Chapter 27 - Fire from the Shadows
"Marcus, engage north ridge! We’ve got hostile sniper teams on the high ground!" Claire shouted into her comms as she rolled behind an air conditioning unit, bullets chewing through the metal casing above her head, sending hot oil and freon spraying into the rain.
*"Copy that, Captain! Bringing the rain!"* Vance’s voice crackled through her earpiece.
From three hundred yards out, the Black Hawk swerved violently, its side-mounted M134 Minigun howling to life. A devastating stream of tracer rounds—three thousand rounds per minute—lanced out from the chopper door, chewing through the tree line where the enemy snipers were concealed. The mountain ridge erupted into a wall of splintered pine, mud, and secondary explosions as the minigun detonated the hostiles' ammunition caches.
"Move! We need to get off this roof before their gunships arrive!" Ethan yelled, firing controlled three-round bursts at shadowy figures attempting to scale the external maintenance ladders.
Margaret was crawling on her stomach, screaming like an animal as bullets ricocheted mere inches from her head. "They're trying to kill me! The board... Julian Vance swore he would protect me if I stayed quiet!"
Claire grabbed Margaret by the back of her vest, dragging her violently across the wet roof toward the interior stairwell door. "Julian Vance? The Director of National Intelligence? The man who just sat in the Oval Office acting like a concerned bureaucrat?"
"He's the chairman of Black Mountain!" Margaret confessed, terrified out of her mind, vomiting words to save her skin. "The defense contracts were just the front! Vance used Montgomery Defense shipping lanes to move black-budget weapons across the Middle East! I kept the encrypted ledger on an offline drive in my penthouse safe in Manhattan!"
"You sold out your own country to a shadow cabal led by the head of American intelligence," Claire said, disgust dripping from every syllable. "And now your partner is tying up loose ends."
Suddenly, the sky above them turned into daylight.
An unmarked AH-6 Little Bird helicopter flared directly above the roof, its nose-mounted forward-looking infrared camera tracking their heat signatures. The twin rocket pods mounted on its lightweight pylons swiveled down, arming with a distinct, terrifying mechanical click.
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"RPG!" Ethan yelled, sprinting toward Claire.
He didn't seek cover for himself. In that fraction of a second, the brother who had taken a bullet for her in the Korengal returned. Ethan hurled his massive, armored body over Claire and Margaret, shielding them completely with his back just as the helicopter unleashed a salvo of two Hydra 70 rockets directly into the elevator housing.
