Quota 0/391 — Only 3 days left
Victor wanted those nuclear warheads, but first he had to getinto the bunker.
The door in front of them was shut tight, and him knocking had done absolutely nothing.
"Got anything that'll open it?" Shirley asked, turning to Olivia.
Using shovels as bargain-bin crowbars had failed. Time for something stronger, louder, maybe even brighter.
At Shirley's nod, Olivia fished a small parcel from her pack. One glimpse of the contents and Victor swore he'd never accept a delivery from her.
The "package" was a lump of grey, clay-like putty that definitely wasn't play-dough.
"Nathaniel, I need a hand," she said, stepping up to the door.
Her homemade explosive, potent as it was, had to be placed just right to crack the reinforced concrete. The simplest spot was near the keypad scanner. Back in the day, officers swiped badges here; the dusty reader still looked intact. Nathaniel had tried hacking it, but the bunker electronic was completely isolated from the outside world. Futhermore, with no actual lock to pick, his talents were useless, though his tools weren't.
He pulled out a precision drill built for precision and set about widening the gap between the wall and the door by roughly ten square centimetres. The job was easy enough, but the tool's small bit drill meant nearly an hour of patient grinding.
Once Olivia placed the charge in place, she announced, "We'll need to backtrack."
They were jammed in a narrow tunnel with only a few metres between the door and the crawlspace. A blast here with no cover would potentially be fatal. Backtracking, though, meant an hour of belly-crawling they didn't have and the explosion might collapse part of the tunnel anyway. Getting trapped wasn't the worry; missing their three-day window to loot the place was. A few days buried underground they could still manage with their supply, but only after the heist.
Or so they thought.
"**No need to go back,**" Nathaniel's suit-muffled voice said, brimming with confidence.
"**These suits will shield us from the blast and shrapnel. As for a cave-in, the crawlspace already puts the whole tunnel at risk. Unless we surface, the ceiling can still drop on us.**"
"**Wouldn't the far side of the crawlspace be safer—farthest from the charge?**" Shirley asked, puzzled.
"**You're right, but I tested the remaining beams. Given the blast angle, the risk is minimal.**"
Victor entered the debate only after Olivia translated.
"What if we deliberately bring the arch down ourselves to control the collapse before the boom?"
Crushing silence. Olivia didn't even bother to relay that idea. She merely muttered into the radio,
"Lie flat, hands behind your head. Worst case, we dig up with the shovels and regroup at the top."
Victor stole one last glance at the sticky tack barely clinging to the widened hinge gap.
'I have a bad feeling about this,' he thought before stretching out face-down beside the others.
Rock scraped his visor; all he could hear was his own thunderous heartbeat. Ending up under a metre of rubble hadn't been on this morning's agenda.
'Whatever. As the philosopher says : something so small can't hurt a big guy like me…'
BOOOOM
He flinched. Honestly, he wasn't the only one. The ground beneath his palms had shuddered.
'Not good!'
Everything happened at once. The tunnel walls quivered, timber beams looking as flimsy as a boat using oars in a hurricane. Dust surged like wildfire, visibility dropping to house-fire levels.
Then the shout:
"**The tunnel's is still in one piece and I can't say the same about the door! We'll check the crawlspace on the way out, right now let's get inside the bunker and begin the search!**"
Victor raised his head. His ears had been reduced to a continuous drifting hiss so everything sounded right now like a scream to him. He stood up shakily and took a few seconds to let his shaky heart settle.
'Everyone seems okay. Wherever Nathaniel got these suits, they work wonders,' he thought, eyeing a slab of rock, thirty-by-fifty centimetres, that had bounced off Olivia's helmet. In the end, she was standing upright like nothing happened.
"I'm fine," she answered feeling his unspoken gaze and worry. "Let's get inside before something else goes wrong."
The tunnel had survived, but his stability was more than relative. They grabbed their bags still on the ground and stepped over the threshold. Inside, the visible dust had almost disappeared, their torch beams sweping freely the surrounding darkness.
Nathaniel flicked a wall switch, and of course, nothing happened. The brittle plastic panel had almost crumbled under his touch.
"**Backup generators must've died decades ago,**" he said.
Using their flashlight it was.
"**We still need to find the entrance to the galleries,**" he reminded them, those mansion-like underground they'd found in New York.
"**I don't expect trouble, but stay sharp. In one hour, let's meet back here with whatever you found.**"
The team into four to cover more ground. Victor had been assigned the sector marked СКЛАД №3, Storehouse No. 3, though Storehouse 1 and 2 were nowhere to be seen on the map.
'Russians surely are weird,' he muttered while walking through the bunker's cold grey corridors. He passed what looked like a cafetaria with rows of white tables and benches that Olivia would search later.
СКЛАД №3
Neither the red sign or the armored door were really comforting. Fortunately they'd scavenged several badges in the lobby. Victor's one read Aleksei Voronin, as for his rank... huuuuh...
П о л к о в н и к
He was squinting hard at the Cyrillic. This one apparently translated to Colonel.
He swiped it in front of the scanner.
The room was enormous. The first thing he saw was rows of metal cabinets stuffed with military crates.
Without thinking much about it, he cracked one's lid.
NO VALUE
NO VALUE
…
NO VALUE
Crammed with energy bars and survival rations.
'Let's see what else is inside the room,' he thought, shutting it without regret.
Tempting cardboard boxes waited at the far wall, and another armoured door led deeper.
Victor started with the row of boxes.
NO VALUE
NO VALUE
…
NO VALUE
For once, Victor disagreed with the system. The boxes brimmed with ammunition. Not a nuke, but still a solid start. Too bad he lacked a trolley to bring them back because he wasn't about to stuff them into his bag. Firstly because he had not the space to take them all, and secondly, not the strength.
Hoping the inner room held better treasure, he pushed the second door wide open.
This time, they were no cabinets or boxes, just because it couldn't sit on shelves.
NO VALUE
NO VALUE
…
Anti-aircraft missile × 1 — value 18
…
Anti-aircraft missile × 1 — value 22
…
Anti-aircraft missile × 1 — value 44
About twenty of them were littering on the floor.
'Why does only three of them have a price tag?' he grumbled, after checking the lot. One day he'd ask the system how the Company ran its business and prices. The missiles looked identical to him: no damage or wear, at least none to his military trained eyes.
'Let's keep the questions for later. Right now, let's just pick up one of them.'
He crouched.
'The priciest will do.'
One hand under the base, the other round the nose cone. Once the setup was perfectly in place, he pulled with all his might.
The Russian SAM didn't budge.
"Think you can grab it?" he asked his faithful companion lurking in the dark.
The creature couldn't speak, but his actions spoke louder than words. It waddled forward, his single arm lifting the missile and setting it atop its cuboid frame in a single swoop.
"Can you take a second?" Victor asked while pointing to an another valued warhead.
The Jester stared, processing the request. After a few seconds, it shuffled over, palm on the missile and hoisting it onto its head where it smacked the first one and knocked it out.
Victor's gaze slid down to his boots, and the missile now resting on them.
'That hurts.'
It felt like someone had just stomped on his foot—sharp, lingering and thoroughly unpleasant—yet the suit had swallowed the majority of the impact.
'Still no idea where Nathaniel found this thing or how it works,' Victor thought, probbing his toes with one hand. The membrane couldn't be more than an inch thick.
He glanced up at his faithful companion. With every step the creature took, the missile on its head was swinging left and right, itching to roll down.
Victor searched through the bag Olivia had handed him in hope of a rope. Securing the missile enough to drag it back was priority one.
"Why the hell are there so many guns in here?" he grumbled, sifting through the contents. There was everything an army could ask for: assault rifles, pistols, grenades, rocket-launchers, explosive charges. Meanwhile him, he had no clue how to use half of it.
'If technology can't save the day, time for the originals: hands and brain.'
His first tactic bombed. To stop the missile rolling right, he'd shove it left, then sprint around and push it again... except the warhead weighed nearly as much as he did, and one shove merely postponed the inevitable fall.
"Time for the big guns!" Victor declared while ordering his pet to halt.
One decidedly shaky leap later, he was astride the Jester's head. Genius plan: clamp the missile between his thighs, then sit on it—like pinning an unruly tuna with sheer body weight.
The trip back was bone-rattling, somewhere between pogo stick and horseback.
Because the others had left him the smallest sector to scour, Victor was the first to return.
'You can shrink back to key-ring size now,' he told the Jester silently.
Unfortunately, he'd forgotten to dismount first.
'That hurts'