Chapter 8 - Bloodline and Iron
The underground bunker beneath the Raven Rock Mountain Complex did not exist on any map provided to Congress.
Carved into solid greenstone granite four hundred feet beneath the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, Site R-Alpha had been constructed during the Eisenhower administration and subsequently renovated by Project Orion to serve as an off-grid interrogation and command nexus. There were no windows. No cell towers penetrated the stone. The air tasted of ozone, damp rock, and filtered oxygen.
Marcus Sterling sat in an unpainted steel chair bolted to the concrete floor of Interrogation Room Three.
His tailored suit had been replaced by an orange paper jumpsuit. The cuffs around his wrists were heavy tungsten-carbide, secured by a hardened chain passed through an eyelet in the floor. A single incandescent bulb hung from a frayed cloth cord directly over his head, casting deep, skull-like shadows across his face.
The heavy steel door swung open with a hydraulic groan.
I walked in first, wearing my black tactical fatigues, the sidearm strapped to my leg. Behind me came Admiral Malcolm Reid.
And behind Reid came General Grant Mercer.
My father was no longer wearing his service jacket. His tie was gone, his collar unbuttoned, his gray hair unkempt. The four-star general looked like a broken shell, but as he stepped into the room and his eyes fell upon Marcus Sterling, something ancient and terrifying reignited behind his pupils.
Sterling looked up, sneering despite the purple bruises spreading across his jaw. "Ah. The family reunion. General Mercer... have you come to apologize for your daughter’s barbarism? Do you know what the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee is going to do to you when he finds out I was kidnapped from Andrews?"
Grant Mercer didn't speak. He walked across the concrete floor, his heavy dress shoes clicking in a slow, deliberate cadence.
"Grant?" Sterling’s smirk wavered. "Look at me. You and I have an agreement. The syndicate has four senators in its pocket. This entire thing can be smoothed over by morning. We call it an unsanctioned Orion drill. We bury the paperwork. I can still guarantee your nomination for Joint Chiefs Chairman—"
*CRACK.*
My father’s right fist smashed into Marcus Sterling’s jaw with the force of an unguided artillery shell.
The steel chair groaned against its floor bolts. Sterling’s head snapped back, blood spraying across the gray concrete wall, a tooth clattering to the floor. The billionaire let out a high-pitched, pathetic whine as he slumped against his chains, his nose visibly broken and leaking crimson down his lips.
Grant Mercer stood over him, his chest heaving, his fist bloody and split at the knuckles.
"You sat at my dinner table," my father whispered, his voice vibrating with a fury so deep it sounded demonic. "You drank my scotch. You asked about my late wife. And all the while, you were slipping death warrants into my signing folders and setting my daughter up to be executed for treason."
"Grant..." Sterling wheezed, spitting a mouthful of red onto the floor. "You... you were so easy. You were so blind. All I had to do was tell you that Maya was operating outside your command... that she was disrespecting your authority. You wanted to believe she was a rogue. Your ego couldn't handle that she was bigger than you!"
Those words hit my father harder than any physical blow could have. Grant Mercer stumbled back half a step, his breath catching in his throat.
Sterling laughed—a wet, rattling sound. "She was twenty-four when the President signed the Orion Mandate! Twenty-four! And they gave her authority over your entire theater! You hated it! You hated that the Mercer name was being eclipsed by a girl who didn't even have the decency to salute you in public!"
"Shut up," Reid warned, his hand moving to his sidearm.
"No," I said, stepping between my father and Sterling. "Let him talk."
I leaned down, placing both hands on the arms of Sterling’s chair, trapping him in my shadow.
"Marcus," I said quietly. "Where are the modules?"
Sterling smiled through his blood. "Already gone, sweetheart. You think I kept them on the Gulfstream? The plane was a decoy. The moment Hayes’s beacon tripped, I knew Orion would move on Andrews. While you were playing commando on the tarmac, the real transport left Fort Belvoir forty minutes ago."
My blood ran cold. "Belvoir?"
"Two tactical ambulances," Sterling whispered, his eyes gleaming with malicious triumph. "Full diplomatic escort. Carrying the prototype modules and four tactical EMP warheads manufactured by my skunkworks division. They aren't leaving the country, Maya. They're heading for downtown Washington."
Admiral Reid cursed violently. "Target?"
"The Federal Reserve? The Pentagon? The White House?" Sterling laughed hysterically. "Why think so small? If you detonate a high-altitude EMP over the National Capital Region while simultaneously wiping the cryptographic keys with Orion's own backdoors, the entire financial and military infrastructure of this nation drops into the dark ages within six seconds. The Iron Aegis doesn't want to sell your tech, General. They want to reset the board."
"Time?" I demanded, driving my thumb into the nerve cluster behind his collarbone.
Sterling shrieked in agony, his body convulsing against the tungsten chains. "Ten... ten minutes! The detonation sequence is hard-coded into the telemetry array at the transmitter site in the Old Post Office pavilion! You can't reach it! Andrews is locked down, Raven Rock is an hour away by air, and Washington's airspace is about to become a graveyard!"
I released him. He slumped forward, gasping for air.
I turned on my heel and walked out of the cell, my father and Reid hurrying behind me into the corridor.
"Vance!" I yelled into my comms as we reached the tactical annex. "Did you hear that?"
"Every word," Vance’s voice responded over the secure fiber line, trembling with panic. "I just pulled traffic cam telemetry from the I-395 corridor. Two dark ambulances with blacked-out federal plates just cleared the 14th Street Bridge heading north toward Pennsylvania Avenue. Maya... they have military-grade jamming suites active. I can't reach the Secret Service detail at the White House. The whole central grid is going dark!"
"We don't have time to scramble a bird from Andrews," Reid said, his face pale. "The flight time alone—"
"We don't use Andrews," my father said suddenly.
Reid and I both stopped and looked at him.
General Grant Mercer was wiping his bloody knuckles with a handkerchief. His eyes were no longer those of a broken father. For the first time tonight, the legendary strategist who had broken insurgencies in three continents was back—except this time, he wasn't fighting for his career. He was fighting for his daughter.
"Site R has a decommissioned subterranean rail spur," my father said, pointing toward the heavy blast doors at the end of the lower tunnel. "Built during the Cold War to evacuate the Cabinet to Mount Weather. It connects to the Amtrak Northeast Corridor via an abandoned freight line beneath Silver Spring. There is a high-speed magnetic-assist rail car in Bay Four. It can put an assault team into the basement of Union Station in twelve minutes."
I stared at him. "That rail line was officially collapsed in 1994."
"I signed the budget line that secretly rebuilt it in 2012," Grant Mercer said, his jaw setting like concrete. "You said I was blind, Maya. You were right. But I didn't spend forty years in the Army without learning how to build a back door to hell."
He looked me dead in the eye.
May you like
"Arm me," my father said. "I'm going with you."
***