Joe held the rifle steady and watched the last man disappear into the darkness.
Three shots. Three bodies. The tunnel swallowed the echoes and gave nothing back.
He stayed prone for a beat longer, scanning for movement deeper in. He saw none, but that meant nothing.
The light down there was bad and the angles were worse.
He knew the situation had changed, and not to his benefit.
Whoever was deeper in the tunnel had heard the shots. They knew exactly what they were up against.
They knew it was him.
I saved you once. This is the second time. There won’t be a third.
The words reverberated in Joe’s memory. Walking into that tunnel right now with guns blazing was a good way to prove Kinsman right.
Joe moved to the work area where the dead men had been standing. The chamber smelled different here. Not just damp stone and machine oil. There was a bite of chemicals under it, a faint tang that didn't belong in an old mine.
He searched his surroundings quickly. Light from the LED strings jumped over tools and cables and cut boards. He saw a couple of drills, old and loud looking. He saw crates of bolts. He saw a battered generator with a fuel can beside it, the kind that ran for hours on a single tank.
He saw an Army-green box. Metal and rectangular. Latches that meant it was made to be opened in mud with cold hands. Stenciled markings rubbed half away by time, but not enough to hide what it was.
Joe knew the shape like he knew the weight of a loaded pistol.
Demolition kit.
He stared at it for a second and felt something inside him settle into place.
Kinsman.
Of course.
A civilian would have used mining explosives, whatever was cheap and available. A soldier used what he trusted, what he'd been trained on, what he'd carried in other places where tunnels and rock and concrete were the difference between living and dying.
Kinsman had widened the mine the way the Army widened things when it needed passage, not permission.
Joe flipped the latches and opened the lid.
Inside were the components, neatly packed, utilitarian, ugly in their simplicity.
Nothing exotic.
Just standard-issue Army blocks of C-4. Olive drab, wrapped in Mylar, each one marked with lot numbers and manufacture dates. Six blocks total, each one a pound and a half. Enough to take down a bridge support or punch through a reinforced wall.
Blasting caps were in a separate foam-lined compartment. M6 electric caps, the kind you fired with a current, not a fuse. Safer that way. More reliable. Harder to screw up in the field.
Det cord on a spool. Primacord. The stuff that burned at four miles per second and turned a careful plan into instantaneous reality.
And the timer. An M81 firing device. Mechanical. Spring-loaded. Twist the dial, pull the pin, and it counted down with the indifference of a clock. No batteries to die. No electronics to fail. Just gears and tension and inevitability.
Joe heard faint sounds deeper in the mine now. Not voices, movement. Boots scraping rock. A metallic clink that might have been a weapon touching stone.
They were repositioning.
Joe's mind ran through the geometry.
The tunnel sloped down. It pinched in places, widened in others. There were timbers set into the rock, and in a mine like this they were not decoration. They carried load. They kept tons of stone from deciding to become gravity.
