“Still pretending to be a soldier?” my brother laughed as my entire family humiliated me at our backyard barbecue, but seconds later, a V-22 Osprey landed outside, two officers saluted me, and my father finally realized he had no idea who his daughter really was. / Chapter 74 / 100

Chapter 74 - Midcourse Intercept

The alphanumeric string flooded across my display in cascading lines of green fire.

`AUTH KEY: 77-DELTA-KILO-909-OMEGA.`

`LINK ESTABLISHED TO HYPERSONIC PLATFORM: VALKYRIE-NINE.`

"Two minutes, thirty seconds to impact!" Miller yelled from across the room. "The glide vehicle is over the Appalachian ridgeline, altitude sixty-five thousand feet, Mach 11.2! Kinetic interceptors from Fort Meade have launched, but the vehicle’s terminal maneuvers are evading radar-guided salvos!"

"He’s using an automated evasion algorithm designed to mimic evasive seabird flight paths," I said, locking my hands onto the terminal interface. "He didn't write this code. He stole it from the DARPA black-budget project we shut down three years ago."

I shoved the decrypted hex-key into the terminal slot.

`EMERGENCY COMMAND OVERRIDE: OVERLORD-ONE.`

`ENTER KILL CODE.`

The prompt blinked steadily. An empty cursor awaiting eight characters.

"The key card didn't have the final eight-digit string!" Miller panicked, watching the radar vector drop toward the Potomac River. "It's just the handshake protocol! What's the password, Commander? What's the code?!"

*Think, Elena.*

What did Jake always say? What was his defining grievance? The one thing that drove him into the arms of the shadow cartels, the one thing that consumed his every thought while he watched me wear the uniform?

He had spent thirty years trying to prove that blood was thicker than duty. He had poured beer on my boots in that backyard barbecue, sneering: *"Still pretending to be a soldier?"*

He thought I was a pretender. He thought the uniform was a costume.

My hands flew across the keyboard. Eight characters.

`P-R-E-T-E-N-D`

Seven letters. I paused. The countdown blinked: *01:15.*

No. Not "pretend."

The final word he whispered before the rocket ignited: *"A real Carter."*

`C-A-R-T-E-R-1`

`ERROR: INVALID CODE. 2 ATTEMPTS REMAINING.`

"One minute to terminal dive!" Miller shouted, clutching the edge of the display. "If you miss this, Washington burns!"

The memory slammed into my chest. The Sunday dinner after my third tour in the Middle East. Jake had pulled me aside into the garage, red-faced, smelling of bourbon. He had asked me why I didn't just come home and take a seat on the board. He told me that family was the only thing that survived when everything else turned to dust.

And I had looked him in the eye and said: *"Some families are just an infection."*

He had hated that word. It had broken him inside.

I typed: `I-N-F-E-C-T-1`

`ERROR: INVALID CODE. 1 ATTEMPT REMAINING. SYSTEM LOCKOUT IN 30 SECONDS.`

"Commander!"

"Shut up, Miller!" I closed my eyes for two fractions of a second, clearing the adrenaline from my forebrain.

Jake was a narcissist. Everything he built was a monument to his own overlooked brilliance. He didn't want to destroy Washington because of ideology. He wanted to destroy it because it represented the authority that had chosen me over him. He wanted to show me who held the leash.

What did he tell me on the encrypted radio just five minutes ago?

*"Now... let me show you what a real Carter does with power."*

`P-O-W-E-R-9-9`

I hit Enter.

The screen flashed blinding white.

`CODE ACCEPTED.`

`MASTER OVERRIDE ACTIVATED: FLIGHT TERMINATION SYSTEM PRIMED.`

"Do it!" Miller screamed. "Detonate the core before it reaches the Potomac!"

I slammed the physical toggle switch beneath the plastic protective cap down with the heel of my palm.

High in the skies above northern Virginia, eighty miles out from the Capital, the hypersonic glide vehicle's control fins locked hard left, pitching the craft into a violent aerodynamic roll. The extreme gravitational shear tore the composite hull apart, and the internal explosive charges detonated in a brilliant, harmless blossom of orange fire across the night sky.

The shockwave rattled the windows of the Pentagon, but the sky remained clear.

The room fell into a deathly silence, save for the rhythmic, steady beep of the clear radar scope.

"Target neutralized," Miller breathed, slumping down in his seat, his hands shaking so violently he couldn't keep them on the armrest. "Splash one. No fallout. Kinetic payload destroyed in the upper atmosphere."

I stood unmoving, staring at the flashing green confirmation.