Chapter 11 - Altitude of Despair
The dial tone was a flat, unyielding hum that seemed to mock the frantic beating of my heart. One hundred and forty-two souls. Men and women I had bled with, trained with, shared MREs with in the suffocating heat of the Helmand Province, now trapped in a silver tube hurtling toward the black expanse of the North Atlantic at five hundred miles per hour.
"Wesley..." Adeline’s voice was a dry, rasping whisper, torn and raw from the breathing tube that had only recently been removed. Her single visible eye—the other lost beneath a web of surgical sutures and heavy gauze—was wide, fixed on my face with terrifying clarity. She had heard the tail end of the conversation through the open speaker of the burner phone. "The C-17... Tail 504. That’s... that’s Falcon Flight."
"I know," I muttered, my voice tight, stripped of all emotion by the sheer magnitude of the tactical nightmare closing in around us.
"Marcus Kane... he didn't just write flight control software," she gasped, her fingers twitching against the starched white hospital sheet, trying to pull herself upright. The monitors beside her bed began an agitated, high-pitched chirp as her heart rate spiked. "He built a backdoor into the primary inertial navigation unit. It’s unpatchable from the cockpit. If Constance hits the satellite uplink... the pitch trim actuators will hard-over. The crew won't even have time to pull the emergency fire handles."
I shoved the burner phone into my tactical pocket, my mind racing through standard operating procedures, discarding every single one of them. The Department of Justice? Too slow. The Pentagon? Compromised from the Joint Chiefs down to the procurement office. Voss Aeronautics had spent a decade embedding their operatives into the defense apparatus, turning the Department of Defense into an unwitting testing ground for compromised hardware.
"Lie back, Adeline," I ordered, my hand resting gently on her uninjured shoulder, feeling the tremor of adrenaline and trauma running through her frame. "I'm going to ground."
"Ground where?" she whispered, panic flashing in her remaining eye. "You're standing in Bethesda, Wesley. You're five thousand miles away from Dover, and even if you had a Gulfstream waiting on the tarmac, you can't outrun a digital radio frequency."
"I’m not trying to outrun the signal," I said, leaning down to press a firm kiss to her cool, antiseptic-scented forehead. "I’m going to cut the throat of the man holding the knife."
I turned on my heel and walked out of Intensive Care Unit 4, leaving the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor behind. The fluorescent lights of the Bethesda military hospital corridor hummed with an eerie, clinical indifference. It was 0422 hours. Thirty minutes since Constance’s call. That meant Flight 504 had roughly five and a half hours of fuel remaining, but the critical window—the point where they crossed the oceanic comms blackout line—was less than forty minutes away. Once they hit that threshold, satellite telemetry would be our only link, and Constance’s remote override would have an unobstructed path straight to the flight deck's primary guidance bus.
As I reached the elevator bank, my tactical instincts—honed by years of leading reconnaissance teams through hostile urban sectors—screamed a warning. The hospital was too quiet. At four in the morning, the corridors should have been echoing with the shuffle of orderlies, the squeak of medication carts, and the low murmur of shift-change nurses.
Instead, the hallway was dead. Absolute, unnatural silence.
I didn't press the elevator button. Instead, I ducked into the stairwell, my boots making silent, rubberized contact with the concrete steps. I unholstered my sidearm—a standard-issue M17 Sig Sauer, retrieved from my locker earlier that evening—and thumbed the safety off. The metallic click sounded deafening in the enclosed stairwell.
Three floors down, near the ground-level exit, I heard the faint, distinct chatter of an encrypted tactical radio frequency.
*“Sector Four is sealed. Perimeter units report no movement on the south loading dock. If the Major tries to exit through the emergency stairwell, terminate with extreme prejudice. Standard operational masking—make it look like a civilian cardiac event.”*
The voice belonged to a man named Miller, a former Delta operator turned private security contractor for Voss Aeronautics. Constance hadn't just threatened a plane; she had already laid siege to the hospital. They knew I was in the building, and they knew I had the hard drive containing the complete blueprint of Project Icarus.
I flattened my back against the concrete wall beside the heavy fire door, waiting. The handle turned with a slow, agonizing squeak. A shadow stretched across the landing—tall, broad-shouldered, clad in matte-black tactical gear without insignia, holding a suppressed MK18 short-barreled rifle at a low-ready position.
He pushed the door open, stepping into the stairwell with practiced, predatory grace.
May you like
He never saw the descending barrel of my Sig Sauer. I struck him across the base of his ballistic helmet with the heavy polymer frame, dropping him silently to the concrete before he could draw a breath. I caught his falling rifle, stripped his radio headset, and stepped out into the ground-floor corridor of Bethesda Naval Hospital, ready for war.
***
