Chapter 7 - The Interception
At forty-five thousand feet, the sky was a deep, bruised violet. The curvature of the Earth was faintly visible against the horizon. Below, the sprawling expanses of the Nevada test ranges looked like a miniature sandbox crisscrossed by tiny dirt trails and dried lake beds.
Claire checked her tactical display.
The *Night-Falcon-02* was slicing through the thin atmosphere at Mach 2.4. Her HUD showed a countdown timer: *TARGET INTERCEPT: 03 MINUTES, 45 SECONDS.*
Suddenly, her threat receiver let out a sharp, rhythmic chirp.
*WARNING: RADAR LOCK - HIGH BAND.*
“Ghost-One, this is Mason,” the comms crackled in her ear. “We’ve got a situation. Harlan must have made a call from his transport before OSI stripped his burner phone. Two contractor-owned F-16 Vipers just scrambled out of the Apex private strip near Groom Lake. They’re flying with civil defense transponders, but they are fully armed with live AIM-120 AMRAAMs.”
“Contractor pilots flying live missiles on domestic airspace?” Claire asked, her voice dropping into combat cadence.
“Arthur Vance owns the airspace over their compound,” Mason warned. “He’s claiming you are a hijacked military asset. They’ve been ordered to engage you before you enter the five-mile broadcast perimeter!”
Claire smiled behind her oxygen mask. “Mason, tell me this jet’s electronic warfare suite is hot.”
“Hot and hungry, Captain. You have full command of the Ghost-Weave override suite. But you can't fire live munitions on civilian contractors without Pentagon sign-off.”
“I don't need live munitions to kill a jet, Mark,” Claire replied. “I know who wrote their flight control software.”
On her radar scope, two bright red blips appeared at thirty miles, closing rapidly at combined Mach 4.
The contractor flight lead’s voice broke through on the emergency guard frequency: *“Unidentified military aircraft in restricted sector Delta-Nine, this is Apex Flight Alpha. You are in violation of private testing airspace. Alter your heading immediately to zero-eight-zero or you will be engaged with lethal force.”*
Claire keyed her mic. “Apex Flight, this is Captain Claire Bennett, United States Air Force. Stand down your weapons or prepare to eject.”
A cold laugh answered her over the radio. *“Bennett? Harlan said you were dead in Tonopah. Guess we have to finish the job ourselves. Fox Three!”*
Two smoke plumes instantly ignited on the tactical display. The lead Viper had fired an active-radar homing missile directly at her.
*MISSILE LAUNCH: THIRTY MILES.*
Claire didn't flinch. She didn't dump chaff or flare. Instead, she dropped the nose of the *Night-Falcon* into a vertical power-dive, plummeting toward the desert floor at Mach 3.0. The air screamed against the composite canopy, the G-meter climbing to negative-five before stabilizing.
The missile tracked her descent, homing in on the massive heat signature of her scramjets.
“Ghost-One, missile closure in ten seconds!” Mason screamed over the comms. “Break! Break hard!”
“Not yet,” Claire whispered.
At ten thousand feet above the canyon floor, with the missile closing to less than three miles, Claire reached up and flipped the red toggle switch labeled: *SYSTEM OVERRIDE - PULSE.*
She didn't run from the missile. She directed the *Night-Falcon’s* focused radar-array directly at the incoming AMRAAM’s guidance head and blasted it with a fifty-kilowatt burst of high-frequency microwave energy.
The missile’s digital seeker head fried instantly. The missile wobbled violently, pitched upward into dead air, and exploded harmlessly against a barren mountainside two miles away.
*“What the hell was that?!”* the contractor pilot yelled over the radio. *“My radar is completely blinded! I’ve lost all targeting!”*
Claire hauled back on the stick. The *Night-Falcon* sliced through the bottom of the canyon, pulling nine Gs of instantaneous turn. Her vision grayed out at the edges as her G-suit squeezed her legs with crushing force, forcing blood back into her brain. She leveled out at two hundred feet off the desert floor, roaring beneath the contractor’s radar envelope.
Before the two Vipers could re-acquire her visually, Claire pulled up directly behind them.
*“She’s on our six! Break, break—!”*
Claire didn't pull the trigger. She reached for the tactical datalink panel, inputting the hexadecimal code she had pulled from Dave Cooper's black box.
“You guys want to play with Apex software?” Claire whispered. “Let’s see how you like the abort code.”
She hit transmit.
The wireless handshake jumped from her nose-cone directly into the flight management computers of the two contractor F-16s.
Instantly, both Vipers’ afterburners cut out. Their digital flight controls froze in place, their rudders locking at neutral.
*“What did you do?!”* the contractor pilot screamed in terror. *“My engines flamed out! My stick is dead! I’m going down!”*
“Punch out, gentlemen,” Claire’s voice was as cold as liquid nitrogen. “Unless you want to ride it all the way to the dirt.”
Two loud bangs echoed across the radio as the contractor pilots pulled their ejection handles, their parachutes blooming against the blue sky as their multi-million-dollar fighter jets glided harmlessly into the soft sand of the salt flats.
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Claire didn't look back. Ahead of her, rising above the jagged ridge of the Black Mountains, stood the sprawling, razor-wire-ringed compound of Apex Defense Dynamics.
***
