Chapter 31 - THE BETRAYAL ON THE RAMP
The muzzle of the nearest suppressed carbine was less than four feet from Elena’s breastplate. The operator holding it was a senior chief petty officer named Harris, a man who had shared black coffee with her three hours ago on the hangar deck. His eyes were cold, stripped of camaraderie, locked into the dead blankness of an executioner following a private ledger.
Elena did not freeze. Her muscles did not wait for her conscious mind to process the horror of Halloway’s treason. Muscle memory forged in the furnace of bloodline discipline took over in the span of a single heartbeat.
Before Harris could squeeze his trigger, Elena stepped inside the angle of his bore. Her left hand shot forward like a piston, driving the heavy steel receiver of her M14 sideways into Harris’s suppressor, deflecting the weapon toward the rubberized floor just as a three-round suppressed burst hissed into the non-skid plating. With the same fluid, circular momentum, Elena drove the buttstock of her grandfather’s walnut-stocked battle rifle upward under Harris’s chin.
The heavy steel buttplate connected with a sickening crack against Kevlar and bone. Harris flew backward into the cramped central corridor of the Super Stallion, his weapon clattering across the deck.
"Ambush!" Elena screamed into her throat mic, her voice cutting through the thundering scream of the twin turboshaft engines. "Off the bird! Clear the ramp! Now!"
Inside the cabin, Miller and Torres reacted with terrifying speed. Miller didn't even drop his secondary weapon; he grabbed the back of the analyst leader's tactical vest and hurled him backward toward the wet concrete of the roof. Torres dropped to one knee on the threshold, raising his short-barreled rifle and drilling two controlled rounds into the chest rig of the second SEAL liaison who was bringing his weapon to bear on the fleeing technicians.
"Go! Go! Go!" Torres bellowed, covering the egress as the four civilian analysts tumbled out onto the rain-lashed roof, sliding across the slick stone.
The pilot of the CH-53, clearly in on the betrayal or reacting to an emergency abort command from his primary frequency, dumped collective and pulled the cyclic hard. The massive aircraft surged upward, its landing gear skittering violently across the parapet. A vortex of blinding rotor wash caught Elena as she leapt backward off the tailgate, hitting the roof in a combat roll.
Behind them, out across the black harbor, the storm parted just enough to reveal the predatory silhouettes of three Navy Mark VI patrol boats tearing through the outer breaker at fifty knots. Their automated 25mm Bushmaster autocannons were already slewing upward, slaved to radar locks painting the chancellery roof.
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"Incoming fire!" Elena roared, dragging an analyst behind the low concrete lip of the roof access bulkhead. "Get below! Down the shaft!"
The night erupted into a blinding staccato of yellow tracers. Heavy explosive rounds tore through the masonry where the Super Stallion had rested seconds before, pulverizing stone into blinding shrapnel.
