Chapter 27 - The Collapse
I spun around, my eyes darting toward the far wall of the cavern where a heavy digital LED countdown clock mounted above the vault door flashed a brilliant, unforgiving red:
02:45... 02:44... 02:43...
"Gavin, get the physical ledgers into the tactical bags—all of them!" I shouted, dropping my weapon back into its holster and grabbing two heavy banker's boxes filled with master indexing files. "Lauren, help him with the Zurich transfer ledgers. We're getting out of here now."
"The primary exit stairwell is already compromised," Gavin yelled back over the blaring klaxon alarm that had suddenly begun to wail throughout the underground chamber, flashing a strobing yellow emergency beacon. "The explosion we heard upstairs must have collapsed the concrete transition tunnel. We're trapped!"
"There has to be an emergency ventilation shaft," I said, scanning the towering limestone walls of the cavern as dust and small stones began to cascade down from the ceiling like winter snow. "Julian’s blueprints from the ironworks bunker showed a secondary drainage conduit leading out toward the river bed."
"Give me the tablet!" Lauren shouted, snatching the mapping interface from Gavin’s hands. Her eyes scanned the topographical schematic of the cavern with fierce, laser-like concentration. "Here—thirty feet behind the main filing racks. A drainage culvert leading straight down the ravine!"
01:15... 01:14... 01:13...
"Move, move, move!" I ordered, hauling Thomas Sterling forward by his collar while Gavin and Lauren clutched the heavy boxes of evidence against their chests as we sprinted toward the rear of the cavern.
The ground beneath our feet began to shudder violently, a deep, subterranean roar vibrating through the rock as the first wave of demolition charges detonated along the upper structural supports of the compound. Huge slabs of concrete and jagged chunks of limestone broke loose from the ceiling, crashing down into the room with deafening concussive force and filling the air with a blinding, choking cloud of gray dust.
"Watch out!" Lauren screamed, shoving Gavin aside just as a massive steel ventilation pipe tore loose from the overhead brackets and plummeted squarely into the spot where he had been standing a fraction of a second before.
"I've got the hatch!" Gavin coughed, frantically spinning the heavy hand-wheel on the industrial drainage valve set into the rear limestone wall.
With a loud, protesting shriek of rusted metal, the heavy steel hatch swung outward, revealing a dark, cramped concrete tunnel through which the sound of rushing rainwater and fresh, cold mountain air echoed like a lifeline.
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"In! Go, go, go!" I shoved Thomas Sterling through the narrow opening first, followed quickly by Gavin and Lauren, before ducking through myself just as the entire front section of the underground archives collapsed in a cataclysmic roar of tumbling stone and billowing fire.
We tumbled out onto the wet, muddy slope of the ravine just as the main entrance of the compound imploded inward, swallowing the multi-million-dollar facility in a monstrous cloud of dust and earth that left nothing behind but a jagged scar in the side of the Blue Ridge.
