Chapter 11 - Inside the Vault
The heavy steel door swung inward, and Loa Sing lunged through the opening, dragging Evelyn and Sarah behind her while Major Hayes swung his heavy metal pipe in a wide, sweeping arc to buy them a critical second of clearance. A suppressed round cracked through the air, sparking off the concrete doorframe just inches from Hayes’s shoulder, before Loa slammed the emergency override button on the inside wall. The massive steel slab slammed shut with a bone-jarring thud, the heavy locking bolts sliding into place with a series of heavy metallic clanks.
Inside, the hangar was vast, cavernous, and bathed in the eerie, pulsing blue glow of a hundred towering server racks. The air was ice-cold, chilled by industrial-grade refrigeration units designed to keep the massive data arrays from overheating.
“We’re locked in, but that door won’t hold against a thermite charge for more than three minutes,” Sarah panted, rushing toward the central control console that dominated the middle of the room.
“Get the primary ledger off that main server,” Loa ordered, pulling the small black voice recorder from her pocket. She plugged it directly into an open USB port on the console. “Evelyn, start downloading the shipping manifests to your local drive. Everything—every transaction, every unauthorized flight manifest, every name.”
Evelyn dropped her laptop onto the steel desk, her fingers flying across the keyboard with frantic speed. A complex data-transfer progress bar appeared on the monitor, crawling at a agonizingly slow pace as gigabytes of encrypted files began to migrate.
“The encryption is fighting back,” Evelyn gasped, sweat beading on her forehead as a wall of red error text cascaded down the screen. “They’ve got a remote kill-switch wired into the main mainframe at the Pentagon. If we don’t isolate the network right now, it’s going to wipe the entire drive.”
“Disconnect the external uplink!” Loa shouted, diving across the console and ripping a heavy fiber-optic cable out of the back of the server rack with a shower of tiny electrical sparks.
The red error text stopped instantly, freezing the progress bar at eighty-two percent.
From the other side of the heavy steel door, a dull, muffled explosion rattled the floor beneath their feet. A cloud of fine gray concrete dust billowed down from the ceiling vents as the tactical team deployed a thermal breaching charge against the hinges.
“They’re cutting the door!” Hayes yelled, bracing his shoulder against the control console as another muffled blast shook the room. The steel hinges groaned, buckling outward under the intense heat and pressure.
“We have eighty-two percent of the ledger!” Evelyn shouted over the rising alarm klaxon. “It’s enough to prove the conspiracy, but we need the physical hard drive to get the decryption keys!”
Sarah reached down with a heavy-duty tactical wrench and unlatched the lower panel of the master server rack, exposing a gleaming, brushed-aluminum solid-state drive array. With a sharp twist, she popped the primary drive free from its housing, holding it up like a trophy.
“Got it!” Sarah yelled.
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Suddenly, the steel door blew inward in a massive shower of white-hot sparks and shredded metal. Through the smoke and fire, three black-clad operatives poured into the room, their carbines raised and pointed directly at Loa’s chest.
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