Chapter 17 - The Tarmac Ambush
"Return fire!" Evelyn yelled, rolling down her window into the freezing mountain gale.
She leaned out, resting the carbine on the door frame, and fired three controlled bursts directly into the tires of the front escort. The front-left tire shredded instantly, sending the truck veering violently toward the tree line, where it wrapped around a massive ancient pine.
The ambulance was on its own. It careened through the rusted chain-link fence of the abandoned airstrip, skidding onto the cracked, weed-choked runway where the massive twin turboshafts of the Black Hawk helicopter were already screaming at full operational pitch.
Armed men in sterile gray uniforms poured out of the helicopter cabin, setting up a perimeter with squad automatic weapons.
"They're loading him into the bird!" Sully roared, braking their vehicle sideways to form a protective wall against incoming suppressive fire.
Bullets rained like hail against the armor plating. Evelyn dropped low, moving through the smoke and crossfire with ruthless precision. She didn't fire blindly; she picked her targets. One contractor down near the landing gear. Another dropped as he tried to bring an anti-material rifle to bear.
"Richard!" she screamed through the roar of the rotor blades.
Inside the open bay of the helicopter, she saw her brother. He was strapped to a stretcher, his face bruised and pale as chalk, an IV line ripped out and spraying saline across the floor. Hovering over him was a man in an expensive tailored cashmere coat over tactical gear—Victor Sterling, the former Chief Financial Officer who had disappeared twenty-four hours before Richard’s trial.
Sterling held a silenced pistol directly to Richard’s head.
"Drop your weapon, Captain Hayes!" Sterling's voice was amplified through a megaphone over the deafening whine of the turbine engines. "Drop it, or I paint the inside of this cockpit with what's left of your brother's brains!"
Evelyn stopped twenty yards away, the rain soaking her hair, her rifle still raised at a dead aim toward Sterling’s center mass.
"It's over, Sterling!" she shouted back, stepping forward through the rotor wash that whipped her clothes against her skin. "Vance has the transponder key. The Department of Justice is raiding your Meridian shell offices in Manhattan as we speak!"
Sterling chuckled—a dry, soulless sound that chilled Evelyn more than the mountain wind.
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"Do you really think this was about money, Evelyn? Do you think your father was killed because of bank balances?" Sterling shouted back, his eyes burning with fanatic zeal. "The transponder key isn't a ledger. It's a launch protocol! And you just brought it directly to us!"
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