Chapter 9 - The Ghost Protocol
The hiss of halon gas releasing from ceiling vents sounded like a nest of vipers waking up. Clara smelled the faint, sweet chemical tang in the air and felt an immediate constriction in her chest. Halon didn’t kill by poisoning; it killed by displacing all oxygen in an enclosed space within two minutes.
"The air is going to drop!" David shouted, his voice muffled as he pulled his canvas jacket over his mouth. "Toby, pull your shirt over your nose! Don't run—running burns oxygen faster!"
"David, the door is sealed!" Clara yelled, coughing as the first wave of gas hit the back of her throat. She looked around the concrete sorting room. There were no windows, no exterior vents, and the baggage slide they had tumbled down was twenty feet up a smooth metal incline.
"The luggage lift," David pointed toward a heavy hydraulic freight platform built into the far wall, designed to carry oversized cargo to the ground-level maintenance bays. "It runs on an independent electrical loop."
David slammed his fist against the lift control panel, but the unit remained dead. "The main breaker trip locked it out!"
"Toby," Clara said suddenly, her vision already beginning to swim as the room's oxygen percentage plummeted. "The duffel bag. The burner phones."
David looked at her as if she were hallucinating. "What?"
"Marcus's bag—he had a universal maintenance override key on his lanyard!" Clara dropped to her knees, tearing through the discarded black nylon duffel. Her hands were shaking violently now, her lungs screaming for clean air. She dumped the contents onto the wet concrete.
Paper maps, empty magazines, the framed photo of David and Toby she had seen earlier—and there, tangled in a set of heavy brass rings, was a long blue access key with a magnetic chip embedded in the spine.
David grabbed the blue key, his fingers clumsy from the onset of hypoxia. He shoved it into the maintenance slot beneath the control panel and turned it with all his remaining strength.
A heavy mechanical buzzer sounded. The hydraulic lift shuddered, then began to groan upward with agonizing slowness.
"Get on!" David dragged Toby onto the grated platform, then hauled Clara up by her coat collar.
The lift rose inch by inch as the cloud of invisible gas pooled beneath them. Clara lay on the metal grating, chest heaving, watching the floor recede. Her head throbbed with a blinding, rhythmic pain. Beside her, Toby's eyelids were fluttering, his small chest struggling for air.
"Stay with me, Toby," Clara whispered, slapping his cheeks gently. "Breathe slow. Look at Mommy."
Ten feet up. Twelve feet.
The top of the lift slammed into the steel ceiling doors with a metallic clatter. The ceiling hatch didn't budge. The release mechanism was rusted shut, jammed from years of salt and runway de-icing chemicals.
Above them, through the seams of the steel hatch, they could hear the thumping of heavy helicopter blades landing on the apron directly outside.
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"David," Clara gasped, black spots expanding across her vision. "It's jammed."
David drew his suppressed pistol, leveled the barrel against the manual lock pin of the hatch, and emptied the remaining seven rounds in the magazine directly into the steel mechanism.
