Page 148 of Enemy Within

Welby spoke softly, holding the detonator. “When this blows, we drop back down and breach. Grenades first. Take as many of her team out as we can. I’ll go first and give the signal when it’s clear for you to follow.”

Pete’s eyes were wide, thick circles of white ringing his irises. He nodded, jerking his head up and down.

Bell gave Pete a long stare but nodded once to Welby.

He jammed his thumb down on the detonator.

Fire bloomed beneath them, blasting the roof of the elevator down into the car. The vent spat downward, shattering against the steel cage. The doors were propped open by design, held in the bunker for the president. Debris roared from the elevator, cluttering the car’s floor and the bunker’s entrance.

“Go!” Welby slid down the cables first. He braced on the edge of the elevator car and peered through the smoke, the dust of the explosion. Steel plates and fluorescent light bulbs swung in the car, next to a gaping hole, just wide enough for a man to squeeze through.

He grabbed the three grenades clipped to his belt. Pulling the pins, he lobbed them through the hole and jumped back, right as gunshots blasted up from the bunker. Bullets whizzed by his legs and slammed into the elevator shaft. More plinked off the elevator’s steel walls.

He counted down the seconds as the grenades rolled into the bunker’s hallway. Shouts and guttural orders echoed from the bunker, Jennifer’s men scrambling in the face of three surprise visitors.

But the bunker was small, just the footprint of a quarter of the West Wing. The concrete walls and iron pipes made a cave, a perfectly sealed blast room. It was the one thing that had always given him the heebie-jeebies about the bunker. It was the perfect place for a grenade ambush.

The Secret Service operated under the belief that there never would be an ambush against the bunker.

Until today.

He listened as the grenades detonated, their blasts magnified by the confined space, the concrete and steel-reinforced walls that wouldn’t give. The blasts had nowhere to go but deeper into the bunker, around the corners that he pictured Jennifer’s team hiding behind. Bits of metal, super-heated, and roaring flames would be spearing into her soldiers. By the cries and shrieks he heard, a chunk of her men were down.

Bell dropped beside him. He pulled two grenades from his own belt and lobbed both into the bunker. They skittered, spinning across the floor, and disappeared into the smoke and gloom.

Fewer voices called out the grenade warning. Fewer shouts. But more moans. Her forces were down.

They waited for the detonation, counting the seconds. Silence, after the blast.

Welby’s met Bell’s gaze.

Time to breach.

Welby dropped to a kneel holding his weapon out, his finger already half squeezing the trigger. He kicked aside the shattered grate and dropped into the elevator, landing crouched in the debris. Spinning, he slammed his back against the wall, covering behind the slim doorframe, and waited for Jennifer’s team to fire.

Beech’s voice whispered in his ear piece. “All we see is smoke. She ducked out of sight at the first grenade. We saw five men go down in the blast. No visual on current targets.”

He couldn’t respond. Not in the silent, smoky bunker. Slowly, he slid forward, peering around the frame of the elevator car.

Smoke and dust choked the air. Debris from the grenades. Bodies on the floor. Men, twisted and unnatural.

He ducked out, clearing right and then left and flattening along the wall. Still no movement. No shadows in the gloom. Looking back, he motioned for Bell and Pete to follow.

Bell came first, lowering himself more slowly through the hole. Pete jumped like Welby had, but stumbled on the landing.

Welby covered them both as they joined him outside the elevator.

The elevator was the dead end of a T intersection. To the right and left, short hallways led to support facilities. A tiny dorm room. A lavatory. A spartan kitchen. Two empty rooms, nicknamed the crying rooms by the staff. Ahead, the central hallway led to the bunker’s operation center, a cramped space stuffed with computer systems, enough monitors to make anyone go blind, server racks set up in a maze, and communications equipment that even Welby had never seen. It looked like a strange mixture between a junk shop and what an alien spacecraft should look like. Like Air Force One had burrowed underground and compacted to the size of a bedroom.

Jennifer was at the end of the hall. On the main screen, President Spiers’s code to unleash the nuclear launch safeguards flashed. The code was less secure than the handprint and retinal lock. Handprints and retinal locks were supposed to be the Cadillacs of the security protocol.

Four of the six digits had been entered. A brute force cyberattack cycled through the final two digits.

They were almost out of time. With each digit uncovered, the possibilities decreased exponentially. As he watched, the fifth digit flashed, plugging into the display. Only one digit left to go.

“Jennifer!” he bellowed. “We know you’re down here!”

Scuffling, just ahead. He spun, his weapon raised. Behind him, Bell fell into the rear, covering. Pete clung to Welby, breathing hard.