Chapter 34
Joe held the rifle steady and watched the last man disappear into the darkness.
Three shots. Three bodies. The tunnel swallowed the echoes and gave nothing back.
He stayed prone for a beat longer, scanning for movement deeper in. He saw none, but that meant nothing.
The light down there was bad and the angles were worse.
He knew the situation had changed, and not to his benefit.
Whoever was deeper in the tunnel had heard the shots. They knew exactly what they were up against.
They knew it was him.
I saved you once. This is the second time. There won’t be a third.
The words reverberated in Joe’s memory. Walking into that tunnel right now with guns blazing was a good way to prove Kinsman right.
Joe moved to the work area where the dead men had been standing. The chamber smelled different here. Not just damp stone and machine oil. There was a bite of chemicals under it, a faint tang that didn't belong in an old mine.
He searched his surroundings quickly. Light from the LED strings jumped over tools and cables and cut boards. He saw a couple of drills, old and loud looking. He saw crates of bolts. He saw a battered generator with a fuel can beside it, the kind that ran for hours on a single tank.
He saw an Army-green box. Metal and rectangular. Latches that meant it was made to be opened in mud with cold hands. Stenciled markings rubbed half away by time, but not enough to hide what it was.
Joe knew the shape like he knew the weight of a loaded pistol.
Demolition kit.
He stared at it for a second and felt something inside him settle into place.
Kinsman.
Of course.
A civilian would have used mining explosives, whatever was cheap and available. A soldier used what he trusted, what he'd been trained on, what he'd carried in other places where tunnels and rock and concrete were the difference between living and dying.
Kinsman had widened the mine the way the Army widened things when it needed passage, not permission.
Joe flipped the latches and opened the lid.
Inside were the components, neatly packed, utilitarian, ugly in their simplicity.
Nothing exotic.
Just standard-issue Army blocks of C-4. Olive drab, wrapped in Mylar, each one marked with lot numbers and manufacture dates. Six blocks total, each one a pound and a half. Enough to take down a bridge support or punch through a reinforced wall.
Blasting caps were in a separate foam-lined compartment. M6 electric caps, the kind you fired with a current, not a fuse. Safer that way. More reliable. Harder to screw up in the field.
Det cord on a spool. Primacord. The stuff that burned at four miles per second and turned a careful plan into instantaneous reality.
And the timer. An M81 firing device. Mechanical. Spring-loaded. Twist the dial, pull the pin, and it counted down with the indifference of a clock. No batteries to die. No electronics to fail. Just gears and tension and inevitability.
Joe heard faint sounds deeper in the mine now. Not voices, movement. Boots scraping rock. A metallic clink that might have been a weapon touching stone.
They were repositioning.
Joe's mind ran through the geometry.
The tunnel sloped down. It pinched in places, widened in others. There were timbers set into the rock, and in a mine like this they were not decoration. They carried load. They kept tons of stone from deciding to become gravity.
A collapse would not have to be total.
A partial collapse would be enough.
He looked around for something with wheels.
Near the wall was an old utility dolly, the kind used to haul boxes and equipment. Thick tires. Bent handle. A tool of brute labor. Beside it sat a low cart, half buried in dust, maybe once used to move supplies in and out.
Joe dragged the dolly free.
He loaded the C-4 onto it and unwrapped three blocks and pressed them together, molding them into a single mass. The compound was pliable, almost like clay. It stuck to itself and held its shape.
He took two blasting caps from the foam compartment and crimped them carefully into the C-4, one on each side of the mass, pushing them deep enough that they wouldn't pull free but shallow enough that the shock would propagate cleanly through the explosive.
Joe twisted the leg wires together, creating a single circuit, then connected them to the firing device leads. Red to red. Black to black. The connections were solid, free of slack.
He cut a ten-foot length of det cord and pressed one end into the C-4 between the blasting caps. The cord would ensure the entire mass detonated simultaneously, not in sequence.
It was the difference between a shaped charge and a mess.
He wrapped the remaining three blocks around the det cord and molded them into the assembly, building a single unit.
Then he set the timer.
The M81 had a dial marked in minutes. He twisted it to three. Not long enough for them to organize and counter it. Not short enough to trap him on the wrong side of it. Three minutes gave him time to get clear and find cover.
He pulled the safety pin and heard the faint tick of the mechanism engaging. The spring was wound and the clock was running.
Joe paused with his hand on the dolly handle and forced his brain to ask the question it needed to ask.
If there were nuclear devices deeper in the mine, could a conventional blast set one off?
The answer was no, not the way people imagined.
A nuclear detonation was not a simple explosion. It was precision. It required a specific internal sequence, timing measured too tight for chaos. You could smash a device apart. You could detonate its conventional components and scatter material that nobody wanted scattered.
But you did not get a nuclear blast by accident.
Joe only cared about consequences.
A conventional blast in a confined tunnel would kill men. It would collapse rock. It would bury evidence. It might also turn anything nuclear into a poisoned mess.
But if his choice was poisoned mess or a city wiped out, it was not a choice.
He pushed the dolly toward the mouth of the tunnel.
The slope was still there, dropping into darkness. The air down the shaft felt colder than the air outside it, as if the mine held winter inside its lungs.
Joe positioned himself at the corner where the tunnel bent and the line of sight disappeared, then shoved the dolly forward.
The wheels clattered. The dolly started rolling down the grade, picking up speed. The ticking of the timer was audible for a moment, then swallowed by distance and stone.
He didn't watch it go.
He listened.
Clatter.
Rattle.
A soft bump as it hit uneven rock.
Then, deeper, a shout. The first human sound he'd heard.
Joe raised the rifle and fired two quick shots into the darkness around the corner, not aiming for a kill, aiming for a reflex. Men ducked when bullets snapped past. Men froze when sound turned into threat.
The shouting sharpened. Movement surged.
Too late.
The dolly kept rolling, the slope doing the work for him.
Joe stepped back, pressed flat against the rock, and counted in his head.
The blast hit as a hard, concussive punch that shoved air out of the tunnel in a violent exhalation.
The sound was not a boom so much as a vicious cracking, stone and timber and metal all arguing at once. The tunnel exhaled debris and darkness, a rolling cloud that turned the LED work lights into dim smears.
Joe ducked and covered his head as grit rained down, sharp as sand, and something heavy struck the ground nearby with a wet thud that might have been rock or might have been something else.
The mine groaned.
Timbers snapped with sounds like rifle shots.
Rock shifted and settled in a long, grinding sigh that seemed to come from deep below, from places where the earth had been holding its shape for a million years and had just been given permission to let go.
When the dust began to thin, Joe lifted his head.
The tunnel ahead was partly choked now. Not sealed. Not a tomb. A partial collapse. Broken beams angled like ribs. Jagged rock piled in the center, some pieces the size of cars, others no bigger than fists. The tunnel beyond was darker, tighter, and angry.
He coughed once, spat grit, and got to his feet.
Joe switched his light to a narrower beam and stepped forward, into the wreckage.