Chapter 18 - The Traitor's Confession
The corridor erupted in high-stakes fury. Captain Vance was pinned against the steel wall, his glasses dangling from one ear as Grayson’s iron grip tightened around his lapels.
"You sold out your own uniform," Grayson snarled, his voice a lethal whisper that rattled the glass panes. "Those are SEAL operators lying in those beds. Men who took the same oath you did."
"You don't understand what's coming, Admiral!" Vance gasped, a crazed smirk curling the edges of his bleeding lip. "My cousin didn't work alone. St. Jude’s was just the preliminary safety trial to verify human toxicity limits on a child's resilient neural tissue. The buyers aren't pharmaceutical conglomerates. They're foreign state-sponsored syndicates who paid fifty million dollars for the finished binary weapon!"
"Where is the neutralizing binder?" Maya stepped out of Pod Charlie, her surgical gloves soaked in Miller's blood. Her eyes held the terrifying stillness of a combat corpsman who had crossed every boundary of human endurance. "Give me the coordinates of the cold storage vault on San Clemente, or I will inject the exact dose of unbuffered NPX-44 you had prepared for Hayes straight into your femoral artery."
Captain Vance looked into Maya's eyes and shuddered. He recognized the look. It wasn't the look of a healer bound by civilian ethics; it was the look of the Ghost of Kandahar.
"Bunker Delta-Seven," Vance whimpered, his defiance crumbling instantly. "Sub-level three beneath the old acoustic tower. The binder is stored in cryo-canisters labeled 'Project Chiron.' But you're already too late. The burn protocol was initiated ten minutes ago. In forty minutes, thermite charges will incinerate the entire facility."
Grayson glanced down at his tactical chronometer. "Coronado to San Clemente is twenty minutes by fast-mover bird. That leaves twenty minutes to breach, extract the serum, and return."
"The boys don't have forty minutes," Maya said, her mind calculating metabolic burn rates. "Miller and Axe are on the threshold. Their organs will shut down within half an hour."
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"Then we don't take a standard chopper," Grayson said, pressing his master comm link. "Lieutenant, scramble the MV-22 Osprey from the special tactics apron. Master Chief Reynolds—gear up. We’re doing an airborne snatch-and-grab."
***