Chapter 42 - Dust and Kinetic Fire
The twin tiltrotors of the V-22 Osprey screamed as the aircraft pitched forward, staying barely fifty feet above the cracked earth of the coastal marshlands. Below us, the sun beat down on miles of decaying oil rigs, rusted holding tanks, and stagnant salt flats that stretched toward the shimmering expanse of the Gulf of Mexico.
I stood by the open crew door, tethered by a safety harness, the wind tearing at my tactical vest. Through my magnified optic, I could see the armored transport tearing across the private service road of the decommissioned Beaumont Petrochemical Complex. It was moving at over ninety miles per hour, leaving a massive rooster tail of gray silt and brackish water in its wake.
"Pilot, get us in front of him," I ordered over the internal comms. "Drop the ramp and prepare the heavy gunner."
"Major, we've got an issue," the pilot's voice crackled through my headset, taut with alarm. "I’m picking up active radar paint from the transport's roof."
"Say again?" I snapped. "That was a naval ambulance! It had no offensive systems!"
"It does now!" Vance yelled from the flight deck. "Look at the roof rack!"
Through my optics, I saw the roof panel of the armored transport peel back hydraulically. A compact, multi-barrel automated weapon station rose from the interior, its motorized traverse whining as it locked directly onto our aircraft. It wasn't a military weapon system I had ever seen in the United States inventory. The barrels were enclosed in a hexagonal carbon sleeve, and the targeting sensor blinked with a cold, predatory violet diode.
"Evasive!" I screamed.
The pilot banked the Osprey violently to the left, but he was half a second too late.
A high-frequency crack split the morning air—not the thumping roar of standard autocannon fire, but the sharp, electric whip-crack of a miniaturized rail accelerator. A hyper-velocity kinetic sabot tore through the Osprey's right engine nacelle, detonating the turbine casing in an eruption of black smoke and shredded titanium.
The aircraft shuddered violently, dropping ten feet in a heartbeat. Alarms shrieked through my headset as the fire suppression systems discharged with a muffled hiss.
"Right engine lost!" the pilot grunted, wrestling the flight controls against the asymmetric torque. "We're going into the dirt! Brace for hard landing!"
"Hang on!" Vance shouted, grabbing the structural bulkhead as the aircraft skidded sideways through the salt grass, its belly plates shrieking against the hardpan earth.
The impact slammed me against the safety harness, driving the breath from my lungs. Dirt and shattered glass sprayed through the open troop bay as the aircraft spun one hundred and eighty degrees before grinding to a halt in a dry irrigation ditch.
For three seconds, there was only the hiss of leaking hydraulic fluid and the distant, fading drone of the transport's engine.
I unclipped my harness, dropped onto the vibrating deck, and kicked the emergency release on the crew door. "Vanguard, check in! Vance! Status!"
"Alive," Vance coughed, hauling himself up from the floor, his cheek bleeding where an unsecured tablet had clipped him. "Team's green. No fatalities. But the bird is dead. We're grounded."
I leaped out of the aircraft, boots sinking two inches into the damp clay. Two hundred yards ahead, the transport had stopped at the massive concrete perimeter wall of the old Beaumont refinery. The heavy blast doors of an underground terminal were grinding open, swallowing the vehicle into the dark belly of the industrial complex.
As the heavy steel doors began their slow descent to seal the tunnel, a solitary figure stepped out from the vehicle's shadow into the harsh sunlight.
He wore black tactical fatigue pants and a gray compression shirt. The pathetic, weeping posture he had maintained on the grass of my father's barbecue was entirely gone. His stance was relaxed, wide-based, balanced—the posture of a man who had spent thousands of hours in lethal training environments.
He raised a pair of binoculars, looked directly across the salt flats at me, and smiled.
May you like
Then, David Carter raised two fingers to his temple in a crisp, flawless military salute, turned on his heel, and walked into the darkness as the blast doors slammed shut.
***
