Chapter 93 - The Shattered Seal
Above ground, the timberline erupted into fire.
The lead armored truck of Vance’s private extraction team smashed through the outer wooden gate of Bay Four, its front grille mangled with twisted chain link. Behind it, a secondary van mounted with a massive parabolic transmitter was already rotating its dish toward the concrete slab of the shop floor.
Inside the van, Vance watched a spectrum analyzer on his tactical console.
"We have localized the harmonic," the technician beside him said, fingers flying across a military-grade keyboard. "Depth is four hundred meters. It’s an anomalous mass. If we hit it with an eight-gigahertz pulse, we can shatter the containment field and force an emergency surface ejection."
"Fire the pulse," Vance ordered calmly. "The girl in prison was right. The grandfather was hiding a high-density power cell. That single artifact is worth forty billion dollars on the private defense market. Liquidate the perimeter guards."
A mercenary stepped out of the truck, raising a grenade launcher toward the upper porch of the timber house where Noah and Ellie were hidden.
"NO!"
The roar came not from the porch, but from the darkness behind the snowbank.
Pete came out of the treeline driving the sixteen-ton Caterpillar industrial grader—the machine Jared had rebuilt with hardened steel plating over the engine block. The massive steel blade was lowered six inches off the frozen dirt.
The grader hit the tactical truck at forty miles per hour.
The sound was like an anvil striking a locomotive. The mercenary’s pickup was crumpled into a jagged wad of twisted sheet metal and thrown twenty feet into the ditch, its engine block splitting in half with an explosive spray of oil and burning radiator coolant.
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Marcus emerged from the tree line on foot, firing controlled, precise bursts into the tires and radiator of the secondary transmitter van, keeping the gunners pinned behind their armored doors.
"Jared!" Marcus screamed into his throat mic. "They fired the first pulse! The ground is tearing open!"
