Chapter 38 - The Descent of Vengeance
"Down!" Julian roared, shoving Arthur Vance flat against the cold slate while returning fire down into the courtyard with controlled, three-round bursts.
A bullet caught Vance in the fleshy part of his shoulder. The billionaire screamed—a high, pathetic wail of pure agony—and began to thrash violently, his shoes slipping over the wet slate.
"Stop moving, you idiot!" I shouted, grabbing him by the lapels of his coat and hauling him toward the iron ladder of the eastern tower. "If you fall, you take us with you!"
Sarah was already at the ladder, her small frame moving with desperate, agile speed. She held the red ledger clamped tightly under her arm, descending the steel rungs that clung to the vertical granite wall of the tower.
"Clara, hurry!" Sarah yelled from twenty feet below. "The helipad pilot is starting the main rotors!"
Across the quarry basin, the helicopter's massive composite blades began to slowly rotate, gathering speed with a rhythmic *whup-whup-whup* that echoed off the sheer granite cliffs. The pilot had heard the gunfire and was preparing to lift off without his passenger.
Julian fired the last round from his carbine, dropping an operative who was aiming an RPG from the bed of a pickup truck below. The RPG discharged wildly, the rocket screaming across the courtyard and detonating against the empty stable block in a massive fireball of burning timber and red brick.
"Move, Clara! Go!" Julian yelled, grabbing Vance by his belt and tossing him unceremoniously onto the ladder platform before swinging his own body over the parapet.
I scrambled down the rungs, my palms burning from the cold iron, the wind whipping my hair into my eyes. Every muscle in my body ached with a deep, bone-weary exhaustion, but the sight of Sarah reaching the quarry gravel below fueled a final surge of adrenaline.
We hit the crushed granite floor of the quarry just as a tactical vehicle rounded the access road, its heavy steel bumper smashing through the chain-link perimeter fence.
"To the pad!" Julian shouted, drawing his sidearm and sprinting toward the concrete platform where the helicopter was already hovering six inches off the ground, kicking up a blinding cyclone of dust, dead leaves, and gravel.
The pilot saw us coming—specifically, he saw Julian's gun aimed directly through the cockpit canopy. The pilot instantly threw up both hands, cutting the collective pitch and letting the skids slam back down onto the concrete.
Julian tore open the sliding cabin door, throwing Arthur Vance inside like a sack of grain. "Sarah, inside! Clara, move!"
Sarah tumbled into the leather-trimmed cabin, clutching the ledger. I jumped in right behind her, grabbing the overhead handhold just as the tactical vehicle came skidding to a halt fifty yards away.
Three mercenaries burst from the SUV, leveling their rifles at our fuselage.
Julian didn't climb inside immediately. He stood on the landing skid, reached into the cockpit, grabbed the pilot's headset, and pressed the muzzle of his pistol against the side of the man's flight helmet.
"Lift off right now, or your skull decorates this windshield!" Julian roared over the deafening scream of the turbine engines.
The pilot jammed the throttle forward and yanked the collective up.
The helicopter surged violently into the air just as a burst of automatic gunfire peppered the belly of the aircraft, the rounds pinging against the Kevlar-reinforced floorplates beneath our feet.
The machine tilted steeply to the left, banking hard over the jagged granite lip of the quarry, clearing the treetops by less than fifteen feet.
Below us, High Ridge was burning.
The thermite charges had ignited the eastern wing. Plumes of black, oily smoke billowed from the roof where we had stood only moments before, mingling with the gray mist of dawn. The grand house of the Sterling family, the monument of my childhood and the tomb of my mother's sanity, was being consumed by fire.
Sarah sat beside me on the cabin floor, her face pale, staring out through the circular window at the blazing estate below.
"It's gone," she whispered, her voice breaking. "Everything Eleanor protected... everything she saved for us... it's all burning."
I reached over and took her trembling hand, intertwining my fingers with hers. With my other hand, I pressed down on the red leather cover of Victoria's ledger.
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"No, Sarah," I said, my voice steady, tears finally cutting through the soot on my face. "High Ridge was just stone and timber. The Sterling blood isn't in those walls. It's in us. And for the first time in twenty-six years... we have the truth."
***
