12
Colonel Elizabeth Karen wondered if she was going to die here.
She hadn’t seen the impact, she’d been facing the wrong way, but Major Markum had.
Instead, her chair had straddled across one of the building’s expansion joints between two separate pours of concrete. One side had dropped vertically by a foot, throwing her into the table. Her left arm wasn’t functioning. Dislocated or broken, she was too shaken up to tell.
It was simply…wrong that something as substantial as the Pentagon could move like that.
Markum was kicking at his office door, to little effect—the floor’s shift had jammed it hard.
He’d shed his jacket and pressed it against the gap along the floor, but it only slowed the smoke now coming in.
“A plane.” She felt like Vicki, stating so much in so few words. A plane
