Chapter 26 - Breach at the Perimeter
Before I could answer, the entire bunker shuddered violently.
The concrete ceiling cracked with a deafening *BOOM*, showering us in gray dust and fragments of shale. The fluorescent lights flickered, died, and then clicked over to deep-red emergency batteries.
On the monitor bank, four of the six screens went black with static.
The tactical commander, Miller, burst into the central chamber, his rifle at the low ready, his tactical vest dusted with pulverized masonry. "Colonel! We’ve got an unauthorized airborne insertion! High-altitude, low-opening jumpers! They dropped straight through the tree line on the southern ridge—at least twenty operators, heavy ordnance, thermal optics!"
Arthur was on his feet instantly, his age vanishing in a single breath. "Who are they?"
"They’re not domestic, sir," Miller said, breathing hard. "They’re running Cyrillic transponders. Thorne didn't just sell the index to the domestic consortium. He double-brokered the coordinates to the Russian foreign intelligence syndicate out of Vienna."
Julian Thorne’s muffled, hysterical laughter drifted through the vents from the locked magazine room. "You thought you won, Arthur!" he screamed through the iron door. "You thought you had the only army in the valley! They don't want the house! They're going to drop a bunker-buster down the elevator shaft and collapse the entire mountain into the limestone cavern!"
Eleanor scrambled backward, her fingernails clawing at the concrete. "Arthur! Let us out! If they drop a thermite penetrator into the well, the blast will cook this entire level!"
Arthur didn't look at her. He strode to the weapons locker at the back of the room, pulled out two tactical vests, and tossed one to me.
"Put it on, Mark," he commanded, snapping a twelve-gauge bandolier across his own broad chest. "The house is gone. The homestead is gone. But they don't get the archive."
"Grandpa, what do we do?" I yelled over the rhythmic, concussive thuds of heavy mortar rounds striking the surface of the ridge sixty feet above us. "Miller said there are twenty of them!"
"This house has been under construction for fifty years, little bird," Arthur said, racking the shotgun with a sound that sent ice water through my veins. "Every wall, every stairwell, every closet has a secondary purpose. You think they’re coming into a bunker?"
He turned to the wall beside the heavy desk and pulled down a large, rusted iron lever labeled: *MANUAL VENTILATION DUMP.*
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"They aren't coming into a bunker," Arthur said, a terrifying, predatory smile spreading across his weathered face. "They’re walking into a slaughterhouse."
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