Chapter 144
The sacrifice was off the table. Charlotte understood it with the same clarity that had carried her across eight states.
She wouldn’t die there. The children wouldn’t die here, but the depot would still burn.
She turned from Mason and Sophia and faced the room again.
The crates, the fuel, the mortar rounds, and the single bulb buzzing overhead all came back into focus.
“Okay,” she said. “New plan. We’re not staying for the explosion. We’re going to rig a delay, get clear, and let this place come down after we’re gone.”
She moved to the nearest crate and lifted the lid. The demolition charges were there, clay-like blocks packed in foam. Beside them, in a separate compartment, were spools of something that looked like a thin rope with a plastic coating.
“Detonation cord,” she said. “I’ve heard the term before, maybe at the military camp or from Grandpa.
It’s a thin explosive material that burns at a controlled rate and chains multiple charges together.
If we run it through the room in a long line, it’ll take time to burn from one end to the other.
That should give us enough time to get out. ”
Sophia was already moving. She found a box of blasting caps on a shelf near the fuel drums, small metal cylinders designed to trigger the main charges.
Mason stayed by the door with Jack, his eyes fixed on the corridor, playing lookout the way he had at Claudia’s farm.
They worked without wasting motion. Charlotte connected the detonation cord to the blasting caps, then ran it in a long, serpentine pattern across the depot floor.
She wove it between crates and looped it around support columns, building a fuse line that would burn for minutes rather than seconds.
The cord was thin and flexible. She estimated the burn rate by eye, slow enough to matter and fast enough to work.
Sophia helped. Her hands were steady despite everything, and she understood the assignment without needing it explained twice.
She took a second spool from the crate and began running parallel lines, doubling the delay.
Near the fuel drums, Charlotte placed three demolition charges in a triangle pattern.
The fuel would ignite first, then the charges, then the rest of the depot in a chain reaction that would leave nothing intact.
She connected the charges to the main fuse line with careful hands, aware that pressure or friction in the wrong place could eliminate the delay she was building.
Mason watched from the doorway. Twice the boy called softly that someone was coming, and twice the sound turned out to be the building settling or distant movement that didn’t approach.
Each time Charlotte paused, listened, then returned to work.
The fuse line ran the length of the depot and back, at least sixty yards of thin cord laid in careful coils across the concrete.
At the end, where it emerged near the doorway, Charlotte fashioned a simple trigger from a blasting cap and a length of slower-burning fuse material she found in a wooden box labeled in Cyrillic.
She couldn’t read it, but she could guess the purpose.
She’d light it last. One match and one flame applied to the slow fuse would give them the time the cord had bought them to reach the ventilation duct, clear the perimeter, and put distance between themselves and whatever happened next.
She stood. The fuse line snaked across the floor in patient coils, connecting crates to fuel and mortar rounds in a sequence that would, if everything worked, reduce the airport’s eastern quadrant to rubble and cripple an occupation’s supply chain.
“Everyone understands the plan?” Charlotte asked.
Sophia and Mason both nodded.
“Ventilation duct. Out past the perimeter. Horses at the campsite. We ride northwest and don’t look back.”
She reached for the matchbook she had taken from a guard’s pocket upstairs.
Just one match, and it would have to be enough.
They had only a few minutes to evacuate a building full of soldiers who had discovered their commander dead and their prisoners missing.
The radio traffic filtering down from above indicated that the search had become methodical, with special attention being paid to the basement levels.
Charlotte struck the match. The small orange flame flickered to life in the harsh light as she touched it to the slow fuse at the point where it met the detonation cord.
The material ignited with a hiss and a curl of smoke.
Then the burn began its steady progress along the first coil of cord toward the charges, the fuel, and everything else they had arranged.
“Go. Move now.”
They moved. Mason went first, then Sophia, then Charlotte, with one last look at the burning fuse and the depot that would soon cease to exist. The corridor outside was clear.
The mechanical room was twenty yards ahead, and beyond it waited the ventilation duct, the maintenance shed, and the open air beyond the perimeter fence.
They had taken three steps when the sound came.
Boots hammered on the stairwell. Heavy, multiple, and moving with the organized tread of men who had been given specific orders about a specific location.
The sound carried through the basement corridor with the unmistakable rhythm of a response heading straight for the one room in the facility that mattered most. The depot door was still open behind them, and the fuse was burning.
“Run. Both of you. Run now.”
Neither child moved; their fear was evident in the tense silence.
Sophia’s hand instinctively grasped Charlotte’s arm, seeking comfort in that small connection.
Mason stood firm beside Jack, his face mirroring the resolve he had shown in moments of desperation before, when escape seemed impossible.
The footsteps grew louder as they reached the bottom of the stairs.
A voice called out in Russian, followed by another response.
Time was slipping away; they were just thirty seconds from the depot door. The fuse was already burning toward the first charge. The children stood beside her in a narrow corridor, with one exit ahead and no time to escape. Anxiety gripped her heart as she realized the urgency of their situation.