Chapter 94 - Cutting Through the Dragon’s Spine
The wind rushing over the stealth aircraft’s hull was an invisible hammer, fighting to rip Claire’s limbs from her torso. Crawling forward on all fours, fighting the immense friction that was turning her outer thermal suit scorching hot, Claire dragged herself toward the primary maintenance hatch located just behind the dorsal avionics bay.
She unclipped a high-frequency thermite cutting torch from her combat belt. Striking the igniter, a stream of blue-white plasma erupted from the nozzle, hissing violently against the titanium-carbon composite shell. Sparks flew in a blinding horizontal hail behind her, immediately swallowed by the clouds.
Inside the pressurized aircraft, sirens were already screaming.
Through the translucent canopy of the forward cockpit, Arthur Montgomery sat slumped in a co-pilot harness, his shoulder wrapped in bloody gauze, his eyes wide with disbelief as he stared at the external proximity alarms.
"She’s on the hull!" Arthur croaked, terror stripping away what little aristocratic dignity he had left. He looked over his shoulder at his wife. "Margaret! It’s her! She followed us from the Urals! She’s on top of the ship!"
Margaret Montgomery did not flinch. She sat in a custom-tailored leather passenger armchair, an open bottle of vintage champagne resting untouched in the gimbals beside her. She wore an immaculate cashmere turtleneck under her coat, her silver hair pristine, her diamond-encrusted fingers dancing across the keyboard of the master cipher terminal.
"Control your trembling, Arthur," Margaret said, her voice dripping with ice. "You built an empire, yet you cringe like a dog before a stray you failed to put down twenty years ago."
"She isn't a stray!" Arthur shouted, his voice cracking. "She’s the One-Eighty-Seven! You saw what she did to the Vympel team in the bunker! She killed thirty men in four minutes! She isn't your daughter anymore, Margaret—she’s a ghost with a gun!"
"She is my flesh and blood," Margaret whispered, her dark eyes glittering with pathological vanity. "Which means she belongs to me. Depressurize the dorsal compartment. Roll the aircraft. Scrape her off against the storm."
The co-pilot hesitated. "Ma'am, if we invert at this speed, the structural integrity of the wing mounts will be compromised—"
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Margaret reached into her coat, pulled a silenced Walther PPK, and put a single round through the back of the pilot’s head without blinking. Blood splattered the glowing avionics glass.
"I didn't ask for a technical assessment," Margaret said calmly, pointing the smoking barrel at Arthur. "Roll the plane, Arthur. Or die beside the pilot."
