Chapter 17 - Siege of the Blackwood Fortress
The quiet clinical halls of the Blackwood facility transformed into a war zone in a matter of seconds. Automatic gunfire rattled through the lower floors, the sharp crack of high-caliber rounds echoing upward through the ventilation shafts.
"Get down!" I barked, grabbing Caroline by the arm and shoving her behind the reinforced steel-reinforced structural pillar of the office.
Hannah drew a compact tactical sidearm from her trench coat with practiced precision, stepping smoothly into the doorway and taking up a defensive firing position.
"How many guards do we have in the building?" Hannah asked calmly, her eyes fixed on the elevator banks at the end of the corridor.
"Only our perimeter detail!" Caroline shouted over the din of distant explosions. "Apex brought a full tactical strike team! They want the neural data backups, and they want us dead!"
"They’ll have to get through the waterfront first," I said coldly.
I reached into my inner jacket pocket and pulled out my encrypted satellite communicator, tapping the emergency broadcast frequency three times.
"All units, this is Mercer. Code Red. Execute Operation Tidal Wave."
Within seconds, the distant roar of heavy helicopter rotors thundered through the overcast sky above the facility. My personal maritime security force—veteran operatives trained on the rough docks of New York—had tracked our convoy coordinates and arrived in full tactical force.
Heavy suppressive fire erupted outside the reinforced glass windows of Sector Nine as our tactical choppers hovered just fifty feet above the roof, deploying rappelling teams directly onto the upper deck.
"Hannah, cover the corridor!" I ordered, pulling Caroline up by her jacket collar. "We’re getting out of here."
"Where are we going?" Caroline cried, panic seizing her features.
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"To find my daughter," I replied, my eyes locked on the secure elevator shaft leading down to the underground residential wing.
We fought our way through the smoke-filled corridors, stepping past shattered glass and overturned medical carts. Every step forward was a battle against the corporate empire that had tried to bury me alive. The dark days were over, and the reckoning had finally arrived.
