“Certainly, that tunnel is a shooting gallery,” Vanya said. “I’d put chain guns in the walls and operate them remotely. In a matter of seconds the air would be so full of bullets you wouldn’t be able to breathe.”

“Don’t forget mines,” Reiji said in respectable English. “Antipersonnel mines would be extremely effective in that confined space.”

“And that’s just the conventional stuff,” Randi said. “The Japanese military seems to have spent the last thirty-plus years developing whole new classes of weapons. The truth is we have no idea what to expect. If we’re right about this place, we could be facing things we’ve never seen before.”

“And if we’re wrong, we’re going to be facing a lot of very confused forklift operators,” Eric said.

That actually got a round of subdued laughter. Not enough to break the tension, but enough to at least take it down a notch.

“Do we know anything about the blast doors?” Karen asked.

“The specs call for a foot of steel, but we think it might be stronger than that.”

“Stronger than a foot of steel?”

Klein’s military brain trust had been going through Takahashi’s claims and had recently come upon something that everyone—including her—had missed: the good general’s limo. Everyone attributed his surviving Yoshima’s assassination attempt to luck, but if you looked at the tape with no preconceived notions, it was clear that luck had nothing to do with it. His car should have been completely vaporized. Instead, it seemed to have suffered barely a scratch before being whisked away by helicopters never to be seen again.

“Maybe a lot stronger, actually.”

“It sounds like it would be easier to just go through the damn rock,” Eric said.

“It doesn’t matter if the door is made of paper,” Vanya said. “The likelihood of anyone surviving an incursion into that tunnel is very remote, no?”

“I know that I don’t want to be the poor son of a bitch standing there with his dick in one hand and a power drill in the other,” Eric said. Everyone seemed to agree.

“Okay,” Randi said. “So we forget the front door.”

“I hate to point out the obvious here, but a bunker buster,” Karen offered. “Quick, effective, and it should get around whatever ground defenses they’ve dreamed up. We could fly it in from our base on Okinawa. They’d have zero time to react.”

Reiji’s brow furrowed. “Bomb Japan? This cannot happen, yes?”

Randi looked up at him. The man was undoubtedly a patriot and she was hesitant to talk freely on this subject in front of him. Having said that, Klein had specifically cleared everyone standing around this table. As far as he was concerned, their loyalty to Covert-One was above suspicion.