Chapter 98 - The Shadow in the Pines
Jared didn't answer the radio. In the silence of the shop, the only sound was the deliberate, heavy clack of a shell being chambered into the Benelli M4 shotgun.
"They don't know the wellhead is connected to the guidance dampener," Jared said, his voice flat, devoid of rage, stripped down to pure survival. "If they blow that casing, they disrupt the orbital telemetry. If that platform loses its landing vector, it won't glide into the designated containment ravine. It’ll come down like an unguided meteor right onto the town."
"I’ll flank them through the timber," Marcus said, tightening the strap of his chest rig. "The snow’s thick enough on the western spur to muffle my boots. I can neutralize the three on the ridge before they set the charges."
"No," Jared said, checking the battery pack on a handheld thermal scanner. "There aren't three. Look at the perimeter sweep."
Marcus turned back to the screen. A second cluster of heat signatures had appeared on the southern boundary, near the bridge where Jared had confronted Melissa's boyfriend with the crowbar weeks ago. Four more men. These weren't local drunks. Their movements were coordinated, disciplined, maintaining five-meter spreads through the pines, their weapons held at the low-ready.
"Contractors," Marcus cursed under his breath. "The corporate syndicate that backed Melissa's legal offensive. They’re using the local idiots as bait to draw us out."
"They want the doors open," Jared said. He grabbed a set of keys from the master pegboard—the heavy iron keys that controlled the pneumatic bypasses throughout the shop. "They think this is a standoff. They don't understand that every square inch of this property was engineered by a man who spent forty years preparing for an invasion."
Jared stepped to the master utility console behind the central lathe. He threw a series of four heavy industrial circuit breakers.
Outside, the snow-covered yard remained silent, but beneath the drifts, three-phase electrical current surged into the underground grounding mesh Arthur had installed in 1968.
Along the northern fence line, Todd and his two accomplices reached the edge of the chain-link barrier. Todd reached out with a pair of bolt cutters to snip the security ties.
The instant the steel jaws bit into the wire, a blinding blue arc erupted with a crack like a thunderclap.
Todd was hurled backward ten feet into the snowdrift, his coat smoking, the bolt cutters vaporized at the hinge. The other two men scrambled in terror, slipping on the ice, screaming as the perimeter fence hummed with eighty thousand volts of stepped-up capacitive discharge.
"That handles the amateurs," Jared said, racking the shotgun slide with mechanical precision. "Now we deal with the professionals."
Through the floorboards, a distant, muffled knock rattled the heating ducts. It wasn't the children. It was the terminal on the table behind them.
*COUNTDOWN TO SURFACE CONVERGENCE: 64 HOURS, 12 MINUTES, 09 SECONDS.*
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The sky above the ridge had begun to hum.
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