The Box by Jeremy Brown (ebook reader play store txt) 📕

It was painted flat black and looked more like a military or S.W.A.T. assault machine than a cash-in-transit vehicle, but considering who was inside, it was probably a bit of both. It had newer run-flat tires but that wouldn’t matter.

Connelly said, “Good morning!”

He turned his free hand in a cranking motion to get the man to drop the window.

The man shook his head and frowned at Connelly, who was apparently too stupid to realize armored windows don’t roll down.

Connelly said through his balaclava, “Is it broken?”

The man shook his head in irritation and leaned down to the gunport centered just below the window.

He moved the interior steel plate aside and said, in a thick Eastern European accent, “No roll! No open! What’s happening here?”

Connelly knew where the men were from and he was tempted to say, “Is that a Romanian accent I detect?”

Just to mess with them.

But Bruder was listening, and he didn’t like improvisation unless it was absolutely necessary, so instead Connelly knocked the stop sign pole against his hard hat and rolled his eyes.

“Oh, duh! Of course it doesn’t open. This thing is like a tank, right? Anyway, you can go on through, nobody’s coming. I don’t even know why they have me standing out here, there’s already a freaking stop sign, you know?”

The man turned and said something to the other man in the passenger seat, who also had a beard, then opened the gun port again.

“What is happening here?”

“Oh, we’re surveying. Surveying! They want to see if it’s possible to widen the tunnel. Wider!”

Connelly looked down the road behind the armored car, then through the tunnel. He had to shield his eyes against the sun, about a hand’s width above the tracks. No other vehicles were in sight, just like every other time they’d scouted the road.

He listened and didn’t hear any approaching freight trains, which was also according to schedule.

“You can go through! It’s fine!”

The man said something to his passenger again and frowned through the thick glass at Connelly, then put the truck into gear and rolled forward.

Connelly could see his mouth moving but couldn’t hear the words. He turned away from the vehicle and looked northwest along the road, seeing nothing but more drifting snow and the remnants of last summer’s corn.

When the armored car’s rear bumper went past him, he unlocked the radio’s talk button, but before he let it go he muttered, “Ten seconds.”

When the armored car moved again Kershaw went to the pile of surveying equipment just outside the tunnel and started messing with a laser level mounted on a tripod. Bruder left him there and walked through the tunnel to the southeast end.

The low rumble of the diesel engine was getting funneled toward him, but he could tell from the sound it wasn’t in the tunnel yet.

He didn’t want to look back.

He walked the twenty three steps without hurrying. When he got to the end of the tunnel, he went to the white crew cab truck sitting on the gravel shoulder with the tailgate and cap open. A telescoping rod with height measurements and a laser receiver attached were waiting on the tailgate along with a bright yellow carrying case the size of a small cooler.

The truck didn’t look like anything special, but some modifications done at a Las Vegas garage would make sure the truck would do what Bruder and the crew needed it to.

So far, all they needed it to do was sit there and look like a truck.

When the sound of the armored car’s engine grew and began to echo straight at him, Bruder took the equipment off the tailgate and started walking along the truck, away from the tunnel and toward Rison, the other man standing out in the wind with a stop sign on a pole.

As he walked, he counted down to himself: 3…2…1.

Kershaw hit the button when the armored car was exactly halfway through the tunnel.

The shaped charges disguised as lumpy concrete patches went off, a jarring crack that smacked out of the tunnel and rolled out into the empty fields.

The small but powerful explosions went up and out at about a fifteen-degree angle from the centerline and lifted the armored car a few inches, just enough to take the weight off the tires and shear the rims off the axles.

The vehicle slammed back down on its belly in a cloud of dust and brief splash of sparks when the old metal struck the concrete.

Kershaw pulled his mask up and lifted an AR-15 with a 16-inch barrel, suppressor, flashlight, and optics out of one of the hard equipment cases and slung it across his chest.

He found the rope tucked into the snow and dead weeds along the concrete retaining wall and moved with it toward the middle of the road. The rope popped loose of the snow and occasional bits of ice until it hung straight down from the railroad overpass and Kershaw pulled hard, unfurling the thick canvas tarp.

The far end of the tunnel was already blocked, so Bruder was ahead of him.

Bruder pushed through the tarp blocking the southeastern end of the tunnel.

The tarp crackled as it moved because of the reflective insulation foil lining the inside, which, along with the thick concrete walls, turned the tunnel into a Faraday box. No electromagnetic signals—like those from cell phones, in particular—could get in or out.

Bruder had a 100,000 lumen flashlight attached to his AR, and he sent the beam through the armored car’s windshield.

Dust and dirt drifted through the white light but he could clearly see the two bearded men in the front seat lifting their hands and turning away from the beam, which hit like a baseball bat when you looked straight at it.

Bruder wasn’t sure how muffled his voice would be inside the vehicle or how badly the ears in there were ringing, so he erred on the side of loud.

“Open the back!”

The two men inside blinked