The Doomsday Key (36 page)

Monk heard the avalanche strike behind him. It sounded like the end of the world, a detonation of ice and rock. A chunk of glacier the size of a one-car garage bounced past Monk on the right. Ice pelted his snowmobile and his back.

Monk hunkered down. He could go no faster. He had the throttle fully open.

As the avalanche’s leading edge reached them, ice boulders pounded alongside their vehicles. A river of dancing pebbles washed under and around them. The smaller bits of glacial ice had been polished smooth during the grinding plunge, turning into a flood of diamonds.

Then they were headed up.

The front skis of the snow machines carved a swift path up out of the valley. The icy monster behind them tried to give chase, but then gave up and settled back into the valley.

To be sure, Monk climbed higher before calling for a stop. Keeping his engine running, he turned and surveyed the damage. A fog of ice crystals clouded the lower valley, but it was clear enough to see to the far ridge.

There was no bunker.

Just broken ice.

“What do we do?” Creed asked.

A shout answered him. They both turned to the left. A pair of Norwegian soldiers appeared, rifles on their shoulders. Only now did Monk spot the Sno-Cat parked higher up the slope.

It was the same pair as before.

But this was no friendly visit like the earlier one.

The soldiers kept their weapons up. After what had happened, they must be ringing with suspicions, half-blind with anger and shock.

“What do we do?” Creed asked again.

Ever the teacher, Monk showed him by raising his arms. “You surrender.”

1:02 P.M.

Painter stood in the dark.

The lights had gone out with the first explosions. At first he thought the hidden bomb had gone off. But as the series of concussive blasts continued, echoing down from above, Painter guessed a missile strike against the mountainside.

It was confirmed a moment later when a massive grumbling roar erupted. It sounded like a freight train running over them and crashing away.

Avalanche.

Screams and shouts echoed from the tunnel as guests and workers panicked. This deep underground, the darkness was absolute and sought to smother you.

Painter remained rooted in place, taking inventory. For the moment, they were still alive. If there
was
a hidden bomb down here, why hadn’t it gone off at the same time as the missile strike?

He squeezed the transmitter in his hand. Pulling the device out of the wall outlet may have saved all their lives, preventing a signal from being telephoned in and triggering the bomb.

But they weren’t out of danger yet.

If Painter had planned this attack, he would’ve built in a secondary backup plan. Something set on a delayed timer to account for any mishap. He thought hard and fast. The transmitter had a limited range, especially with all the rock. If a bomb was planted, it had to be close, likely brought in recently.

The caterers?

No, too many and too risky. Somebody would’ve seen it.

Then he remembered Karlsen’s earlier words as they entered the back office:
Seed shipments arrive daily. Unfortunately, now they’re backlogged due to the party.

The storage bins.

Blind, Painter stepped over to the stacked boxes. He fumbled the top off one and shoved his hands into it, all the way to the bottom. He sifted through the heat-sealed aluminum seed packets.

Nothing.

He knocked the bin aside. It crashed in the dark.

“What are you doing?” Gorman shouted, startled.

Painter didn’t have time to answer. Desperation kept him silent. He found nothing in the second bin—but as he yanked the lid off the third, a glow shone from inside the box, buried under a layer of seed packets.

In the darkness, the tiny light shone as brightly as a beacon. The other men drew closer. Painter picked aside the packets and exposed what lay beneath.

Numbers on an LED display glowed back at him.

09:55

As he watched, the counter ticked downward.

The room’s lights flickered, went off, then came back on. The emergency generators had finally kicked in. Out in the hall, the screaming
immediately quieted. While their situation was no better, at least they would die with the lights on.

Painter reached inside and carefully lifted out the object. He doubted it had been rigged with any motion-sensing trigger. The storage bin had been shipped, likely roughly handled in transit. Still, he cautiously lowered it to the floor and knelt beside it.

The object was the size of two shoe boxes, roughly barrel-shaped. The LED display glowed on the top. A net of wires folded into the metal casing under it. Military lettering—PBXN-112—stamped into its side left no doubt in Painter’s mind as to what they all faced.

Even Boutha guessed.

“It’s a bomb,” he whispered.

The man, unfortunately, was wrong.

Painter corrected him. “It’s a warhead.”

1:02 P.M.

Krista braked the four-wheel-drive truck at the foot of the mountain. As she fled down the icy road, she had watched the missile barrage in her rearview mirror. Flames had filled the world behind her. Concussions had rattled her truck windows. A moment later, the glacial ridge of the mountain had broken away and shattered across the entrance to the seed vault.

By the time her truck came to a stop, her hands still trembled on the steering wheel. Her breathing remained hard.

She had fled immediately after the phoned warning. What if she had been delayed, been slowed up for some reason? There had been no margin for error.

Still, she
had
survived.

The terror in her was slowly transformed into a strange elation. She was alive. Her hands balled into fists on the steering wheel. A bubbling laugh of relief shook out of her. She fought to compose herself.

To either side of the road, men appeared in camouflaged polar snowsuits. A tank of a vehicle on massive treads trundled to block the road.

She had nothing to fear. Not any longer. These were her forces.

She shoved the truck door open and headed over to join them. Snow had begun to fall. Heavy flakes drifted through the air. She climbed up into the cab of the giant vehicle. The rear passenger compartment was packed with grim-faced men bearing assault rifles.

Outside, the others mounted snowmobiles.

The road into the mountains might be gone, but she still had work to do up there. There would be stragglers after the bombing, and she had her orders.

No survivors.

1:04 P.M.

“Can you stop it?” Senator Gorman asked.

In the back office, the others all gathered around Painter and the warhead on the floor, even Karlsen. He looked as sick as anyone. This must not have been his play. Especially since he was trapped with them. Painter did not have time to contemplate the significance of that.

Instead, he faced the others. “I need someone to run and check on the condition of the upper tunnel,” he said calmly and firmly. “Have we caved in? Is there a way out? And I need a maintenance engineer ASAP.”

Two of Boutha’s men nodded and ran back out, all too happy to flee
away
from the warhead.

“Can you defuse it?” Karlsen asked.

“Is it nuclear?” Gorman followed up.

“No,” Painter answered both of them. “It’s a thermobaric warhead. Worse than a nuclear weapon.”

They might as well hear it straight. The warhead was a form of fuel-air explosive. The casing was filled with a fluorinated aluminum powder with a PBXN-112 detonation charge buried in the center.

“It’s the ultimate bunker-buster,” Painter explained as he studied the device. Talking helped him to concentrate. “It’s a two-stage explosion. First, detonation casts a massive cloud of fine aerosol. Enough to fill this
entire tunnel. Then the powder ignites in a burning flash. This creates a pressure wave that crushes everything in its path, using up all the oxygen at the same time. So you can die four ways. Blown up, crushed, burned, or suffocated.”

Ignoring the gasps around him, Painter focused on the detonator. His expertise wasn’t in munitions but in electronics. It didn’t take him long to recognize the tangle of lead, ground, and dummy wires. Cut the wrong one, change the voltage, trigger a shock … there were a thousand ways for it to blow up in your face and only one way to stop it.

A code.

Unfortunately, Painter didn’t know it.

This wasn’t like the movies. There was no bomb expert to defuse it at the last second. No clever ploy to implement, like freezing the warhead with liquid nitrogen. That was all cinematic crap.

He looked at the clock.

In less than eight minutes, the warhead was going to blow.

The pounding of feet alerted them to the early return of a runner.

“No cave-in,” the man gasped out. “Ran into one of the soldiers coming back down. Outer blast door held. He opened it. It’s just a wall of ice out there. We’re buried. So thick, he said, you can’t see any daylight through it.”

Painter nodded. The strategy made sense. The vault had been engineered to withstand a nuclear strike. If you wanted to kill everyone down here, toss in a warhead like this and seal it up tight. If the firestorm didn’t kill you, the lack of remaining oxygen would.

That left his second option.

The other runner appeared with a tall Norwegian built like a refrigerator. The maintenance engineer. His eyes spotted the warhead on the floor. He went pale. At least he was no fool.

Painter stood, drawing his attention up from the bomb. “Do you speak English?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any other way out of here?” He shook his head.

“Then those air locks for the seed rooms. Are they pressurized?”

“Yes, they’re maintained at a strict level.

“Can you adjust them higher?”

He nodded. “I’ll have to do it manually.”

“Pick one of the seed banks and do it.”

The engineer glanced around the room, nodded, then took off at a dead run. The man definitely was no fool.

Painter turned to the other men—Boutha, Gorman, even Karlsen. “I need you to gather everyone into that seed vault. Now.”

“What are you going to do?” the senator asked.

“See how fast I can run.”

1:05 P.M.

With his hands on his helmet and no ability to speak the language, Monk had a hard time negotiating for their freedom.

The Norwegian soldiers continued to level their weapons at the prisoners, but at least their cheeks weren’t pressed as firmly against the rifle stocks. Creed pleaded their case. He had his helmet off and was speaking rapidly, a mix of Norwegian and English, accompanied by charades.

Then a voice started to rasp in Monk’s ear, full of static, coming from his helmet radio. Most of the communication dropped out.
“Can you hear … help … no time to …”

Despite having a rifle pointed at his face, Monk felt a surge of relief. He recognized the voice. It was Painter. He was still alive!

Monk tried responding. “Director Crowe, we read you. But it’s choppy. Is there any way we can help?”

He failed to get any response. The tone of Painter’s voice didn’t change. The transmission wasn’t reaching him.

Creed had heard Monk’s outburst. “Is that the director? He’s still alive?”

The two rifles focused on Monk.

“Alive but trapped,” he answered. He held up a hand, struggling to listen to the radio. The transmission remained crap. There was a lot of rock to get through, even for a SQUID transmitter.

The soldier barked at him. Creed turned and tried to explain. Their stern faces shifted from anger to concern.

As static buzzed in his ear, Monk considered his options. How long would the oxygen last in there? Could they get heavy digging equipment moved up there fast enough, especially with the road bombed out?

Then a few words burst through the static. It squashed his momentary hope. Painter’s words were chewed apart by the static, but there was no mistaking the threat.

“Down here… a warhead… We’ll try to …”

Static cut off the rest.

Before Monk could relate the bad news to Creed, a rumbling echoed over the mountains, accompanied by the whining roar of snowmobiles.

They all turned.

Down the mountainside, a cluster of vehicles slowly wound up from the lower valley, heading their way.

Monk lifted his binoculars and focused on one of the snowmobiles. Men were double mounted. While one drove, the other had a rifle up on a shoulder. They were all dressed in polar suits. Snow-white, with no military insignia.

A stray Norwegian soldier had somehow made it halfway down the mountain already. He waved at the approaching party.

A rifle cracked.

Blood spattered against the white snow.

The soldier dropped. Monk lowered his binoculars.

Someone had come to clean house.

1:09 P.M.

Painter didn’t know if his radio transmission got out. He had plugged the SQUID into the wall and hoped for the best.

All he could do now was run.

He pushed a caterer’s serving trolley ahead of him. Strapped on top
with bungee cords was the warhead. He sprinted up the hundred and fifty yards of the tunnel.

The LED display glowed back at him.

04:15

As he ran, he watched it tick down below the four-minute mark. At last, he spotted the outer blast door at the top of the exit ramp. It had been left open by the guard who had peeked out. Chunks of ice had spilled inside, but beyond the door was a solid wall of broken glacier.

With a surge of speed, he shot up the ramp. He wanted the charge placed as close to that opening as possible. Reaching the top, Painter shoved the trolley cart toward the door, spun on a toe, and sprinted in the opposite direction.

At least it was all downhill from here.

He fled, breath gasping, trying to lengthen his stride.

If he couldn’t stop the bomb, he might as well make use of it. He didn’t know how thick the plug of ice was over the door, but the warhead’s thermobaric payload was unique. The initial blast could help break some of the ice; then, as the cloud of fluorinated aluminum ignited, the searing heat would vaporize and melt more. But it was upon the secondary blast wave that Painter pinned all his hopes.