Chapter 10 - The Hidden Data Packet and the Next Target on the Horizon
Ten miles away from Pueblo Memorial Airport, huddled inside the dimly lit booth of a roadside diner off Interstate 25, I slid a small, encrypted micro-SD card out of the lining of my boot and plugged it directly into a burner laptop.
The screen flickered to life, illuminating my face with the cold blue glow of classified architectural schematics.
It was the complete digital manifest of the Vanguard sabotage operation—every maintenance log, every corrupted electrical control unit serial number, and every high-ranking Pentagon official who had signed off on the hit.
My phone buzzed softly against the laminate tabletop.
An incoming encrypted text message from an unknown sender in Washington, D.C.
It contained only two lines of text:
Target confirmed neutralised in Denver.
Next deployment scheduled for Chicago O'Hare.
Call sign Meridian is still active.
I stared at the glowing words for three long seconds, feeling the old adrenaline surge back through my veins with terrifying clarity.
They thought they had grounded me permanently three years ago.
They thought a sabotaged commercial flight over the Rockies would erase my existence once and for all.
Instead, they had just handed me the keys to the entire conspiracy.
I closed the laptop, slipped the micro-SD card back into my pocket, pulled the hood of my jacket down over my forehead, and walked out into the freezing Colorado night to catch the earliest flight north.
The war was only just beginning.CHAPTER 11 — The Red-Eye to Chicago: Uncovering the Next Vanguard Target
The predawn air in Denver was biting and cold, carrying the sharp scent of melting frost off the tarmac as I boarded a routine commercial red-eye bound for Chicago O'Hare International Airport.
My identity was once again buried beneath layers of forged civilian credentials, my face hidden beneath the brim of a wool cap and the collar of a heavy winter coat.
The micro-SD card containing Director Vance’s entire master sabotage manifest rested securely against my collarbone inside a waterproof pouch, burning against my skin like a digital coal.
As the Boeing 777 leveled off at thirty-six thousand feet over the sprawling flatlands of Nebraska, I opened my encrypted burner laptop on the tray table and began decrypting the deeper data layers hidden beneath the surface maintenance files.
What I found froze the blood in my veins.
The Pueblo Memorial incident involving Frontier Flight 781 had never been a standalone hit designed solely to eliminate me; it was merely a live-fire operational test for a much larger, catastrophic corporate conspiracy code-named Project Phoenix.
According to the encrypted memos authored by Vanguard Aerospace Defense executives, Project Phoenix was designed to systematically sabotage three separate commercial wide-body airliners over major metropolitan transit corridors within a single forty-eight-hour window.
The objective?
To manufacture a nationwide aviation safety crisis so severe that the federal government would be forced to panic-outsource the entirety of the nation's air traffic control and military flight software architecture to private defense contractors like Vanguard under emergency emergency-procurement statutes.
And the next scheduled target on their lethal deployment list wasn't a random commuter flight.
It was United Continental Flight 409—a transcontinental red-eye carrying a congressional subcommittee delegation returning from a classified defense appropriations hearing in Washington, D.C.
The flight was scheduled to depart O'Hare at sunrise, carrying twenty-four high-ranking lawmakers and federal oversight officials who had recently threatened to audit Vanguard’s bloated multi-billion-dollar federal defense subsidies.
If Flight 409 suffered a catastrophic mid-air electrical and fuel system failure over Lake Michigan, nobody would ever suspect a corporate assassination plot.
The world would simply mourn a tragic, unexplainable mechanical accident caused by aging legacy avionics.
I looked at my watch.
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We were thirty minutes away from landing in Chicago.
If I didn't reach O'Hare's secure maintenance hangars before Flight 409's pre-flight checklist began, an entire congressional committee would die in a ball of fire over the Great Lakes.
