Through the passenger windows, pinning the Boeing 777 in fifty thousand lumens of blinding white daylight, stood four armored tactical vehicles flanked by two massive Sikorsky MH-60M Black Hawk helicopters of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Night Stalkers), their twin General Electric turboshaft engines screaming at full military war-emergency thrust!
WHOP-WHOP-WHOP-WHOP.
The forward left boarding door of the aircraft was not opened by a gate bridge.
It was thrown outward by the senior purser, and the heavy pneumatic emergency stairs deployed down to the snow-covered tarmac with a violent, metallic crash!
CLANG.
Standing at the bottom of the gantry stairs, his four solid-silver cast stars blazing beneath the halogen searchlights, wearing his full Service Dress Blue uniform of midnight-blue wool despite the driving blizzard…
Was Vice Admiral David Mercer.
Beside him stood United States Attorney Marcus Cooper, holding an unsealed, four-hundred-page federal grand jury indictment stamped with the raised red-wax dry seal of the DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY // SPECIAL ADMIRALTY CHANCERY.
