“We have… about three minutes,” she wheezed, coughing up a spatter of dark blood. “They have linear shaped charges. They’ll blow the hinges off this vault and throw gas inside.”
I knelt beside the primary server terminal, my SIG rested on the console, my eyes locked on the heavy steel door.
“The drive,” I said, my voice eerily calm. “You said the drive has the truth.”
Vance reached up with a trembling, bloody hand and tapped a sequence of keys on the terminal. A 10-inch ruggedized SSD popped out of the master bay with a mechanical hiss.
“This is the master telemetry for Project *Janus*,” she whispered, handing the drive to me. “Every operational order. Every memory modification protocol. Every target you eliminated before they put you to sleep in Nashville. And… the override codes for the entire network.”
I took the drive. It was cold, heavy, no larger than a deck of playing cards.
“Why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance, Sarah?” I asked, looking down at her pale, blood-smeared face. “When I breached the study. You had your weapon up. You could have put a round through my eye before I cleared the threshold.”
A strange, broken expression crossed her face—a mixture of professional shame and something far more human.
“Because for five years… I wasn’t just Captain Vance,” she whispered, her eyes shining with unshed tears. “I sat at your dinner table every Sunday. I watched you teach the neighbor’s kid how to fix a bicycle chain. I saw you sit on the porch for hours, staring at an empty chair, missing a woman who never existed… and I realized that the monster the Pentagon created was gentler, kinder, and more decent than the people who gave me my orders.”
She swallowed hard, a tear cutting a clean track through the soot on her cheek.
“I tried to find a way out for both of us, Richard. The Singapore buyer wasn’t for profit. I was selling the Aegis backdoors to buy two non-extradition identities in South America. I was going to pull you out before the burn order came down. But Ethan caught me. He was loyal to the Director until the very end.”
A heavy metallic thud echoed against the exterior of the vault door.
*Clank.*
The Cleaners were setting the magnetic breaching frames against the heavy steel hinges.
“They’re on the door,” I said.
“Take the rear egress,” Vance pointed toward a narrow steel hatch behind the server racks. “It leads to an old drainage culvert that empties into Percy Warner Park. There’s an extraction vehicle parked near the golf course—a black Dodge Charger with false plates. The keys are behind the rear license plate.”
“And you?”
She looked down at her bleeding torso, then up at me with a faint, tired smile.
“I’m combat ineffective, Colonel. I’ll only slow you down. Give me your sidearm. I’ll hold the fatal funnel for forty seconds while you make the tunnel.”
I stared at her for two seconds.
Thirty years of military conditioning told me to accept the tactical reality: an immobile casualty is an anchor on a retreating element. In JSOC, you leave the compromised asset behind to secure the primary objective.
I stood up.
I holstered my SIG Sauer.
Then I reached behind the server racks, grabbed the heavy pry tool from my tactical breaching kit, and jammed it into the manual override mechanism of the rear egress hatch. With a heave of leverage that strained every tendon in my shoulders, I ripped the rusted iron seal open.
“Get up, Captain,” I commanded.
She blinked in disbelief. “Richard, you’re violating basic extraction protocol. If you carry me, your movement speed drops by fifty percent. Your survival probability drops below twenty.”
I bent down, hooked my right arm beneath her shoulders, and hauled her to her feet, supporting her weight against my chest.
“I spent thirty years following protocols written by cowards in air-conditioned offices,” I said, looking her dead in the eye. “And for the last five years, I was a father.”
A faint, ironic smile touched my lips.
“And a father doesn’t leave his kid behind.”
*BOOM!*
The shaped charges on the vault door detonated with a blinding flash of orange fire. The massive steel hinges sheared off in a rain of white-hot sparks, and the multi-ton door collapsed inward with a deafening crash that shook the foundations of the mansion.
I didn’t look back.
With Vance slung over my shoulder in a modified fireman’s carry, I dropped feet-first into the dark, damp concrete shaft of the drainage culvert.
The drop was ten feet into freezing, knee-deep runoff water. The impact sent a jolt of agony through my damaged left knee, but I didn’t break stride. I waded through the rushing water, hunched beneath the low curved ceiling of the tunnel, pushing forward into the blackness.
Behind us, flashlight beams cut through the smoke at the top of the shaft.
“Target has egressed through the maintenance line!” a harsh voice shouted from above. “Deploy fragmentation canisters! Clear the pipe!”
*Clink-clink-clink.*
Two steel cylinders tumbled down the shaft, splashing into the water twenty yards behind us.
“Down!” I yelled.
I drove Vance beneath the surface of the muddy water and threw my own body over her as the two M67 fragmentation grenades detonated simultaneously.
The shockwave through the confined water was like a physical kick to the spine. The concussive overpressure blew my helmet off, ringing through my skull like a church bell, while hot steel fragments shrieked over our heads, ricocheting violently off the concrete walls.
Water showered down on us in a torrential deluge.
I dragged myself up, coughing out sulfurous water, and pulled Vance to her feet. She was barely conscious, her head lolling against my chest.
“Move,” I muttered through clenched teeth, more to myself than to her. “Move, Hayes. Move.”
We broke into a shambling run through the culvert. The tunnel sloped downward, carrying us beneath the perimeter fences of Belle Meade, underneath the winding asphalt of Page Road, and out into the dense, forested hills of Percy Warner Park.
After four hundred yards of suffocating darkness, the tunnel opened into a wide concrete spillway surrounded by towering oak and hickory trees.
Rain was pouring in sheets now, a violent spring thunderstorm that drummed against the canopy and washed the blood from our clothes. In the distance, through the mist and darkness, the red and blue emergency lights of Nashville police cruisers and federal response vehicles were beginning to seal off the access roads leading up to Caldwell Manor.
They thought the fight was up on the ridge.
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