Chapter 54 - The Descent into the Permafrost
The descent felt like running down the inside of an artillery barrel during a sustained bombardment.
Each footstep on the perforated steel grating sent jarring shocks into my shins, but the vibrations coming from the mountain itself were far worse. The granite and ancient glacial ice were shuddering as the shockwave of the warhead’s supersonic descent pushed a solid wall of displaced air directly into the Nunatak ridge.
"Eight seconds!" Catherine’s voice came over our tactical earpieces, strained against the roar.
We reached the sub-level three landing just as a reinforced hydraulic pipe overhead burst, spraying supercooled glycol across the concrete walls. I vaulted the railing, dropping ten feet down onto the platform of Level Minus Four, rolling hard on the frozen concrete floor to absorb the impact. Catherine dropped down beside me an instant later, landing with the fluid grace of an operative who had survived thirty years of clandestine warfare.
The corridor stretched forward into the gloom, lined with frosted server racks and sealed vault doors marked with black hazard insignias. At the far end, behind a thick pane of cracked reinforced glass, a tower of communication modules blinked in rapid, rhythmic green pulses. Atop the tower, a cylindrical antenna assembly rotated slowly inside an armored vacuum casing, sending a high-frequency directional beam directly up through a thermal exhaust chimney.
"There it is!" I pointed my weapon at the glass. "The transponder!"
"Armor-piercing rounds won't crack that housing in time!" Catherine shouted over the rising din. "The casing is depleted titanium!"
She lunged forward, grabbing an emergency breaching charge from a maintenance locker mounted to the wall. It was an M37 demolition block with an adhesive strip.
"The signal is carrying a telemetry handshake!" I yelled, reading the digital display on the exterior terminal beside the glass. "The weapon isn't dropping as an unguided mass! It's tracking the precise frequency of the transponder to correct its flight path at three thousand feet!"
"Four seconds!" Miller’s voice screamed through the comm net, buried under a blizzard of static. "Hannah! Catherine! It’s on top of us—"
Catherine slammed the demolition charge against the base of the antenna’s power conduit, pulled the arming pin, and reached for the instantaneous chemical fuse.
"Mother, wait! The setback distance!" I screamed, lunging to grab her harness.
"If I don't ignite it now, the beacon lives long enough for the warhead to penetrate the cap!" she screamed back.
She didn't hesitate. Catherine shoved me backward with a strength born of pure maternal ferocity, throwing her body over the charge just as she twisted the ignition ring.
I threw my weight into her, tackling her sideways through an open blast door leading into an auxiliary storage bay just as the demolition block detonated.
The blast was blinding, a sharp, concussive fist that ripped the air from our chests and shattered every glass partition in the corridor. A cloud of shredded fiberglass and superheated copper wire roared down the hall. Behind it, through the smoke, the rhythmic green pulse of the transponder sputtered, surged with white sparks, and died into total darkness.
The signal was severed.
Above us, forty thousand tons of reinforced mountain screamed.
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Even without the guiding beacon, the sheer mass of the Mach 14 penetrator couldn't be dissolved by the wind. Deprived of its terminal micro-adjustments, the warhead drifted three hundred meters south of its intended target, missing the primary bunker shaft by a fraction of a degree.
It hit the southern ice wall of the Nunatak at twelve thousand miles per hour.
