Chapter 8 - The Breach
The heavy steel door of the warehouse didn't just open—it exploded inward.
A flash-bang grenade vaulted through the threshold, hitting the concrete floor with a deafening screech of white light and thunderous sound that rattled my teeth and left my ears ringing with high-pitched static.
“Down!” Matteo shouted, tackling me behind a heavy steel workbench just as a hail of automatic gunfire chewed through the wooden crates above our heads.
Splinters rained down like wooden shrapnel.
“Sal! Status on the upload!” Matteo yelled over the chaos, firing two controlled shots toward the doorway.
“Ninety percent!” Sal shouted back from behind a server rack, returning fire with a submachine gun. “Hold them off for thirty more seconds!”
Footsteps pounded across the concrete floor as tactical operators in black gear swarmed into the warehouse, shouting commands in Russian and English. Smoke grenades filled the air with thick, acrid gray fog, stinging my eyes and making it hard to breathe.
I coughed, gripping the heavy Glock Matteo had handed me. My hands shook, but the fear had melted away, replaced by a cold, laser-focused survival instinct.
Two men broke through the smoke, rushing our position behind the workbench.
I popped up from cover, ignoring the scream of my racing pulse, and pulled the trigger twice. The first shot caught the lead operator in the ceramic vest, dropping him backward; the second bullet shattered a hanging fire extinguisher, sending a high-pressure jet of white foam blasting across the floor and blinding their advance.
“Good shot!” Matteo roared, leaning around the edge of the workbench and taking out the second operator with a precise headshot.
“Upload complete!” Sal yelled triumphantly. “Data is mirrored to three secure off-site servers in Geneva, London, and Tokyo! The Syndicate is naked!”
“Delete our local drive!” Matteo ordered. “Fall back to the secondary exit!”
We scrambled toward the back of the warehouse, ducking behind stacked shipping pallets as more bullets chewed up the metal siding around us. Sal led the way, kicking open a rusted emergency exit door that led directly down a concrete slipway toward the freezing waters of Boston Harbor.
Heavy rain hit us like a wall of ice as we spilled out into the night air.
Behind us, the warehouse dissolved into chaos as Sal triggered a remote thermal charge wired to the main server racks.
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BOOM.
A muffled shockwave blew out the back windows of the warehouse, sending a towering pillar of orange fire shooting up into the rainy sky, silhouetting the burning ruins of the Syndicate’s local operations center.
