Chapter 23 The Canyon #2
The S-curve appears ahead—the canyon doglegging hard left, then immediately right, like something drew it drunk. The walls at the turns tighten to seventy feet. With our rotor diameter and turbulence buffers, that gives me maybe twenty feet of error per side.
On a straightaway, that’s nothing.
On a high-speed turn with crosswinds, that’s everything.
“First turn in five—four—three …”
I bank left.
The cyclic moves. The collective adjusts to maintain altitude in the turn. The canyon wall rushes toward us on the port side, stone filling the window, filling the world …
We slide through the gap.
“Contact left, fourteen feet,” Ariel calls.
The wind shear hits at the apex.
Forty knots my ass—this gust is pushing fifty-five, maybe sixty, and it comes from above like a fist. The bird lurches starboard. The right-side rotor clearance collapses—twenty feet, fifteen, ten—
I slam the anti-torque pedals, counteracting the yaw before it can spin us into the wall. The cyclic tilts against the gust. For one eternal heartbeat, we’re flying sideways, momentum carrying us toward stone while I fight physics with nothing but my hands and the aircraft’s screaming protests.
“Six feet,” Ariel says.
The turbine whine becomes a shriek.
“Four feet.”
My molars could powder diamonds.
“Three feet. Holding.”
The gust passes. The bird stabilizes. We clear the wall with thirty-seven inches of space.
Thirty-seven inches. Less than the width of my shoulders.
“Second turn in three.”
“Copy.”
The right turn is worse. The wind is on our nose now, hammering the tail rotor and trying to spin us like a top. I fight it—constant adjustments, pressure on the pedals, reading the air like Sarah reads intelligence reports.
The walls blur past. I don’t blink.
We clear the turn with two feet to spare.
“S-curve complete,” Ariel says. “Canyon widens to one-twenty. Point-six miles to the dam.”
Point-six miles. Less than sixty seconds of flying. We’re going to make it.
Above us, the drone swarm spreads along the rim, tracking but impotent. They’ve learned not to descend—three more tried while we were threading the choke point, and three more became debris on the canyon floor.
But Phoenix isn’t finished.
The SAMs start launching.
A stuttering roar precedes them—somewhere ahead, multiple launches, missiles streaking across the canyon mouth on trajectories that shouldn’t work.
They can’t angle down to hit us—their acquisition systems need a target above the horizon, and we’re twelve degrees below it—but Phoenix is firing anyway.
“Missiles incoming—impact on walls!”
The first one hits the canyon rim fifty feet above us. Stone explodes outward. Rocks the size of refrigerators break loose from the cliff face and tumble toward the floor.
Phoenix can’t shoot us directly.
So it’s trying to bring the canyon down on our heads.
“Debris! Debris! Debris!”
Ariel’s warning is unnecessary. I’m already moving.
The collective drops—altitude bleeding from forty feet to thirty as I dive under a cascade of falling stone. A boulder the size of a Volkswagen tumbles past the port side, close enough that its wind wake buffets our tail. Dust fills the air, turning visibility to shit.
I’m flying blind.
Instruments. Instinct. The feel of the air against the fuselage and the subtle changes in rotor acoustics that tell me where the walls are.
“Twenty meters, eleven o’clock.”
A rock shelf looms out of the dust—a jutting tooth of stone that would have taken off our rotor. The collective drops again. We duck under it, my helmet nearly scraping the ceiling of our own cockpit from the g-forces.
Another missile impact. More debris. The canyon has become a shooting gallery.
“Ghost, status,” I bark into comms.
“Intact. Minor debris strikes.” A pause. “Get us to that goddamn dam, Torque.”
“Working on it.”
The dust clears in patches. Through one gap, it appears.
Ghostwater Dam.
It rises from the canyon like a monument to paranoid genius—four hundred feet of concrete and steel built into the living rock, a Cold War relic repurposed for something worse.
The control tower sits halfway up the face, a tumor of glass and metal accessible only by maintenance stairs that climb the exterior.
At the base, barely visible through the settling debris, is our insertion point: a service door leading into the dam’s guts.
“Visual on target,” I announce. “One hundred feet.”
“Copy.” Ghost’s voice. “Server team ready.”
“Tower team ready.” Thorne.
And then, on a private channel, quieter than the rest: “Ready.”
Sarah’s voice. Steady. Certain.
I don’t answer. Don’t need to.
The canyon opens into the dam’s staging area—a natural amphitheater carved by floods that no longer flow.
The drone swarm fans out across the sky above us, forty-plus units held at bay by the canyon walls that still bracket our flanks.
The SAMs go silent. They’ve realized what Phoenix has calculated:
We’re too low. Too fast. Too committed.
We’re going to land.
“Flare in three,” I announce. “Brace.”
The collective rises. The nose pitches up. Airspeed bleeds off in a controlled dive toward the canyon floor, our skids reaching for the patch of flat stone that serves as our LZ.
For one moment, everything goes still.
No turbulence. No debris. No missiles. Just the settling dust, the whisper of rotors spinning down, and the knowledge that we just did the impossible.
The skids touch ground.
“Contact.”
The team moves.
Ghost, Brass, and Halo drop from the port bench—three shadows peeling toward the service door without a backward glance. They know what they’re doing. They’ve done it a hundred times.
On the starboard side, Sarah and Thorne dismount. I grab my Glock from the cockpit holster and swing out before the rotors have stopped spinning.
Ariel catches my arm. “I’ll hold here. Extraction in fifteen minutes, or I come looking.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Don’t be late, Torque.”
I could make a joke. Something about punctuality and death wishes. The old Torque would have.
Instead, I just nod.
Sarah is waiting by the service door, and Thorne is already working the lock. Her hair has come loose from its twist—strands escaping across her face, tactical vest gray with dust from the flight. The queen pendant glints at her throat.
She looks at me.
I look at her.
No words. No time for words. But something passes between us anyway—a promise, a reminder, a truth that doesn’t need language.
I flew through a stone needle for you.
I know.
Not because I don’t care if I die.
I know.
Because I finally care if I live.
Thorne gets the door open. The interior of the dam yawns before us—a throat of concrete and steel and humming machinery, leading up toward the control tower.
Where Phoenix waits.
Where her father waits.
“Move,” Thorne says.
Sarah goes first. I follow. Thorne covers our six.
The door closes behind us, and we begin to climb.