Chapter 73 - Dead Man's Hand
A storm of six-barrel 7.62mm minigun rounds tore through the fourth-floor facade of Walter Reed with catastrophic force.
The sound was not a series of individual gunshots; it was the terrifying, mechanical rip of canvas—a chainsaw operating at ten thousand revolutions per minute. Concrete exploded into blinding powdered dust; glass turned into lethal, high-velocity shrapnel that shredded the ceiling tiles, medical monitors, and steel partition frames into ribbons.
The rounds chewed through the outer wall eighteen inches above where Abigail and I lay flat against the floor. Debris rained down on my back, heavy slabs of plasterboard and shattered cinder blocks crushing the air from my lungs. Abigail did not scream; she locked her arms around my neck, burying her face into my chest, her body rigid as an iron bar.
For six endless seconds, the aerial barrage pulverized the east wing. Then, the miniguns fell silent, replaced by the thrum of turboshaft engines banking hard to the north.
"Abigail, can you move?" I coughed, spitting pulverized drywall and blood from my mouth.
"I can move," she wheezed, her eyes wide, coughing through the thick cloud of white gypsum smoke. "Mom... my leg is bleeding, but it’s just glass. I can walk."
I pulled her upright, ignoring the white-hot agony radiating from my fractured ribs. The entire wing was structural ruin. The exterior wall was gone, replaced by a jagged, gaping chasm opening out into the cold night sky. Below, on the perimeter roads of the hospital, headlights were beginning to swarm—the D.C. Metropolitan Police and military security forces from the naval compound across the street were finally mobilizing.
The attack hadn't been designed to sustain an occupation. It was an assassination sweep designed to kill by sheer, concentrated volume of fire.
"We move down the central service spine," I said, slinging the dead operative's suppressed carbine over my shoulder. "The elevators are dead. The east stairs are sheared in half. We take the laundry chute access to the sub-basement."
"And then?" she asked, clutching the SIG Sauer tightly against her hip.
"And then we disappear before the brass arrives. Walter Reed is compromised from the top down. Whoever authorized those helicopters through the D.C. Special Flight Rules Area has three-star clearance or higher."
We scrambled through the pulverized wreckage of the corridor. As we reached the service elevator vestibule, my captured radio began to hiss with static.
"General Gardner," the cultured voice returned. He was no longer using an open tactical band; he had routed the transmission directly through an auxiliary emergency frequency. "I assume you survived the strafe. You possess an infuriating resilience."
"You're running out of airspace," I hissed, pushing open the heavy steel access panel to the maintenance chute. "Joint Base Andrews will have F-16s over the district within four minutes."
"Andrews?" The man chuckled softly, the sound laced with pity. "General, who do you think gave the order to ground the alert scramblers at Andrews ten minutes ago for an 'unscheduled radar recalibration'? Look at your own uniform. Look at the flag on your shoulder. You spent thirty years fighting enemies abroad, believing the home front was a fortress of law and order."
The elevator maintenance door swung open with a screech of rusted iron. A narrow service ladder descended straight down into the subterranean dark.
"I am Marcus Sterling," the voice whispered into my ear. "Arthur was my cousin—a greedy, weak-willed idiot who thought he could use our family's infrastructure to settle personal domestic disputes and play God with real estate. But the network does not belong to the Sterlings. It belongs to the Consortium."
"Marcus," I said, committing the name to memory like an execution warrant. "You murdered Claire Vance in her cell."
"Claire was a weak thread. She talked to your prosecutors. She was going to name the domestic staging hubs. In our world, General, silence is not an agreement. It is an absolute requirement. You have forty-eight hours to deliver the master drive to the coordinates I will transmit to your personal phone. If you do not... I will not send helicopters to Walter Reed again."
He paused, his voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper.
"I will send six men to the civilian residential sectors where your junior officers live. Their wives. Their children. I will burn every life you have ever touched until you crawl to me on your knees."
The radio clicked off.
"Mom," Abigail whispered from behind me, staring into the black shaft of the service ladder. "Who was that?"
May you like
"A dead man," I said. "Climb."
***
