Chapter 18 - Ambush Over the Atlantic: Falling Through Fire
The cabin plummeted into chaos. The scream of the turboprops shifted from a steady hum to a frantic, mechanical shriek as the pilot pulled the aircraft into a violent evasive dive. Emily held Sarah tightly against her chest, crying out as the sudden G-forces pinned them against the metal bulkheads.
"Brace!" Daniel roared, throwing his body over Emily and his child, gripping the cargo straps with white-knuckled desperation.
Through the small porthole, a streak of blinding white fire ripped through the black storm clouds. A long-range interception drone, launched from a private vessel operating in the international waters off the coast of Greenland, had fired an air-to-air missile directly at their tail.
The pilot managed to deploy magnesium flare countermeasures at the last fraction of a second. The missile detonated fifty yards off the port wing.
The shockwave tore the left engine completely off its mounts.
A deafening explosion ripped through the side of the aircraft, sending shrapnel tearing through the aluminum fuselage. Wind howling at three hundred miles per hour blew into the cabin, instantly dropping the temperature to twenty below zero. Decompression alarms wailed like banshees. The plane began a fatal, sickening spin toward the frozen waters of the North Atlantic.
"The hydraulic lines are severed!" the pilot screamed over the intercom. "We’re losing altitude! I can't hold her! We have three minutes before we hit the water!"
Sarah Lin was already on her feet, defying the catastrophic turbulence with supernatural composure. She dragged two military-grade tandem parachute packs from an emergency storage container.
"We jump!" Sarah yelled through the shrieking gale.
"She’s an infant!" Emily screamed back, terror finally cracking her voice. "Sarah won't survive the freezing air!"
"She won't survive an eight-thousand-foot crash into the ocean either!" Sarah Lin shouted, clipping the first harness securely around Daniel and Emily, locking them together with heavy steel carabiners. "There is an Icelandic fishing trawler five miles south of our projected drop zone! It’s owned by Lin Foundation allies! If we hit the water within their radar sweep, we live! If not, we drown!"
Daniel looked into Emily’s terrified eyes. "Look at me, Em! Look at me! Hold Sarah tight inside your survival suit! Cover her face with the thermal respirator!"
Emily wept, but her hands moved with desperate speed, sealing the infant inside the insulated, heated storm-suit, anchoring Sarah against her chest beneath the heavy straps.
Daniel kicked the manual release lever on the rear cargo ramp.
The hydraulic ramp groaned, then blew open into the freezing void. Below them lay an unimaginable nightmare: an endless, churning black ocean whipped into forty-foot waves, illuminated only by the burning engine wreckage trailing from their doomed aircraft.
"Jump! Now!" Sarah Lin commanded.
With a final breath of freezing, thin air, Daniel held Emily and his daughter tightly in his arms and leaped backward into the roaring abyss.
The sensation of falling was absolute terror. The sky spun violently—black clouds, burning metal, roaring wind. Daniel fought against the atmospheric pressure, extending his arms to stabilize their descent as the doomed cargo plane spiraled downward and struck the Atlantic below in a monumental explosion of fire and white foam.
At four thousand feet, Daniel pulled the primary deployment cord.
The parachute canopy snapped open with a violent, spine-crushing jolt. For a brief second, they hung suspended between the stormy heavens and the raging sea. Below them, through the sheets of sleet, Daniel saw it: the pale yellow searchlight of a single maritime trawler cutting through the mountainous waves.
They were going to hit the water. But as they drifted toward the freezing ocean, Daniel looked up at the secondary parachute canopy carrying Sarah Lin.
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Hovering five hundred feet above Sarah was not a rescue craft. It was a high-speed black helicopter, its spotlights trained directly on the old woman. A sniper leaned out of the helicopter door.
A single suppressed shot echoed over the roar of the ocean.
