43: Chapter 43 Ancestral Secret Order: Daughter Out of the Game

The Warren Family was nothing more than a local snake in Nevada, calling the wind and summoning the rain in that desert state, covering the sky with one hand, but their vision and reach, in the end, could only extend to the backrooms of Las Vegas casinos and the state legislature's budget committee.

The most Edward Warren could suppress was a state police chief and a few city council members.

But the Hopkins Family was different.

What the Hopkins Family could influence was The Pentagon's procurement list, the Department of Defense's annual budget allocation, and the renewal of the Lighthouse Country's strategic bomber fleet.

Because what the Hopkins Family controlled from behind the scenes was none other than Northrop Grumman, one of the five major defense giants of the Lighthouse Country.

This company had only one core product: the B-2 "Spirit" stealth strategic bomber.

In the history of military aviation, there had never been an aircraft like the B-2 that looked like it didn't belong to this era, or even to this planet.

It had no traditional fuselage, tail, or rudder; the entire aircraft was a massive, smooth flying wing, its surface covered in a layer of dark gray radar-absorbent coating that swallowed electromagnetic waves inch by inch.

When it swept across the sky at an altitude of thirty thousand feet, the ground radar screen would only display a blurred reflection smaller than a sparrow.

No country's air defense system could reliably capture it; no missile trajectory could lock onto a flying wing that had all but vanished into the background noise.

It could take off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, cross the entire Pacific Ocean, penetrate the world's densest air defense network, drop precision-guided bombs onto any bunker on the other side of the blue planet, and then turn back and return as if it had never appeared at all.

"Reach any corner of the world, drop munitions, and destroy completely" — that was how The Pentagon's official propaganda slogan read.

But anyone who had truly studied the engineering history of the B-2 would discover an inexplicable fact: from the time Northrop and Grumman—the predecessors of Northrop Grumman—merged until the eve of the B-2's official service, it had taken only three years.

Three years.

A newly established company had achieved what the four veteran defense giants that had been deeply involved in the defense industry for nearly a century—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon Technologies—had failed to do.

It had achieved what the former Soviet Union had not.

It had achieved what no other country in the world had done.

They had sent a stealth flying wing, possibly the closest thing to alien technology in human history, into the sky, and the starting point of it all was precisely the day that mysterious businessman merged the two companies in 1994.

No one in the outside world knew who that mysterious businessman was.

Various financial reports would only write in the history of Northrop Grumman's rise: "In 1994, sensing changes in the landscape of the defense industry, Northrop and Grumman completed a merger under the mediation of a private investor who wished to remain anonymous"... and then there was nothing more.

That name had been gently, frame by frame, erased from all public records.

But Diana knew who he was.

Frederick Hopkins.

Her grandfather.

The old hunter in the family's old photo album, wearing an old-fashioned hunting jacket, his eyes so sharp it felt like he could pierce through twenty years of time from the photo paper.

The old man who, when she was seven, taught her how to shoot bottle caps with a .22 rifle in the backyard of the estate.

The man who, on his deathbed, gave her father, Daniel Hopkins, his final order.

"As long as anyone dares to touch the accounts of the Hoover Dam from 1947 to 1997, no matter who they are... hunt them down to the ends of the earth and silence them, leave no one alive."

Diana always remembered the scene when her father, Daniel Hopkins, said these words.

That was twenty years ago, in that luxury ward on the top floor of the Sacred Heart Hospital in Scottsdale.

The room was very quiet, quiet enough to hear the slow and rhythmic electronic beeps of the infusion pump.

The curtains were half-drawn, and the afternoon Arizona sun spilled in through the other half of the window, dividing her father's face—worn down by illness until it was almost nothing but bone—into one half of light and one half of shadow.

There were only three people in the room: her, her brother Charles, and her father lying on the hospital bed, already without much strength left.

Old Daniel had been lying in that hospital bed for nearly three months.

By the last few days before his death, he was very clear that the time he had left was only enough to entrust his will.

"Diana... Charles..."

Old Daniel's voice was hoarse and weak, his eye sockets deeply sunken, his throat wheezing faintly with phlegm as he breathed.

But those eyes—everything in them was nearly fading away, except for that bit of coldness in his bones which still stood firm—eyes exactly like his grandfather's, looked over the bedsheet at the siblings, "You must listen clearly: the matter of the Hoover Dam cannot be touched."

"No matter who comes to touch it... politicians, intelligence officers, mercenaries, journalists, some nobody who caught the scent from who knows where..."

"As long as they touch that line, hunt them down to the end, never leave a living soul."

"This is what your grandfather entrusted to me before he died."

Diana stood on the right side of her father's hospital bed, and Charles stood on the left.

She was thirty-three at the time, and she thought she knew everything.

Since she was little, her grandfather would hold her on a desert pickup truck and say, "You can handle a company."

When she was sixteen, her father had revealed the "succession order" to her—the behind-the-scenes control of Northrop Grumman would one day be handed to her, while Charles would guard the family's territory.

"Father," she asked, and because she was in the prime of her life, there was not much fear in her voice, but more confusion, "Why silence them?"

"What exactly is the matter with the Hoover Dam? Is it engineering corruption? Is it some undisclosed government project..."

"I don't know." Old Daniel interrupted her.

Diana froze in place.

She had never heard her father say "I don't know" in such a tone.

In her life before thirty-three, her father was that wall of omniscience.

Every procurement list handed over by the Department of Defense, every change of position within the military-industrial system, every fund account holding shares of the Hopkins assets—he could answer everything clearly.

Only now was he saying "I don't know."

"I really don't know..." Old Daniel's gaze turned to her, the wrinkles around the edges of his eyes stretching out in a weary and powerless pattern, "This is how your grandfather instructed me before he died."

"He didn't explain the reason."

"Your grandfather's father... from his generation, this rule has been passed down."

The ward was quiet for a long time.

Diana looked at her father's bloodshot eyes, which were still struggling to remain clear before his death.

There were no answers in those eyes, only orders.

For the first time, she read one thing in those eyes: it wasn't her father ordering her, but her father also executing an order.

An order that had never been explained since the generation before last, but which every generation had carried out without reservation.

Then Old Daniel died.

The nurse turned off the buzzing of the monitor that had already turned into a straight line.

Diana stood before the hospital bed, looking at her father's gradually cooling face, her heart filled with two things: one was the kill order, and the other was that modified will.

Her brother Charles would become the behind-the-scenes controller of Northrop Grumman, while she would guard the Hopkins Family's eighty thousand acres of desert real estate and a huge pile of silent stone.

Diana turned away from the window, walking slowly along the paved path of the courtyard toward the sandstone fireplace in the center, where the flame had long since been extinguished.

Her fingers subconsciously pinched at the dark forest green silk cuffs.

Even ten years later, every time she thought of this, there would still be a dull pain in her chest, as if being slowly cut open by a dull knife.

That position which should have belonged to her, the position of behind-the-scenes controller of Northrop Grumman.

That defense giant capable of directly influencing defense policy and controlling b-2 bomber procurement contracts.

Sitting in that position meant entering The Pentagon's defense procurement circle, meant being able to sit in the room next door drinking coffee when the Senate Armed Services Committee submitted appropriation proposals, meant being able to shake hands and exchange pleasantries with the Secretary of Defense for a few minutes, and then, outside the lens of all the media, complete the fine-tuning of national strategy... and eventually use this as a springboard to reach for the highest power in the Lighthouse Country.

And all of this, in her father's eyes, was originally hers.

Charles was five years her senior, a taciturn, dull man with no interest in the diplomatic socializing of the defense industry circle.

He was able to sit in the boss's chair at Northrop Grumman purely because his surname was Hopkins, but Diana should have been the one to take Northrop Grumman to the next level.

She was smarter than Charles and understood the connections and procedural rules in the defense circle better than Charles.

By the time she was twenty, she could already replace her father to receive procurement representatives from The Pentagon and lock in all their preferences and bottom lines within just one hour.

Even her father never hesitated to say to her in private: "The next person in this chair is you."

Until that afternoon. That afternoon when the sunshine was a bit too bright.

She had just returned home from Princeton University for summer vacation at that time, with less than half a year left until her graduate school graduation.

Charles was not there; he was already in the mechanical and electrical workshop of Northrop Grumman at that time, following a few retired technicians, tinkering with some old propeller engine scraps all day, with no concern for business matters.

Diana was alone in the archives in the east wing of the estate, flipping through the records of the family's assets from the past few decades.

Then, she flipped to a document...