Chapter 68 - The Subterranean Dossier
Jared gripped the radio, his thumb hovering over the push-to-talk button. Every instinct honed over months of betrayal told him to release the battery and throw the plastic casing into the snow. Melissa had plotted with Victor Graves. She had signed off on the eviction of his children. She had celebrated their misery over Christmas dinner with cat food and laughter.
Yet the panic in her voice was not an act. It was the sound of a person staring into a meat grinder.
"Jared!" the radio crackled again, interspersed with the deafening hum of heavy machinery. "Graves didn't want the land! He never cared about the commercial plaza! They... they found grandfather's safe deposit key in my apartment... they brought me to the secondary shaft by the quarry! Jared, there are soldiers here... but they aren't ours! They aren't speaking English!"
Jared depressed the button. "Melissa. Where are you?"
"The pump house! The old drainage intake at Spur 09!" she shrieked. A sharp crack of small-arms fire echoed over the frequency, followed by the clatter of shell casings on stone. "They're trying to force the manual flood valves! They said if the shop's core doesn't vent into the aquifer, the whole mountain will—"
The transmission was violently cut short by a burst of heavy automatic fire, followed by a voice speaking in rapid, clipped Russian, and then the sickening squelch of an open carrier dying into white noise.
Jared pulled the radio from his mouth, his mind racing through the schematics his grandfather had left in the oil-stained safe beneath Bay 3.
*Project Aethelgard.*
In 1962, the Department of Defense hadn't just built an emergency fallout bunker beneath the shop. They had tunneled into the granite crust of the Appalachian fault line to install an autonomous fail-safe: an automated seismic disruption device designed to collapse the valley's transport corridors in the event of a Soviet land invasion. His grandfather hadn't been an ordinary army engineer; he had been the caretaker of the burial vault.
And Jared's deed to the land hadn't been an inheritance of wealth. It was a centuries-long sentinel post.
"Noah," Jared said, kneeling down in front of his son, his voice dropping into steady, unshakeable steel. "You take Ellie and you crawl into the deer blind behind the ridge. The timberline blind has two down sleeping bags, a case of water, and an emergency beacon. You do not touch that beacon unless the sun comes up and I haven't returned. You lock the trapdoor from inside."
"Dad, don't leave us!" Noah grabbed Jared's sleeve, tears welling in his eyes.
May you like
"I have to shut the valve at the pump house, Noah. If that aquifer breaches, this entire mountain collapses. Bay 1 will sink into a three-hundred-foot sinkhole, and everything we rebuilt will be gone. Look after your sister. You are the man of this family now until I climb back up this hill."
Noah swallowed hard, looked at Ellie, and nodded. "Until you climb back up."
