Chapter 30 - The Man in the Crosshairs
`WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED SYSTEM OVERRIDE.`
`EXTERNAL IP DETECTED: UNENCRYPTED SATELLITE RELAY.`
`ORIGIN: UNKNOWN.`
The progress bar on the massive screens violently froze at 99%.
Senator Vance’s smug smile vanished, replaced by an expression of pure, unadulterated shock. He lunged toward the keyboard, his fingers clattering frantically across the keys. "What is this? Who authorized an external handshake?! The platform's firewall is air-gapped!"
"Sir!" one of the remaining technicians screamed from the server floor below. "Our uplinks are being hijacked! Someone just overrode the master server from an offshore transponder!"
The giant displays flickered. The lines of defense code, financial records, and military rosters vanished, replaced by a single live video feed.
The camera showed a sparsely furnished room constructed of rough-hewn pine logs. Through a snow-dusted window in the background, towering alpine peaks were visible under a twilight sky—the Swiss Alps.
Sitting in a heavy leather chair, facing the camera, was an elderly man.
His hair was pure white, his face weathered and carved with deep combat scars. On his right hand, resting casually against an armrest, was a heavy gold West Point ring, Class of 1972.
Evelyn’s breath hitched in her throat. The world seemed to stop spinning.
"Dad...?" she choked out, her voice barely a whisper against the deafening sirens.
The man on the screen leaned forward, looking straight into the lens as if he could see through the fiber-optic cables connecting them across six thousand miles of ocean.
*"Senator Vance,"* Samuel Hayes said, his voice smooth, calm, and utterly devoid of mercy. *"You always were an arrogant bureaucrat. You thought you could take my network and use it to line your pockets. But you forgot the first rule of warfare: never assume the general is dead until you've burned the battlefield."*
"Samuel..." Vance gasped, stepping back from the console as if he were seeing a ghost risen from hell. "You... you died in Berlin. I watched the hospital monitors flatline myself!"
*"You watched what I paid you to watch,"* Samuel replied coldly. Then, his eyes shifted on the screen, softening as they found Evelyn.
*"Evie,"* the old man whispered, a heartbreaking warmth breaking through his weathered face. *"Forgive me, sweetheart. I had to make them believe you were alone. I had to let Richard bleed so they would drop their guard. You did everything I trained you to do. You brought the cancer out into the open."*
"Dad, what is this?!" Evelyn screamed at the monitor, tears burning her eyes. "Richard is dying in Walter Reed! Vance says you built this entire corrupt machine!"
*"I built the trap, Evie,"* Samuel said softly. *"And now... the trap snaps shut."*
A piercing, shrill missile warning alarm suddenly tore through the platform's public address system:
`INCOMING SURFACE-TO-SURFACE MUNITION DETECTED.`
`RADAR LOCK CONFIRMED: FAST ATTACK MISSILE INBOUND.`
`TIME TO IMPACT: FORTY-FIVE SECONDS.`
Evelyn spun toward the observation window looking out over the Chesapeake Bay. Through the thick fog, two brilliant streaks of white rocket fire were cutting through the black water at Mach 3, arcing directly toward the offshore rig.
On the screen, Samuel Hayes stood up from his chair, his eyes fixed on Evelyn with desperate urgency.
May you like
*"Forgive me, Evelyn..."* Samuel commanded, his voice trembling with an emotion she had never heard from him before. *"Now run!"*
Before she could speak, a sniper’s high-caliber round shattered the observation glass behind her, blowing Senator Vance’s chest wide open in an explosion of crimson gore, and the deck beneath Evelyn's feet tilted violently into the sea.
