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
