American Sniper: The Last Round – Episode 43
The medical transport lifted inches above the runway while Carl Oliver shifted away from the armored landing gear. Rachel Fisher’s warning left him less than a second to identify another option. The engines, cockpit, and fuel system offered only lethal outcomes. Matthew’s pale face remained visible behind the cabin glass, reducing every calculation to the safety of a man Carl had ample reason to hate.
Jane Valentine saw the emergency barrier controls beside the hangar. Raising the steel wall would destroy the aircraft, but activating the runway arresting cable could catch the rear gear without overturning it. The system was designed for military jets and had not been tested on a medical transport.
Lewis reached the control panel and found its hydraulic pressure disabled. Mercer had anticipated the obvious safety response. Carl noticed the fluid line running beneath the runway and followed it toward a manual accumulator. A release valve remained visible behind the departing plane.
He fired through the access cover and struck the valve handle. Stored pressure surged into the arresting system. The cable rose behind the front wheels and caught the rear landing assembly as the aircraft climbed.
The transport dropped hard, skidding sideways across the runway. One wing clipped a light mast, but the fuel tanks remained intact. Emergency crews moved only after Ruiz’s agents identified the contractors firing from the service vehicles. Foam trucks surrounded the aircraft while agents created a corridor wide enough to remove patients without exposing them to the remaining gunmen.
Carl reached the cabin with Jane close behind him. Matthew lay restrained to the stretcher, pale from his unfinished recovery but conscious. Two medical attendants surrendered when Ruiz entered. Mercer was nowhere aboard.
The cockpit crew said their passenger had left before engine start through a catering vehicle. They believed the transport carried a sedated federal witness under emergency orders. Mercer had used Matthew to ensure Carl would focus on stopping the plane while the true escape passed through the gate unnoticed.
Matthew laughed weakly when Jane asked where Mercer had gone. He said the commander never trusted aircraft while ground routes remained available. Years earlier, Matthew financed a hardened communications center beneath the old Halcyon Arsenal, connected to the airfield by a freight tunnel.
Ruiz ordered the tunnel sealed, but Elena found recent train activity already moving away from the airport. The cargo manifest listed obsolete targeting equipment scheduled for destruction. Mercer could hide inside the shipment and reach Halcyon before tactical units secured the surrounding roads.
Lewis wanted Matthew placed under genuine medical guard before they continued. Jane agreed despite her uncle’s crimes. Saving him at the gala and on the plane did not mean forgiveness; it meant Meridian would not choose which witnesses lived long enough to answer.
Matthew asked Jane to wait. He admitted Halcyon held Meridian’s original command archive, separate from Mara’s financial index. Mercer called it the Crown Ledger. It contained operational orders, recordings, and proof of every official who authorized missions through the network.
The archive could destroy Meridian completely, but Mercer would erase it before capture. Halcyon’s underground structure was built to survive weapons tests, making an outside assault useless. The only access code had been divided among three senior operators: Mercer, Mara, and Lewis.
Lewis denied possessing any code. Matthew explained that Meridian extracted it from phrases Lewis repeated during captivity. His portion was not a number he consciously knew; it was embedded in a response pattern conditioned through years of interrogation.
The revelation disturbed Lewis more than physical threats had. Mara might have planted commands inside his memory that he could activate without understanding. He asked Carl to keep him away from Halcyon. Carl refused to treat him as a weapon simply because Meridian had tried to make him one.
Rachel arrived from the stadium against medical advice, her shoulder bandaged beneath a borrowed jacket. She knew the second code because Mara once trusted her to escort the Crown Ledger. The third belonged to Mercer. Together, Rachel and Lewis could open the archive before he destroyed it.
Jane questioned why Rachel had withheld that information. Black Widow said knowledge remained useful only while no one else possessed it. Trust did not come naturally to someone who survived by selling access in pieces. Jane warned that another concealed fact could end their temporary alliance.
Elena located the freight train entering Halcyon’s outer tunnel. They had forty minutes before it reached the underground center. Ruiz gathered agents cleared through the independent investigation, while Chris arranged aerial surveillance through the National Team’s military contacts.
Carl studied the arsenal plans. One ventilation shaft overlooked the command platform from nearly two thousand yards away, a shot complicated by heat rising from the old test furnaces. Mercer had selected a fortress that demanded the skill he spent years exploiting.
Lewis touched the ribbon tied around Carl’s rifle and said they would face the code together. Jane would lead the entry team with Rachel, while Carl covered the command platform from the ridge. No one would enter alone or carry information the others were denied. The plan mattered, but the way they made it mattered more: every person heard the risks before accepting a role.
As their convoy left the airfield, Mara Vale called Ruiz from detention. Her transport had been attacked, two guards were down, and the connection carried the sound of an opening door. Before the line died, she said Mercer had not sent rescuers—he had sent someone to remove her code permanently.