Leviathan(74)
Thor bent his head, teeth clenched, eyes tight.
“No,” he whispered. “Almighty God, you are my strength. And I trust my life … to YOU!”
With a roar he surged back.
Steel was ripped from stone.
* * *
Connor finished rewiring the exit door that would allow them to escape the Command Cavern. He glanced up as Chesterton approached.
“You finished with that, Connor?”
“It's finished,” Connor replied, rising to gaze across the cavern where Barley and a handful of soldiers were rigging a formidable load of C-4, dynamite, claymore mines, and other incendiary devices. “Is that enough of a charge to blow that thing to pieces?”
“It'd better be,” Chesterton grimaced, “'cause it’s all we've got. And once we blow it, this cavern is going to be superheated to about thirty thousand degrees for about ten seconds before the roof comes down. So we won't be getting back in here for supplies.”
“Are you taking everything you can carry? Just in case?”
“Yeah,” Chesterton confirmed, handing Connor a rifle. With a short pause, Connor took it. He knew it was an M-16 with a grenade launcher attached to the lower part of the barrel. It was what they called an M-203.
“Do you know how to use that?”
Without waiting for an answer Chesterton handed Connor an ammo belt with a dozen 50-round clips and another shoulder belt with a large number of antipersonnel grenades that could be fired from the grenade launcher.
“Yeah,” Connor replied steadily. “I've fired a few rounds through one.”
“Well this ain't no plinking contest, Connor. If that thing comes through that door, you just need to remember one thing.”
“What's that?”
“When in doubt, empty the clip. Ammo is cheap. Your life isn't.”
“Yeah, I guess that—”
A thunderous collision struck the vault of Alpha Corridor, and Chesterton immediately spun, leveling his rifle. At the door, soldiers scurried back, shocked by the terrific impact, and Connor saw that Barley alone stood his ground, slamming detonators into the C-4 as fast as he could move.
“Barley!” Chesterton screamed. “Get out of there!”
“Ten seconds!” the lieutenant shouted. He ran to a high load of dynamite and quickly adjusted a detonator. Connor ran up to Chesterton, who was screaming to the rest of the scrambling soldiers. “Get that other vault open so we can retreat! Do it now!”
A second impact, but deeper, continued like a prolonged nuclear blast, quaking the vault beside Barley. Connor glanced up as stalactites broke away from the ceiling, falling like spears.
“Look out!” he yelled, leaping to the side to avoid a two-ton impact of a calcite column. He rolled to his feet to see Barley working feverishly to finish the explosive charges.
Again a sharp impact struck the vault, and then another explosive blast and another impact, and Connor realized suddenly what was happening. The beast had finally pinpointed a specific weakness in the vault, a single section that it was attacking to overcome the portal. A hissing could be heard in the wall. Connor whirled to see Frank staring at the vault.
“What's that sound?” Connor asked.
“It's nitrogen,” Frank replied, holding his place. “Leviathan has ruptured the nitrogen lines to freeze the steel bracketing!” Then the scientist's face brightened. “Of course! Of course that's what it would do!”
“What?” Connor yelled. “What would it do?”
“It's not attacking the vault at all! It's attacking the nitrogen lines! The lines rupture and spray across the steel freezing the steel bracketing that holds the vault in place! After that Leviathan can easily shatter the steel brackets because the steel will be brittle as ice! Then it's just going to knock the door into this cavern!” Connor heard a savage rending of metal in the wall above the vault.
“Barley!” Chesterton bellowed. “Get out of there! That's a direct order! Get out of there now!”
Breathless and fatigued the muscular man looked up. “One more second, Colonel, and I can—”
“NO! Forget it! Move! Move! Move!”
In an explosion of rock and nitrogen gas, a monstrous foreleg blasted open a gaping hole twenty feet high on the wall, far above the fire door. A roar thundered through the dark orb as Leviathan's powerful limb, skin gleaming like black metal-leather, savaged the hole even farther—shattering the steel like wood, reaching in farther to pull back again, shredding the metal with black claws. Chesterton ran toward Barley who stuck an entire handful of detonators into a brick of C-4.
In a colossal display of unstoppable strength Leviathan slammed both forelegs through the hole, one after the other. Connor and Frank backed up. Then Leviathan tore at the ruptured space for the length of the entire vault before it jerked both forelegs back through.