Chapter 62 - Airspace Blackout
The Osprey plummeted out of the clouds, banking violently along the contours of the Blue Ridge foothills. Below us, the rolling forests of Virginia blurred into an emerald streak.
"Missile lock! Radar painting us from the north-northeast!" the pilot yelled, his knuckles whitening as he dragged the cyclic control back. "It’s a Patriot battery from Fort Belvoir! Tartarus has automated the perimeter air defense grid!"
"Flares! Deploy counter-measures!" Bradley roared.
A salvo of magnesium flares burst from the Osprey's flank in a blinding curtain of white-hot phosphorus. Seconds later, a surface-to-air missile detonated two hundred meters off our starboard wing. The shockwave slammed into the tilt-rotor aircraft like a physical fist, violently tossing me against the steel reinforced bulkhead.
Pain lanced through my ribs, but my hands never left the emergency harness.
"Engine two is running hot!" the co-pilot screamed over the shrieking turbine alarm. "Hydraulics dropping! We can't maintain lift across the Potomac!"
"Put her down on the parkway!" I commanded, unbuckling myself and staggering toward the rear ramp release. "Bradley, prep the jump kit! We don't ride this bird to the crash site!"
The green jump light on the bulkhead turned amber, then flashed red. The rear cargo ramp hissed open, letting in a torrential howl of sub-zero wind and the deafening roar of burning jet fuel. Five hundred feet below, the black asphalt of the George Washington Memorial Parkway carved through the dense canopy of oak and pine.
"Go! Go! Go!"
We leaped into the slipstream.
The parachute deployment was brutal, wrenching my collarbone as the silk canopy snapped open against the rushing air. Below me, the Osprey skimmed the tops of the trees before erupting into a towering fireball against an abandoned interstate overpass.
I hit the asphalt hard, tucking into a shoulder roll and popping the harness release before my boots had even finished sliding across the grit. Bradley landed thirty yards behind me, drawing his suppressed carbine before his parachute had fully collapsed.
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Around us, the world was completely, horrifyingly quiet.
The highway was dead. No civilian traffic. No emergency sirens. Just the humming vibration of the power lines overhead, carrying the high-frequency pulse of Tartarus straight into the heart of the nation's capital.
