Chapter 39 - Midnight Reckoning at the Old Rail Yard
The Chinook banked sharply over the dark, swollen waters of the Chesapeake Bay, the turbulent air tossing the massive airframe like a toy in a storm.
Julian pulled the trigger of his antique revolver.
CLICK.
The chamber was empty. He had burned through his final round on the ground.
With a feral roar of desperation, Julian hurled the heavy iron weapon at my head. I ducked beneath the flying steel, the gun whistling inches above my hair and vanishing into the black sky behind the open ramp.
He lunged forward, using the weight of the steel lockbox like a battering ram.
The corner of the metal box struck my left collarbone with a sickening crunch of bruised muscle. The pain was blinding, shooting white-hot fire down my arm, but my training held. I caught Julian’s lapel with my right hand, swept his forward foot with my heel, and drove him violently into the corrugated steel floor of the cargo bay.
The steel lockbox slipped from his fingers, skidding across the wet deck and coming to a halt six inches from the edge of the open ramp, teetering above a two-thousand-foot drop into the freezing black waters of the bay.
"No!" Julian shrieked, scrambling on his hands and knees toward the box. "That’s two billion dollars in leverage! That’s my birthright!"
I reached out, planting my bare foot squarely against his chest, pinning him flat against the vibrating metal ribs of the fuselage.
I drew my M17 service pistol, pressing the cold, rain-slicked barrel directly between his eyebrows.
"Look at me, Julian," I commanded, my voice carrying the absolute, terrifying finality of an executioner on the high seas.
Julian froze. The madness in his eyes collapsed into a pathetic, shivering whimper. The rotor wash tore at his wet hair, freezing his tears against his pale cheeks.
"My father died in a cold mountain cave," I said, leaning down until my face was three inches from his. "General Graves took shrapnel to his lungs and lived forty years with scarred flesh. My mother scrubbed floors until her fingers bled, and I spent my eighth birthday counting pennies for a city bus so I could do what was right."
I reached over with my left hand and pulled the steel lockbox away from the precipice, sliding it safely behind my knee.
"Your grandfather, your father, Marcus Vance, and you... you believed that courage was an investment portfolio. You thought honor could be bought, leveraged, and traded on a foreign exchange."
The cockpit cabin door banged open.
The two civilian flight contractors, seeing their employer pinned beneath the barrel of a full Colonel's sidearm, raised their hands instantly, abandoning the flight controls to the autopilot.
"Set this bird down at Fort Aldridge airstrip," I barked at the pilots without breaking eye contact with Julian. "If this aircraft shifts one degree off course, you will be tried as enemy combatants under the Law of Armed Conflict."
"Landing now, ma'am! Setting down immediately!" the co-pilot yelled, diving back into the cockpit to punch the emergency transponder codes.
I looked back down at the shivering billionaire under my foot.
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"You wanted to release the list, Julian?" I asked softly. "You won't have to. Tomorrow morning, I am walking that box into the United States Senate myself. Every name. Every account. Every traitor who ever stole a dime from an American soldier."
Julian closed his eyes, weeping silently in the dark as the helicopter began its descent back toward the shining lights of the home he had tried to destroy.
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