ROOOOAR.
The Black Hawk lifted vertically into the howling snowstorm, its three-bladed wheels clearing the airport radar towers by thirty feet, pivoting ninety degrees south at one hundred and sixty knots toward the Calumet River channel!
23:51 CST.
The squall over the Calumet River shipping slips had turned into a blinding, horizontal ice storm—a freezing gale that slickened the industrial concrete apron and rusted rail spurs along the deep-water testing berths of Parcel Ten // The Calumet River Command Aperture.
Ahead of us, rising against the black night sky, blazed the lower boundary of the Mercer Sovereign Marine Reserve—the historic eighty-acre maritime tract surveyed by Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer Senior eighty years ago.
Tonight, however, the sovereign facility was under private military siege.
The heavy steel security gates of Slip Ten had been ripped clean off their reinforced concrete pillars by industrial towing winches.
Parked across the container staging apron were three heavy commercial crane trucks and two specialized tracked core-drilling rigs bearing the private corporate crest of Apex Strategic Demolition // Vaduz, Liechtenstein!
