“Halden,” Reed growled. He keyed his radio. “Tactical Team Alpha, converge on Building 42 immediately. Suspect is armed and highly dangerous. Shoot to neutralize if necessary.”
In the air, the situation was rapidly deteriorating. The saboteur, Halden, must have realized something was wrong. The helicopter's telemetry wasn't matching the physical environment perfectly because of the dummy device's slight latency. In a panic, Halden sent a hard-override command.
Viper One violently pitched forward, nose diving toward the jagged canyon walls at an extreme angle.
“Colonel, he’s trying to crash you!” Emily screamed over the radio. “Pull the switch! Pull it now!”
Kane didn't hesitate. He let go of the locked cyclic stick, reached down under his seat, and felt the rough texture of the red paracord. He gripped the heavy steel lever and yanked it upward with every ounce of strength he possessed.
A loud, metallic THWACK echoed through the cockpit.
Instantly, alarms erupted. The main computer, suddenly regaining contact with the severed servos, registered massive hydraulic failures and pressure anomalies. The cyclic stick went completely limp in Kane's hands, then violently snapped back to its physical center.
Kane grabbed the controls, groaning as the G-forces slammed him back into his seat. The helicopter was plummeting, the ground rushing up to meet him in a terrifying blur of brown and grey rock. He pulled back hard on the cyclic, fighting the sluggish response of the damaged hydraulics. The rotors groaned, biting into the air, fighting gravity.
With less than a hundred feet to spare, the nose pulled up. The tail rotor clipped the top branches of a scraggly desert pine, sending a shudder through the airframe, but the helicopter leveled out, skimming just above the canyon floor.
“Viper One to Overlord,” Kane panted, his chest heaving, sweat pouring down his face. “Manual control restored. The bird is wounded, but we are flying. Returning to base.”
In the command van, Emily collapsed back into her chair, burying her face in her hands, shaking uncontrollably. Major Reed put a hand on her shoulder. “Good work, Specialist. Now let’s go get our rat.”
Chapter 6: Unmasking the Saboteur
Building 42 was a non-descript modular structure on the outer edge of the base, housing civilian contractors. By the time Major Reed and the heavily armed Tactical Team Alpha arrived, the door had been kicked in.
They found Greg Halden frantically trying to smash his computer equipment with a fire extinguisher. He was a pale, thin man with receding hair, wildly out of place among the heavily armed soldiers pointing assault rifles at his chest.
“Get down on the ground! Do it now!” the team leader roared.
Halden dropped the extinguisher and fell to his knees, raising his hands. On the desk in front of him, a highly modified military field laptop was still smoking, its screen shattered, but a complex directional antenna was mounted in the window, aimed squarely in the direction of the desert canyons.
Major Reed stepped into the room, his face a mask of cold fury. He looked at the shattered equipment and then down at the cowering man.
"Greg Halden," Reed said softly. "You're a long way from the IT helpdesk."
Halden was sweating profusely, his eyes darting around the room. "I want a lawyer. I have immunity."
"Immunity from whom?" Reed asked, signaling his men to cuff him. "The foreign intelligence service paying you offshore? Or the domestic terror cell that wanted an Apache gunship? The moment you tried to kill Colonel Kane, any protection you thought you had evaporated."
Later that evening, in the stark, concrete interrogation room, the full scope of the plot unraveled. Halden wasn't a master spy; he was a desperate man drowning in gambling debts. A shadowy online contact had offered him a way out: a deposit of two million dollars into a cryptocurrency wallet in exchange for planting a device on the base's newest Apache and providing network access.
Halden had used his IT credentials to manipulate the hangar camera reboots. He had used his clearance to study the Apache's schematics and construct the remote bypass according to the blueprints his handlers provided. He had wrapped the tape left-handed because he was, in fact, left-handed—a detail he never thought would matter.
"Who were your handlers?" Kane demanded, standing in the corner of the interrogation room, his flight suit traded for a crisp dress uniform.
"I don't know!" Halden sobbed. "They only communicated through encrypted dark-web forums. They wanted the targeting pod. They were supposed to fly it to a dry lake bed a hundred miles south where a transport plane was waiting. When the helicopter didn't land yesterday, they threatened to kill my family. I had to try again today. But the signal... it lagged. I panicked. I just wanted to crash it so they couldn't have it either, so I could say it was an accident."