Chapter 36 - THE SANITIZED SUMMIT
The air in the concrete vault grew heavy, charged with the ozone hum of impending disaster.
Emma did not lower her weapon. "Who launched them, Kozlov?"
The old Russian smiled through his blood-stained beard, tapping the leather briefcase with his left hand. "The people who signed the checks for your grandfather’s execution, Emma. The ones who sit in the Pentagon and the Senate. Davies was just a low-level distributor. The real directors of the Black Shutter syndicate realized that once you took down the domestic network, I became a liability. They don't want Volume Two recovered. They want us both turned into ash."
"Donovan," Emma commanded through her encrypted mic, ignoring the shrieking static. "Can you intercept the missiles?"
"Negative!" Donovan screamed over the link. "They're low-altitude terrain-following cruise missiles! Traveling at Mach 0.9 through the valleys! Even if the Romanian batteries fired, they couldn't acquire them through the mountain clutter! You have one hundred and forty seconds to get out of the structure!"
"There's an underground drainage sluice beneath the weather station," Kozlov said, his breathing growing heavier as blood pooled beneath his boots. "It cuts three hundred meters through solid granite down into the southern ravine. It was built during the Cold War to survive a tactical nuclear strike."
Emma kept the pistol leveled at his brow. "Why are you telling me this?"
Kozlov’s eyes flicked to the photograph tucked into the frame of the ticking metronome—a faded, black-and-white picture of two young men in winter uniforms standing shoulder-to-shoulder on an alpine crest in 1985. One was Kozlov. The other was Emma’s grandfather, Thomas Carter.
"Because your grandfather was the only marksman who ever beat me at three thousand yards," Kozlov whispered, his voice cracking with old regret. "When Davies ordered me to take him out in ninety-one, I took the contract because I was an idiot who believed the empire would rise again if we had the money. But Thomas didn't die begging. He died looking through his sights, trying to take me with him."
Kozlov pushed the heavy leather briefcase toward her across the rusted desk.
"Volume Two is inside," the old sniper said. "Every account. Every name. Every deep-cover asset the syndicate placed into the Department of Defense. Take it and run down the sluice."
"You're coming with me," Emma said. "You're standing trial."
"Look at me, girl," Kozlov laughed bitterly, coughing more blood into his beard. "The shrapnel from my own rifle severed the femoral artery under my collarbone. I have three minutes of blood left in my brain. I die on this mountain. But you... you finish the war."
From outside, the distant, screaming howl of incoming turbojet engines ripped through the blizzard. The cruise missiles had cleared the lower ridge. The air inside the room began to vibrate, plaster falling from the ceiling like artificial snow.
"Go!" Kozlov roared, his left hand slamming down onto the desk. "Go, Pale Horse!"
Emma grabbed the leather briefcase. She looked at the dying sniper for one fraction of a second—acknowledging the terrible, tragic lineage of lead and blood that connected them across three decades—then spun on her heel and sprinted toward the heavy blast door leading down into the subterranean drainage shaft.
She hit the rusted emergency release lever with all her weight.
The steel door swung open with a screech of tortured iron. Emma threw herself into the black throat of the concrete tunnel just as the first cruise missile slammed directly into the roof of the weather station above.
May you like
The world vanished in fire.
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