My Daughter Was Beaten, Locked Away, and Threatened by Her Millionaire Husband’s Family—When They Laughed at Me and Said My Military Rank Didn’t Frighten Them, I Slowly Turned Around and Made One Move They Never Expected. / Chapter 36 / 100

Chapter 36 - The Architect's Sanctuary

*Crack!*

The 9mm hollow-point round took Richard directly in the right shoulder, spinning him violently out of the leather command chair. Blood splattered across the white illuminated buttons of the STRATCOM console.

"Contact!" Vance roared as the server room blast doors behind Richard hissed open.

Four elite Obsidian Apex bodyguards poured into the command room, their weapons firing on full auto. Concrete chips and severed cables rained from the ceiling as a lethal storm of high-caliber rounds tore through the amphitheater.

"Down!" I screamed, tackling Abigail behind the reinforced steel podium of the primary briefing station.

A Delta operator took a burst to his chest plate, grunting in pain as he collapsed backward, returning fire while sliding down the wall. Vance unpinned a fragmentation grenade, waited two seconds, and hurled it around the server rack.

*KABOOM!*

The concussive shockwave blew two of the mercenaries through the glass partition of the server farm, their weapons clattering across the raised flooring. The remaining two were systematically cut down by the surviving Delta operators in three seconds of brutal, surgical marksmanship.

Smoke hung heavy in the subterranean chamber. The harsh claxon of the automated launch alert began to wail at deafening volume:

*CRITICAL WARNING: T-MINUS ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY SECONDS TO STRATEGIC LAUNCH INITIATION. EMERGENCY ACTION MESSAGE CONFIRMED.*

I scrambled over the shattered glass toward the command console.

Richard was crawling on his hands and knees, dragging his blood-soaked right arm, leaving a thick crimson smear across the linoleum. With his left hand, he was reaching toward a secondary terminal set into the steel pedestal of the mainframe.

I stepped onto his outstretched wrist with my combat boot, pressing down with the full weight of my body until the bones ground together.

Richard cried out in agony, his face pressed against the cold steel floor.

"It's over, Richard," I said, breathing heavily, the heat radiating off my weapon barrel. "Give me the emergency abort sequence."

He turned his head slowly, blood bubbling at the corner of his lips, a ghastly, triumphant smile stretching across his pale face.

"There... is no... abort sequence, Eleanor," he coughed, his teeth stained red. "The Phoenix Protocol is hard-coded into the military satellites. Once the biometrics are locked in, the only way to stop the missile release is to completely purge the strategic mainframe."

"Then tell me the purge code!" I commanded, driving the barrel of my M4 against the base of his skull.

"The purge code requires two simultaneous cryptographic keys," Richard whispered, his breath wheezing as his punctured lung filled with fluid. "One is in my head. The other... the other belongs to the commanding officer of the Pentagon's Strategic Readiness Command."

He looked up at me with dying, mocking eyes.

"That's you, Eleanor. But to input the purge... you have to bypass the system's thermal firewall manually. Inside the core reactor room. The radiation coolant has leaked. Whoever enters the primary core room will take a lethal dose of gamma radiation in thirty seconds."

He wheezed out a choked laugh.