Chapter 7 - STEEL AND SMOKE
The warehouse exploded into an inferno of crossfire.
Kian’s tactical team engaged immediately, muzzle flashes strobing against the dark walls like violent lightning. Gunfire rattled with deafening fury, the sharp crack-crack of suppressed carbines drowned out by the thundering roar of heavy assault rifles.
Kian pushed himself up, coughing blood, his side bruised from the fall, but his weapon was already level. He fired two controlled bursts over the catwalk railing, dropping two mercenaries advancing toward the ladder.
"Can you move?" Harper shouted, reloading her sidearm with blistering speed.
"I can fight," Kian grunted, his jaw tight with grim resolve. "The cargo bay is fifty yards north. If Kabir gets to the trucks, he'll detonate the dirty isotopes to cover his retreat."
"He won't get to the trucks," Harper said.
She unclipped two smoke canisters from her vest, pulled the pins with her teeth, and hurled them down into the center of the kill-zone. Thick, impenetrable white smoke billowed outward, blinding the mercenaries and swallowing the flashlight beams.
Harper didn't wait. She vaulted over the catwalk railing, catching a hanging steel cable, and slid down into the fog like a wraith.
To anyone else, the smoke was a wall of blindness. To Harper, it was home.
She moved through the whiteout with sensory precision, tracking footsteps by the splash of water on concrete, locating targets by the heat of their weapon barrels. A mercenary materialized through the haze; Harper caught his rifle barrel, knocked it aside, drove her heel into his knee, and struck his carotid with a lethal palm strike. He collapsed without a sound.
She moved like a phantom, taking down three more in silent, brutal succession.
Suddenly, a heavy hand grabbed her shoulder from behind, spinning her violently around.
Rajesh Malhotra lunged at her, a combat knife gleaming in his fist, his face contorted in manic, desperate fury. "You ruined everything, you filthy whore!" he screamed, slashing the blade toward her throat.
Harper leaned back, the steel tip slicing through the collar of her tactical shirt, missing her skin by a millimeter. She caught his wrist, twisted it outward until the bone popped with a sickening crunch, and drove her elbow directly into his nose.
Rajesh shrieked in agony, dropping the knife.
Harper didn't hesitate. She swept his legs out from under him, pinned him to the flooded concrete, and pressed the cold barrel of her Glock against the center of his forehead.
"Still think poor white people are pathetic, Rajesh?" she whispered in ice-cold Bambaiya Hindi.
Rajesh sobbed, blood pouring from his broken nose, his hands fluttering uselessly. "Please... please, don't..."
"Get up," a gravelly voice commanded from behind the smoke.
Harper froze.
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Kabir Dev stepped out of the haze, his gold submachine gun pointed directly at Harper’s chest. Beside him, two remaining guards held Kian Thorne, battered and bleeding, his arms pinned behind his back.
"Drop the weapon, Sparrow," Kabir said, his dead eyes crinkling in cruel delight. "Or Mr. Thorne’s brains decorate this floor before you can pull that trigger."
