A twenty-two-pound high-explosive fragmentation mortar shell falling through the air doesn’t scream. It whines with a sickening, swaying whistle as its welded stabilizing fins slice through the damp cave air.
Through the sight aiming cross of his Zeiss monocle, Arthur Vance tracked the high-speed arc of the projectile. The shell had reached the apex of its flight path forty meters above the underground lake and was now speeding up downward at nine point eight meters per second squared. Its chosen point of impact was not the underwater stone boat ramp where Titus held the breakwater. The mortar was dialed directly for the open concrete apron fronting the railway upkeep shop. The precise location where sixty commoner mechanics, Old Thomas, Toby Mallow, and Dr. Calder’s triage station were packed.
If the shell struck that concrete apron, three thousand case-hardened heavy dark metal ball bearings would spray outward at faster-than-sound speed, shredding sandbags, ripping through wooden partitions, and turning the entire forward defensive line into a butcher’s butcher shop.
“Take cover!” Valerie Koslov screamed from the upper railway frame stands, diving flat against the iron rails as the whistling grew to an ear-splitting pitch. “Mortar incoming! Clear the boat ramp!”
Down on the apron, men and women scrambled in desperate panic. Toby lunged toward the triage tent, throwing his own body across a wounded commoner who had taken shrapnel to the leg. Old Thomas hauled furiously on the carbon-arc lamp’s cable, trying to drag the generator into the shelter of an adit…
