The majority of the thing’s weight, mostly up front, would just be dead metal, shaped to penetrate soil and concrete. The explosive portion would be rigged to blow only after the weapon had traveled some distance beneath the impact point. What that distance might be, Travis couldn’t guess, but without question the bomb would explode inside the complex, not above it. Whether anyone in the place survived was a dice roll now.
He turned and found Paige beside him, Bethany just beyond her, both of them thinking the same things he was. Their eyes were wide—they weren’t even trying to hide the fear. None of them said anything. They just waited. Whatever was coming was only seconds away.
In his peripheral vision Travis saw orange light flare across the wall of screens; the last Patriots had converged on the crippled bomber and brought it tumbling downward in a cartwheel of fire. Now the floor of the room began to vibrate with a high-frequency hum—the 30mm chain guns in the desert had opened up, though in all likelihood they were just shooting at the falling aircraft. Travis didn’t look to see if any of them were firing on the bunker buster. Even if they were, they probably couldn’t stop it.
An absurd thought struck Travis in the moment before impact: an image of the little vault built into their closet wall down on B16.
Where they’d left the Tap for safekeeping.
Chapter Twenty-One
The sound the bomb made when it punched through into the building was nothing like what Travis had expected, whatever he’d expected. It sounded like a machine gun. He realized immediately what he was hearing: the successive impacts as the thing slammed down through one concrete floor after another. It seemed to pass very close to Defense Control, maybe just a few feet beyond one of the walls, before thudding onward, deeper into the complex. Travis could no more count the floors it passed through than he could count autofire shots, but he guessed it’d gone at least as far down as B20.
Then it blew.
Every sensation came at once. The air pressure wave, like someone had clapped a pair of hands violently over Travis’s ears, nearly rupturing the drums. The ungodly jolt to the building’s structure, killing the power and dumping the room into pitch blackness. And then the kinetic shock of the explosion itself, heaving upward, certainly powdering the dozen floors above and below it, and pressing hard against those farther away. Travis felt the concrete beneath his feet arch up impossibly. Heard the reinforcing steel within it groan and crack, and knew without any doubt that when it sagged back a second later it would simply break. He and Paige and Bethany and everyone in the room would plunge with it, pressed to nothing as the interior of Border Town pancaked to a few stories of rubble down at B51.
The floor reached the top of its upward heave. It seemed to linger there for longer than should’ve been possible—time itself was hard to gauge just now—and then it fell back toward level, and right past it. The rebar crackled and strained again at the lowest extent.
But held.
The floor was rising once more—not quite to even, but close—when Travis heard the screams. They came from directly below: Security Control on level B5. With the screams came the sound Travis had expected to hear all around him—the avalanche roar of concrete falling apart. The floor on B5 had given.
A second later the screams were gone, washed out by the maelstrom noise of one story after another collapsing in sequence. A steel-and-concrete waterfall rushing down and away. It sucked the air out of Defense Control and Travis heard a high, surging whine somewhere close by. He realized it was an airstream being drawn down through the line of holes the bunker buster had made.
And then it was over. No more sound. No more air movement. Just the building’s remaining framework shuddering with latent energy from the blast and the collapse.
Emergency lighting kicked on within fifteen seconds. Wall-mounted bulbs that normally ran off the grid switched to batteries.
The air was choked with concrete dust. Everyone stood in a daze, looking for one another or for the exits, or doing nothing at all. Travis saw a tech stoop and straighten a keyboard that’d slid partway off a desk.
Bethany was crying. Paige’s eyes were red but nothing was spilling from them. Travis had no idea what his own eyes were doing.
He took a step and realized the floor was tilted to a greater degree than he’d first believed. He imagined the entire level, or at least a portion of it, sagging toward some lowest, weakest point.
He indicated the door they’d come in through earlier. “Come on.”
As soon as they stepped into the corridor they saw where the bomb had passed. Dead centered in the hall, halfway to the elevator, was a ragged hole two feet wide. There was another in the ceiling straight above it.