Chapter 7 - The Last Stand of the Master
7
The heavy blast doors sealed shut with a thunderous thud, cutting off the roar of the escaping tactical truck and plunging the subterranean vehicle bay into a grim, enclosed arena of blood and fire.
Raymond stood alone behind the steel workbench, his breath coming in steady, controlled gasps, his finger resting lightly on the trigger of his Walther PPK. Across the bay, Director Vance ducked behind a concrete support pillar, his submachine gun smoking from continuous suppressive fire.
The Vanguard operatives temporarily ceased firing, forming a tactical semicircle around the center of the bay. Their commander—a tall, scarred veteran wearing a black communications headset and an unbadged tactical vest—stepped forward, lowering his carbine barrel just an inch.
"Mr. Hawthorne," the commander’s voice echoed coldly through the cavernous space, distorted slightly by his comm-mask. "You've made this entirely too difficult. If you had simply allowed the estate to be sanitized quietly, your family would have retained their corporate board seats."
Raymond stepped out from behind the workbench, his posture completely unyielding, his gray eyes fixed on the mercenary with a look of absolute, glacial contempt.
"You killed my son, you murdered an American naval officer, and you turned my family home into a slaughterhouse," Raymond said, his voice carrying an icy resonance that commanded the entire room. "Did you really think I was going to let you walk out of here with a clean conscience?"
The commander chuckled, a dry, humorless sound. "Your son was a liability, Mr. Hawthorne. He discovered classified Department of Defense automated defense protocols that exceeded his security clearance. He chose to play the hero; the system simply corrected the error."
"And now the system is about to be terminated," Raymond replied softly.
He reached down with his left hand and pressed a hidden toggle switch embedded discreetly beneath the steel workbench—the master activation switch for the facility’s terminal self-destruct override.
Not a bomb. Not an explosion.
The Halon-9 Fire Suppression Protocol—a high-density, oxygen-deprivation gas system designed to instantly suffocate any unauthorized biological entity trapped inside a sealed subterranean vault within forty-five seconds.
"What is that sound?" one of the Vanguard operatives muttered nervously, looking up as a series of heavy pneumatic valves hissed open along the ceiling grid.
A dense, freezing white fog began to cascade downward from the overhead vents, hissing loudly as it displaced the oxygen in the room.
"It's a gas purge! Breach the doors—now!" the commander roared, realizing the trap too late as he raised his rifle and fired blindly toward Raymond.
Bullets sparked off the steel workbench and shattered the concrete behind Raymond, but he didn't flinch. He stood his ground, watching as the sub-zero Halon gas rolled across the floor like an avalanche.
Within seconds, the Vanguard operatives began to stagger, dropping their weapons as their lungs burned for oxygen, their vision blurring in the freezing white fog. One by one, heavy-kitted mercenaries collapsed onto the polished concrete floor, unconscious and incapacitated.
The commander staggered forward another two steps, lifting his carbine with shaking hands, before his knees buckled and he crashed heavily to the ground near Raymond’s boots.
Raymond stepped over the fallen mercenary leader, his breath pluming in the freezing air of the gas-choked bay. He walked over to the manual hydraulic override panel beside the sealed blast doors, punched in his master biometric security code, and hit the release switch.
HISS-CLANG.
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The massive steel doors ground open, letting in the cool, clean night air of the Long Island coastline.
Raymond walked out into the open courtyard, looking up at the star-filled sky above Hawthorne Manor. The battle for his estate was over, but the war for the truth had only just begun.
