Chapter 4 - Rise from the WreckageWhen consciousness returned, it tasted like copper and smoke.
Coughing violently, I unbuckled my harness and shook my head to clear the ringing in my ears. The cabin was a mangled skeleton of twisted metal and exposed wiring. Emergency alarms wailed a high-pitched, metallic symphony of death.
"Marcus!" I choked out, wiping blood from my forehead.
"I'm... I'm here, Boss!" Marcus groaned, crawling out from beneath a collapsed overhead luggage compartment. He was bleeding heavily from his shoulder, but he was moving. "Are the boys?"
My heart stopped. I spun around to the seats where I had strapped Noah and Eli. The seats had been sheared clean off their floor bolts by the G-force of the crash, sliding forward into the cockpit bulkhead.
"Noah! Eli!" I screamed, tearing away chunks of burning debris with my bare hands, ignoring the searing pain as jagged metal sliced into my palms.
"Uncle Arthur..."
A tiny, weak voice emerged from beneath a heavy leather cushion. I threw the cushion aside. Noah was trapped beneath a crumpled frame, but he had thrown his entire body over Eli, shielding his younger brother from the brunt of the impact. Eli was unconscious, breathing shallowly, but alive.
Working with adrenaline-fueled panic, Marcus and I hoisted the metal beam off them, pulling both boys out into the aisle just as a wall of fire engulfed the cockpit.
"We have to move! The fuel tanks are going to blow!" Marcus yelled, kicking open the emergency exit hatch.
Freezing wind and heavy salt spray hit us instantly. We weren't in the ocean—we had somehow crashed onto a desolate, rocky shoreline. Jagged cliffs rose sharply behind us, and furious black waves crashed against the jagged rocks below.
"Take Eli," I told Marcus, lifting the unconscious four-year-old into my security chief's arms. I scooped Noah up into my own arms, ignoring the burning agony in my ribs. "Run!"
We scrambled over the slippery rocks just as the Gulfstream erupted behind us, a massive fireball lighting up the stormy night sky, turning the churning ocean into an expanse of bloody orange.
We collapsed into the mouth of a sea cave just off the beach, panting and shivering in the freezing rain.
Noah buried his face in my chest, crying silently now, his small body shaking uncontrollably. I held him tight, staring out at the burning wreckage. Whoever had hacked our plane didn't just want us stopped—they wanted us erased.
And as I reached into my pocket to check my encrypted satellite communicator, I found it crushed to pieces. We were completely cut off from the world.
Or so I thought.
"Uncle Arthur," Noah whispered, his voice trembling as he pointed a shaking finger toward the dark, echoing depths of the cave behind us. "Someone's coming."
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I turned slowly, pulling a tactical knife from Marcus's belt. Out of the pitch-black shadows of the cave, a beam of light cut through the damp air. A man stepped forward, dressed in a tactical wet-suit, holding a silenced submachine gun.
He didn't look like an assassin. He looked like a ghost from my past.
