Chapter 84 - The Ghost in the Cockpit
Sparks showered from the bypass module as Naomi short-circuited the external receiver. The heavy gunship lurched violently in mid-air, dropping two hundred feet in a sudden stomach-churning downdraft before the auxiliary stabilizer gyros kicked in.
Inside the cockpit, warning alarms blared like enraged hornets.
"What did you do?!" the pilot screamed over the intercom. "You just severed the uplink! The secondary dead-man circuit will detonate the fuel cells in sixty seconds!"
"Ethan, secure Vanessa into a crash harness," Naomi ordered calmly. Her fingers were flying over the exposed circuitry, splicing exposed wires with bare copper threads stripped using her combat knife. "The Council's scuttle protocol uses a five-stage logic gate. It’s the identical failsafe they taught us to defuse blindfolded at age fourteen."
"You're dismantling a military auto-destruct with a hair clasp?" Ethan asked, buckling a semi-conscious Vanessa into a troop seat along the wall before strapping himself in opposite her.
"Yes," Naomi said softly. "And fifteen seconds to spare."
Her fingers moved with the rhythmic, inhuman precision that had once made her the most lethal phantom in the syndicate's shadows. Red wire to bypass relay. Blue optical feed looped into the primary altimeter. A swift, calculated pulse of counter-voltage from her stun baton straight into the scuttle capacitor.
A harsh, electrical pop resonated through the bulkhead.
The shrill wailing of the self-destruct alarm abruptly died, replaced by the low, steady chime of standard manual controls. The cockpit door slid open with a hydraulic sigh.
The pilot, a middle-aged mercenary with bloodshot eyes and a broken nose, stared out at Naomi with trembling hands raised. "You... you really are the Ghost of Generation Nine."
"Out of the seat," Naomi commanded.
The pilot unbuckled himself without a word of protest and backed into the cargo hold with his hands visible. Naomi slid into the commander's seat, her eyes sweeping across the sprawling array of flight instruments, multifunction displays, and navigation readouts.
She grabbed the cyclic control stick, felt the heavy, responsive resistance of the dual-rotor tiltrotor, and banked the massive black aircraft hard to the southwest.
"Flight time to Pennsylvania?" Ethan called from the rear cabin.
"At maximum cruising speed with afterburners engaged on the auxiliary turbines, four hours and twenty minutes," Naomi replied, watching the digital map trace their new vector across the stormy North Atlantic.
"Will Whitmore House hold for four hours?" Ethan asked, his voice strained with anxiety. "My mother is there. The staff... Mr. Henderson has no idea what’s coming."
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Naomi looked down at the console, where an incoming encrypted signal had begun pinging from a transponder located precisely on the grounds of the Whitmore estate.
"Julian has already breached the outer perimeter," Naomi said, her knuckles whitening on the flight stick. "The siege has begun."
