Chapter 12 - The Lockdown
The red strobe light pulsed relentlessly against the concrete walls of the server room, casting long, frantic shadows across the broken equipment and fallen operatives. Thomas stared up at the ceiling speaker, his jaw clenched tight as the chilling reality of Vance Jr.'s threat set in. The transmission had gone through, but they were trapped deep inside a mountain bunker with no exit route and two minutes before the ventilation system pumped poison into the facility.
"He's not bluffing," Thomas said, pulling the technician up by his jacket collar and shoving him toward the secondary service hatch behind the server racks. "That hatch leads to the emergency drainage culvert. It's our only way out before they seal the sector."
Maya unclipped a breaching charge from her tactical belt and slapped it onto the locking mechanism of the heavy steel service hatch, stepping back quickly behind the concrete workbench.
"Cover your ears!" she yelled, pressing the remote detonator.
The charge blew the hatch inward with a sharp crack, revealing a dark, damp concrete drainage pipe sloping downward into the heart of the mountain. Without a moment's hesitation, the technician scrambled through the opening first, disappearing into the pitch-black tunnel.
Thomas turned to follow, but paused as he noticed Maya lingering by the primary server console, her fingers flying across the keyboard once more.
"What are you doing?" Thomas demanded, grabbing her arm. "We have less than a minute before the gas drops! We need to move, now!"
"I'm setting a delayed packet trace," Maya replied calmly, refusing to budge as she yanked a small memory card from the terminal port. "If we die in this bunker, Vance will just claim we were rogue saboteurs who destroyed the facility ourselves. This card logs every command he inputs from the command center, proving he authorized the cover-up from the very beginning."
The heavy steel door at the top of the stairwell groaned as industrial hydraulic clamps engaged from the outside, sealing the primary exit with a definitive, bone-chilling thud. A faint hiss of pressurized gas began to drift down from the ceiling vents, carrying a sharp, chemical scent that immediately burned the back of their throats.
"Time's up," Thomas coughed, pulling Maya toward the open drainage hatch just as the first wave of dense, greenish vapor began to pool along the floor.
May you like
They scrambled through the narrow opening together, pulling the heavy steel hatch shut behind them and throwing the manual locking lever just as the heavy hiss of lethal gas flooded the server room they had left behind.
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