"Full throttle, Marcus!" Elena commanded.
Marcus shoved the massive twin throttles forward to the stops. The DC-3 lurched forward like an awakening beast, bursting through the half-open hangar doors, smashing the rusted metal panels aside, and roaring down the mossy mountain runway.
Behind them, the gunship swerved, attempting to line up a shot on their tail. But the mountain fog was thick, and the sheer blast from the DC-3's dual radial props threw up a blinding vortex of mist and gravel.
"Tail is up!" Elena called out, watching the analog airspeed needle climb past sixty knots. "Seventy... seventy-five... V-one! Rotate!"
Marcus pulled back firmly on the yoke. The old warbird groaned, its riveted aluminum skin straining against the aerodynamic forces, and lifted cleanly off the tarmac just as the first burst of 7.62mm rounds shattered the runway behind them.
"We're airborne!" Sarah shouted from the cargo floor, clutching the metal lockboxes with white knuckles.
"Don't celebrate yet!" Marcus barked, banking hard to the left into a narrow canyon. "Gunship on our six o'clock, closing fast!"
Through the vintage cockpit windows, Elena saw the sleek, modern silhouette of an armed Eurocopter hovering directly above their flight path. The pilot was trying to herd them into the jagged granite cliffs of the Swiss border.
"Marcus, cut the left engine throttle!" Elena ordered suddenly.
"What?! Elena, we'll lose altitude—"
"Do it! Asymmetric thrust! Induce a flat spin drop into the canyon mist!"
Trusting her instincts implicitly, Marcus cut the port engine and kicked the heavy rudder pedal to the floor. The DC-3 swung violently sideways, dropping fifty feet like a falling leaf directly beneath the rotor wash of the attack chopper. The pursuing pilot, completely unprepared for such an aggressive, analog stunt from an antique aircraft, overshot them by hundreds of feet.
"Full power! Recover!" Elena yelled.
The engines roared in unison. The DC-3 surged through the dense white blanket of fog, hugging the canyon floor barely fifty feet above the rushing pine trees, until the radar blips of their pursuers completely vanished in the mountain terrain.
They crossed into Swiss airspace completely undetected, hidden in the blind spot of radar shadow beneath the peaks of the Alps.
Chapter 26
An hour later, the DC-3 touched down silently on a private grass airstrip owned by an eccentric alpine watchmaker who had been an old flying buddy of Elena's father. By midday, disguised in heavy wool coats and dark glasses, Elena, Marcus, and Sarah were sitting in the back of an armored Mercedes sedan sliding through the pristine, rain-slicked streets of Zurich's financial district.
The global media storm had reached an unprecedented fever pitch. Massive electronic billboards throughout Paradeplatz flashed the headline:
*ELENA CARTER ACCUSED OF MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR AIRLINE EMBEZZLEMENT — WARRANT ISSUED ACROSS SCHENGEN ZONE.*
Beneath the headline was a glamour portrait of Evelyn Carter, clad in a mourning-black silk suit, addressing the world press from the Carter family estate in Geneva, her voice dripping with calculated maternal heartbreak: *"I loved my daughter. But when an executive becomes intoxicated by power, they must answer to the law. Global Continental Airlines will not fall with her."*
"Look at her," Sarah whispered furiously, pointing at the screen. "She's acting like the grieving mother while preparing to strip every asset out of the company."
"She’s moving fast because she knows the physical evidence still exists," Elena said, her voice dropping into a razor-thin tone of determination. "She thinks her legal team destroyed all the backups in London. She doesn't know we have the analog tapes. But we need one more thing before the shareholder tribunal tomorrow."
"What's that?" Marcus asked.
"The founder's cipher," Elena replied. "My father held a primary safety deposit box at Bankhaus Hoffman, the oldest private bank in Zurich. Inside that box is the original, handwritten founding charter of Global Continental Airlines. In the appendix, my father included an irrevocable golden share clause: if the majority trustee commits treason against the company's integrity, the founding heir has unilateral authority to dissolve the board on the spot."
Ten minutes later, the Mercedes pulled into the underground entrance of Bankhaus Hoffman.
The bank’s interior was an imposing fortress of polished black marble and whisper-quiet vault rooms. An elderly, white-haired Swiss banker named Herr Brecht bowed slightly as Elena presented her father’s antique signet ring and biometric thumbprint to the scanner.
"Frau Carter," the banker spoke in hushed, reverent tones. "Your late father instructed me that if you ever presented this ring in person, you were to be escorted to Vault Level Four immediately."