Chapter 5 - The Escape
Wood splinters and shattered glass rained heavily down on us as the gunfire violently tore through the room.
I covered my head with my arms, pressing my face hard into the cold concrete floor.
Dominic shielded my body entirely with his own, the heavy kevlar in his suit absorbing the flying debris.
"The Russians found us," Dominic shouted over the deafening roar of the helicopter outside.
He grabbed my arm and dragged me aggressively toward the reinforced steel emergency exit at the back of the room.
"We have to get to the subterranean loading docks!" I yelled back, relying on my intimate knowledge of the building.
I punched the override code into the exit keypad, and the heavy door swung open.
We sprinted down a dark, narrow utility corridor that my father hadn't bothered to maintain in years.
The sound of heavy tactical boots echoed loudly from the floor above us.
The cartel hitmen were already inside the building, actively hunting us down.
"How did they track us so quickly?" I gasped, my lungs burning fiercely as we ran.
"They didn't track me," Dominic replied grimly, checking the magazine of his pistol.
"They tracked the massive financial transfer someone just made on that laptop."
We reached the cavernous underground loading dock, which smelled strongly of diesel fuel and damp concrete.
Several massive shipping containers sat in the dark, waiting to be loaded onto the morning freight trucks.
"My extraction team is exactly three minutes away," Dominic told me, pulling out an encrypted satellite phone.
Before he could dial, a massive steel garage door at the end of the dock began to grind upward.
Three heavily armed men in dark tactical gear rolled under the rising door, sweeping the room with laser sights.
We dove quickly behind a stack of wooden shipping pallets just as their lasers passed over our position.
"I only have two magazines left," Dominic whispered, his gray eyes calculating our grim odds.
I looked frantically around the loading dock, my logistical brain desperately searching for a solution.
I spotted the master control panel for the automated heavy-lifting cranes mounted on the ceiling.
"Can you provide covering fire for exactly ten seconds?" I asked him, pointing toward the electrical panel on the wall.
Dominic smirked, a dangerous, thrilling expression that made my stomach completely flip.
"I can give you fifteen," he promised.
He leaned out from behind the pallets and opened fire, instantly dropping the closest cartel hitman.
I sprinted blindly across the open concrete, bullets completely sparking against the floor just inches from my feet.
I reached the control panel and violently slammed my fist onto the emergency release switch.
The massive, three-ton magnetic crane above the hitmen instantly released its heavy cargo.
A massive steel shipping container plummeted directly down from the ceiling.
It crushed the remaining two hitmen instantly, sending a terrifying shockwave through the entire building.
The silence that followed was completely deafening.
Dominic walked over to me, looking at the crushed container and then back at my face.
"You just dropped a three-ton container on professional assassins," he said, sounding genuinely impressed.
I tried to smile, but my phone suddenly buzzed violently in my pocket.
It was a text message from an unknown, untraceable number.
May you like
You missed one, Claire.
I looked up at Dominic, completely terrified, just as the red dot of a sniper rifle laser settled directly onto the center of his chest.
