Chapter 6 - The Poisoned Air
The toxic green gas poured rapidly into the underground room, filling the air with the smell of bitter almonds.
I shoved Emily toward the narrow opening of the emergency ventilation shaft and ordered her to start crawling.
My lungs began to burn instantly, and my vision blurred as the deadly nerve agent seeped into my pores.
I climbed into the metal shaft right behind her, using pure adrenaline and maternal instinct to keep my body moving.
The enclosed space was suffocatingly tight, and the jagged metal edges tore at my tactical uniform.
I held my breath for as long as humanly possible, but the agonizing lack of oxygen was making my muscles spasm violently.
Emily looked back at me through the clear visor of her gas mask, tears streaming down her terrified face.
She tried to take the mask off to share it with me, but I grabbed her hand and shook my head furiously.
I forced her to keep moving forward until we finally saw the faint glow of moonlight ahead.
We burst out of the rusty exhaust pipe and collapsed onto the damp forest floor.
I gasped desperately for clean air, violently coughing up blood as my lungs fought to clear the poison.
It took me ten agonizing minutes to regain enough strength to stand on my own two feet.
I knew the strike team would eventually find the shaft and track our movements through the woods.
I pulled out a secure satellite phone I had grabbed from the bunker and dialed a ghost number.
A man named Jax answered on the first ring, his voice gruff and thick with sleep.
Jax was a former black-ops sniper who owed me his life after a botched mission in the Middle East a decade ago.
I gave him our exact coordinates and told him I was burning every bridge I had left.
Jax arrived twenty minutes later in a stealth transport vehicle, heavily armed and ready for a war.
He tossed me a fresh rifle and informed me that he had just intercepted a massive encrypted radio transmission.
The Prescotts were currently loading the illegal weapons cache onto a cargo ship at the city's private docks tonight.
They were planning to flee the country and destroy all the evidence before the sun came up.
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We sped toward the docks under the cover of darkness, preparing to end this nightmare once and for all.
As we breached the outer perimeter of the shipping yard, a high-caliber sniper bullet shattered our vehicle's engine block.
