Chapter 82 - Ascent on a Thread of Steel
The titanium piton hammered into the hydraulic assembly of the gunship's port landing gear with a dull *thunk*, the magnetized prongs deploying instantly and locking around the strut. Naomi felt the high-tensile carbon cable snap taut with violent force, nearly jerking her arm from its socket as the aircraft banked against a brutal gust of Arctic wind.
"Ethan! Take the tether!" Naomi shouted.
Ethan didn't hesitate. Despite his bruised ribs and bleeding temple, he lunged forward, clipping his survival harness to the primary ring on Naomi’s harness. He reached down with his free hand, snagging Vanessa by the scruff of her collar.
"No! No, I can't climb that! I have vertigo!" Vanessa wailed, flailing against the howling blizzard.
"Then stay here and drown in the Arctic Ocean," Ethan barked, his aristocratic composure entirely replaced by the raw survival instinct he had forged since Naomi first shattered his naive world in Philadelphia. He shoved the auxiliary carabiner into Vanessa’s safety loop and locked the gate. "Hold on to my belt and shut your mouth!"
Naomi engaged the motorized ascender. The tiny German-engineered motor screamed under the triple load, but the gears held. With a sudden upward jolt, their feet left the disintegrating floor of the Svalbard vault just as the entire lower sector collapsed.
Beneath them, millions of tons of steel, cryo-fluid, and secret history plunged into the black Atlantic surf, swallowed by foaming waves and crushing ice blocks. The draft sucked at their legs, trying to drag them down into the vortex, but the ascender whined furiously, dragging them upward toward the black belly of the aircraft.
A crewman in pressurized black tactical gear appeared in the gunship's open bay door, raising an assault rifle. He spotted the cable vibrating against the landing gear and leaned out to sever it with a thermal torch.
"Not today," Naomi muttered through clenched teeth.
She drew her silenced SIG Sauer from its tactical holster, leveled it one-handed while hanging three hundred feet above an icy abyss, and fired two precise rounds upward through the snowstorm. Both bullets found the slit between the operative's tactical helmet and ballistic collar. The man stiffened, dropped the torch into the dark, and tumbled backward onto the cargo bay floor.
Ten seconds later, Naomi hauled herself over the lip of the ramp, rolling smoothly into the pressurized, red-lit hold of the gunship.
Two more Apex Council security operatives were already pivoting from the primary console, their submachine guns coming up to eliminate the intruder. But Naomi was already inside their reaction radius. She sprang off the deck like a coiled spring, ducking under the first spray of 9mm rounds, sweeping the legs out from under the closest guard, and using his falling body as a human shield against the second.
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The transition from a maid dusting Whitmore crystal to a ghost operative neutralizing an airborne squad took less than four seconds. A shattered windpipe, a dislocated shoulder, and a concussive strike to the temple later, both operatives lay motionless on the ribbed aluminum deck.
Naomi turned back to the ramp controls, hitting the hydraulic toggle to winch Ethan and a weeping, frozen Vanessa inside before sealing the pressure door against the storm.
