Chapter 10 - The Road to the Black Hills
The armored Ford Bronco tore out of the suburban driveway, its heavy-duty tires throwing up gravel and shards of safety glass as it surged into the darkened night. The glowing embers of the police cruiser faded rapidly in the rearview mirror, swallowed by the winding ribbon of asphalt leading away from civilization and deep into the rugged wilderness of the Black Hills.
Inside the cab, the dashboard glowed with the amber light of analog dials. Arthur sat in the driver's seat, his hands resting firmly on the reinforced steering wheel. His face was illuminated by the faint glow of a ruggedized GPS unit mounted on the dash, its blinking red cursor tracing a relentless path toward a set of coordinates that hadn’t existed on any official map since nineteen-eighty-four.
He glanced briefly toward the passenger seat, where the heavy canvas duffel bag and the black-and-white photograph rested side by side.
The satellite phone mounted on the center console crackled to life, breaking the rhythmic hum of the heavy-duty engine.
"You're making good time, Arthur," the disguised, synthesized voice echoed through the cabin speakers. "Though I must admit, I expected you to put up more of a fight before abandoning your little suburban paradise."
Arthur didn't take his eyes off the winding mountain road ahead. The headlights cut sharp beams through the dense pine forest, catching the occasional flash of reflective animal eyes in the brush.
"Where is the boy?" Arthur demanded, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that vibrated through the cab.
"Toby is resting comfortably," the voice replied smoothly. "He has no idea that his beloved grandfather is a decorated war criminal who left a trail of bodies from Da Nang to Berlin. Ignorance is such a peaceful blanket, isn't it?"
Arthur’s grip on the steering wheel tightened until his knuckles turned ghostly white. "If you touch a single hair on his head, I will pull you out of that mask and feed you your own teeth."
A soft, synthesized chuckle echoed from the speakers. "Such fierce loyalty for a child you've known for seven years, yet you traded your own flesh and blood for a medal and a pension forty years ago. How poetic that it ends where it all began—at Sector Four."
The line clicked dead.
Arthur’s foot pressed harder down on the accelerator. The Bronco roared, its supercharged engine whining as it climbed the steep incline of the mountain pass. The temperature dropped rapidly, frost beginning to feather along the edges of the reinforced windshield.
Sector Four. The words sent a cold shiver down even Arthur’s hardened spine. It was the subterranean black-site training facility carved deep into the granite core of the Black Hills—a place where the government trained operatives to be ghosts, and where Arthur had allegedly executed his own eldest son for treason four decades ago.
Suddenly, the GPS unit on the dash flickered, the screen turning entirely black before flashing a single word in bold red letters: AMBUSH.
Without a fraction of a second to spare, Arthur hauled the steering wheel hard to the left just as a blinding flash of white-hot light erupted across the highway twenty yards ahead.
BOOM.
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A massive landslide of rock and pine logs crashed down from the cliffside, slamming directly onto the asphalt where the Bronco would have been a second earlier, blocking the entire mountain pass with a wall of immovable debris.
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