Chapter 48 - The Highway Ambush
"Hostile armor ahead!" Thomas roared, fighting the steering wheel as the heavy suburban whipped into a violent, controlled spin.
Claire’s combat instincts took over before her conscious mind could process the danger.
"Hold on!" she screamed, reaching over to yank the emergency handbrake while bracing Hayes with her left arm.
The autocannon atop the armored personnel carrier unleashed a deafening, rhythmic burst of high-explosive thirty-millimeter rounds.
The asphalt ten yards ahead of their hood erupted into violent geysers of pulverized stone and orange fire, shrapnel hammering against their bulletproof windshield like a swarm of angry hornets.
The heavy glass held, spider-webbing into a mosaic of fractured white cracks, but the force of the blast lifted the suburban's front tires completely off the ground.
Behind them, the secondary suburban carrying Miller and Marcus accelerated hard, its heavy steel cattle-guard smashing directly into their rear bumper to shove them out of the fatal funnel.
"Get off the road! Into the ditch!" Miller’s voice barked over the tactical radio amid the deafening thud of falling ordnance.
Thomas threw the transmission into reverse, flooring the gas pedal as the heavy vehicle careened off the shoulder of the highway, plunging down a steep gravel embankment into the moonlit scrubland below.
The suburban bounced violently, the suspension groaning in protest as they slammed to a halt behind the cover of a massive concrete drainage culvert.
The second suburban followed an instant later, sliding sideways through the sagebrush to form an angled defensive perimeter.
"Status!" Claire shouted, racking her rifle as she kicked her passenger door open into the freezing prairie wind.
"Hayes is secure, but the vehicle is dead," Thomas yelled back, inspecting the smoking engine block that had taken a piece of heavy shrapnel. "Radiator is split wide open."
Across the highway above them, the heavy drone of multiple approaching helicopters began vibrating through the very earth beneath their boots.
Claire looked toward the northern horizon; two black attack choppers, running completely dark without navigation lights, were sweeping low over the telephone poles, their forward searchlights carving through the tall grass like twin white blades.
"Those aren't contractors," Marcus said, limping up to the culvert with a shoulder-mounted anti-tank launcher resting across his broad chest. "Those are active-duty AH-64 Apaches. Margaret’s friends in the Pentagon pulled the big levers."
"They're painting us with infrared," Miller warned, peering around the concrete edge through his night-vision monocular. "We have less than ninety seconds before they roll in with Hellfire missiles."
Claire looked up at the looming mountain range in the distance; the jagged granite peaks of Cheyenne Mountain stood like black monoliths against the indigo sky, less than seven miles away.
"They're trying to pin us down until Julian can seal the facility from the inside," Claire said, her tactical mind dissecting the battlefield with ice-cold clarity.
"We can't outrun Apaches on foot across open prairie, Commander," Thomas said grimly, chambering a round into his sidearm. "This is a kill box."
"Then we don't run across the prairie," Claire replied, her gaze locking onto the massive drainage culvert behind them.
"The culvert?" Hayes asked, wheezing as he leaned against the concrete wall. "That’s an irrigation spillway from the mountain reservoir."
"It leads directly into the lower hydro-electric intake tunnels beneath Cheyenne's eastern face," Claire said, remembering the structural blueprints from the Firstborn dossier. "It was built in the fifties as an emergency overflow."
"It’s flooded, Claire," Hayes warned, his face pale under the moonlight. "And the grate is solid titanium."
"Marcus," Claire said, turning toward the burly heavy-weapons specialist. "How many rockets do you have left in that tube?"
Marcus looked down at the launcher in his hands, a vicious grin splitting his soot-stained face.
"One high-explosive anti-armor warhead, Commander," Marcus chuckled softly. "Guaranteed to open any door on God’s green earth."
"Blow the grate," Claire commanded. "Miller, Thomas, pull the Admiral. We move in three, two, one!"
Marcus stepped out into the open mouth of the culvert, leveled the launcher at the massive iron bars blocking the subterranean pipe fifty feet away, and pulled the trigger.
The backblast illuminated the ditch in an inferno of orange flame as the rocket streaked forward, striking the center of the heavy iron grate with a concussive roar that shook the earth.
The titanium bars shattered into twisted, white-hot fragments, leaving a smoking, black maw leading straight into the belly of the mountain.
May you like
Above them, the lead Apache crested the ridge, its nose-mounted thirty-millimeter chain gun spinning up with an electric whine.
"Inside! Now!" Claire screamed, shoving Thomas and Hayes into the roaring darkness of the pipe just as the hillside behind them erupted into an inferno of explosive fire.
