
"You can't take me back," she spat, her face inches from the floor. "I have diplomatic protection from three separate Middle Eastern regimes! I know the names of seventy senators who took money through my offshore trusts! The moment I set foot in an American court, the entire establishment will burn down!"
"You're not going to an American civilian court, Aunt Eleanor," I said, kneeling down until my face was level with hers.
The smell of expensive French perfume was overpowered by the stench of burning cordite and her own rising terror.
"You are an enemy combatant captured on foreign soil in possession of weapons of mass destruction," I said with absolute, unyielding coldness. "You aren't going to a courtroom. You are going to a floating black site in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. You will sit in a five-by-seven steel cell with no windows, no visitors, and no lawyer. You will never see the sun again. And every morning, when the guards open your meal slot, they will hand you a plain military ration in a black plastic trash bag."
Eleanor’s eyes dilated with sheer, unadulterated horror. "No... no! Ethan, wait! I have files! I have letters your father wrote you before he died! I have the deeds to everything your mother stole! You can have it all! The family estate in Newport—it's worth eighty million dollars! I will sign it over to you right now!"
"Keep it," I said, standing up and turning my back on her. "My family threw me out when I had nothing. I don't need their blood money now that I have everything."
"Admiral!" Ramirez suddenly shouted, tapping his headset. "We have incoming fast-movers on radar! Unmarked gunboats entering the outer harbor. They're not Syrian military—they’re private contractors flying black flags. Eleanor’s extraction team just arrived, and they’re coming in heavy!"
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Through the thick concrete of the bunker, the distant roar of high-caliber machine guns began to reverberate.
***
