Chapter 38 - The Red Dawn of Black Ridge
The upload meter chimed:
`99%...`
A canister bounced through the attic door, hissing white smoke. I dove behind an antique cast-iron woodstove just as the stun grenade detonated with a concussive roar that blew the remaining windowpanes outward into the storm.
My ears rang with a deafening, continuous squeal. The world went white, then grey, then violently dark.
Through the haze of smoke and ringing silence, a figure stepped through the shattered attic doorway.
It wasn't a tactical operative.
The man was limping heavily, his tailored three-piece suit charred, shredded, and soaked in black mud. Half of his face was an angry map of second-degree burns from the kerosene explosion in the vault, his gold-rimmed spectacles hanging crookedly from one ear.
Director Sterling Vance.
He didn't look like an executive anymore. He looked like a demon dragged straight out of an open grave. In his right hand, he held a blackened, heavy-caliber revolver, pointed directly at my face.
"You really... have... your father's luck," Sterling wheezed, his voice mangled by smoke inhalation and burnt vocal cords.
I tried to raise the .45, but my fingers were numb from the concussion of the blast. The heavy gun slipped from my grasp, clattering uselessly against the attic floorboards.
Sterling dragged himself forward, his boots leaving bloody smudges on the wood, until the barrel of his revolver was pressed directly against the center of my forehead. The steel was scalding hot.
"Turn it off," Sterling whispered, his burnt lips peeling back over red-stained teeth. "Abort the transmission. Abort it, or I swear to God I will splatter your brains across these rafters and pull the hard drive from your corpse."
Behind him, on the transmitter screen, the text changed:
`BROADCAST COMPLETE.`
`GLOBAL PACKET DISTRIBUTION: 100%.`
`ALL SECRETS DECLASSIFIED.`
Sterling’s eye twitched toward the screen. In that fractional second, the realization hit him—not just that he had failed, but that in sixty seconds, every major newsroom, foreign intelligence service, and federal prosecutor on Earth would possess the documents that would tear down his entire empire.
His finger tightened on the trigger.
"Then we die together, nephew," he snarled.
Before the hammer could drop, the entire roof of the farmhouse was ripped away with a deafening, mechanical roar.
A blinding, thousand-lumen spotlight descended from the screaming storm clouds above, pinning both of us in an ocean of daylight. The violent downdraft of twin rotors flattened the attic insulation into a white blizzard.
Hovering twenty feet above the exposed rafters was an unmarked, matte-black stealth helicopter—an aircraft that belonged to neither the FBI nor the CIA.
From its open side hatch, a sniper rifle barrel extended into the beam of light, its crosshairs locked onto the back of Sterling Vance’s skull.
Over a military-grade loudspeaker that shook the very foundations of Black Ridge, an unfamiliar voice cut through the hurricane:
"Director Vance, drop your weapon. You are in violation of Treaty Protocol Seven. Step away from the cipher."
May you like
Sterling slowly looked up into the blinding light of the gunship, his face twisting into an expression not of anger, but of absolute, paralyzing terror.
"No," Sterling whispered into the roaring wind. "Not them."
