“Go topside. Tell Mrs. Colson to find some men with empty pockets and deaf ears to move all this dirt. We need strutters, too.”
“Three, Pat?”
Patrick thought for a moment. “Better make it four.”
“All right. Give me a minute, me fuckin’ balls got lodged somewhere near my lungs.”
“And while you’re up there,” Patrick added. “Tell my mother… that the timeline has been accelerated.”
A beat passed, and then, “By how much, Pat?”
He thought through it. Twenty yards in twenty seconds. Twenty f*****g seconds.
“Tell her we’ll be there in four weeks.” Beneath the pounding adrenaline, there was hope burgeoning. Patrick grinned.
Four weeks.
“Come on, Gun,” he said now. “We need to get some timber on these walls.”
His brother was still breathing too heavily, his hands on his knees. But Gunner n
