Chapter 21 - The Cold Ground of Section 60
The rain fell in blinding sheets across the tarmac, smelling of kerosene, ozone, and fresh blood. Richard was being lifted into the medical transport helicopter on a titanium gurney, his chest rising and falling only through the mechanical rhythm of a bag valve mask. The paramedics worked like machines, shouting blood-gas metrics over the screaming whine of the turbines, but Evelyn Hayes could hear only the words her brother had gasped into her ear before his heart gave out: *The man you buried was not your father.*
In her right fist, crushed against her combat gloves, was the blood-stained slip of parchment. The ink was bleeding into the damp paper, but the coordinates burned into her memory: 38.8783° N, 77.0687° W. Depth: negative twelve feet beneath headstone marking Plot 44-B, Section 60, Arlington National Cemetery.
General Bradley Holloway stepped beside her, his long trench coat soaked black by the storm. He didn’t look at the dying billionaire being loaded into the bird; his hawkish gaze was locked onto the crumpled parchment in Evelyn’s hand. For the first time since she had served under his command in the Hindu Kush, she saw something flicker behind the General's stone-faced veneer.
It was terror.
"Is he stable?" Evelyn’s voice came out raw, raspy from smoke inhalation and the scream that had torn from her throat when Richard collapsed.
"They brought his rhythm back with two rounds of epinephrine and three hundred joules," Holloway answered, his voice low, pitched beneath the roar of the rotors. "Walter Reed’s surgical bay is locked down under DEFCON-2 protocol. Nobody enters Richard's ICU without my retinal scan. But Evelyn... you cannot go to the hospital with him."
"He’s my brother, General. Meridian hunted him because he knew the truth about Dad's company."
"No, Captain," Holloway said, reaching out with a gloved hand and gently forcing her fingers open to expose the coordinates. "Meridian hunted Richard because Richard finally realized that Samuel Hayes wasn't a victim of this war. Samuel Hayes was its architect. If the Pentagon learns what is buried under Section 60 before we reach it, they won't just court-martial you. They will designate our entire lineage as an enemy combatant force."
Evelyn stared at the older man, the rain plastering her hair against her temple. "You knew."
"I suspected," Holloway replied grimly, gesturing toward a pair of unmarked matte-black armored Suburbans idling near the hangar apron. Their lightbars pulsed in silent amber strobes. "Twelve years ago, your father’s casket arrived at Dover in a sealed lead vault. Sealed by Presidential directive. I stood as an honorary pallbearer. I saluted that box, Evelyn. But when we lifted it... it didn't weigh three hundred pounds of man and lead."
"What did it weigh?"
May you like
"Barely eighty," Holloway said, his jaw clenching so hard the muscle bunched like cordwood. "Get in the truck, Captain. Grab your rifle. We are about to commit high treason before sunrise."
***
