The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

daughter, as he’d left the house the night before. She’d been sitting in the leather recliner beside the couch, in a big purple T-shirt. Bangs in her eyes. She’d looked at him and said what she always said when he left for the base.
    Careful.
    It meant good-bye, but it meant a lot more the way she said it—high and soft, her eyebrows arched. It meant I love you. It also meant If anything happens to you, I’m always going to love you. He knew it meant all those things. He wasn’t imagining any of it.
    Careful.
    That word, in his daughter’s voice, was Dennis Pike’s last thought.
    Travis saw the first distinct explosion maybe a fourth of a second before the next. The leading Patriot detonated almost nose-to-nose with the bomber, reducing everything forward of the wings to a particle cloud—which the plane instantly outran. The second Patriot, coming from the aircraft’s left, exploded just beneath the port-side wing, which at once became a sheet of flame. An instant later the starboard wing, the only intact lifting surface, pitched upward, hauling the entire plane high and left in a roll.
    And revealing, like a curtain drawn aside with a flourish, a bomb that’d been freed from the bay less than a second earlier.
    Travis heard sharp breaths sucked in around him.
    The loosed weapon, so close now that it was visible from multiple camera angles, was long and sleek like a missile, but it didn’t fly like one. It had no propulsion of its own. It simply arced forward in a smooth line, gently falling away from the climbing trajectory the plane had held. The bomb’s tip dropped to level and then gradually angled downward. Travis could see that by the time it hit the surface, its nose would be pointing straight down, and though he’d never seen one before, he knew exactly what kind of bomb it was.
    A bunker buster.
    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