“They’re livestock,” she said.
“Jesus,” Michael muttered, folding his arms and watching Forrest very closely.
When Kane finally entered Launch Control, Forrest looked expectantly in his direction. “We set?”
“All set,” Kane said, wiping his hands with an oily rag.
“Looks like we’d better be,” Forrest said. “These pricks here are unloading shaped charges.”
Kane shrugged it off. “They’ll only get the number one door. We’ll still have numbers two and three after that.”
“How do you know they’ll only get one door?” Michael wanted to know.
“Would you knowingly walk into a goddamn blast furnace?”
“Blast furnace?”
“We got our own dragon lives in this cave,” Kane said. “You didn’t know that?”
“Um, guys?” Emory said, looking into her lap. “I think my water just broke.”
“What water?” Ulrich turned around. “Oh, that water!”
Forrest looked at Emory and laughed. “You can tell it’s Wayne’s kid, with the shitty timing.”
“Hey, fuck you, Jack. It’s not ‘my kid.’”
“It will be pretty fucking soon,” Emory said, taking Michael’s hand as she stood up from the chair. “Good luck with the battle, guys.”
Michael walked her down the hall to Medical.
Sean West was in the process of packing an emergency med kit in case they were forced to evacuate the facility when he looked up to see that Emory’s fatigue pants were wet. “Stress of the moment?” he said with a smile.
“Musta been,” she said. “I started having contractions the second I stood up.”
“Help her onto the bed, Michael. And go find Price, will you?”
“Get Erin too,” Emory called. “And be sure to tell Marty!” She took off her jacket and lay on her side while West went about preparing a semisterile environment. “Hey, Doc, do you have any of those silver suicide things?”
He turned around. “How do you know about those?”
“I don’t think anything’s a secret down here, Doc.”
A shadow crossed his brow. “What do you want one for?”
“Well, if those bastards get in here anytime soon, I won’t be any good for fighting or evacuating.”
“I’ll be taking care of you. Don’t worry.”
“No offense, Doc, but I’ve seen things go to shit way too fast in this current reality. I’d feel a lot better if I had one of those things in my jacket pocket right here by the bed.”
He stood looking at her, knowing she was right about the fluidity of battle. He opened a cabinet, took a titanium vial not much larger than a tube of chapstick from a steel box, walked over and put it into her jacket pocket. “Once this siege has lifted, I want it back. They’re too dangerous to have floating around down here with the kids.”
“No problem.”
Erin arrived and sat down on the edge of the bed with Emory, taking her hand. “How do you feel, honey?”
“Pissed. I’m supposed to be getting ready for a fight, but I’m in here having a fuckin’ kid.”
“Do you still feel like you want me to—”
“Erin, don’t even try getting out of this!”
Erin kissed her hand, suddenly overcome by emotion. “There’s no greater gift one woman can give another.”
“Bullshit,” Emory said, already bored with Erin’s sentimentality. “I can think of a few things right off the bat.”
“Like what?” Erin asked.
“Some good head, for one thing.”
West laughed out loud.
“You’re terrible!” Erin said. “You sound like Wayne.”
“Must be why he and I get along so good.”
Back in Launch Control, Forrest and the others stood watching as Moriarty walked into the house with a meter-long plastic tube under his arm, strolling into the kitchen like General Patton as he removed his gloves. They recognized him even with the beard as he faced the tiny fiber-optic camera hidden in the smoke detector on the kitchen wall. The fact that the kitchen table was stained dark with blood didn’t seem to bother him as he pulled a rolled-up blueprint from the tube and rolled it out on the table.
“Oh, that’s just fucking great!” Ulrich said, sitting back in the chair.
“What is that?” Michael asked.
“It’s a schematic of this facility,” Forrest said quietly. “The Air Force must have still had it on file locally.”
“That means we’re in big trouble, right? Won’t they go right to the lift elevator and blow their way through?”
“No,” Forrest said. “And if even they do, they’ve still got a pair of blast doors to get through—if they get past us in the cargo bay.”
Ulrich turned around in the chair and looked up at him. “Would you care to tell me what makes you so fucking sure he won’t go straight to the lift elevator?”
Forrest took a moment to light up a cigarette with his brass Zippo before replying. “Why would he look for something he doesn’t know about?”
“He’s got the goddamn schematic right there on the table, Jack!”
“He has the original schematic,” Forrest said. “See, I do my research, Stumpy. Only two Titan installations were given lift elevators. This one and another one clear the fuck up in North Dakota some place. And our lift elevator wasn’t added to this installation until two years after it went online. Hence… jerkoff up there knows nothing about it.”
Fifty
Moriarty stood looking over the schematic, scratching at himself as Lieutenant Ford came into the kitchen with a couple of men. “This house obviously wasn’t part of the original plan, lieutenant. So the main blast door must be located beneath it. You two, go down and check the basement.”
Ford waited until the men were gone. “Are you worried about a booby trap?”
“Better safe than sorry,” Moriarty said with a shrug, again digging at his crotch.
The men returned unharmed and said the entrance to the silo was indeed located in the basement and that it was sealed shut.
“Told you,” Moriarty said quietly, rolling up the schematic. “It’s sealed, which means our Green Beret friends are still down there eating our food. Mark my words, Lieutenant. Before this is over, I am personally going to feed that smartass Captain Forrest his fucking liver.
“Sergeant Yoshinaka!” he said, stepping into the living room. “Are you ready to blow the doors off this beast?”
“They’re bringing up the charges now, Major,” answered a Japanese-American male with three dingy blue chevrons on his arms.
“And you’re sure you can do this?”
“These shaped charges were designed for exactly this kind of work, Major. Don’t worry. Three big bangs and this place is ours.”
“You’d better know what you’re talking about,” Moriarty said. “Because those six wretches out in that truck are the last of the livestock. After them, we’ll have to eat the women, and that won’t go over well with the men.”
“I still think we should send a foraging patrol ahead into Lincoln,” Ford said.
“No,” Moriarty said. “We can’t afford to risk losing any more men. Find the air shafts. There are two of them on the west side of the compound. Pour diesel oil down them and light them up. It’s time to let these jokers know we’re here.”
Moriarty and his remaining men had spent the last three months in North Platte rooting out the survivors there and scraping by on whatever scraps they could find, but the cities were becoming less fruitful as the months passed due to competitor armies, and their own force had been considerably worn down by attrition through combat, disease, and starvation. They were down to a hundred men, which was a large force to feed but not large enough so they could afford too many more firefights with rival groups. They were also starting to run low on ammunition.