He stood, a little tentatively. No time to worry if anyone inside the building heard the guard’s shots. And no time to worry about the gunshot wound to his back; if the bullet traveled in his body and pierced a major organ or blood pathway, he’d be dead soon enough.
With a bullet in him, with a migraine seriously eroding his operating capacity, and with the chance that others heard the shots and sounded an alarm, Kit decided to use the thermite now; he’d rather confirm the placement of the servers first, but he might not live long enough to do that. So he started pulling the pins on ALSG814 thermite grenades. He held three back in reserve, but he ignited twenty others, dropping them strategically on the roof above the room where the guard said the servers were located.
Thermite can burn at 4,000 degrees. The intense heat, produced through a chemical reaction, unleashed molten iron onto the roof. Since a single thermite grenade can melt through a vehicle’s engine block in seconds, twenty thermite grenades burned through the corner roof section of Popov’s headquarters with a searing rain of liquefied hell that Kit was sure would destroy the computer servers in the room below.
Even brief glances at the fiery thermite hurt Kit’s eyes with a stabbing trauma that traveled through to the back of his skull. And extreme throbbing pain from the migraine itself now raked the right side of his brain like a ball-peen hammer slamming steel.
He moved away from the inferno and fought to focus his thoughts. His first priority was to find Kala. But he’d also have to make sure the servers were destroyed.
Vomit covered the fronts of the two guards who stumbled out from the CCTV room. The men looked green and could barely stand. A couple of guards sitting on a couch and smoking in the common room on the ground floor looked over to their comrades.
“Damn, what did you two eat for dinner?” Clearly, the guards had not heard the gunfire from the roof. The building was buttoned up tight and soundproofed.
But the nauseous guards couldn’t speak.
“Go clean up, we’ll watch your post.”
As the sick guards headed to the toilet, the other men crossed toward the CCTV room.
The bald hacker didn’t understand what had just happened, but a meteor—it must be a meteor—had just dropped onto his monitor in front of him and split it in two. Then a molten drop landed on his keyboard, and another glob hit his wrist, instantly severing his hand and instantly cauterizing the wound. As a scream formed on his lips, a blob dropped onto his waxed, shiny head and burned all the way down his spinal cord, through the chair he sat on, and burrowed into the floor.
The heavily pierced girl with the tattoos on her neck going up onto her ear screamed maniacally. Her screams caught the attention of the long-haired blond guy, who pulled off his earphones, stood up, and looked to the ceiling right as a molten mass collapsed onto him. His body simply melted, as the hellacious ooze ate into the floor.
The tattooed girl stumbled toward the door, instantly hyperventilating from abject fear. The one second it took her to open the door cost her her life, as a small drop of thermite landed on her back and pierced her with a very different kind of piercing than she was accustomed to, and burned right through her spine.
CHAPTER 51
Yulana leaned all her weight onto the battery-powered drill with a very long drill bit. The steel bit ate through the mortar with relative ease, but the wall was thick. She felt the give when the bit cleared the interior of the wall, and she backed the bit out of the cement. With shaking hands, she unwound plastic tubing and pushed the tubing through the hole she had just drilled.
She bent down to the backpack at her feet and struggled to pull out a heavy steel canister that was two feet long and eight inches in diameter. She connected the tubing to the nozzle and then turned the valve to the ON position. The Kolokol-1 gas now pumping into the ground floor was the equalizer that might enable she and Kit to pull this off; she only prayed her daughter Kala was not being held on the ground floor.
Yulana clicked the TALK button of her radio three times and heard three clicks in return. Then she ran for cover in the parking lot.
Kit felt a burning, searing pain from the bullet wound in his back as he opened the steel fire door at the bottom of the landing and entered the third floor. As he eased on a pair of sunglasses to shield his eyes from the lights, the acrid stench of burning flesh and plastic invaded his nostrils. In addition to sensitivity to light, most migraine sufferers, including Kit, had sensitivity to smells and sounds. The smell caused him to wretch, but there was nothing left to come up.
He moved forward. Strangely, the floor was eerily quiet, until a piercing alarm sounded up and down the hallway. The sound hit him like a hot poker thrust into his brain stem and caused him to stagger and cry out. He regained his balance just as a hacker who’d been sleeping bolted out of a room wearing only boxer shorts. The man stopped just short of the barrel of Kit’s P90.
Sweat now poured from Kit’s face in the cool confines of Popov’s headquarters. The hacker blanched when he took in Kit’s visage and greenish skin color.
“That’s the server room?” Kit asked in Russian as he gestured to where smoke now wafted from a doorway.
“No, the server room is on the ground floor, two floors directly below that room.”
Damn it! The rooftop guard confused the hackers’ workroom with the server room! thought Kit.
“Who are you!?” demanded the shirtless hacker.
Kit stuck the barrel of his weapon under the man’s chin. “The data from the American fiber-optic strands… is it all in the servers or has it been sent elsewhere?”
The man’s eyes went huge. “I-I don’t know.”
Kit jammed the gun barrel harder. “You know.”
“I-I can’t say.”
“You’re lying again, so I’ll kill you right now.” Kit made like he was going to pull the trigger.
“We have it all here!” said the hacker, hurrying to get the words out. “We haven’t sold access yet because we have yet to find the high-dollar strands.”
Kit slammed the butt of his weapon into the man’s head, and he went down, unconscious. “Appreciate your cooperation.”
Kit stumbled to the hackers’ room and saw the carnage. All of the computers were destroyed, but it hadn’t been his intention to kill the hackers, especially in such a horrible way. The rooftop guard had either been mistaken or had lied. Yes, the hackers were spies and thieves working hard to hurt the United States of America; maybe they were the ones who had stolen his mom’s life savings. Still, they weren’t targets to kill, and especially not with thermite.
As shouts and commotion began to filter out from the various rooms, Kit hurried back into the stairwell; pain shot all the way up into his shoulder, and his head felt like a church bell being struck at noon.
Viktor Popov lay in a deep, satisfied sleep in a gigantic bed next to Sasha, his sexed-up red-haired personal assistant. And while ballistic ceramic sheeting lined all the walls, floor area, and ceilings of his personal rooms, the material didn’t withstand temperatures of 4,000 degrees. The ceiling began to bubble, and then a dripping white-hot chemical syrup poured down onto Sasha. Her body jerked awake as her legs were amputated on the spot.
Popov woke to the sight of glowing, molten droplets raining down. He rolled clear and jumped off the bed just as a large chunk of the hackers’ room upstairs, or at least the melted remains of it, collapsed onto his beautiful lover. It was the most horrific, insane, surreal sight he’d ever seen, and Viktor Popov had personally created many a horrific sight in his life.