see only the consequences: silence, gaps, confusion, and a growing dependence on the men giving orders from the sealed command levels.

For two days the tension stretched but did not break.

Then came the night of March 2nd.

Arman was halfway through a handover in Sector 4 when the first impact hit.

Every description he heard afterward failed to capture it.

It was not like artillery.

It was not like a nearby blast.

It was the feeling of something impossibly heavy driving straight through the mountain’s body.

The floor lurched upward.

Overhead lights burst in a chain.

Dust exploded from the ceiling so thick it turned the corridor white.

Somewhere farther down the line, a steel gate screamed against its hinges.

Men dropped where they stood.

A second impact followed so fast that it felt connected to the first, as if the same giant hammer had struck twice.

Then came a deep, splitting groan from the rock itself.

Arman pushed himself up and saw a crack zigzagging down a support wall.

A siren tried to start, choked, and died.

B-2 Spirit bombers had crossed the darkened airspace and released GBU-57 bunker-busting bombs into the mountain complex.

The penetrators did what the base had been built to deny: they reached deep enough, hard enough, and precisely enough to break the structure from within.

Arman did not know any of that yet.

He only knew the tunnel had changed.

The air carried powdered concrete and something sharper, metallic, overheated, unnatural.

Soldiers shouted for medics.

Someone screamed that it was an earthquake.

Then the emergency lights failed and the whole corridor fell into a red gloom.

A voice barked over the internal system, distorted by static: all units remain in position.

Do not move between sectors.

Await further orders.

That message should have comforted him.

Instead, it made the back of his neck go cold.

He ran toward the nearest junction and found chaos already multiplying.

One side passage had collapsed completely.

Two technicians were trying to drag a wounded man clear of falling debris.

Down the launch prep corridor, a blast door had buckled inward, not outward, as though the mountain had struck from the wrong direction.

Arman grabbed a respirator off a wall rack and shouted for everyone still standing to move toward the central gallery.

Then the secondary wave began.

The B-1 Lancers entered the battlespace to hunt mobile air defenses while B-52 Stratofortresses and follow-on strike aircraft started dismantling the surface systems that kept the underground city alive.

Above the mountain, ventilation shafts were smashed, communication antennas destroyed, generators wrecked, and power lines cut.

Below, men felt only the symptoms.

The airflow changed first.

Fans slowed.

Pressure shifted.

In some corridors the air went still; in others it came back hot and dirty, carrying smoke from places fire had already won.

The first internal detonation rolled through the tunnel network ten minutes later.

Arman had just reached the central gallery when the sound arrived from deep below: a hard, contained blast, then another, then a longer roar.

Ammunition was cooking off.

Missile components, stored charges, propellant, and fuel were beginning to ignite in sequence.

That was the moment discipline started to break.

Some units rushed toward emergency exits.

Others retreated deeper, away from the heat, only to discover that