We still held air superiority around the fortress in District Two, yet it turns out our rebel comrades had been busy while we were gone. Capitol forces had attempted a breakout by air. Only a few of their planes had managed to run our hovercraft blockade. The transport bringing us back to Two did not have its invisibility shields up, so I got a full view of the landscape.
Fortress schematics were chief amongst the valuable intelligence Plutarch had gotten us from the inside. I had them running through my mind during the less-critical stages of the District One mission. In short, they were a painful reminder that the Capitol is evil but not stupid.
During the Dark Days, rebels had taken District Thirteen from the inside. There was no chance of that now. The Capitol was especially careful about the loyalty of the personnel they assigned there, and by loyalty I mean the degree of effectiveness of their brainwashing. The discipline was even more strict than usual. Plutarch had managed to get some spies in, but nowhere near a critical mass.
After the Capitol lost Thirteen, it needed more than lightly fortified ground bases out west. Thirteen really had mined graphite despite its concealed main purpose as a nuclear weapons facility. Two really did produce stonework despite its hidden function as the Capitol's general military nexus. One of the biggest exhausted quarries had been turned into the fortress we now faced today
Lyme had said that the Hunger Games had been her only way out of the quarries, yet she was still a stonemason's daughter. Damn it, they were Two's Seam and the military infrastructure Two's Merchant Section. However, here the downtrodden people were outnumbered in addition to being trampled on by the Capitol boot.
Lyme had deployed along with a few covert operations specialists when the time was right. Victor Squad was many things, but we were very overt, so Lyme had gone alone.
They nevertheless flocked to Lyme when their hometown heroine returned to help them rise up. They were only able to secure the outlying parts of the district, but they had proved more than able to hold the line until the bulk of rebel forces showed up, including the rest of Victor Squad.
The rock was too thick to blast through with conventional explosives. Only nuclear missiles could crack the outside of the mountain or the ground and upper levels above the heart of District Thirteen. Neither side dared take that step, some of the little sanity that had been demonstrated during the slaughter of the past couple months. What point would it serve to rule over charred bones and cooked meat?
The Peacekeepers inside the fortress needed to breathe, but the air vents were the most heavily fortified part of the complex. We could bomb down the shafts, but the bottoms thereof were strengthened against exactly that. All of the entrances made for a horrible ground approach – forces trying to storm the gates would be channeled into chokepoints where they could be massacred with impunity. The Capitol understood the natural barrier of the western mountains, once equally unimaginatively called the Rockies. It was, from a tactical perspective, how they had won the first war, and it wouldn't be how they'd win the second. "No more talk about storming the entrances!" an exasperated Lyme yelled after another tense, fruitless planning session.
"Well damn, ain't this a tough nut to crack!" Plutarch shouted back. 'The Nut' was catchier than 'The Western Fortress' and that's the name we ended up using outside of the most formal written dispatches.
Lyme had beautifully represented Two's lower class. Brutus and Cato were similarly emblematic of the district's supposed elite, although the real elite were the of course Capitol masterminds. Their presence helped encourage much of the population to not oppose our push closer to the fortress. They had it better than most folks in the districts, so they had needed this push towards rebellion.
Cato's mother was now in uniform somewhere, but incognito to help protect other tribute relatives. She had come with us willingly. "Although not as quickly as I would have liked!" Lyme had muttered once. However, for all the Capitol knew, she could have been abducted, and played nice for her son's wedding.
Cato's grandfather had long since accepted his son's death and distanced himself from his grandson's treason. Or did he just tell himself that as a coping mechanism? At any rate, he sure presented himself as a loyal ex-Peacekeeper, whether he meant it or not. He was one of many District Two men with a wife several years younger. Her father had been a Peacekeeper too, one of the tens of thousands of Capitol rank-and-file during the Dark Days. That was the man Cato had been named after. It seemed he was mending his great-grandfather's misdeeds in spectacular fashion. Clove's parents were another ex-Peacekeeper with a years-younger wife. Cato had told everybody the name of Clove's sister during his arena rant. The Hawkinses had one son before their daughters Clove and Flavia. Alexander was an active duty Peacekeeper, having enlisted right when he came of age after last year's reaping. Publicly he presented himself as a loyal servant of the Capitol, with a grudge against his sister's killer on top of that. Yet he knew who was really responsible, and we had another inside man.
I marveled that it had already been two and a half months since our last day in the arena. It had certainly been the most momentous few weeks in the nation's history. There had been no turning back since we ran our mouths on the arena floor. Now let's make it only a few more weeks to finish what we started.
The Capitol forbade Peacekeepers from marrying or having children, to prevent loyalty to a new family. However, they could only do so much about loyalty to birth families. Someone had to raise their slaves, whether blood relatives or not, people who would be attached to each other, not their government. After all, watching relatives suffer at the Capitol's hands was how so many of us grew to hate the big city that ruled Panem with an iron fist.
Over the course of the next few days, the late autumn snows began to fall. There were mainly flakes at ground level, no serious accumulation, but higher on the mountain, the snow was really piling up. I recalled the view from the air and I finally had the trap I wanted to bring.
"Now bombing the mountain would do some good," I began. "It should trigger an avalanche and clog the air vents with snow."
"He has found it!" Plutarch shouted.
"A way to basically trigger a mine explosion!" Katniss countered with a fury she had probably learned from my rants.
"The Capitol's violence is intended to perpetuate itself. This violence is intended to bring an end to it," I countered.
"Our spies would be glad to die if our enemies go down with them" Plutarch pointed out.
"We can't afford to wait around any longer trying to starve them out," I said, repeating the words of various superiors. Plutarch nodded approvingly. The occupants of The Nut were very prepared for that possibility, and it would give the Capitol time to build up its own defenses and maybe even counterstrike somewhere. "Those of us from The Seam know that cruel fate too." If I was alone with her, I probably would have said something with a sarcastic 'Catnip' or two.
"It needs to be done to win this war. Anyway, here the trapped wouldn't burn up and would be able to make it to the 'elevator' that is the access railroad." That tunnel surfaced in the middle of one of the nearby villages, and that spot was one of the most heavily guarded parts of the blockade. "If they choose to surrender."
"It's a go," Plutarch said, either giving an order or passing one along from back at headquarters. Lyme held the field command, but not control over such high-level decisions. Some of Plutarch's agents had calculated the best spots to actually drop the bombs.
I could work a crowd, that much was known, so I addressed the aircrews. I saw a couple familiar faces. "I ain't straight, but I'm ready to do my part to make sure my craft flies straight," Anna Flowers declared. Many of us laughed, Madge the loudest.
Lyme stationed Victor Squad, including herself, right at the exit of the train tracks. From that vantage point, the bombs hitting their targets gave off little puffs of white dust, yet it soon became the cascade I intended it to be, flowing into the massive shafts that were the air vents. In but a few minutes, we heard the rumblings of a train car. Then we heard another all too familiar noise. "Some surrender!" were Emerald's last words as anonymous bullets shredded what had once been a pretty face. I aimed a retaliatory volley accordingly. I felt some apparently slam into my armor; on rage and adrenaline, I simply focused on spraying more out.
Several of my squadmates lay on the ground, although the woman and two men of District Two stood tall. Wiress, Hook and Regina looked particularly wounded. I knew what Katniss looked like when she dodged for cover and she had taught Finnick the gesture. Sapphire surged into the gap as Gloss and Cashmere laid down cover fire to each side of her. Had somebody given her a gun? No, she was determined to get blood on Amazon, and that she did. The hilt turned from pink to red. The bayonet charge took by surprise soldiers expecting more gunfire, a note topping the unrelenting chaos. The bursts became more sporadic as we closed in on the remaining train cars, actual surrenders. Disaffected base staff helped overpower the few remaining Peacekeepers.
"To Hawthorne's nutcracker!" Plutarch cheered with the bodies still warm. When the smoke cleared, Bass, Flavia, Hercules, Ruby, Octavian, Jet, Star, Windmill, and Maria were chief amongst the Capitol's fallen useful idiots. Now it was time for that city to fall and its masterminds to pay the price.