Chapter 10
Elena waited in the absolute stillness of the shadows until the voices inside the dispatch office quieted and the overhead light flickered out, signaling that Hayes and his associate had locked up and departed through the rear loading bay.
She exhaled a slow, controlled breath, letting the tension drain from her shoulders before stepping out from behind the pallet crates. Moving with swift, purposeful strides, she reached the metal door of the dispatch office. The latch was unlocked—a careless mistake born of arrogance, or perhaps simply a sign that they didn't expect anyone to be wandering through their secure storage facility at two in the morning.
Inside, the office was cramped, dominated by a heavy metal desk cluttered with empty coffee cups, crumpled requisition forms, and a secure terminal connected to the base’s local intranet network.
Elena switched on her small flashlight, setting it down on the desk so the beam cast a functional pool of light across the keyboard. She didn't bother trying to pick the filing cabinets; physical paper could be easily faked or destroyed. What she needed was the digital metadata—the underlying transaction logs that recorded every time a file was modified or deleted from the base’s central registry.
She plugged her encrypted thumb drive into the terminal’s auxiliary USB port. The screen flickered, demanding a command-line override sequence. Her fingers flew across the keyboard with practiced speed, entering a bypass routine she had learned during her specialized technical training in the intelligence corps.
A progress bar appeared on the amber monitor, crawling slowly across the screen as her script scraped the deleted sector allocations from the local hard drive.
10%... 45%... 80%...
Suddenly, a red warning prompt flashed across the interface: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED. INTRANET PROTOCOL LOCKOUT INITIATED.
Elena’s heart didn't skip a beat. She anticipated the firewall’s countermeasure. With a sharp tap of the enter key, she executed a data-dump command, forcing the drive to siphon the remaining sector logs into her local cache before the system could trace her IP address back to the terminal router in her barracks.
The progress bar hit 100% just as the monitor screen went entirely blank, replaced by a flashing security alert.
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Elena yanked the thumb drive from the USB port, slipped it securely into her tactical pocket, and turned toward the door just as heavy footsteps echoed down the exterior metal stairs outside the office window. Someone had noticed the network ping.
She didn't hesitate. She vaulted through the open window into the cool night air, landing softly on the gravel below just as the dispatch door was kicked wide open.
