Moriarty placed a great deal of hope in this installation and what they might gain by taking it. If he didn’t find a way to feed and reequip his men within the next couple of weeks, they would soon cease to exist as an effective fighting force. He followed Sergeant Yoshinaka and his men into the basement and watched them attaching the linear-shaped charges of composition C-4 to the concrete casement around blast door number one.
The charges were each three feet long with an aluminum V-shaped liner. The opening of the V would be placed against the concrete, which upon detonation would project a superheated explosion in one continuous, bladelike jet deep into the concrete, searing through the steel locking pins within the casement and breaching the underground fortress’s first line of defense.
Lieutenant Ford came down the stairs knocking the dirty snow from his boots against a support pole in the center of the room. “We just lit up the air shafts,” he said, batting the snow from his trouser legs. “And the exhaust fans kicked right on, so they’re definitely down there!”
“And they’re shitting their pants,” Moriarty said with a smile. “All this time they’ve been down there thinking they had life by the ass. But it’s like General Patton once said, Lieutenant: ‘Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man.’”
When Yoshinaka was finished setting the charges, the three of them went upstairs and outside into the hip-deep snow where thick black smoke poured out of both ventilator shafts. Crouching in the back of one of the trucks, Yoshinaka attached the wires to the detonator.
“Ready, Major?”
“Blow that fucker, Sergeant.”
“Fire in the hole!” Yoshinaka shouted, and pressed the button.
They felt a shock tremor beneath their feet, and a deep boom came from inside the house. The windows did not blow out, however, since Yoshinaka had instructed his men to leave the front and back doors open to neutralize the pressure wave.
“Is that it?” Moriarty asked, having expected an earth-shattering kaboom.
“That’s it,” Yoshinaka said, hopping down from the truck.
“First squad!” Moriarty shouted. “Move up!”
Twelve men with rifles went running into the house, and Moriarty followed, waiting for them to make sure the enemy wasn’t coming out to fight.
Even with the dust still settling in the basement, he could plainly see that the steel door had been effectively blasted loose of the concrete casement. A number of men grabbed hold of the door and with gut-wrenching effort managed to pull it over onto the basement floor, where it landed very hard against the cement.
Moriarty shined his flashlight down the tunnel to blast door number two. “Beyond that door, gentlemen, is a stairwell leading down three stories. And that’s where we’ll find the door to the main complex.”
“Think maybe they got some women in there, Major?” asked one of the men.
“They’re stupid if they don’t, son,” Moriarty said, clapping the twenty-year-old on the shoulder. “Now clear the room and two of you go lug another case of charges down here.”
“What sort of defense you think they’ve lined up in there?” Yoshinaka wondered.
“They can line up whatever they want,” Moriarty said arrogantly. “Once we put the damn flamethrower to work in their tunnels, they’ll be screaming to capitulate. Trust me, Sergeant. This is shock and awe at its finest. We’ll go through these assholes like shit through a goose.”
Two men returned with a case of explosives and carried it down the tunnel to the second door.
“I’ll be outside with Lieutenant Ford,” Moriarty called down the tunnel. “All this dust is choking me.”
“Won’t be long,” Yoshinaka called back, going right to work unwrapping the explosives. He handed a flashlight to one of the men. “Hold this light, Sims, so I can see what the hell I’m doing here.”
The soldier beside Sims stood ready to fire should someone attempt to open the blast door from the other side. None of them noticed the small fiber-optic camera watching them through a tiny hole in the concrete above the door, but after a few seconds Sims heard a strange hissing sound in the ceiling right above his head.
“What’s that noise, Sarge?”
Yoshinaka looked up. “I don’t— Run!”
The three men dashed for the exit, but they didn’t make it. Six jets of flaming, pressurized gasoline shot down from six recessed holes in the ceiling, engulfing the entire tunnel in a scorching pyroclastic cloud of roiling black-orange flame, burning lava-hot to fry the meat from their bones. The charges exploded a few seconds later, the blast expelling the burning bodies from the tunnel.
“What the fuck was that?” Ford gasped outside on the porch, looking to Moriarty for the answer.
“Christ, Yoshinaka must have blown himself up!”
They took three men into the house, cautiously shining their lights down the basement stairs to see that it was filled with black smoke, smelling the stench of broiled flesh mixing with the smell of burnt gasoline.
“That’s the end of Yoshinaka,” Ford said grimly. “At least we’ve still got Edelstein to set the charges.”
“How did he fuck up?” Moriarty wondered. “C-4 is extremely stable.”
“Maybe somebody inside opened the door and tossed in a grenade.”
“No, that’s not cordite you smell,” Moriarty said. “That’s burnt gasoline. Something’s not fucking right here.”
They waited an hour for the smoke to clear, and then five of them went down into the basement with their flashlights and pistols in hand, seeing the three mutilated bodies piled against the far wall.
Moriarty shined his light down the tunnel and saw that the blast door was still intact. “Zeek, get in there and check that door. See if it’s been damaged at all.”
The young airman walked cautiously down the tunnel to the door and gave it a kick, but the hatch was as solid as a mountain. “It’s undamaged,” he called back. “Didn’t even scratch it!”
When Zeek was halfway back, the jets of flame blasted down into the tunnel again, engulfing him in another roiling ball of orange flame.
“Holy Jesus!” Moriarty screamed, dancing backward to escape the intense heat.
Ford jumped away too, but not before his left arm and back caught fire. He screamed and flailed around like a madman until Moriarty and the other airman managed to knock him down, using their jackets to beat out the flames. But by then Ford had suffered third-degree burns to both his back and shoulder.
“Medic!” Moriarty screamed up the stairs. “Somebody get the medic down here!”
They hauled the screaming Ford out into the snow and laid him down. The icy cold helped to deaden the pain, but it wouldn’t do much to prevent the inevitable infection the man was going to contract.
“Don’t let them eat me!” Ford was howling, clutching at Moriarty’s jacket, his face black and burned. “Don’t let the men eat me, Ben! Please!”
“Nobody’s going to eat you,” Moriarty said. “Morphine! Get this man some goddamn morphine!”
The medic shot him up with a dose of morphine, and they carried him off moaning to one of the trucks. “He won’t survive for very long with those burns,” the medic told Moriarty. “How much more morphine do you want me to waste on him?”
“Spread the word around,” Moriarty said quietly. “Let the men decide. If it sounds like they want to let him die, bleed him out. Be less of a mess for the butcher that way.