Chapter 50 - THE ZERO PROTOCOL
The wind between the two towers fell into a terrifying, dead calm, as if the storm itself was holding its breath.
Emma stood on the wet steel grating of the platform, eighty yards away from the man who had taught her the mathematics of murder. Her magazine was empty. The rifle in her hands was cold iron and dead wood.
In her bandolier, one round remained.
A single round.
"You can't cycle the bolt, load the chamber, and acquire a sight picture before I drop this toggle, Emma," Kincaid said, his voice dropping into a chilling, conversational calm. He held the brass detonation key out at chest height, his thumb resting on the spring-loaded spring arm. "You’re fast. You’re the best we ever built. But you can't beat thirty milliseconds of spring steel."
Emma didn't reach for her bandolier. Her hands remained resting lightly on the stock of her weapon.
"You taught me that a sniper who relies on her next round has already missed with her first," she said.
Kincaid frowned, his eyes narrowing through the rain. "What are you talking about?"
"I didn't shoot to break the transmitter, Thomas," Emma said, her voice completely devoid of emotion.
Kincaid’s gaze flicked down toward the shattered transmitter dish behind him. For the first time, he noticed the jagged, six-inch furrow the heavy .30-06 round had carved across the main structural stay-cable of Tower Two before it shattered the feed horn.
The high-tensile steel cable, already bearing forty tons of lateral tension in the gale, had been shaved down to three remaining strands.
And those three strands were unraveling, one by one, with the sharp, metallic *ping-ping-ping* of overstressed piano wire.
Kincaid’s face turned the color of chalk. "You..."
"Zero," Emma said.
The final strand snapped.
With a sound like a freight train derailment, the main stay-cable of Tower Two whipped through the empty air, shearing the steel support struts of the upper platform with catastrophic violence. The entire top sixty feet of the tower twisted sideways, the girders screeching and buckling under the sudden, asymmetric load.
Kincaid lunged forward, his boots slipping on the bloody grating, his hand desperately trying to throw the detonation toggle as the world fell out from beneath him.
Emma Carter did not watch him fall.
She pulled the final cartridge from her bandolier, dropped it into the chamber with a single, practiced motion of her wrist, and turned her back to the abyss.
Behind her, through the howling fog, came the thunderous, screeching collapse of five hundred tons of twisted iron crashing toward the dark river. But above the roar of the collapsing tower, a new sound cut through the night air—a sound that made Emma stop dead on the ladder.
From the dark tree line below, where General Sterling and his men were supposed to be securing the perimeter, came the sharp, unmistakable stutter of suppressed automatic fire.
Then, the static on Emma’s tactical earpiece burst open with a voice that was neither Sterling’s nor Vance’s.
May you like
"Sierra-Charlie-01, this is Redacted Command," an unfamiliar, aristocratic voice spoke through the encrypted channel, calm, polite, and terrifyingly close. "Thank you for clearing the tower. The General has been detained. The third volume was never Davies's failsafe, Emma. It was ours. And you’ve just brought it directly to us."
Emma’s finger froze on the cold steel of the rifle bolt as a dozen red laser designators pierced the swirling fog, locking simultaneously onto her chest, her throat, and the center of her forehead.
