Chapter 8 - The Breach Below
The hydraulic ram ripped free, leaving a gaping jagged tear in the reinforced steel door. Through the breach, a thick gray canister hissed, tumbling into the center of the server room.
"Thermite gas!" Emilio yelled, lunging forward. He kicked the canister with the heel of his boot, sending it skittering out through the broken frame into the corridor just as it erupted into a blinding pillar of white-hot magnesium fire. The chemical heat was instant and overwhelming, melting the linoleum tiles and blistering the paint on the concrete walls.
"The culvert hatch, under the floor grating!" Toby shouted, coughing as bitter smoke seeped through the shattered door.
Toby and Vance dropped to their knees, hooking their fingers into the heavy iron drainage grate that sat beneath the central server rack. They pulled upward together, their muscles straining against decades of rust and grime. With a metallic screech, the grate lifted, revealing a dark, rushing channel of brackish stormwater four feet below.
Automatic gunfire hammered through the ruptured doorway. Emilio dropped to one knee, firing blind bursts around the doorframe to keep the Apex team back. Concrete chips sprayed into the air like shrapnel. A high-caliber round caught Emilio along his upper ribcage, tearing through his leather jacket and painting a red slash across his white skin. He grunted, stumbling back a step, but did not drop his weapon.
"Go! Get in the water!" Emilio barked, his voice ragged with pain.
Maya climbed down into the culvert first, gasping as waist-deep, freezing water hit her chest. Vance dropped in beside her, supporting her against the slick, moss-covered concrete walls of the underground drain.
"Toby, move!" Maya cried upward through the opening.
Toby grabbed Emilio by the arm, hauling the wounded hitman toward the opening. "You're hit."
"Graze," Emilio snapped, though his face had gone pale under the harsh server lights. "Drop down, I'm right behind you."
Toby dropped into the rushing current, the icy shock knocking the wind from his lungs. Emilio paused at the rim of the grate. He took a fragmentation grenade from his tactical vest, pulled the ring with his teeth, and wedged it directly between the cooling pipes of the central mainframe server.
"Enjoy the blackout," Emilio muttered.
He dropped through the grate into the culvert just as the tactical team breached the room. Two seconds later, the fragmentation grenade detonated, rupturing the high-pressure freon tanks and triggering a chain-reaction electrical explosion. A rolling wave of orange fire and black smoke roared over the iron grating, sealing the sub-level above in a catastrophic fireball.
In the dark culvert below, the four of them were swept forward by the surging stormwater. The concrete pipe sloped downward sharply, carrying them deeper into the subterranean drainage network beneath the athletic fields. The roar of the explosion above faded, replaced by the relentless, deafening rush of filthy water slamming them against the curved walls.
After fifty yards of blind, tumbling darkness, the current slowed. Toby caught a rusted iron ladder bolted to the culvert roof, extending his other hand to catch Maya before she was swept past. Emilio hauled Vance out of the main flow onto a narrow concrete ledge running alongside the storm channel.
They lay gasping in the damp chill, listening to the muffled sirens wailing miles above them.
"Where are we?" Vance asked, her teeth chattering violently.
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Toby looked up through an iron maintenance grate six feet above their heads. Through the slots, he could see the underside of the wooden bleachers, illuminated by the distant sweep of vehicle headlights.
Parked less than twenty feet away was Donovan's black Mercedes, its engine idling with a low, predatory purr.
