Chapter 16 - The Old Badger's Tunnel
The detonation blew me flat against the frozen scree. Shrapnel shrieked over my helmet, slicing through the freezing mist like red-hot needles. For two seconds, all I could hear was the high-pitched, metallic whine of ruptured air inside my eardrums, drowning out the roar of the wind.
Beside me, Miller grunted, clutching his shoulder as crushed granite peppered his tactical vest. Down in the gulch, the lead APC's autocannon barked again—three thumping beats of heavy thirty-millimeter rounds that ripped into the cliff face ten yards below, showering us in pulverized limestone.
"Adele! Respond, damn it! Valkyrie, report!"
Gordon’s voice broke through the ringing in my ears. It wasn't the voice of the haughty, dismissive old man who had laughed at my 'paper-pushing' career at his retirement gala forty-eight hours ago. It was the thunderous, desperate roar of a combat commander watching his daughter stand on the brink of an abyss.
I keyed the throat mic with a trembling, dust-caked glove. "Valkyrie Actual is functional. We took near-miss fragmentation. Ridge is collapsing. Speak to me, General."
Across the Pentagon TOC, a dozen high-ranking brass leaned over Gordon Vance’s shoulders in deathly silence, holding their breath.
"The rock face behind your left shoulder," Gordon barked, his voice steadying into a lethal, surgical rhythm. "Fifty years ago, before the satellite grid existed, the Soviet 40th Army ran an underground survey line through that gorge. There is a vertical drainage shaft carved into the granite six meters past the dead pine. It’s overgrown with frost, but the fissure is six feet wide. Drag your wounded into that crevice right now!"
"How do you know that?" I muttered, dragging Miller by his drag handle while Sergeant Hayes laid down a disciplined, three-round burst at the advancing muzzle flashes in the valley.
"Because I mapped that godforsaken mountain from an SR-71 in seventy-four before you were even born!" Gordon yelled back, his fist slamming down onto the polished tactical console in Washington. "Move, Adele! They’re adjusting their fire arc! You have seven seconds before the next salvo!"
I didn't question him. "Miller, Hayes, on me! Fissure at nine o'clock! Move, move, move!"
We scrambled backward over the jagged ice, our combat boots slipping on blood-slicked stones. I threw my shoulder against a thick curtain of frozen roots and dead scrub pine. Behind it, exactly as the old man had said, a pitch-black opening yawned inside the living mountain.
We tumbled inside just as three high-explosive incendiary rounds obliterated the boulder where we had been kneeling a heartbeat earlier. The shockwave slammed the rock shelf, showering the cave entrance in a cascade of ice and stone, sealing out the blinding whiteout of the storm and plunging us into darkness.
Inside the cavern, the air was dead cold and smelled of sulfur and ancient dust.
"We're inside the shaft," I panted into the mic, wiping a smear of blood and frost from my brow. "We’re in defilade, but we’re pinned. The blast caved in part of the throat. We have one way in, one way out, and five armored vehicles sitting at the base of the mountain."
Through the satellite relay, Gordon's breath was ragged. "Listen to me, Valkyrie. You aren't just facing local rebels. Those aren't standard border militia APCs. I’m looking at the thermal scan through the TOC uplink right now. Those are customized BMP-3s with active thermal optics and electronic warfare suites. Someone paid top dollar to put a hit on your team."
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"Who?" I asked, checking Miller's tourniquet in the gloom.
In the Pentagon, Gordon looked up at the circle of generals standing around him. His jaw hardened into pure granite. "Someone who knew your flight path before wheels went up. And when you get back, Adele... you and I are going to tear them limb from limb."