Chapter 32 - The Ghost on Route 11
The culvert emptied out into a roaring torrent of red Virginia clay and freezing runoff water. The icy current hit my boots like lead weights, but the biting cold only sharpened my focus.
Behind us, up on the ridge, the warm, historic sanctuary Nathan and I had fought so hard to reclaim was already engulfed in plumes of smoke. They hadn't just raided the house; they had dropped incendiary thermite to erase every trace of Chief Vance’s audio recorder and whatever evidence they thought we kept inside.
"They're burning it," Nathan muttered between ragged breaths, his eyes reflecting the distant orange glow through the rain-lashed hemlocks. "Everything we rebuilt..."
"Wood and stone can be rebuilt again," I said, clamping my hand onto his arm, pulling him deeper into the laurel thicket. "The truth can't. Vance died protecting that recording. If we let them take us, Bradley and Marcus get written off as rogue bad apples, and the Iron Trident gets their war in the Pacific."
We scrambled down through the jagged ravines, avoiding the main gravel road where the spotlights of two additional pursuit vehicles swept the tree crowns. An hour of brutal, silent descent brought us to an overgrown hunting blind off Route 11, where an old 1998 Ford F-250—unregistered, entirely mechanical, completely devoid of GPS chips or modern computer modules—sat concealed under rusted corrugated iron. Nathan had hidden it there three weeks ago as an emergency contingency.
Nathan hot-wired the ignition beneath the dashboard. The diesel engine sputtered, wheezed, and then roared to life with an unrefined, iron-throated rumble.
"Where to?" Nathan asked, throwing the gear into reverse and killing the headlights, navigating the rain-slicked dirt lane purely by instinct. "Richmond? D.C.?"
"No," I replied, opening the waterproof pouch that held Vance’s encrypted drive and my service credentials. My fingers traced the golden Navy emblem on my wallet badge. "Vance made it crystal clear. 'Don't trust anyone wearing four stars.' That means the Pentagon brass is compromised right to the top. If we go to Washington, we walk straight into an interrogation room that doesn't officially exist."
"Then where?"
"Boston Harbor," I stated coldly. "The USS *Constitution*. Vance said the master ledger—the actual manifest detailing which strike groups and black-budget carriers were fitted with Marcus’s smuggled guidance hardware—is cached inside the keel of Old Ironsides."
Nathan shot me a stunned look through the dark cabin. "The oldest commissioned warship in the United States Navy? Evelyn, that’s a national monument guarded around the clock by active-duty sailors and federal park rangers."
May you like
"Which makes it the only place on American soil where a shadow division can't send a strike team without the entire world watching," I countered. "Vance knew that. He hid the evidence in the heart of our history. We head north. And we don't stop for anything."
---
