Chapter 22 - Blood and Radar
The rain lashed against the fuselage of the black Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk as it cut through the gale-force turbulence over the Tyrrhenian Sea. Inside the pressurized cabin, red tactical lights bathed the interior in a sinister glow.
Adrien stood over a glowing tactical holotable, surrounded by four of his deadliest lieutenants. Maps of the Dinaric Alps shifted beneath his fingers, displaying heat maps, topographic elevations, and intercepted radio signals.
Across the cabin sat a man tied to a steel support pillar. It was Julian Vane, the traitorous dockmaster who had facilitated the sea-lane breach at Adrien’s villa. His face was swollen to twice its size, blood dripping from his split lips onto his torn designer shirt.
Elena sat on a bench opposite him. She wasn't watching the monitors. She was cleaning the firing pin of a submachine gun, her fingers methodical, terrifyingly calm.
"Julian," Adrien said, not looking up from the map. "You’ve known my family for twenty years. My father spared your brother from the concrete mixers in Palermo. Is this how you repay the Hudson name?"
"I... I had no choice, Adrien," Julian sputtered, spitting a mixture of phlegm and teeth onto the grated metal floor. "Vanessa... she has people in London. She had my daughter held at gunpoint in her dorm room. She said if I didn't cut the shore sensors for twelve minutes, they’d send me her fingers in an envelope!"
"Your daughter is safe," Elena spoke up. Her voice was chillingly soft.
Julian’s eyes snapped to her. "What?"
Elena didn't look up from her weapon. "Twenty minutes ago, Adrien’s London cell breached the flat in Kensington. The two men holding your daughter were executed. She is currently sitting in a private suite at the Dorchester under twenty-four-hour guard. Safe. Unharmed."
Julian let out a ragged, disbelieving sob. "Thank God... thank God..."
"Don't thank God yet, Julian," Elena murmured, finally lifting her gaze. Her green eyes were bottomless pools of obsidian coldness. "You bought your daughter’s life with mine. And worse, you traded her safety for my baby girl."
Elena stood up, walking toward the bound man. The elite mercenaries in the cabin looked away, instinctively knowing better than to step between an enraged mother and her prey.
She pulled a serrated combat knife from her tactical belt, pressing the tip directly against Julian’s left kneecap.
"Where is the secondary landing strip?" Elena asked.
"I don't know! I swear to you, I only cleared the water passage—"
Elena didn't hesitate. She drove the blade half an inch into the joint.
Julian shrieked, an ear-splitting howl of agony that was swallowed by the roar of the twin turbine engines overhead. He bucked against the steel chains, veins bulging in his neck.
"Elena," Adrien murmured, his hand gently settling on her shoulder. Not to stop her out of mercy, but out of precision. "The cartilage will dull the blade. Let me."
"I asked a question, Julian," Elena said, ignoring her husband, her hand steady on the hilt, twisting it a millimeter deeper. "The strip. Now."
"Podgorica!" Julian screamed, tears and mucus streaming down his face. "An abandoned Soviet radar facility outside Nikšić! She bought the mountain bunker three years ago! There’s an underground hangar! She has fifty men from the Serbian paramilitary front! Please... please, pull it out!"
Elena yanked the knife free and wiped the red blade on Julian’s sleeve. She turned to Adrien. "Nikšić. Is it on your grid?"
Adrien tapped the console. A three-dimensional scan of a sprawling, Cold War-era subterranean facility appeared in glowing green wireframe. It sat perched atop a razor-sharp ridge in the mountains of Montenegro, surrounded by sheer granite drops and dense pine forests.
"It’s heavily fortified," Adrien said, his tactical mind assessing the kill zones. "Anti-air batteries on the north rim. Thermal cameras covering the perimeter. An assault from the sky will be suicide. We’ll be shot down before we clear the ridge."
"Then we don't drop from the sky," Elena said, her eyes burning into the screen. "We go through the mountain."
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Adrien looked at his wife, seeing the ruthless fire in her soul, and felt a surge of lethal pride. "Get the wingsuits ready," he ordered the team. "We drop five miles out, below their radar ceiling. We take the mountain by foot."
***
