Authors: Thomas Koloniar
M
oriarty stood in the center of the lift elevator looking down through the hole they had blown in the deck as he waited for it to touch down. He then stepped into the cargo bay with twenty-five of his best men and stood looking around.
“They’re raising rats down here, Major,” said the man who had slid down the rope to lower the elevator for the rest of the team.
Moriarty stood grinning. His plan had worked perfectly. They had taken the cargo bay without firing a shot, and they were about to blow the first blast door with their enemy still entirely unaware of their presence. The fact that the plan had actually been Jeffries’s was irrelevant.
“Goddamn textbook!” he said, clapping Edelstein on the back. “Get that fucking door blown, Corporal. Christ Jesus, I think we’ll be running through their fucking halls before they even know we’re in. Get that goddamn flamethrower ready, Bishop!”
Edelstein and his men went quickly to work setting the linear charges in the shape of a man-door in the center of the much larger three-ton blast door.
“Major!” an airman shouted from across the sixty-by-sixty-foot square bay. “These two trucks are loaded up with MREs!”
“Nobody touches the food until after we’ve secured this installation!” Moriarty ordered. “Is that clear?”
Suddenly, there was a thunderous explosion outside the lift opening. One of their men standing near the edge lost his balance and fell in, snapping his knee when he hit the deck.
“What the fuck was that?” Moriarty demanded.
“Holy fuck!” the injured man screamed, holding his knee. “They blew up the fucking house!”
“Christ, they’re probably attacking!” Moriarty said in fear. “Everyone back on the lift!”
Twenty-five men piled back onto the lift as the twenty-sixth ran to hit the up button.
Nothing happened.
“Major, they’ve cut the fucking power! We’re fucking trapped!”
Moriarty’s men fell into instant panic as the sound of automatic rifle fire began to erupt outside the opening and another man fell to the deck, shot through the head.
“Blow that fucking door open!” Moriarty screamed at Edelstein. “We’re rats in a goddamn barrel down here!”
Edelstein and his men went back to setting the charges, finishing quickly. “Everybody take cover!”
The men took cover behind the trucks as Edelstein ran backward, reeling out the wire for the detonator. He quickly twisted the wire ends around the leads then shouted, “Fire in the hole!” giving the small handle a twist.
The charges blew with a loud
bang
and the men surged forward to pry the chunk from the center of the door with crowbars. It fell forward onto the concrete, and everyone stood well clear of the opening as Moriarty shined his flashlight carefully inside the tunnel, all of them fearing another horrifying pyrotechnic countermeasure.
This tunnel was of an entirely different construction than the main entrance, made of steel walls and a steel ceiling, supported by I-beam framing every forty-eight inches for its entire length of thirty-two feet. The flooring was made of steel grating, and the walkway itself was suspended from no less than twenty steel-spring shock absorbers, ostensibly to allow the tunnel to survive a near-hit from a nuclear weapon. There were no holes in the ceiling or the walls, and there was nothing in the tunnel except some rubble blown inward by the blast.
“Get to work men,” Moriarty said, casting an upward glance at the dim opening in the ceiling, half expecting to see it encircled by enemy riflemen.
As Edelstein and his team hurried down the tunnel with the case of charges, two badly battered Green Berets stood up from beneath the steel grating with blood running from their eyes and ears. They opened fire at near point-blank range, aiming for the necks and faces of the four-man demolition team and killing them instantly.
Both Forrest and Kane then pulled the pins on a pair of grenades each and tossed them down the tunnel after Moriarty’s men, who were scrambling for cover with no idea what kind of force they had so suddenly and unexpectedly come up against. The grenades exploded as they bounced clear of the opening, and six of Moriarty’s men were killed or badly wounded, the quadruple explosion badly disorienting and rattling the remainder even as they fled.
Forrest and Kane pulled themselves up from the hole in the floor and shuffled to the end of the passage. Neither bothered to speak; it would be days before either would be able to hear at all. They switched on their infrared night vision as they took cover inside the partial doorway, easily seeing many of the men who were relying on the poor light for cover.
They began to fire, hitting Moriarty’s men in their exposed legs and arms, shattering bone and picking them apart. There was a lot of return fire but none of it was accurate enough to do much good, as most of Moriarty’s men had grown lax about recharging their NVDs. Kane took a hit in his left shoulder and Forrest took a direct hit on his boron carbide chest plate, but both men remained cool, calm, and collected, choosing their targets before squeezing off each three-round burst.
Moriarty lay on the concrete behind a small generator with his arms wrapped over the top of his helmet, his knees pulled tight to his chest in order to make himself as small a target as possible. He was now deadly certain he had fallen into some kind of Special Forces trap and that his middling force was heavily outgunned.
There wasn’t much of anywhere for his men to hide other than behind the wheels of the three vehicles, but with them pushing and shoving one another in an effort to get the best cover, they were like ducks in a shooting gallery. Men were dropping their weapons and screaming in capitulation even as they were being shot apart—but no one was listening.
A few moments later the loading dock fell silent, and Moriarty slowly reached to open the flap on his holster, drawing the pistol and pulling his knees beneath him to sneak a peek over the top of the generator.
Forrest was standing there with his M-4 shouldered and ready to fire. “Major Moriarty, I presume?”
Moriarty dropped the weapon, and Kane delivered him a butt-stroke to the side of his head, sending him sprawling across the concrete.
U
lrich listened for the shock wave to strike the blast door, signaling that Emory had blown up the house. Counting to five, he pulled the lever and swung the door wide, running the twenty-foot length of the tunnel through the smoke and dust until he came out the other end into the dim light of the basement, where three dead airmen lay on the floor with their lungs crushed. A murky sky was visible at the top of the steel staircase, telling Ulrich the house had blown up, out and away—just as he had intended when he set the charges.
He and the other four men—Danzig, Vasquez, Sullivan, and Marty—stormed up the stairs and opened immediate fire on the stunned crowd of nearly thirty men gathered at the opening over the cargo bay, firing from prone positions on the flooring of the house. They shot the airmen down with near impunity as the airmen struggled through the deep snow in a vain attempt to seek cover. The few who tried to return fire were the first to be eliminated, one toppling over backward into the hole.
Sullivan banged Marty on the shoulder, signaling him to help reduce the men on their left flank who were taking up firing positions within the row of trucks and trailers. Marty sprayed them with grazing fire as Sullivan fired a 40mm grenade into the side of a small diesel tanker, killing five in the explosion and flushing many more from the cover of the trucks on either side of the inferno.
Ulrich and the others had eliminated the airmen near the lift elevator and were now adding to the fire directed at the trucks, where there were thirty or so Air Force men left to be dealt with.
Sullivan fired another grenade into the side of the explosives truck, killing or injuring another ten.
“Take cover!” Ulrich shouted, smacking Danzig on the shoulder and pointing toward what used to be the back porch, where the brick foundation of the house would provide them decent cover. “We’re too exposed!”
Danzig was crawling backward when he saw Vasquez’s head drop face first onto the deck, a round having struck him to the left of his nose and blowing out the back of his head. Danzig grabbed for his friend’s ankle, but Sullivan knocked his arm away and shoved him toward cover.
“He’s gone!”
Ulrich grabbed Marty’s collar and practically dragged him as Marty continued to pour fire onto the enemy, deftly switching out the empty magazine and continuing to fire like a veteran soldier. The two of them toppled off the back porch into the lee of the foundation.
Sullivan fired a grenade and blew up another truck, glancing behind him to his right as he was loading another round, seeing the Humvee ascending from below the earth. He swung the weapon around and was about to fire when Kane’s dark face emerged from the gunner’s opening in the roof.
The Humvee raced off the deck and swung wide around the compound to the west, outflanking the enemy position. Kane fired into their exposed flanks as Forrest sped through the snow, and within a few seconds the remaining airmen were throwing down their weapons and putting their hands into the air.
“Let’s move!” Ulrich shouted, jumping onto the porch and then charging across the floor to the front stairs.
The airmen were walking out to meet them with their hands raised, all of them shaggy and filthy and utterly demoralized.
“Hands on your heads!” Danzig screamed, kicking one of them viciously in the groin. “Down on your fucking knees!”
Soon there were eleven airmen down on their knees in the snow with their hands on top of their heads. Sullivan stalked the row of trucks, shooting the wounded where they lay. Forrest and Kane checked inside each of the trailers for supplies and holdouts, but all they found were two sickly women who had somehow managed to survive the hail of bullets. The truck with the cage on the back of it was in flames, the five men inside, who had been on the menu, now terribly overcooked.
“There’s only six of you?” asked a young airman in abject disbelief.
“There were seven of us!” Danzig said, stomping pugnaciously forward to deliver a rifle butt to his face, knocking him over backward into the snow.
“Linus!” Forrest shouted. “Enough!”
“Sir!”
“Weapons and ammo!” Forrest was shouting much more loudly than necessary, his ears no longer bleeding but still ringing like church bells. “We leave nothing of value up here. Kane! Get on the Cat and push that dirt back into the hole.” He used hand signals to explain himself and marched off through the snow. He climbed the stairs onto the foundation of the house, knelt beside Oscar Vasquez and turned him gently over onto his back, stripping him of his weapons and ammo. He took the dog tags from around Oscar’s neck and put them into his pocket, rooting through his pockets for anything his wife Maria might want.
Danzig came up onto the foundation and began to remove Oscar’s boots.
Forrest stared at him.
“We wear the same size, Captain.” Danzig got his first look at the ruptured blood vessels in Forrest’s eyes, pointing to his own boots so Forrest would know what he was saying.
“Won’t be any more boot factories for a while, will there?” Forrest said in a loud voice.
“No, sir.”
“What do you want done for him, Linus? We can’t let Maria see him with his face shot apart.”
“Let’s build him a big fire, sir,” Danzig said, gesturing with his hands.
“Good idea!” Forrest said, offering him Oscar’s dog tags. “It was better this way, Linus. Diabetic coma’s no way for a soldier to die.”
“Yes, sir. I have a request, sir.”
“A what?”
“Request!” Danzig said in a raised voice.
“What is it?”
Danzig pointed at the men still on their knees in the snow, making a shooting gesture with his thumb and forefinger. “I want to do the executions.”
Forrest nodded and returned his attention to Vasquez.
Danzig walked off through the snow and took a 9mm pistol from the pile of captured weapons, shooting each airman in the back of the head one at a time. None of the condemned men bothered to plead for their lives until Danzig came to the last one.
“I never touched any of those women!” the man pleaded over his shoulder. “Ask them! I never touched any of them. Ever!”
“I believe you,” Danzig said, squeezing the trigger and watching his body fall over into the gray snow.
Afterward, Forrest’s men built a large funeral pyre from the debris of the house. It was growing dark by the time they lay Oscar’s body in the center of it, dousing it with gasoline and setting it ablaze.
Kane was only just finishing with the landscaping when Forrest walked over and climbed up onto the machine with him. “We have to find a patch to weld over that hole in the lift deck!” Forrest shouted. “Any suggestions?”
Kane backed off on the throttle and sat thinking. His eyes and ears had stopped bleeding as well but both men looked a mess.
“I can cut a patch from the hood of one of the trucks,” he said loudly. “It’s not as tough as boiler plate but it’s better than nothing.”
“We’ll work until we’re finished,” Forrest said, patting him on the shoulder with a grin. “And this time we’ll cover the lift deck with three feet of dirt!”
It was ten at night before they finished clearing the bodies from the cargo bay and patching the hole in the lift. Dr. West came into the cargo bay to look over the two women, taking Forrest and Ulrich aside.
“They’re sick,” he said slowly enough for Forrest to make him out, not wanting the women to overhear him. “I don’t think it’s anything communicable,” he said directly to Ulrich, “but I’ve given them TB tests to make sure it’s not tuberculosis. We’ll know in three days. Until then, at the very least, they should remain quarantined here in the bay. With some penicillin and hot food, they should be ready to join us inside within a week or two.”
He then turned to Forrest and made an OK with his fingers.
“Okay, Sean,” Forrest tried to say more quietly. “Thanks. Now would you mind going inside? We’ve got some dark business to take care of out here, and I don’t think your oath allows for you to be present.”
“Sure,” West said, glancing across the bay to where Major Benjamin Moriarty sat shackled to the fender of a truck before withdrawing to the tunnel.
When West was gone, Forrest walked over and freed Moriarty long enough to cuff his hands behind his back with Sullivan and Kane looking on. Then he shoved Moriarty across the bay toward the two women.
“It’s up to you, ladies,” he said, keeping a firm grip on the handcuffs. “What sort of justice do you want?”
One of the women backed away, afraid of Moriarty even now, but the other held her ground. “What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean tell me what you want done and I’ll do it.”
Moriarty turned to look him in the eyes and smirked, so Forrest smashed in his front teeth with the frame of his .45, dropping him straight to his knees. “So what’ll it be, ladies?”
“Just shoot him,” the woman said quietly. “He’s not worth another minute of time.”
Forrest looked to Ulrich to see what she had said, and Ulrich drew a finger across his throat. He then hauled the battered major to his feet and shoved him over to the lift, knocking him back to his knees. Kane stepped onto the lift beside him, carrying a lantern, and Danzig pressed the up button to send them to ground level.
The lift locked into position at ground level and Moriarty looked up at them. “Fuck you bo—”
Forrest shot him through the mouth and he fell over dead, his spinal column severed. He dragged the body through the snow and threw it onto the pile as Kane climbed back up onto the Cat. Soon the lift was buried beneath three feet of landscaping, and the ’dozer was blown up with a stick of TNT. Both men then went into the basement, where Danzig stood waiting for them, carbine in hand, and the three of them entered the silo, sealing the blast door behind them.
The siege was over.
W
hen Veronica and Melissa got their first look at Forrest, they both gasped and started to cry as they wrapped themselves around him.
“Shhh,” he said softly, holding them tight in each arm. “It’s not permanent.”
Veronica looked over Forrest’s shoulder at Dr. West, who stood against the wall in the corridor. “Is he lying, Sean?”
West shook his head. “He’ll likely have some hearing loss, but he looks a lot worse than he is. It was just the pressure wave.”
Forrest saw Maria Vasquez coming into the hall and he freed himself from Veronica and Melissa and went to her, folding her into his arms as she cried. “I’m sorry,” he whispered into her ear. “It’s my fault.”
She looked up at him and shook her head. “It’s what he wanted,” she said carefully, making sure he could read her lips. “And he had a good last year . . .”