Chapter 45 - THE HIGHWAY OF RAIN
The black unmarked Suburban cut through the curtain of heavy rain along Route 50 at eighty miles per hour, its blue tactical flashers reflecting off the drenched asphalt of the empty highway.
Outside the armored windows, the world had gone dark. The explosion at Arlington had knocked out the high-voltage substations feeding the Maryland corridor, leaving miles of suburban strip malls, gas stations, and residential developments shrouded in an eerie, pitch-black silence. Only the headlights of the military convoy illuminated the streaming water running along the gutters.
Emma sat in the front passenger seat, cleaning the bore of her rifle with a pull-through patch. Her movements were smooth, mechanical, and unhurried. General Sterling was in the rear, speaking rapidly into a tactical SATCOM phone, his face pale against the interior cabin lights.
"I don't care if the Joint Chiefs are in the bunker, Colonel!" Sterling roared into the handset. "The command frequency has been compromised by an external transmitter! If they authorize an emergency network reset from the Pentagon, they are walking straight into the Black Shutter loop! Tell them to hold all traffic until I confirm the source!"
He dropped the phone with an oath, running a hand over his crew cut. "The Pentagon is blind. Their screens are showing incoming telemetry from three phantom targets over the Atlantic. The automated fail-safes are preparing to lock down the eastern seaboard’s automated power grid to prevent an electromagnetic surge."
"It’s an old KGB tactic," Emma said, inspecting the patch as it came out clean. "Create a phantom threat on the perimeter to force the command staff into locking their own doors. Then, while the doors are locked from the inside, you clean out the basement."
"Who is at Annapolis, Carter?" Sterling leaned forward, his hands gripping the back of her seat. "Vance swore on his life that Davies was working alone."
"Vance didn't know anything," Emma replied, sliding the bolt back into the rifle's receiver and locking the handle down with a crisp click. "Davies was a strategist. He wouldn't leave his life's work in the hands of an incompetent aristocrat's son like Vance. Vance was just the decoy—the arrogant fool in uniform Davies used to attract attention, while the real executioner stayed in the shadows."
"The real executioner?"
"The man who taught me how to read the wind before Davies ever found me," Emma said, her gaze fixed on the endless sweep of the windshield wipers. "Major Thomas Kincaid. The man who was reported dead in the Danube delta in nineteen-eighty-four."
Sterling froze, his mouth half-open. "Kincaid? Carter, that’s impossible. Kincaid was pulled out of the river in a body bag. I signed the burial honors myself."
"You signed for a closed casket with eighty pounds of lead sinkers inside," Emma said quietly. "Kincaid taught Davies how to build the Ghost Needle. He was the only sniper in the division who was better than me at two thousand yards."
She looked at her reflection in the dark side window.
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"And he’s the only man who knows how I shoot."
***
