(aka The Events at New Dominion College Part 3)
Copyright 2015, 2021 Lisa Summers
All characters depicted in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All characters in this story are at least 18 years of age. This particular book is the third of a multi-part series describing the events at New Dominion College.
No man saw the greatest conspiracy in history coming.
This is a story from that hidden, global war.
Chapter 1
The skier dressed in Bogner Sport Ski down jacket and deceptively expensive Malena ski pants prepared for her last run of the day down the Back of the Valluga Trail at St. Anton, as shadows began to lengthen and the fluffy Austrian hard-packed moguls became harder to read, particularly with all the loose snow that had fallen the two days previous.
"Are you sure you want to make this run alone?" her companion asked. "Please take a guide, at least."
"You're always so fearful of challenges, darling," the attractive black-haired middle-aged woman responded, kissing the blonde woman on her tanned, smooth cheek. "Young women should be confident, always. Women will inherit the earth."
"Well, I just want to make sure you're around to accept it," the young woman replied, mollified by her lover's confident air.
"Make certain that our 9 PM dinner reservations at Restaurant Fuhrmannstube are confirmed," the skier said. "I will want to spend some time with you in bed and the shower before we make our grand entrance."
Smiling and self assured, she boarded the cable car that would take her up the mountain. Tourists courageous enough to visit the top of the mountain, but certainly not brave enough to challenge it looked at her oddly - not many skiers were confident enough to even try this trail, and at this time of day most of the confident had retired to their après ski activities. She inwardly sneered at her fellow passengers. "To live on the edge is to live," she thought, surveying their cattle-like faces. The men disgusted her, the women disappointed.
Still, going "one step farther" than other women had brought her great success in life, just as a chance meeting with an Australian grand dame decades before had so significantly changed her life, and she had every confidence that her run here would be rewarding, if only to remind her that she wasn't quite dead yet.
She snapped on her skis and bindings and began her run, looking out at the initial vast expanse of white. She was exhilarated by the thin, crisp late afternoon air of the Austrian Alps, and by the delightful week that she'd spent with her protΓ©gΓ© from New Dominion College. The future was bright and clear, as was the snow field before her.
Just as she reached the moderately difficult first turn which required a sharp left shift off the wide and open snow field and into a narrow snow chute, her attention was distracted by the oddest thing - a small, flying thing no bigger than a book, approaching her from the left side. She found it difficult to focus on it, it was moving so fast and ice crystals were already forming on her snow goggles, which were slow in adjusting to the different light as her eyes moved from the white snow to the deep blue of the Austrian sky, and back again.
She saw, but never actually heard, the small, bright explosion of C-4 no more than 30 feet away, at about head height, which literally drove her off her skis, her body sliding inexorably towards the sheer precipice before her on the right side of the run. Her arms and legs scraped against the hard packed snow to no avail, her speed hardly decreasing at all, at first many meters away from the yawning gulf, then the dark valley below opened up in front of her.
For a few precious moments she felt as though she were suspended in mid air, all time and the world itself frozen and immobile around her. She wondered idly if there was a miracle occurring or if it was only an accident of perception, until seconds later she hit the rocks 700 meters below just as a diffuse sense of sadness and regret began dawning inside her.
No one else saw the explosion, not even the person secreted behind a pile of boulders at the top of the run, operating the drone controller. The mini-explosion completely disintegrated the small Matrix-i quadcopter drone, leaving no parts larger than a millimeter or so, most of which also fell over the precipice in a dissipating cloud of debris, or were covered by the snowfall later that night.
Chapter 2
"Everyone in place?" whispered Natalia Carey into the headset microphone of her Harris Falcon combat radio.
The answers from the 3 other members of her squad were all affirmative.
"Go 1," she snapped back, the signal that they were cleared to begin operations.
Their location was outside of a small, nondescript warehouse structure approximately three miles from New Dominion College, in Roanoke, Virginia. Taking out the old watchman, located in his guard shack at the gated entrance to the facility went quickly and smoothly, as they'd known it would, leaving him harmlessly snoring on the floor of the small plywood building yards away from the main building.