Chapter 42 - The Midnight Convoy Through the Shenandoah
The Virginia highway snaked through the Shenandoah mountains under a furious curtain of torrential rain.
Lightning cracked across the jagged ridges, illuminating the wet asphalt in flashes of blinding, bone-white glare. In the lead was an unmarked, up-armored Chevrolet Suburban, followed by two tactical support vehicles carrying eight operators from the Pentagon's elite Protective Services Battalion.
I sat in the front passenger seat of the lead vehicle, watching the tactical tablet mounted on the dashboard.
The digital map of Fort Aldridge was glowing with blinking amber warning triangles.
"General Bennett! This is Base Operations!" the radio crackled through layers of atmospheric static. "The civilian power feed to the western township was cut five minutes ago! We have reports of armed men in civilian tow trucks blockading Highway 40! They’ve severed the fiber-optic trunks leading into the academy campus!"
"What about the children, Captain?" I yelled into the microphone, my fingers digging into the vehicle's grab handle as we took a hairpin turn at seventy miles per hour. "Report on Building Three!"
"Mrs. Clara Bennett initiated lockdown procedures the moment the transformers blew! She has eighty students and faculty barricaded inside the reinforced gymnasium basement! But our perimeter security teams are taking sniper fire from the abandoned grain silos on the old railway spur!"
"Hold the line, Captain! We are twelve minutes out!"
Suddenly, the night erupted in fire.
BOOM!
A roadside explosive—a military-grade shaped charge buried beneath the asphalt of the bridge approach—detonated fifty yards ahead of our convoy.
A geyser of mud, pulverized concrete, and red flame blasted into the storm. The shockwave slammed into our Suburban, cracking the reinforced windshield into an opaque spiderweb and throwing the heavy six-ton vehicle sideways against the steel bridge barrier with a deafening screech of grinding metal.
The rear support vehicle slammed on its brakes, tires smoking against the slick road, forming a hasty defensive wedge.
"Ambush! Dismount! Dismount!" Major Cruz shouted from the rear seat, kicking his door open into the driving rain.
From the wooded hillside above the highway, three heavy machine guns opened up in synchronized, overlapping fields of fire. Tracers tore through the darkness, stitching lines of white-hot lead across the roofs of our vehicles.
I kicked my door open, rolling into the ditch beside the bridge abutment, my combat uniform soaking through instantly with icy mountain mud.
I raised my carbine, resting the barrel on the concrete rail, and sighted through the optic.
Two hundred yards up the ridge, masked by pine branches, the muzzle flashes of three shooters were strobing against the dark.
"Cruz! Suppressive fire on the treeline! Operators Two and Three, move up the drainage culvert with grenades! Clear that ridge!"
"Moving!"
The mountain pass became a roaring battleground. The disciplined, rhythmic bark of our five-point-five-six rifles answered the chaotic spray of the mercenaries above.
I fired three controlled pairs into the center muzzle flash. The shooter collapsed backward through the wet brush, his weapon firing a wild, dying burst into the black clouds.
Thirty seconds later, two concussive thumps echoed from the culvert as my operators flanked the position, silencing the remaining machine guns with ruthless, surgical precision.
I scrambled up the muddy embankment to where the lead ambush coordinator lay wounded in the pine needles.
He was dressed in sanitized black tactical gear, his helmet cracked, a heavy silver signet ring gleaming on his left hand: CITADEL – CLASS OF 1982.
I knelt on his chest, pressing the muzzle of my pistol against the bridge of his nose. Rain washed the blood from his pale, aristocratic face.
"Where is Specter-Nine?" I demanded, my voice cutting through the thunderstorm like cold iron.
The man wheezed, a bloody, defiant grin curling his lips. "You're too late, little girl... The Foundry... your mother... she’s already there. The circle closes where your father began."
My heart went ice-cold.
May you like
The Old Aldridge Iron Foundry.
The shuttered, rusted industrial plant that bordered the railroad tracks two miles north of our old apartment—the place where my father had worked night shifts as a young college student before enlisting in the Army thirty years ago.
