Chapter 17 - SUBTERRANEAN DISARMAMENT
The ventilation shaft was tight, cold, and smelled strongly of stale diesel fumes and damp concrete.
Emily slid through the ducting on her stomach, her carbine pressed flat against her chest, her elbows taking her weight to prevent the sheet metal from flexing or popping under her momentum.
Thirty feet down the duct line, she reached a horizontal junction overlooking the main basement access corridor. Through the small slots of a louvred steel vent, she could see two guards standing outside a heavy, reinforced vault door stamped with Arabic warning symbols.
Both men were wearing body armor and tactical headsets, armed with modern submachine guns.
Emily checked her weapon's optic. Through the vent slots, she lined up the red crosshair directly over the neck of the guard on the left.
She didn't use her firearm.
Instead, she pulled a small glass ampoule from her chest rig—a specialized aerosol compound developed by Division Nine for non-acoustic indoor clearing operations. She cracked the glass seal inside a small hand-held air launcher and thrust the nozzle through the vent louvers.
A silent, invisible cloud of high-density gas drifted down from the ceiling duct.
The guard on the left blinked, his eyelids suddenly growing heavy. He reached up to touch his collar, his rifle slipping from his fingers. Before he could warn his partner, he crumpled to the cold concrete floor.
The second guard turned in alarm, raising his weapon toward his falling comrade—but as he inhaled the surrounding air, his knees buckled instantly. He collapsed on top of the first guard, both men slipping into a deep, chemical-induced unconsciousness.
Emily kicked the ventilation louver open, dropping five feet onto the corridor floor.
She stepped over the sleeping guards, reaching into the belt pouch of the senior sentry to retrieve a heavy biometric keycard. She swiped the card through the scanner beside the vault door.
A heavy pneumatic latch released with a quiet, muffled thump.
The vault door swung inward six inches, revealing the dimly lit interior of Target Site Omega's central server control room.
Standing at the far end of the room, surrounded by rows of blinking server racks and glowing satellite monitors, was Malik.
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He had his back turned to the door, typing furiously into a ruggedized terminal keyboard as he prepared to execute the final data transfer to the off-site proxy servers. Across his broad back hung a custom leather shoulder holster holding a heavy sidearm.
"You're seven minutes late, Emily," Malik said, his thick, raspy voice echoing through the quiet server room without him even turning around to face her.
