Joe kept moving.
The air was thick with dust and smoke, each breath coating his throat with grit. The LED work lights were mostly gone now, either buried or shattered, leaving only his flashlight to carve a path through the darkness.
Slumped against the wall just beyond the worst of the collapse, maybe thirty feet from where the dolly had detonated, was a man. His legs were stretched out in front of him, one bent at a wrong angle. His left side was dark with blood, his tactical vest torn open, the plates inside cracked.
A pistol rested loosely in his right hand, the barrel pointed at nothing.
The man's head was down, chin nearly touching his chest, as if he were resting. As if he'd just decided to sit for a moment and catch his breath.
Joe's light touched his face.
The man's head came up slowly. His eyes were unfocused, glassy, the pupils different sizes. Blood ran from his nose and ears. Internal damage. The blast had scrambled something inside his skull.
He saw Joe.
Recognition flickered across his face. Not Joe specifically. Just the shape of a threat. The understanding that he was not alone and that being alone would have been better.
The man's hand tightened on the pistol.
Joe watched the movement. Watched the fingers curl. Watched the arm begin to lift, shaking, the barrel rising inch by inch from the ground.
Joe raised the rifle and shot the man once in the forehead.
The sound was flat and final, swallowed immediately by the mine.
The man's head snapped back against the stone. The pistol clattered from his hand. His body slumped sideways and was still.
Joe stepped over him and kept going.
The main chamber was wider than the rest of the mine, the ceiling higher, the walls scarred where shaped charges had bitten into the rock years ago when they'd first expanded the space. Heavy steel I-beams had been installed to support the roof, bolted into the stone with industrial anchors, reinforced with concrete poured into forms and left to cure.
The blast had reached this far but hadn't collapsed it. The reinforcement had partially held.
Bodies lay scattered across the floor.
Two near the entrance, thrown backward by the pressure wave, their faces gone, their chests caved in. Another slumped over a workbench, his back shredded by shrapnel, the bench itself split down the middle.
Joe's light swept across the carnage and stopped on a man. He was older than the rest and clearly didn’t belong.
Joe knew he was looking at what remained of Volkov.
He lay near the far wall, pinned beneath a section of collapsed shelving and a steel support beam that had torn free from its moorings. His legs were crushed, twisted at anglesthat meant they'd never work again. His chest rose and fell in shallow, irregular gasps.
But it was his left arm that told the story.
It was gone.
Not severed cleanly. Torn away. The shoulder was a ragged stump, bone fragments visible in the mess of tissue and blood, the arm itself lying three feet away, still wearing the sleeve of what had been a wool sweater. The kind of thing a university professor might wear.
Volkov's face was pale, bloodless, his skin the color of old paper. His glasses were cracked, one lens missing entirely, the frames bent and hanging crooked on his face. His eyes were open but distant, staring at something Joe couldn't see.
He was seventy if he was a day. Thin. Frail-looking. His hair was white and neatly combed despite everything, parted on the side in a style that belonged to a different decade. His clothes were wrong for this place—wool trousers, leather shoes, a button-down shirt beneath the sweater. He looked like a man who'd been pulled from a library and dropped into hell.
A metal briefcase lay beside him, still attached to his severed arm by a handcuff locked around the wrist.
Joe knelt and examined it.
The case was aluminum, reinforced at the corners, with a combination lock built into the latches. The kind of case you used when you couldn't afford to lose what was inside.
