The scent of JP-8 jet fuel still clung to my uniform when the transport’s hydraulic ramp slammed

The terminal screen locked completely, frozen in a vicious loop of crimson error codes that mocked my every keystroke. The physical keyboard went dead under my fingertips, the plastic keys turning ice-cold as the main frame’s cooling fans whined into an ear-splitting crescendo.

*00:02:45... 00:02:44...*

Two minutes and forty-five seconds until Falcon Flight plowed into the freezing swells of the North Atlantic at six hundred miles per hour.

Outside the reinforced blast doors of the NSA relay station, I could hear the muffled shouts of base security and the heavy thud of tactical battering rams preparing to breach the entrance. They had me cornered. In less than sixty seconds, federal agents and corporate mercenaries would flood the chamber, dragging me out in handcuffs—or leaving me dead in a pool of my own blood with a fabricated suicide note in my pocket.

"Not yet," I gritted through clenched teeth, my eyes darting across the sprawling array of server racks.

There was no time to hack the firewall. Constance’s administrative lock was absolute, hard-coded into the ROM chips of the flight computer thousands of miles away in a secure facility in Zurich, synchronized with the satellite relay hovering silently in geostationary orbit above the Atlantic. As long as that satellite link remained open, the malicious code would execute its final dive sequence.

I needed to sever the link physically. Not through software, but through raw, unadulterated hardware destruction.

I unhooked the high-gain microwave transmitter from my makeshift rig, ripping the thick copper coaxial cables free with my bare hands until my knuckles bled. I adjusted the frequency dial to maximum output—a concentrated, wide-spectrum electromagnetic pulse designed to fry every semiconductor within a hundred-foot radius, including the NSA master terminal itself.

"Major Calloway! Open the door!" a voice roared from the hallway outside, followed by the deafening *thud* of a breaching charge igniting against the steel hinges.

The blast door bowed inward, sending a shower of sparks and concrete dust raining down across the server floor.

I spun the dial on the microwave transmitter all the way to redline, pointed the directional horn straight at the central communication array, and jammed the toggle switch into the 'ON' position.

A blinding flash of white light filled the room, accompanied by a sound like a low, rolling thunderclap. Every single server rack shuddered violently as thousands of individual hard drives and processing units short-circuited simultaneously, emitting a chorus of pathetic squeals, electrical pops, and acrid plumes of black smoke.

The master terminal screen flickered once, turned brilliant white, and then went pitch black.

Silence descended on the bunker, broken only by the crackle of dying electrical fires and the frantic coughing of the security team as they finally kicked the shattered blast door inward and stumbled through the smoke with their weapons raised.

"Drop the weapon! Drop it now!" a voice screamed through the haze.

I didn't drop anything. I slowly raised my empty hands, letting the smoking transmitter fall to the concrete floor at my feet, and turned to face the blinding tactical flashlights of half a dozen armed men.

As the smoke cleared, I looked down at the dead black screen of the console.

On the encrypted tactical audio earpiece still wedged in my ear, the silence stretched for three agonizing seconds. Then, Lieutenant Colonel Sarah Vance’s voice crackled back to life, steady, confused, and wonderfully, miraculously alive.

"Base control, this is Falcon Lead. We just experienced a massive avionics reboot. Autopilot dropped offline, and manual flight controls are fully restored. Uh... what the hell just happened to our navigation bus?"

I closed my eyes, letting out a long, shuddering breath as the weight of the world finally lifted from my shoulders.