Chapter 6: The Breach
Deep within the subterranean federal bunker, the automated diagnostic alarms began to chime with a soft, persistent ping. Agent Thorne snapped awake from a light sleep on the cot opposite Chloe’s medical station, his hand instantly dropping to the service pistol holstered at his belt. He hurried across the metallic flooring to the central command console, his fingers flying across the keyboard to check the exterior sensor logs.
""Evelyn,"" Thorne called out sharply. ""Wake up.""
Evelyn emerged from the adjacent supply room within seconds, fully dressed in her combat trousers and tactical boots, her service weapon already in hand. ""What is it?""
""External perimeter sensors just went dark on sector three and four,"" Thorne said, his face pale in the screen's blue glow. ""Not a malfunction. Someone is actively scrubbing our signal routing. They're jamming our satellite uplink.""
Evelyn checked the internal closed-circuit monitors. The camera feed outside the bunker's heavy blast doors showed absolute darkness; the motion-activated security floodlights had been systematically shattered. ""They found us,"" she stated, her voice devoid of panic, replaced entirely by cold, tactical focus. ""How did they track the encryption handshake so fast?""
""It wasn't standard terrestrial tracking,"" Thorne muttered, tracing the data packets pouring into the console. ""It was military-grade electronic warfare signatures. Someone with access to Department of Defense frequency allocations just triangulated our router.""
Across the room, Chloe sat up on her cot, rubbing her eyes, her face tight with fear. ""Aunt Ev... are they here?""
""Stay down, Chloe, and keep away from the doors,"" Evelyn instructed firmly, walking over to inspect the manual override locks on the bunker's secondary bulkhead. She turned to Thorne. ""If they have military-grade EW gear, they're preparing to breach the blast doors with a thermic lance. We have less than ten minutes before they burn through the seals.""
""We need to destroy the core drive,"" Thorne said, reaching for the physical release lever on the secure server rack. ""If they capture the forensic mirror of your phone, everything we fought for is lost.""
""No,"" Evelyn countered, stepping between Thorne and the server rack. ""Destroying it means we go down in the dark, and Senator Vance walks free with her secrets intact. We use the backup. We upload the encrypted files to the independent journalistic collective I established contact with before we went dark.""
Thorne hesitated, looking at the progress bar on the upload screen. ""Bandwidth is crippled by the jamming. At this rate, it will take fifteen minutes to push the uncompressed video files through the encrypted proxy.""
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""Then we buy fifteen minutes,"" Evelyn said, checking the magazine of her sidearm. She grabbed a tactical shotgun from the armory locker and handed it to Thorne, keeping her assault rifle ready. ""You finish the upload. I'll secure the choke points.""
Before Thorne could argue, a deafening explosion echoed through the concrete walls, followed by the blinding white-hot hiss of a thermic lance chewing through the outer blast door. The air inside the bunker instantly filled with the acrid smell of burning steel.
