Chapter 76 - The Iron Tide
The interior of Tartarus-Alpha was a labyrinth of cavernous industrial bays, pulsing conduit lines, and the deafening shriek of gas turbines.
I moved through the service conduits, bypassing the main elevators which Vance had undoubtedly locked down or wired with proximity charges. Every wall was stamped with my father’s original design bureau insignia—an iron compass encircled by an unbroken chain. My father had conceived this place during the darkest days of the Cold War as a failsafe, an unassailable bastion to preserve command-and-control if the continental United States was reduced to radioactive glass.
The Syndicate had perverted it into a doomsday blackmail engine.
I reached the threshold of the primary missile silo bay—a vertical chamber eight stories tall, hollowed out of the platform’s core. Suspended in the center of the void, surrounded by a spiderweb of hydraulic loading cranes and gantry arms, hung the *Leviathan-4*—a monstrous, multi-stage ballistic canister designed to seed the ocean floor with hypersonic nuclear torpedoes.
A dozen private military operators were securing the final umbilical disconnects around the base of the missile. At the central command pulpit, fifty feet above the deck on a cantilevered glass bridge, stood Vance.
He had shed his immaculate tailored suit. Now he wore an armored flight suit, his face illuminated by the harsh blue glow of the countdown terminal: **04:18... 04:17... 04:16.**
"Spread out!" the contractor squad leader down on the deck shouted suddenly, catching the reflection of my wet uniform in the plexiglass conduit. "Intruder on the upper staging ring!"
Heavy weapons fire erupted instantly.
Rounds chewed through the composite conduit next to my head, spraying me with sparks and molten fiberglass. I vaulted over the catwalk railing, catching an overhead crane hook with my left hand and swinging down into the shadow of the missile's secondary stage.
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As I dropped, I fired in three-round controlled bursts. Two contractors working the umbilical lines dropped instantly, their armor failing against the high-velocity armor-piercing rounds. I hit the steel grating in a slide, coming up behind a heavy nitrogen tank as fifty-caliber rounds from an automated turret pulverized the position I had vacated seconds earlier.
"You're too late, David!" Vance’s voice boomed over the facility's public address system. "The ignition sequence is hardwired into the terminal's sub-atomic clock! You can shoot every man in this room, but unless both of our hands touch that biometric pad to confirm an abort code, that bird flies! And I would rather watch this coast burn to ash than give you the satisfaction of dragging me before a tribunal!"
