Chapter 167 - The Sister's Final Gambit
The wind on the elevated flight deck was a physical wall of freezing fury. At four hundred feet above the raging ocean, the storm whipped across the narrow landing pad with hundred-mile-per-hour gusts, making the entire steel tower sway like a metronome over an open grave.
The sleek, matte-black Sikorsky S-76 was tied down with quick-release mooring lines, its twin turboshaft engines screaming at eighty percent power, the massive main rotor blades slicing through the gale in an invisible, lethal blur of carbon fiber.
Through the rain-streaked perspex of the cockpit windshield, I could see Clara.
She had strapped herself into the pilot’s seat, her hands trembling violently on the collective and cyclic sticks as she ran through the emergency startup sequence. Beside her on the co-pilot’s seat sat the heavy waterproof Pelican case containing the bearer bonds, the encrypted satellite drives, and the forged sovereign deed to Whispering Pines.
Even now, with the earth shaking beneath her and her father dead at the bottom of the moonpool, the poison of greed had completely hollowed out her soul. She was willing to leave her brother, her family, and the entire Pacific coastline to drown, so long as she escaped with the paper wealth of the syndicate.
Bennett and I breached the flight deck hatch fifty feet away.
The backwash from the rotor blades hit us like a sledgehammer, reeking of burned kerosene and sea salt.
Clara looked through the cockpit window and saw me.
Her face contorted into a mask of pure, unadulterated hatred. She didn't hesitate. She didn't wait for the engine temperatures to stabilize. She reached out, slammed the throttle levers to full emergency war power, and hauled up on the collective.
The Sikorsky’s landing gear left the nonskid deck with a violent, asymmetric jerk. The helicopter drifted sideways, fighting the ferocious crosswinds, its tail rotor hovering barely three feet above the perimeter safety netting.
"She doesn't know how to handle high-wind hovering in an S-76!" Bennett shouted over the roar of the engines. "She’s going to roll the airframe!"
"She’s not rolling it anywhere!" I yelled.
I didn't draw my sidearm. A stray bullet into the fuel bladder could detonate the pad and kill us all.
Instead, I sprinted across the slick deck toward the secondary mooring station. One of the heavy Kevlar tie-down cables was still attached to the starboard landing strut, its lower end anchored to a high-capacity hydraulic tension winch on the deck floor. Clara had tripped the pilot-side emergency releases, but she had failed to verify the starboard deck cleat in her panic.
The helicopter surged upward, climbing ten feet into the air. The Kevlar cable snapped taut with the sound of a whip cracking.
The sudden, asymmetric tension jerked the Sikorsky violently to the right. The fuselage banked forty-five degrees, the tips of the main rotor blades missing the steel safety railing by less than eighteen inches, sending a blinding spray of sparks across the pad as they chewed through an aluminum perimeter antenna.
Inside the cockpit, Clara shrieked, fighting the controls, but she lacked the tactical flight hours to handle an out-of-trim hover in hurricane-force shear winds.
I reached the deck winch, grabbed the manual ratcheting lever, and locked the pawl down into the gear teeth. The cable held fast, pinning the multi-million-dollar aircraft to the dying rig like a harpooned whale.
"Bennett! Clear the rotor arc!" I roared.
I unslung my tactical breaching shotgun, stepped directly beneath the banking belly of the aircraft, and leveled the barrel at the exposed hydraulic lines of the starboard landing gear actuator.
*BOOM!*
The heavy slug severed the hydraulic cylinder. The landing strut collapsed inward, causing the Kevlar cable to wrap violently around the lower fuselage, jamming the tail-rotor control linkages running along the bottom tail boom.
The Sikorsky spun violently ninety degrees, losing all anti-torque authority.
Clara lost control completely. The helicopter dropped back toward the flight deck, its skids slamming down onto the steel grating with bone-shattering force. The port landing gear sheared off entirely, the aircraft tipping onto its side as the spinning main rotor blades struck the diamond-plate deck.
The sound was apocalyptic.
Carbon-fiber blades shattered into thousands of supersonic shrapnel fragments, tearing through the flight deck, shredding the safety netting, and ripping into the upper derrick structure. The engine turbines screamed in agony as the drive shaft snapped, belching black smoke and flames into the freezing rain before grinding to a catastrophic halt.
Silence—broken only by the howling storm and the creaking of the sinking rig—descended over the pad.
I moved through the drifting smoke, Bennett right beside me, our weapons up, clearing the shattered perimeter.
The helicopter lay on its side, the cockpit perspex spiderwebbed and smeared with soot. Fuel was pouring from the ruptured belly tank, washing across the steel deck toward the open exhaust manifold.
We had less than sixty seconds before the whole pad went up in a fireball.
I reached the shattered cockpit door, grabbed the warped frame with both hands, and ripped it outward.
Clara was suspended in her five-point harness, dazed, blood streaming down her forehead from a deep cut above her brow. The Pelican case had broken open during the crash; thousands of sheets of bearer bonds and the forged parchment deed of Whispering Pines were blowing across the cockpit, sticking to her blood-soaked flight suit like grotesque, paper parasites.
She blinked through the red haze, looking up at me as I drew my knife and sliced through her harness straps.
"Marcus..." she whispered, her voice weak, stripped of all arrogance, sounding for a split second like the little sister who used to ask me for lunch money before I shipped off to Great Lakes. "Help me... don't leave me here..."
I grabbed her by the shoulder straps of her survival vest and dragged her out of the crushed cockpit, hauling her across the shattered glass and aviation fuel onto the flight deck.
"You spent your whole life thinking family was something you could trade, exploit, and discard, Clara," I said, looking down at her as Bennett scooped up the encrypted master hard drive that had rolled out of the cabin. "You were wrong."
I pointed toward the ocean.
May you like
"And now, you’re going to face the justice you thought you could outrun."
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