Chapter 102 - The Screaming Air
The deafening scream of dual turbofan engines tore through the gale outside the Shetland Bastion. The reinforced glass rattled in its iron frame, spiderwebbing under the sheer acoustic pressure before exploding inward in a hail of diamond-sharp shrapnel.
"Down!" I screamed, lunging across the blood-slicked concrete to drag Clara beneath the heavy steel lip of the master terminal.
Behind us, Vance was already moving. His combat shotgun barked twice into the shattered doorframe, cutting down two black-clad operators who had dropped from the fast-ropes above the skylight. Eleanor was still on her knees, staring blankly at the floor where Arthur’s blood had dried into a black crust. The patrician arrogance that had sustained her through decades of psychological butchery had evaporated into pure, paralyzing catatonia.
"Eleanor, get up!" Vance bellowed, grabbing the collar of her cashmere coat and hauling her to her feet with one arm while leveling his sidearm with the other. "They aren’t here to negotiate a trust fund! They’re leveling the footprint!"
A thermite missile struck the north exterior wall. The concussive blast blew out my eardrums, turning the world into a ringing void of dust, fire, and heat. The entire concrete structure groaned, hundred-year-old iron rebars shearing like dry twigs.
*"Bring the child to the ice,"* the grandmother's voice still echoed in the chambers of my skull. Not a ghost. Not an algorithm. The architect of my father's sadism had lived in the shadows for seventy years, pulling the puppet strings that made Arthur raise his fists and Eleanor look away with six venomous words.
"We don't go out through the surface!" I yelled over the ringing in my ears, hauling Clara toward the rear access shaft. "The drainage conduit! It empties directly into the sea cliffs!"
"Emily!" Clara sobbed, her fingers digging through my jacket down to my bruised ribs. "The planes—they’re coming back around!"
"Keep your eyes on my back, Clara!" I shouted. "Do not look away! Do not stop!"
Vance fired a continuous suppression pattern into the corridor behind us as a secondary team of commandos breached through the fiery breach in the north wall. Laser sights sliced through the churning cordite smoke like red surgical scalpels.
"Go, Sterling!" Vance roared, taking a round to the shoulder plate. The impact spun him, but he didn't falter. He shoved Eleanor into the hatch of the maintenance shaft. "I have the rear! Move your bloodline before this island becomes a crater!"
I hit the rusted steel rung of the emergency ladder first, guiding Clara's trembling boots onto the steps below me. Above us, the ceiling caved. A thousand tons of granite and pre-stressed concrete collapsed into the master control room, obliterating the terminal, the communications array, and any trace of the Shetland Bastion's existence.
May you like
As we tumbled into the freezing blackness of the drainage conduit, the deep, thunderous boom of high-yield bunker-busters obliterated the surface, leaving us plunging into the icy spray of the Atlantic.
***
