Chapter 28 - The Adirondack Bastion
The frozen peaks of the Adirondack Mountains rose like jagged teeth beneath a leaden gray sky. Snow flurried in blinding sheets across the desolate pine forests, whipping against the windshield of our low-flying MH-47 Chinook as we skimmed fifty feet above the treetops.
Below us, nestled in a glacial valley once designated as a decommissioned radar tracking station from 1962, sat the target: *The Iron Gate.*
It was a fortress carved into the living rock of the mountain, surrounded by a double perimeter of razor wire, automated sensor towers, and guard posts manned by heavily armed contractors in snow-camo winter gear. On the tarmac outside the blast doors sat two massive eight-wheel heavy transport trucks, their hydraulic ramps lowered as crates marked with yellow hazardous-material stencils were loaded into their bellies.
Beside the trucks stood a sleek, matte-black Mil Mi-8 transport helicopter, its twin rotors idling slowly in the freezing wind.
"Visual on the convoy," Vance reported from the cockpit door. "They're five minutes from completing loading. Once those trucks hit the logging roads to the St. Lawrence River, we lose them in the blizzards."
"We don't let them hit the road," I said.
I checked the seal on my winter combat jacket, racking the bolt of my Daniel Defense M4 carbine. Abigail stood beside me, fully kitted in high-mobility winter gear, her suppressed submachine gun slung across her chest. She wasn't the terrified girl I had pulled from Julian Sterling’s luxury torture chamber in Quail Hollow. She was a Gardner. She was a soldier's daughter, stepping onto the battlefield to reclaim her family's honor.
"Ramp down!" I commanded.
The hydraulic ramp of the Chinook hissed open into the teeth of the blizzard. The sub-zero wind blasted into the cabin, roaring with deafening power.
"Snipers, take out the perimeter towers!" I barked into the radio.
Two synchronized suppressed shots cracked from the open ramp. In the guard towers two hundred yards away, two sentries collapsed instantly, their rifles clattering to the steel platforms below.
"Touchdown in three! Two! One!"
The massive Chinook flared hard, its landing gear skidding across the packed ice of the facility's apron.
"Go! Go! Go!"
We spilled out into the blinding white storm, a wall of disciplined, lethal force. Suppression fire raked the loading bay. The private security contractors scrambled for cover, shouting in Russian and accented English as the sudden avalanche of lead caught them unprepared.
Abigail dropped to one knee behind a row of concrete fuel barriers, her weapon coughing twice. An enemy contractor advancing with an assault shotgun dropped into the snow and did not move again.
"Clear left!" Abigail shouted, her voice cutting through the roar of gunfire with terrifying authority.
"Moving up!" Vance bounded forward, hurling a flashbang through the open doorway of the primary guard shack. The concussive blast blew the snow out of the windows in a blinding cloud, followed immediately by two double-taps from Vance’s carbine.
I charged the primary loading ramp of the lead transport truck. A contractor leaned out of the passenger cab, raising a submachine gun. I didn't break stride. I raised my rifle and fired a four-round burst through the windshield. The glass spiderwebbed with red, and the cab went silent.
"Secure the crates!" I roared to the trailing operators. "Secure the—"
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A deafening explosion ripped through the mountain air.
***
