Chapter 68 - Iron Bloodline
We slammed through the armored door into the control bunker, throwing the three-inch steel bolts into place just as a stray twenty-five-millimeter round struck the exterior plate, leaving a melon-sized dent in the steel and vibrating the entire frame with a bone-jarring ring.
Inside, the bunker was relatively safe, but the clock was merciless:
*T-MINUS 00:14:02 TO ORBITAL LINK CONFIRMATION.*
"Miller, take the terminal on the left!" I ordered, unscrewing the titanium cap of the drive with my teeth, exposing the gold-plated multi-pin bus at its base. "Override the fire-control locks! Route the telemetry through the naval frequency Hayes is using out there!"
Miller collapsed into the operator's chair, his bloody hands flying across the mechanical keyboard. "I'm in, but the encryption is shifting every thirty seconds! Marcus, this isn't standard military crypto—this is your father's proprietary algorithm! It’s asking for a secondary security phrase!"
I slammed the drive into the master receiving port beneath the central monitor. The terminal screen flared bright green, sweeping a laser scan across my face and measuring the galvanic skin response of my thumb pressed against the glass sensor.
*BIOMETRIC CONFIRMED: VANCE, MARCUS E. (COMMANDER / SOCOM)*
*SECURITY LEVEL: OMEGA-SEVEN.*
*ENTER SECONDARY CIPHER:*
"Eleanor," I turned toward my mother, who was sitting against the wall, her eyes wide, staring at the dent in the blast door. "The cipher. What did he say before he died?"
"He didn't give me a phrase, Marcus!" she cried, tears cutting paths through the grime on her cheeks. "He was delirious! He was mumbling about the war, about the ballrooms, about how everything we built was made of paper!"
"Think!" I roared, leaning over her, my shadow swallowing her completely. "He was a perfectionist! He never left anything to chance! What were his last words to you in that room?"
Eleanor clutched her head, her body trembling with violent sobs. "He... he grabbed my wrist... just like I grabbed yours tonight at the gala. And he whispered... *'The ghost is in the uniform.'*"
I stopped dead.
My mind flashed back to Chapter 1—the glittering chandeliers of the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, the sea of gold braid and polished medals, the smirk on my brother Robert’s face, and Eleanor’s fingernails digging into my wrist as she hissed: *You have no place in this ballroom.*
And then, Commanding General Sterling stepping to the podium, opening the sealed crimson folder, and reading the name of the recipient for the Distinguished Service Cross. Not Robert Vance.
*Marcus Vance.*
I spun back to the keyboard, my fingers typing with mechanical precision:
`THE GHOST IS IN THE UNIFORM`
The terminal let out a long, high-pitched electronic tone that settled into a steady, rhythmic pulse.
*CIPHER ACCEPTED.*
*OVERRIDE ENGAGED.*
*TERMINATING DOVER FLIGHT PROTOCOL... 34%... 58%...*
A sudden, violent explosion blew the hinges off the armored blast door behind us.
The three-inch steel slab toppled inward, crashing to the floor with a deafening boom. Through the swirling cloud of gray plaster and cordite smoke stepped General Arthur Sterling.
His uniform was torn, his left arm hung limp at his side, and half his face was covered in a mask of dried blood from the crash of the patrol craft. But in his right hand, he held a shortened carbine, its barrel pointed directly at the core terminal.
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"Step away from the console, Marcus," Sterling whispered, his voice cracked with mad determination. "Or I blow the storage core to hell, and the Dover package detonates on its fail-dead timer regardless."
***
