Chapter 37 - THE DESCENT THROUGH FLAME
The concussive shockwave struck Emma like a physical hammer.
The concrete walls of the sluice buckled under the force of two thousand pounds of high-explosive ordnance detonating directly overhead. Chunks of shattered masonry and twisted rebar rained down around her as she plummeted down the steep, forty-five-degree emergency drainage chute, her boots skidding across layers of frozen slime and broken concrete.
The air behind her turned into an inferno.
A wall of superheated gas and burning kerosene roared down the shaft, singeing the edges of her tactical smock. She pulled the leather briefcase tight against her chest, curling her body into a ball as she tumbled end over end through the pitch-black abyss.
The fall felt endless. The sound was deafening—the groan of an entire mountain facility collapsing in on itself, followed by the secondary detonations of the second and third cruise missiles pulverizing the surface ruins into gravel.
With a bone-jarring impact, Emma was violently ejected from the mouth of the drainage pipe.
She flew through the freezing air and slammed into a deep, soft snowdrift sixty feet below the cliff face, rolling violently through the powder before coming to a halt at the edge of a frozen mountain creek.
For a long moment, she lay motionless in the snow, staring up at the burning peak.
Where the Cold War weather station had stood moments before, there was now only a massive crater of black, smoking ruin. The fire tore through the storm clouds, illuminating the snow with an eerie, orange glow. Ivan Kozlov, the Black Shutter mercenaries, and every trace of the sniper’s perch on the Devil’s Tooth had been erased from the map.
Emma coughed, spitting out a mouthful of ash and blood. Her left shoulder was dislocated from the fall, throbbing with a white-hot, agonizing pulse.
She set her jaw, wedged her left arm between two frozen boulders at the creek bed, and threw her body weight backward with a sharp, brutal jerk.
*Snap.*
The joint popped back into its socket. A sharp gasp tore from her throat, but she didn't scream. She picked up the briefcase from the snow.
The lock was dented, but the reinforced titanium casing was intact.
"Donovan," she whispered into her radio collar, adjusting the cracked frequency dial. "Donovan, do you read me?"
Only static answered. The blast had wiped out the local relay repeater.
She was alone. She was behind the former buffer zone, twelve miles from the nearest extraction point, with zero communications, an incoming Class-Five blizzard, and an injured arm.
And then, through the sound of the wind, she heard the distant, thumping rhythm of rotor blades.
Emma crawled behind the frozen bank of the creek, wiping the frost from her rifle’s surviving backup iron sights.
From behind the southern ridge, a dark silhouette emerged against the firelight. It was not a Romanian search-and-rescue bird. It was a black, unmarked MH-60 Black Hawk, flying low under the radar floor, its infrared searchlights sweeping the snowy ravines like the eyes of a hunting raptor.
The syndicate was cleaning up the remnants. They hadn't just fired the missiles; they had sent a cleanup team to confirm the kill.
Emma pressed her back against the frozen rock. She reached into her pocket.
May you like
She still had two rounds left.
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