*KABOOOOM.*
The four-inch-thick carved oak carriage doors behind us were cleaved off their structural brass hinges by an eighty-pound linear hydraulic tactical breaching ram deployed by an active direct-action assault element from the **United States Marshals Service Special Operations Group (SOG)** and the **United States Navy Board of Harbor and Subterranean Security**:
*CRASH-ROAR-SHATTER.*
A concussive shockwave of freezing winter sleet, pulverized heart-pine framing, and tactical propellant blew through the room, extinguishing twelve silver memorial candelabras, shattering the stained-glass transom over the viewing chapels into a blizzard of blue and crimson glass, and throwing two junior mortuary apprentices flat onto their backs across the velvet runners:
*SCREAMS-PANTING-TERROR.*
Through the billowing clouds of tactical exhaust…
Illuminating the two-story rotunda in forty thousand lumens of clinical, blinding white tactical halogen…
Advanced twelve SOG operators.
They wore sterile dark-charcoal Nomex drysuits, Level IV boron-carbide plate carriers, and Ops-Core ballistic helmets fitted with panoramic night-vision brackets folded onto their foreheads. Across their chests hung suppressed SIG Sauer MCX Rattlers, their weapon-mounted PEQ-15 infrared lasers cutting through the drifting smoke in twelve razor-sharp needles of incandescent crimson light:
