“Over my cold dead body, Jack Forrest.”
He laughed. “You sure sound like a mother to me.”
“You never pass up the chance to get a rise out of me, do you?”
“Nope.” He gave a Veronica a kiss. “How’s my girl?”
“Worried,” Veronica said.
“Don’t be. That’s my job.”
“Yet you never do.”
“That’s because it’s much more productive to act.”
“Well, Wayne’s worried,” Erin said. “He says not, but I know him. He’s as worried as I’ve ever seen him, in fact.”
“He’s just a pussy.”
Veronica slapped him on the arm.
“He’s called Wayne lots worse, V. Believe me. And vice versa. You’d think they hated each other the way they talk to one another. It’s disgusting.”
“I do hate him,” Forrest said, pretending to shake a cigarette from his pack, watching for Erin’s reaction.
“You even try smoking around this baby…”
He tucked the cigarettes back into his trouser pocket and gave Veronica a wink.
“What’s going on in the cargo bay?” Erin asked. “Wayne won’t tell me.”
“We’re just making sure nobody cuts through the lift elevator.”
“No, before all this,” Veronica said. “All five of you have been spending more time in there than normal lately.”
“Don’t think we haven’t noticed, Jack.”
“I can describe it in two words,” he said with a smile. “‘Top Secret.’”
Erin rolled her eyes. “At least Wayne has guts enough to say it’s none of our business.”
When Erin left, Forrest said quietly, “You were right about Melissa.”
“What do you mean?”
“A couple weeks ago when you said she manipulates me once in a while.”
“Oh, well…”
“It’s not really a big deal, though.”
She put her arm around him and kissed his neck. “I never tried to imply that it was. She’s a teenage girl. Every woman down here was like that at her age.”
“Well, I’d rather think of her as completely innocent.”
She laughed and kissed him again. “You and every man who’s ever had a daughter.”
Fifty-Four
“Major, you’d better come see this!” Sergeant Jeffries said, shaking Moriarty awake.
Moriarty let go of the woman he was using for warmth and rolled over onto his back. “What’s happened, Sergeant?”
“The men have found something I think you should see right away, sir. Something in the snow.”
Moriarty swung his feet over the edge of the cot and put them on the floor. He slapped the woman’s backside and told her to get up and put on his boots for him. After she tied his laces he stood up, cuffed her hands behind her back, and told her to go lay down. A few minutes later he was tromping off after Jeffries through the deep snow with his hands in his coat pockets. On the far side of the compound a dozen men stood in a circle with flashlights, shining them on the snow.
“What are they looking at?” Moriarty asked.
“It’s weird, sir. You need to see it for yourself.”
Moriarty marched up and stood looking at the snow. At first he didn’t see what they were talking about. He was looking for a specific item, like a frozen arm sticking out of the snow, but after a moment he saw what they had found… a slight depression in the snow shaped like a nearly perfect rectangle, about the length and width of an Army six-by-six truck.
“I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “You men get some shovels and be ready to dig, but nobody is to step into that area until ordered to do so. Sergeant Jeffries, get the complex blueprints and a compass and meet me in the house! We may not need that goddamn bulldozer after all.”
A short time later Moriarty and his staff were gathered around the kitchen table by the light of six army lanterns. “Okay,” he said, using the compass to orient the blueprints in the way one would orient a map. “You will notice, gentlemen, there is nothing in these plans to indicate anything located beneath the depression in the snow. Which is because whatever is located there was not added to this installation until after it was commissioned. Does anyone care to take a guess at what it might be?”
“A vent?” Jefferies suggested.
“Even better,” Moriarty replied. “It’s a hydraulic lift elevator, and below that lift elevator is a cargo bay. A cargo bay that is very likely full of supply, supply that will be ours the very moment we blast our way through the left deck. But what is even better, gentlemen, is that we will once again have unfettered access to a blast door. Now, this blast door will likely be larger and slightly thicker than the one we have already dealt with, but we will still be able to blast our way through it. Isn’t that right, Corporal Edelstein?”
“Yes, sir!”
“But why is there a depression in the snow?” one of the other men asked.
“Heat,” Moriarty said. “There’s obviously just enough heat below the deck to cause a slight melt close to the ground, which has dropped the surface level of the snow.
“Now, advise the men to dig slowly and very, very carefully. I’m guessing these cagey bastards have covered the deck with dirt, so when they reach dirt, the men are to put the shovels aside and dig with their hands. And no one—I repeat—no one is to step on that deck in anything other than stocking feet. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Major.”
“Very good, gentlemen. Let’s move with a purpose.”
The room cleared and Moriarty stood looking out the kitchen window with Jeffries at his side. He checked his watch. “Still two hours before first light,” he muttered. “We need to do this right, Sergeant. Get some men moving around down in the basement with flashlights. Make it look like they’re up to something. It doesn’t matter what. Just so they have the attention of those bastards below. Keep it mysterious.”
“Yes, sir,” Jeffries said. “What about the ’dozer, sir?”
“We’ll talk with Edelstein about that. Six feet of concrete is a lot to blast through. And assaulting through an opening like that won’t be easy.”
“What if we wait until the ’dozer gets here, and we let them see us digging on the far side of the compound,” Jeffries suggested, “to make it look like we’re digging down to the access tunnel for the number two silo? Wouldn’t that draw their attention even farther away from the cargo bay? And with the camera angle being what it is, they won’t be able to see us working on the lift elevator.”
“But they will wonder why we’re letting them watch.”
“We can show them a note. Tell them to surrender or else. They’ll think we’re letting them see in order to prove we can back up our threat.”
“So the question becomes when to hit them,” Moriarty said.
“I think a couple of hours after first light, sir. Give them time to see us and concentrate their defenses on the far side.”
“All right. We’ll start digging as soon as the ’dozer gets here, and exactly two hours later we’ll blow a hole in the lift deck. If there are no defenses in the bay, we’ll send two men down by rope to see if there is power to the lift. In the event the bay is defended, we’ll rain grenades down on them until there’s nothing left but ground chuck.”
Fifty-Five
Forrest was sitting on the john when the alarms began to sound once again. “Jesus Christ!” he said, pulling a length of paper from the roll and hurriedly wiping his ass. “Every fucking time!”
“Forrest to the LC immediately!” Kane’s voice called over the P.A. “Forrest to the LC!”