Chapter 47 - Sub-Zero Retribution
Victoria cracked faster than a frozen window. She began babbling coordinates, encryption codes, and flight patterns between desperate gasps of freezing mountain air.
"She’s on the *Valkyrie*!" Victoria wept, her fingernails digging into the ice. "The airborne command cruiser Arthur built for the Defense Ministry three years ago! Mama had it quietly transferred to an offshore corporate registry before Arthur’s diagnosis was announced!"
Arthur's eyes widened in realization. "The Boeing 747-8 Sovereign Airborne Citadel. It has unlimited air-to-air refueling capability and stealth radar shielding. It’s an airborne fortress."
"And that’s where she has Eleanor?" I demanded, tightening my grip.
"Yes! Yes!" Victoria screamed. "Aunt Eleanor isn't dead! She was placed in a medically induced coma because her biometric voice keys are required to authorize the final nuclear-grade corporate divestment at the Geneva summit! Mama keeps her in the primary medical suite on the lower deck of the *Valkyrie*! If you kill me, Mama will pull the plug the moment she misses our scheduled check-in!"
Clara stepped up beside me, holding a military-grade tablet extracted from one of the neutralized turncoat operatives. "She’s telling the truth about the check-in, Lucas. The data burst from that surrogate was transmitting an encrypted handshake to an airborne node currently circling 48,000 feet over the Greenland Sea."
"How long do we have before the handshake expires?" I asked, rising to my feet.
"Seventeen minutes," Clara replied grimly. "If the carrier doesn't receive the authentication ping from this hangar confirming Arthur's death and your capture, the *Valkyrie* will break orbit and head into Russian-patrolled airspace. Once she crosses that border, we can't touch her without starting an international incident."
Arthur reached down and retrieved his cane from the floor, leaning on it with newfound resolve. "We don't need seventeen minutes. We have the *Ghost*."
He turned toward the dark, recessed corner of the hangar, where a massive set of interior blast doors remained sealed beneath sheets of untouched frost. He pulled an old titanium key from his inner coat pocket—an analog key that no digital hacker could ever intercept—and jammed it into the manual override box.
With a tremendous hydraulic roar, the interior blast doors rolled apart.
Behind them sat a magnificent, matte-black needle of an aircraft—an experimental supersonic interceptor, twin scramjet engines resting within a razor-sharp delta wing design, the Vance Aerospace insignia emblazoned in discreet silver foil on the vertical stabilizers.
"The *Vance Phantom-X*," Arthur said, pride resonating in his chest. "Built to chase satellites. Mach 3.8 at sea level. We can catch the *Valkyrie* before she ever sees Greenland."
I looked at Clara, then back at my father. "Can she handle a mid-air docking?"
Arthur looked at me with an audacious grin that answered every question I had ever had about where my bloodline came from. "Only if the pilot sitting in the cockpit has the nerve of a maniac."
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"Then let's go get my mother back," I said.
***
