Chapter 11 - The Man Who Was Supposed to Be Dead
The central screen flickered.
A man appeared inside a dim control room.
He was in his late fifties, with silver hair and a burn scar running from his left temple to his jaw. Behind him stood banks of monitors displaying airport cameras, maintenance records, and aircraft locations.
Martin stepped backward.
“Victor Lang.”
Ethan had heard the name before.
Victor Lang had been Samuel Hale’s business partner and the lead investigator of Project 417. According to the official report, Victor died in the same workshop explosion that killed Samuel.
But he was alive.
Victor smiled faintly.
“Hello, Martin.”
“You caused the explosion,” Martin said.
“I survived it.”
“You disappeared.”
“I adapted.”
Ethan looked at the frozen countdown.
“You killed my father.”
Victor’s expression did not change.
“Your father refused to accept reality. Airlines do not want perfect safety. They want controlled risk, predictable losses, and profitable replacement contracts.”
“You’re selling broken parts.”
“I am selling dependency.”
Victor touched a control panel.
The countdown restarted.
Thirty-seven seconds.
Thirty-six.
The manual override wheel began turning backward on its own.
Ethan grabbed it, but the force inside the mechanism was too strong.
Victor continued.
“Samuel built the mechanical override. I built a motor around it.”
Martin ordered the security officers to search the chamber for the secondary control line.
One officer found a thick cable running beneath the floor.
Ethan followed it toward the defective turbine crates.
The cable disappeared under the central row.
They pushed several crates aside and uncovered a narrow maintenance shaft.
Warm air rose from below.
The motor controlling the override was somewhere underneath them.
The countdown reached twenty-five seconds.
Ethan climbed into the shaft before anyone could stop him.
The passage was barely wide enough for his shoulders. He crawled through darkness, following the vibration of the motor.
Behind him, Martin shouted for him to return.
Ethan kept moving.
At the end of the shaft, he found a rotating gear assembly connected to the manual wheel. The motor had been fitted with an emergency braking system.
If he jammed the gears incorrectly, the shaft could crush his hand.
He removed the strongest wrench from his toolbox.
On the screen above, Victor watched through a hidden camera.
“You have your father’s courage,” he said.
Ethan positioned the wrench between two gears.
“And you made the same mistake he did.”
Ethan looked directly at the camera.
“What mistake?”
“You believed I wanted to destroy the warehouse.”
The countdown reached ten seconds.
Victor smiled.
“The explosives are not beneath aircraft 417.”
A new camera feed appeared on the warehouse screens.
It showed Flight 782 inside the main maintenance hangar.
Director Crane stood beside it, unaware that several red lights had begun flashing beneath the fuel tanks.
The sabotage had never moved from one target to another.
May you like
There were two targets.
And the second countdown had already reached five seconds.
