Chapter 33 - The Siege of Forest Park
While the Pacific Northwest prepared for a ghost flight to Seattle, the real war arrived at our gates faster than anticipated.
Dominic Corvo was not a man who relied on single-layer plans. He had predicted the possibility of an overseas counter-move. At 3:15 PM, three hours before my scheduled departure, our perimeter alert system at the West Hills estate went haywire.
The main house was completely silent.
In the library, Mrs. Gable was helping Joshua assemble a plastic model of an antique clipper ship. Emma was sitting near the large stone fireplace, her knees drawn up to her chest, sketching a pencil drawing of the Cascade mountain range.
Suddenly, every light in the mansion flickered once, twice, and died.
The hum of the central heating ceased. The grand grandfather clock in the foyer seemed to tick with deafening volume in the sudden quiet.
Two seconds later, the heavy emergency generators in the sub-basement roared to life with a deep, vibrating rumble, casting the corridors in pale, amber emergency lighting.
Mrs. Gable stood up instantly, her grandmotherly warmth vanishing, replaced by the grim survival instincts of a woman who had served my family through three gang wars. "Joshua. Emma. Under the floorboards. Now."
Emma didn't panic. She didn't scream. Her gray eyes narrowed, her jaw setting with that same terrifying resolve I had seen on Track Nine.
"It's not the city power, Mrs. Gable," Emma said calmly, setting her sketchbook on the table. "They cut the primary trunk line at the base of the hill. Listen."
Through the thick, reinforced glass of the library windows came the distant, distinct sound of high-caliber rifle fire—muffled, rhythmic, and deadly.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
"Security detail to primary residence!" Thomas’s voice screamed through the internal comms panel on the library wall. "Multiple hostiles emerging from the Forest Park tree line! They bypassed the thermal sensor grid using cryogenic cloaking blankets! They're on the lower lawn!"
A heavy ballistic impact slammed against the library's reinforced outer shutters with the force of a sledgehammer, spider-webbing the thick composite glass but failing to breach the steel core.
"Safe room Delta!" Mrs. Gable commanded, pulling Joshua by the hand.
Joshua grabbed Emma’s wrist, pulling her toward the concealed bookcase that led to the subterranean bunker. "Emma, come on!"
"Wait," Emma whispered, her eyes fixed on the surveillance monitor mounted behind the desk.
On the screen, four operators dressed in charcoal tactical gear were advancing across the rose garden, carrying specialized hydraulic breaching rams. They were moving directly toward the secondary service entrance—the one door whose electronic locking mechanism was tied to the auxiliary generator grid.
Standing alone at that doorway, pinned behind a decorative stone pillar, was Thomas. His weapon was jammed, and two red laser sights were dancing across his chest.
Emma didn't run to the bunker.
She sprinted across the library to my private desk, reached beneath the center drawer, and hit the manual override switch that I had shown her only once, six months ago, during a weekend fire drill.
"Emma, no!" Mrs. Gable cried out.
"They're going to kill Thomas!" Emma shouted.
With a heavy, mechanical hiss, the estate's high-pressure fire suppression system activated across the entire lower terrace.
Dense, blinding clouds of pressurized nitrogen gas erupted from concealed nozzles along the garden pathways, dropping the ambient temperature on the terrace to negative twenty degrees in four seconds and creating an impenetrable wall of freezing fog.
The laser sights on Thomas’s chest instantly scattered and refracted in the thick vapor.
The two lead mercenaries stumbled back, coughing and clawing at their respirators as the extreme cold shattered their night-vision optics. Thomas rolled behind the steel door, slamming the manual hydraulic deadbolt into place just as a burst of automatic fire chewed through the exterior frame.
Upstairs, the heavy oak doors of the grand foyer burst open.
I stepped into the house, my tactical trench coat soaked with rain, my Kimber .45 in my hand, flanked by six private contractors from our Seattle reserves. Marcus was right behind me, carrying a heavy tactical shotgun.
We had arrived five minutes ahead of schedule.
"Clear the halls!" Marcus roared, his men sweeping the lower corridors with ruthless precision.
Two mercenaries who had managed to breach the conservatory through a shattered glass skylight raised their weapons. I didn't give them the chance to acquire their targets.
Two controlled, double-tap rounds center-mass dropped the first operator onto the Persian rug. Marcus’s shotgun barked once, the heavy kinetic blast blowing the second man back through the shattered glass into the rose garden.
Within three minutes, the remaining hostiles on the lawn realized their element of surprise had evaporated into a meat grinder. The sounds of retreating boots and racing utility vehicles faded down the muddy slopes of Forest Park.
Silence returned to the estate, heavy and suffocating.
I sprinted down the hallway toward the library, my heart hammering in my chest like a piston. "Emma! Joshua!"
The hidden bookcase swung open.
Joshua ran out first, throwing his arms around my waist, trembling violently. But behind him walked Emma.
Her sweater was pristine. Her hands were steady. She looked at the smoke drifting down the grand hallway, looked at the spent brass casings littering the hardwood floor, and then looked directly into my eyes.
"I used the nitrogen switch, Daddy," she said quietly. "Thomas is alive."
I dropped to my knees, pulling both of my children into my chest with an intensity that bordered on painful. I buried my face in Emma’s hair, breathing in the scent of lavender and clean rain, feeling the steady, rhythmic beat of her fragile heart against my ribs.
"You saved him, Emma," I whispered, my voice breaking for the first time in ten years. "You saved him."
She pulled back slightly, her small, warm fingers gently wiping a smear of rain and gunpowder from my cheek.
"Corvo is scared of you, Daddy," she whispered with an eerie, absolute certainty. "That's why he attacked our house. He knows you're going to break him."
I looked into the eyes of this eleven-year-old girl—the child who had once hidden crusts of bread beneath a pillow, who had now commanded a tactical defense of her own home—and I knew she was right.
"Marcus," I said, rising slowly to my feet, my voice colder than the Arctic ice.
"Sir?"
"Forget the decoy flight to Seattle."
May you like
Marcus paused, racking the slide of his weapon. "What are your orders, Boss?"
"Fuel the Gulfstream for Switzerland," I said, staring out through the shattered conservatory toward the dark mountains. "And call our people in Bern. Tell them the King of Portland is coming to collect his medicine."
