Chapter 32 - SCATTERED IN THE SMOKE
The heavy 25mm rounds carved fist-sized gouges out of the concrete parapet, showering Elena and her squad in pulverized stone and choking cordite smoke. The CH-53 climbed aggressively into the tempest, its side gunner attempting to train an M2 .50 caliber machine gun back down on the rooftop, but a stray burst from the patrol boats—either through sheer incompetence or fratricidal confusion—shredded the heavy transport's tail rotor. The massive helicopter yawed violently, screaming in metal agony, before plunging into the churning surf below the seawall in a colossal plume of fire and sea foam.
"Move! Down the maintenance shaft!" Elena ordered, her voice steady despite the adrenaline hammering in her temples. She held her grandfather’s rifle at the low ready, her thumb sliding over the safety catch.
Miller led the way, kicking open the reinforced hatch leading into the fortress's ventilation and service tunnels. The four analysts scrambled downward into the darkness, terrified, clutching the encrypted hard drives like life preservers. Torres lingered at the hatch, laying down suppressing fire toward the parapet where the first team of boat-borne operators had begun firing grappling hooks onto the lower battlements.
"Captain, we’re boxed in!" Miller shouted from the ladder below. "Radio traffic is flooded. JSOC’s tactical net is dead, and the coastal relay is screaming with an all-points kill order on Company B! Halloway’s narrative is running wild—they're calling us traitors who seized the Citadel to sell the telemetry to foreign bidders!"
"Let them talk," Elena said, stepping backward down the iron rung ladder with her eyes fixed on the gray dawn filtering through the hatch. "A lie can run halfway around the world, Miller, but it can’t outrun a 7.62 round through an open iron sight. Close that hatch."
Torres slammed the heavy steel door shut and spun the internal locking wheel. Almost immediately, the exterior of the hatch shuddered under the impact of breaching charges or heavy hammer blows.
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"Where are we heading, Captain?" Torres asked, wiping grease and rain from his forehead. "If the harbor belongs to Halloway, every extraction corridor by sea or air is burned."
"The old submarine pens," Elena replied without hesitation, adjusting the sling of her scarred M14. "My grandfather’s tactical journals from the joint NATO garrison here in seventy-four documented a deep subterranean slipway running beneath the harbor mouth. It was abandoned after the Cold War, but the tidal tunnels remain unmapped on modern digital manifests. If Halloway wants our heads, he’ll have to come dig us out of the rock."
