Chapter 129 - The Bloodline Cipher
The flight across the Atlantic was a journey through the apocalypse.
At seventy thousand feet, David could see the curvature of the Earth, and it was bleeding light. The entire eastern seaboard of North America was dark—not a single city light shone from Boston to Miami. Instead, massive geometric lines of crimson energy traced the ancient fault lines of the continent, all converging on a single point in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
The orbital dreadnoughts hung above him like obsidian executioners.
Suddenly, the stealth craft’s radar warning receiver screamed a high-priority alarm.
*MISSILE LOCK. MULTIPLE VECTORS.*
Through the small viewing viewport, David saw two streaks of fire climbing through the cloud deck below him. They were high-altitude interceptors, launched from automated coastal batteries near Norfolk. Vance Munitions hardware.
David grabbed the manual control stick, his muscles screaming in protest as he threw the stealth craft into a violent barrel roll. The G-forces tore at his unhealed wound; he could feel the cold dampness of fresh blood soaking through his field dressings, but he ignored it, his eyes glued to the optical targeting feed.
The first missile detonated four hundred meters to his port side, the supersonic shockwave sending the light stealth craft into a terrifying flat spin. The canopy cracked, a thin spiderweb of white lines obscuring his vision. The second missile was closing fast—less than three miles and closing at Mach 6.
David didn't have flares. He didn't have chaff.
He reached down to the navigation plinth and pulled the manual override for the scramjet’s fuel oxidizer.
He flooded the engine.
The scramjet violently backfired, producing a massive plume of superheated thermal exhaust that acted as an improvised decoy. The second missile locked onto the thermal bloom, detonating directly behind the exhaust nozzle.
The blast sheared off the left winglet of the stealth craft.
The aircraft tumbled out of the upper stratosphere, entering a uncontrolled, screaming dive toward the dark, forested ridges of Virginia below.
Inside the rattling, disintegrating cockpit, David fought the stick with both hands. The altimeter was unwinding at blinding speed: 40,000 feet... 30,000... 20,000. Through the cracked canopy, the dark, snow-covered spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains rushed up to meet him.
He wasn't going to make the Shenandoah Command Complex. He was coming down directly over Blackwood.
"Computer!" David yelled into the mask. "Dump auxiliary fuel! Arm ejection seat!"
"ERROR. HYDRAULIC FAILURE. EJECTION CANOPY SEALS FROZEN."
The canopy wouldn't blow.
David took a deep breath. He pulled his service knife from his belt, reversed the grip, and slammed the heavy pommel of the blade against the cracked acrylic directly above his head. Once. Twice. The cold-brittle material shattered, the freezing rush of 400-knot wind instantly ripping the mask from his face and tearing at his skin.
At five thousand feet, through the howling wind, David saw the Blackwood Estate.
It was not the stately, historic mansion of his childhood. The antebellum manor had been stripped away, revealed as merely a decorative shell over a massive, brutalist citadel of dark iron and reinforced concrete. Four massive defensive towers rose from the manicured gardens where he had once played as a boy, each bristling with automated flak cannons. In the center of the estate, where the grand ballroom had stood, a circular silo had opened, radiating a beam of crimson energy that shot straight into the low-hanging storm clouds.
David hauled himself up through the shattered canopy, the slipstream nearly tearing him from the cockpit.
At two thousand feet, he kicked himself free into the freezing night.
He pulled the ripcord of his parachute at eight hundred feet. The silk canopy snapped open with a violent jolt that nearly dislocated his shoulder, arresting his fall just as the burning wreckage of the stealth craft slammed into the estate’s outer perimeter wall, erupting in a colossal fireball that illuminated the snow-covered pine forest.
David hit the snow hard, rolling through the frozen brush, his parachute tangling in the branches of an oak tree.
He cut the cords with his knife, dropped into the snow, and lay motionless, listening.
The alarm sirens of Blackwood were howling—the familiar, three-tone wail of the Vance private defense grid.
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David Vance stood up in the shadows of the Virginia forest, racked the slide of his sidearm, touched the Silver Star on his chest, and walked toward the house where he was born.
***
