Chapter 47 - The Gauntlet of Grease
Footsteps struck the floorboards above—heavy, disciplined, deliberate. Not street thugs. Not corporate rent-a-cops like the cowards who had taped a diaper to my desk and laughed at my arthritic hands in the executive tower three months ago.
These were operators.
"Clear left," a muffled, gravelly voice came through the open hatchway. "Thermal sensor picked up a heat signature down near the anvil base. Move in."
I didn't panic. Panic is an emotion reserved for men who don't know the terrain.
I climbed the ladder swiftly, closed the heavy armor plate until it sat on its silent safety catch, and slipped behind the heavy cast-iron column of the fifty-ton Cincinnati press brake. The shop was dark, save for the blue-green ambient light leaking through the rain on the clerestory windows.
Two men entered the central aisle. They wore sterile black tactical fatigues, suppressors on their short-barreled carbines, and night-vision goggles mounted to ballistic helmets. They were sweeping the corners, checking blind spots with methodical precision.
"Floor’s clear," the point man whispered into his throat mic. "Anvil’s raised. The old bastard found the hatch."
"Find him. Double-tap. Clean house, then call the transport team," the second man answered.
He stepped directly onto the cast-iron drainage grate in front of the hydraulic lift.
What he didn’t know was that forty years ago, my father had rigged the shop’s compressed air system to a central dump valve near the main bench. With a single yank of a wire lanyard hidden behind the press brake, I dumped two hundred pounds per square inch of industrial shop air directly into the hydraulic line beneath his feet.
*BOOM!*
The hydraulic floor plate launched upward with the force of an artillery shell, slamming into the first operator’s chest and sending him cartwheeling through the air. He crashed through a stack of untreated cedar pallets with a sickening crack, his carbine clattering across the concrete.
The second shooter spun toward my position, raising his weapon to fire.
I didn't shoot. The blast of a 12-gauge in an enclosed cinder-block shop would alert Clara and deafen me for hours. Instead, I yanked the overhead crane controller hanging from a steel cable beside me.
The five-ton magnetic lifting head, hanging thirty feet above, dropped two feet, swung in a violent, pendulum arc, and swept across the aisle.
The man saw the shadow too late. The heavy steel crane hook caught him square across the shoulder, lifting him clean off his boots and pinning him against the steel frame of the vertical milling machine. His weapon flew from his grip, skidding harmlessly into the oil-catch basin.
I stepped out from behind the press brake, the barrel of the Remington leveled dead at the center of his forehead.
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"You boys should have asked around town," I said softly, the hammer cocked back with a chilling click. "Nobody breaks into Reed Machinery twice."
***
