Area 7

FOURTH CONFRONTATION

The heat hit them like a blast furnace.

Blistering desert heat.

It was everywhere. In the air. In the rock. Against your skin. Enveloping you, surrounding you, as if you were standing in an oven. The complete opposite of the subterranean cool of Area 7 and the X-Rail tunnel.

Out here, the blazing desert sun ruled.

Shane Schofield sped down a narrow water-filled canyon at breakneck speed, blasting through the heat, sitting at the controls of a very odd-looking — but very fast — speedboat.

With him in the boat was Book II, while behind them, in a similar craft of their own, were Brainiac and Herbie.

Technically, Schofield's boat was called a PCR-2 — patrol-craft, river, two-man — but it was more commonly known as a "bipod," a small two-man jet-propelled rivercraft built by the Lockheed Shipbuilding Company for the U.S. Navy. The bipod was known for its unique design configuration. Basically, it looked as if someone had joined two small bullet-shaped jet boats with a thin seven-foot crossbeam, in effect creating a catamaran-type vehicle with two pods at either end of the beam. Since both open-topped pods were possessed of powerful twohundred-horsepower Yamaha pump-jet engines, it made for an extremely fast — and extremely stable — boat frame.

Schofield's bipod was painted in desert camouflage colors — brown blobs on a sandy yellow background — and it shot over the water at incredible speed, kicking up twin ten foot sprays of water behind it. Schofield sat in the left-hand pod, driving, while Book II sat in the right-hand one, manning the boat's sinister bow-mounted 7.62 mm machine gun.

The sun shone — burning hot.

It was already 100 degrees in the shade.

"How you guys doing over there?" Schofield said into his wrist mike as he looked back at the other bipod behind him — Brainiac was driving, Herbie sat in the gunner's pod.

Brainiac's voice: "I'm okay, but I think our scientist friend here is turning green."

They were speeding down a twenty-foot-wide slot canyon that wended its way southward, toward the main body of Lake Powell.

The pool of water at the far end of the loading bay had indeed led out to the lake, a tight, dark, winding cave whose exterior door — a brilliantly camouflaged plate-steel gate designed to look like a wall of rock — had been left open by the escaping thieves.

Schofield and his men had emerged from the cave at the end of a dead-end canyon and powered off not a moment before the entire wall of rock behind them had been blasted outward by the monstrous AFX explosion.

The two bipods sped around a wide bend in the water filled canyon.

When viewed from above, this canyon resembled a race-car track, a never-ending series of twists, turns and full 180-degree bends.

That wasn't so bad.

The trouble started when it met up with all the other narrow canyons of Lake Powell — then the canyon system resembled a giant high-walled maze of interconnecting natural canals.

They came to an intersection of three canyons, arriving at it from the northeast.

At first Schofield didn't know what to do.

Two rock-walled canals stretched away from him — a fork in the watery road. And he didn't know where Botha was going. Presumably the South African scientist had a plan — but what?

And then Schofield saw the waves. Saw a collection of ripples lapping against the sheer stone walls of the canyon branching away to the left — barely perceptible, but definitely there — the residual waves of a motorboat's wash.

Schofield gunned it, swinging left, heading south.

As he traveled down the canyonways, banking with the bends, he looked upward. The rocky walls of these canyons rose at least two hundred feet above the water level. At their rims, Schofield saw clouds of billowing sand, blowing viciously, offering sporadic relief from the blazing sun.

It was the sandstorm.

The sandstorm that had been forecast to occur that morning, but which the members of HMX 1 had expected to miss.

It was absolutely raging up there, Schofield saw, but down here, in the shelter of the canyons, it was relatively calm — a kind of meteorological haven below the canyon system's high rocky rim.

Relatively calm, Schofield emphasized.

Because at that moment, he rounded a final corner and, completely unexpectedly, burst out into wide open space — into an enormous craterlike formation with a giant flat topped mesa rising out of the water in its center.

Although the crater was bounded by magnificent sheer rock walls, it was too wide to offer total protection from the wild sandstorm above. Flurries of sand whipped down into the vast expanse of open water, swirling maniacally.

It was then that through the veil of wind-hurled sand, Schofield saw them.

They were rounding the right-hand base of the mesa, speeding away.

Five boats.

One large white powerboat that looked like a hydrofoil, and four nimble bipods, also painted sand-yellow.

To Schofield's horror, at least a half-dozen slot canyons branched out from the walls of this circular crater, like the points on a clock, offering a multitude of escape routes.

He hit the gas, charged into the sandstorm, heading for the southern end of the central mesa, hoping to take the South Africans by surprise on the other side.

His bipod skipped over the water at incredible speed, propelled by its powerful minijet engines. Brainiac and Herbie's bipod bounced along beside it, kicking up spray, jouncing wildly through the horizontal rain of flying sand.

They rounded the left-hand end of the mesa — and saw the five South African boats heading for a wide vertical canyon that burrowed into the western wall of the crater.

They gave chase.

The South Africans must have seen them, because right then two of their bipods peeled away from the main hydrofoil, turning in a wide 180-degree arc, angling menacingly toward Schofield's boats, their 7.62 mm machine guns flaring to life.

Then suddenly — shockingly — the left-hand South African bipod exploded.

It just blew out of the water, consumed in a geyser of spray. One second it was there, the next it was replaced by a ring of foaming water and a rain of falling fiberglass.

For its part, the right-hand South African bipod just wheeled around instantly, abandoning this confrontation, and took off after the other South African boats.

Schofield spun. What the…?

SHOOOOOMU

Without warning, three black helicopters came bursting out of the sandstorm above the crater and plunged into the canyon system from behind him!

The three choppers swung into the relative shelter of the crater like World War II dive bombers, banking sharply before righting themselves without any loss of speed. They thundered over Schofield and his team, powering toward the South African boats as they disappeared inside the slot canyon to the west.

The choppers just shot into the narrow canyon after them.

Schofield's jaw dropped.

In a word, the three helicopters looked awesome. Sleek and mean and fast. They looked like nothing he had ever seen before.

They were each painted gunmetal black and looked like a cross between an attack helicopter and a fighter jet. Each helicopter had a regular helicopter rotor and a sharply pointed nose, but they were also possessed of downwardly canted wings that extended out from their frames.

They were AH-77 Penetrators — medium-sized attack choppers; a new kind of fighter-chopper hybrid that combined the hovering mobility of a helicopter with the superior straight-line speed of a fighter jet. With their black radar absorbent paint, swept-back wings and severelooking cockpits, they looked like a pack of angry airborne sharks.

The three Penetrators shot forward, banking into the narrow canyon after the four South African speedboats, completely ignoring Schofield and his men.

And in a fleeting instant, Schofield had a strange thought. What the hell were the Air Force people doing out here? Weren't they after the President? What did they care about Kevin?

In any case, this was now a three-way chase.

"Sir!" Brainiac's voice came in. "What do we do?"

Schofield paused. Decision time. A tornado of thoughts whizzed through his mind — Kevin, Botha, the Air Force, the President, and the unstoppable countdown on the Football that at some point would force him to give up on this chase and turn back…

He made the call.

"We go in after them," he said.

Schofield's bipod roared into the canyon the South Africans and the Penetrators had taken, Brainiac and Herbie's bipod close behind it.

It was a particularly winding canyon, this one — left then right, twisting and turning — but, thankfully, sheltered from the sandstorm.

About a hundred yards in, however, it forked into two subcanyons, one heading left, the other right. Little did any of them know that the subcanyons of Lake Powell have a habit of swinging back on each other, like interweaving pieces of string, forming multiple intersections…

Schofield saw the three Air Force choppers split up at the fork — one going left, two going right. The four South African rivercraft up ahead of them must have already split up.

"Brainiac!" he yelled. "Go left! We'll take the right! Remember, all we want is the boy! We get him and then we high-tail it out of here, okay?"

"Got it, Scarecrow."

The two bipods parted — taking separate canyons — Schofield peeling right, Brainiac banking left.

For Schofield, it was like entering a fireworks show — a spectacular display of tracer bullets, missiles and dangerously exploding rock.

He saw the two black choppers eighty yards up ahead — trailing the lead hydrofoil and one of the South African bipods. The two speeding helicopters stayed below the canyon's rim — the raging sandstorm above the canyon system preventing them from going any higher — banking and turning with the bends of the winding canyon, their roto blades thumping.

Tracer bullets streamed out from their nose-mounted Vulcan cannons. Air-to-ground missiles streaked out from their wings and blasted into the rocky walls of the canyon all around the two South African speedboats.

For their part, the South Africans weren't exactly either.

The men in the bipod had come prepared to protect the lead hydrofoil — they had a shoulder mounted Stinger missile launcher. While one man drove the bipod, the gunner thrust the Stinger onto his shoulder and fired it up at the trailing Penetrators.

But the Penetrators must have had the same ultrapowerful electronic countermeasures that the AWACs planes inside Area 7 had, because the Stingers just shot past them spiraling wildly, careering into the walls of the canyon where they detonated, sending showers of car-sized boulders splashing down into the canal below — boulders which Schofield had to swerve to avoid.

And then suddenly Schofield saw a long, white object drop out of a hatch in the belly of one of the black choppers and, dangling from a small drogue parachute, splash down into the water.

A second later, the water beneath the chopper churned into a froth and he saw a finger of bubbles stretch out from the roiling section of water, heading straight for the South African bipod.

It was a torpedo!

Five seconds later, completely without warning, the speeding bipod exploded violently.

The force of the blast was so strong that it lifted the fast moving bipod clear off the water's surface. Indeed, such was the bipod's velocity that it tumbled end over end, totally out of control, bouncing across the water's surface like a skimming stone until it slammed — top-first — into the hard rock wall of the canyon and blew apart.

Schofield drove hard, closing in, now fifty yards behind the action. He needed to catch up, but the South Africans had had too much of a head-start.

And then abruptly the canyon turned… and intersected with its twin from the left — the subcanyon that Brainiac and Herbie had taken in pursuit of the other two South African bipods — so that now the two canyons formed a giant X-shaped junction.

And it happened.

The white South African hydrofoil shot into the intersection from the top-right-hand corner of the X — at exactly the same time as one of its own bipods entered the junction from the bottom-right.

Speeding rivercraft shot every which way.

The hydrofoil and the bipod swerved to avoid each other. Both fishtailed wildly on the water, sending a wall of spray flying into the air — and losing all of their forward momentum in an instant.

The second South African bipod from Brainiac's canyon never even had a chance to slow down.

It just shot straight through the X-shaped junction like a bullet — between the two boats that had been forced to stop, blasting spectacularly through their spray — before zooming off down the canyon ahead of it, heading west.

The three Air Force Penetrators — two from Schofield's canyon, one from the other canyon — were also thrown into chaos. One managed to haul itself to a halt, while the other two whipped through the airspace above the junction, crossing paths, missing each other by inches, and overshooting the momentarily stalled boats below.

It was all Schofield needed.

Now he could catch up.

In his bipod, Brainiac was still eighty yards short of the X-junction.

He saw the mayhem in front of him — saw the restarting hydrofoil, and the stalled South African bipod.

His gaze fell instantly on the hydrofoil, which was now rotating laterally in the water, preparing to resume its run down the canyon to the bottom-left of the X.

Brainiac cut a beeline for it.

Schofield arrived at the junction just as the hydrofoil peeled away to the south and Brainiac's bipod swooped into the narrow canyon fast behind it.

"I'm going after the hydrofoil, sir!"

"I see you!" Schofield yelled.

He was about to follow when some movement to his right caught his eye. He spun to look down the long high walled canyonway that stretched away from him to the west.

He saw one of the South African bipods disappearing down the elongated canyonway — all on its own.

It was the bipod that had shot straight through the intersection, from the bottom-right corner to the top-left. Curiously, it was not even trying to return to give aid to the hydrofoil.

Then, in a blink, the tiny bipod was gone, vanishing down a narrow side canyon at the far end of the larger canyonway.

And it hit Schofield.

The boy wasn't in the hydrofoil.

He was in the bipod.

That bipod.

"Oh, no," Schofield breathed as he snapped round and saw Brainiac's speeding bipod disappear around a bend in the southern canyon in pursuit of the hydrofoil. "Brainiac…"

Brainiac's sand-colored bipod was moving fast.

Really, really fast.

It came alongside the speeding South African hydrofoil, the two rivercraft hurtling down the narrow rock-walled canal like a pair of runaway stock cars, with two of the Air Force Penetrators firing wildly down on them as they did so.

"Brainiac, can…you hear…me…?" Schofield's garbled voice said in Brainiac's ears, but in the roar of bullets, engines and helicopter rotors, the young Marine couldn't make out Schofield's words.

Brainiac got Herbie to use his pod's controls and bring the bipod in close to the speeding hydrofoil while Brainiac himself climbed out of his seat.

He watched the hydrofoil as they sped alongside it — saw its two strutlike bow-mounted skids carving through the water — but he couldn't see inside the big speedboat's smoked-glass windows.

Then, with a deep breath, he jumped — across the gap between the two speeding boats — landing on his feet, on the foot-wide side decking of the moving hydrofoil.

"…ainiac…out…of there!… "

Schofield's voice was a blur.

Brainiac grabbed a handhold on the roof of the speeding hydrofoil. He wasn't sure what he expected to happen next. Perhaps some resistance — like someone throwing open one of the hydrofoil's side doors and firing on him. But no resistance came.

Brainiac didn't care. He just dive-rolled onto the hydrofoil's forward deck and blasted out the vehicle's windshield. Glass flew everywhere and a second later, when the smoke cleared, he saw the inside of the boat's cabin.

And he frowned.

The hydrofoil's cabin was empty.

Brainiac climbed inside — and saw the hydrofoil's steering controls moving of their own accord, guided by some kind of computer controlled navigation system, an anti-impedance system that directed the vehicle away from all other objects, rock walls and boats alike.

Then suddenly, in the silence of the cabin, Schofield's voice was loud and alive in Brainiac's ear.

"For God's sake, Brainiac! Get out of there! The hydrofoil is a decoy! The hydrofoil is a decoy!"

And at that moment, to his absolute horror, Brainiac heard a shrill beep that would signal the end of his life.

A second later, the entire hydrofoil blew, its windows blasting outwards in a shockingly violent explosion.

The force of the blast flipped Herbie's bipod, too, causing the little speedboat to flip over onto its top and skid in a gigantic spraying mess across the surface of the canal, before it smashed into the wall of the canyon and stopped.

After the impact, the crumpled bipod just lay still, droplets of water raining down all around it.

Back at the X–Intersection, Schofield was about to take off after the rogue South African bipod that had skulked away from the fight when, from completely out of nowhere, a line of bullet geysers shattered the water all around his boat.

It was the fourth and last South African bipod firing on him.

It had started up again and was now heading eastward, back into the canyon that led to the crater with the mesa in its middle.

Before Schofield could even think of a response, two parallel lines of much bigger bullet geysers erupted all around his sand-colored bipod. They hit so close, their spray spattered his face.

This barrage of fire came from the third Penetrator helicopter, which still hovered above the X-shaped junction, turning laterally in midair, searching for Kevin. The black chopper's sixbarreled Vulcan cannon roared loudly as it spewed forth a long tongue of bright yellow flames.

Schofield gunned the engine of his bipod, wheeling it around to the left, away from the Penetrator's gunfire — but also, unfortunately, away from the rogue bipod that he was sure contained Kevin — instead taking off after the other South African bipod that had headed back east, toward the crater with the mesa in it.

The Penetrator gave chase, lowering its nose, powering forward like a charging T-rex, its thrusters igniting.

Schofield's bipod skimmed across the surface of the water, its hull barely even touching the waves, trailing the South African bipod through the winding rock-walled canyon, the sharklike Penetrator looming in the air behind it.

"Any ideas?" Book II yelled from the gunner's pod.

"Yeah!" Schofield called. "Don't die!"

The Penetrator opened fire and two more lines of geysers hit the water all around their speeding bipod.

Schofield banked left — hard — so hard that the boat's left-hand pod lifted clear out of the water, just as a line of bullets ripped up the choppy surface beneath it.

And then, just then, two torpedoes dropped out of the bottom of the Penetrator.

Schofield saw them and his eyes widened.

"Oh, man."

One after the other, the torpedoes splashed down into the water and a second later two identical fingers of bubbles took off after the two bipods, charging up the water-filled canyon behind them.

One torpedo immediately zeroed in on Schofield's boat.

Schofield cut right, angling for an oddly shaped boulder that jutted out from the right-hand wall of the canyon. The gently sloping boulder looked remarkably like a ramp…

The torpedo closed in.

Schofield's bipod whipped across the water. Book II saw what Schofield was aiming for — the boulder…

The bipod hit the rock ramp, just as the torpedo swung in underneath its jet engines and — the bipod shot up out of the water, its exposed twin hulls rocketing up the length of the rock — scratching, shrieking, screeching — and then suddenly, whoosh! like a stunt car leaping up into the sky, it shot off the end of the sloping boulder, just as the torpedo detonated against the base of the ramp, shattering it into a thousand fragments that went showering upwards in a glorious flower-shaped formation behind the soaring bipod.

The double-hulled boat landed in the water with a splash, still moving fast.

Schofield looked forward just in time to see the South African bipod up ahead of him veering left, heading for a semicircular tunnel burrowed into the left-hand wall of the canyon.

He took off after it, the remaining torpedo charging through the water behind him like a hungry crocodile.

The South African bipod shot into the tunnel.

A second later, Schofield's twin-hulled boat whipped into the darkness behind it.

The torpedo swung in after them.

Their headlamps blazing, the two bipods zoomed down the length of the narrow tunnel at almost a hundred miles an hour, the dark wet walls of the passageway streaking past them in a blur, like some ultrafast indoor roller-coaster ride.

Schofield concentrated hard as he drove.

It was so fast!

The tunnel itself was about twenty feet wide and roughly cylindrical in shape, with its walls curving slightly as they touched the shallow water surface. About two hundred yards ahead of him, he saw a small point of light — the end of the tunnel.

Suddenly Book II yelled, "It's closing!"

"What!"

"That other torpedo!"

Schofield spun.

The torpedo behind them was indeed moving in quickly, closing the gap fast.

He snapped to look forward — saw the water-blasting jet engines of the South African bipod five yards in front of him. Damn it. Since each bipod was about thirteen feet wide, the tunnel wasn't wide enough to pass.

Schofield gunned it left — but the South African bipod cut him off. Tried right. Same deal.

"What do we do?" Book II called.

"I don't…" Schofield cut himself off. "Hang on!"

"What?"

"Just hold on tight!"

The torpedo weaved its way under the surface of the shallow water like a slithering snake, edging dangerously close to Schofield's stern.

Schofield hit his thrusters, pulled closer to the South African bipod in front of him — so that now the two sleek twin-hulled boats were whipping along at a hundred miles an hour in the tightly enclosed space barely afoot apart.

Schofield saw the South African driver turn quickly in his seat and see them.

"Hello!" Schofield gave the man a wave. "Goodbye!"

And with that, just as the torpedo began to disappear underneath the stern of Schofield's boat, Schofield jammed his thrusters as far forward as they would go and yanked his steering yoke hard to the right.

His speeding bipod swung quickly right, the whole twin-hulled boat lifting completely out of the water as it ran up the curving right-hand wall of the tunnel. The bipod bounced so high up the wall that for a moment it was actually traveling at right angles to the earth.

The torpedo didn't care. With its original target lost, it quickly overtook Schofield's wall skimming boat and zeroed in on the only other object in the vicinity — the South African bipod.

The explosion in the narrow confines of the tunnel was huge.

The South African bipod was blasted to bits — bits that were flung all around the tunnel, followed by a rolling, roaring fireball that filled the narrow cylindrical passageway.

Still moving fast, Schofield's twin-hulled boat swooped down off the sloping wall and blasted right through the charred remains of the South African bipod, exploding through the billowing wall of fire that now filled the tunnel before — suddenly, gloriously — it burst into the bright open space of the awaiting canyon at the end of the passageway.

Schofield eased back on the throttle an his bipod ground to a halt in the middle of this new canyon.

His face and body were soaking wet, covered in spray. Book II was the same.

He looked at this new high-walled canyon around them, trying to get a bearing on where they were, and quickly realized that this wasn't a new canyon at all — it was the same subcanyon he had taken earlier when he and Book II had separated from Brainiac. Indeed, as he now saw, he and Book weren't far from the fork in the canyon where they had split up from Brainiac.

Schofield revved the engine, started to swing around, to continue his pursuit of the rogue South African bipod, when suddenly he heard a strange thumping noise to his right.

He snapped around.

And saw another helicopter — a fourth helicopter — half-obscured by the vertical wall of the canyon, hovering fifty feet above the water at the fork of the two subcanyons.

One thing about this helicopter struck him straight away.

It wasn't a Penetrator. It was far too chunky, not nearly sleek enough.

As he saw it swing around in midair, Schofield recognized the chopper to be a CH-53E Super Stallion, a powerful heavy-lift transport bird like the two that usually accompanied Marine One. The Super Stallion was renowned for its toughness and strength — with its lowerable rear loading ramp, it could hold fifty-five fully equipped men and carry them into hell and back.

The Air Force men must have brought this Super Stallion along to carry the boy back in, as the attack-configured Penetrators only had room for three crew members.

Judging by the way it hovered at the fork of the two canyons, however, slowly turning laterally, Schofield figured that this chopper was more than just a prisoner transport — it was providing support of some kind.

Schofield spun his bipod around, headed slowly and cautiously toward the Super Stallion.

"What are you doing?" Book II asked. "The kid is that way."

"I know," Schofield said, "but the way I see it, we're not going to catch that boy on the water.

It's time we got into the air."

The three 7th Squadron commandos inside the Super Stallion all wore headsets. One flew the chopper while the other two spoke into microphones, speaking quickly amid the roar of the helicopter's rotor noise.

They, too, were searching for the rogue South African bipod that had slipped away after the near collision in the X-intersection.

"…Penetrator One, this is Looking Glass," one of them said. "There's a canyon coming up on your right, take that. It might have gone down that way…"

The other radioman said, "Penetrator Two. Cut back to the north and check that slot canyon on your left…"

A map of the canyon system glowed green on each of the men's computer screens.

The three illuminated dots on the left — P-1, P-2 and P-3 — indicated the three Penetrators prowling the canyons for the rogue bipod. The stationary dot near the mesa crater, "L-G," depicted the Super Stallion, call-sign "Looking Glass." The black line indicated the path of the chase so far.

While the two radiomen continued to issue instructions, the pilot peered forward through the bubblelike canopy of the helicopter, his eyes searching the canyon in front of them.

Amid the roar of the rotor blades and the sound of their own voices in their headsets, none of the crew heard the dull thunk! of a Maghook hitting the underside of their mighty chopper.

Schofield's bipod sat in the water directly beneath the Super Stallion — bucking and bouncing on the churning wash generated by the helicopter's downdraft — having approached the big transport bird from behind.

A thin threadlike rope connected the bipod to the underside of the Super Stallion fifty feet above it — the black Kevlar fiber rope of Schofield's Maghook.

And then suddenly a tiny figure whizzed up into the air toward the chopper, reeled upward by the Maghook's internal spooler.

Schofield.

In a second, he was hanging from the Super Stallion's underbelly — fifty feet above the water's surface, right next to an emergency access hatch built into the big helicopter's floor — gripping the Maghook as it clung to the helicopter's underside by virtue of its bulbous magnetic head.

The noise was shocking up here, deafening. The wind blast from the rotors made his 7th Squadron clothes press against his skin, made the Football hanging from his webbing twist and flap wildly.

Super Stallions have fully retractable landing gear, so Schofield grabbed a fat cable eyehole as a handhold. Then he hit a button on the Maghook, allowing it to unspool down to Book.

Within seconds, Book II was beside him, hanging from the Maghook on the underside of the Super Stallion.

Schofield grabbed the access hatch's pressure-release handle. "You ready?" he yelled.

Book II nodded.

Then, with a firm twist, Schofield turned the handle and the emergency hatch above them dropped out of its slot.

The men inside the Super Stallion felt the blast of wind first.

A gale of fast-moving air rushed into the rear cabin of the Super Stallion a second before Schofield swung up through the hatch in its floor, closely followed by Book II.

They came up inside the chopper's rear troop compartment, a wide cargo hold separated from the cockpit by a small steel doorway.

The two radiomen in the cockpit both spun at once, looking back into the hold. They went for their guns.

But Schofield and Book II were already moving fast, guns up, mirroring each other's movements perfectly. One shot from Schofield and the first radioman went down. Another from Book and the second guy was history.

The chopper's pilot saw what was happening, and realized quickly that a gun wasn't his best way out of this situation.

He pushed forward on the Super Stallion's control stick, causing the entire helicopter to lurch dramatically.

Book II lost his balance immediately, and fell.

Schofield, already dancing quickly toward the cockpit, dived to the floor and slid — forward, fast, on his chest — toward the open cockpit door.

The pilot tried to kick the door shut and seal off the cockpit, but Schofield was too quick.

He slid head-first — rolling onto his back as he did so — sliding in through the doorway, into the cockpit, and jolting to a perfect halt inside the threshold — one hand propping open the door, the other gripping his.44 caliber Desert Eagle, aimed directly up at the bridge of the pilot's nose.

"Don't make me do it," he said from the floor, his eyes looking up the barrel of his gun, his finger poised on the trigger.

The pilot was stunned, his mouth open. He just glared down at Schofield — on the floor, with his gun held unwaveringly in the firing position.

"Don't make me," Schofield said again.

The pilot went for the Glock in his shoulder holster.

Blam! Schofield put a bullet in his brain.

"Damn it," he said, shoving the dead pilot out of his seat and taking the controls. "I told you, you asshole."

Schofield and Book's Super Stallion roared down the narrow canyonway, banking with each bend, heading for the X-intersection where all the rivercraft had nearly collided earlier.

In his mind's eye, Schofield remembered seeing the rogue bipod sneaking off down the western branch of that intersection and then disappearing off to the right, into a narrow slot canyon at the far end.

With the help of the Super Stallion's map of the canyon system, he now saw that slot canyon — it snaked its way to the north, opening onto another lakelike crater with a small mesa in it.

That was where the rogue bipod had been heading.

But what's waiting in that crater? Schofield thought.

Why are the South Africans heading there?

The Super Stallion thundered down its narrow rock walled canyon, heading for the X intersection, rounded a bend — and came face-to-face with one of the Air Force Penetrators. Schofield yanked on the control stick, reining the Super Stallion to a lurching halt in midair.

The Penetrator was hovering above the X-intersection, turning laterally in the air, looking down each of the four rock-walled alleyways that met there. It looked like a gigantic flying shark, searching for its prey.

It saw them.

"Looking Glass, this is Penetrator Three," a voice said sharply over Schofield's cockpit intercom. "Got any realtime imagery from the satellite yet?"

Schofield froze.

Shit.

"Book, quickly. Weapons check."

The Penetrator turned in the air to face the Super Stallion.

"Looking Glass? You listening?"

Book II said, "We got a nose-mounted Gatling gun. That's it."

"Nothing else?"

The two helicopters faced each other, hovering above the intersection like a pair of eagles squaring off, a hundred yards apart.

"Nothing."

"Looking Glass," the voice on the intercom became cautious. "Please respond immediately with your authentication code."

Schofield saw the Penetrator's downturned wings — saw the missiles hanging from them.

They looked like Sidewinders.

Sidewinders… Schofield thought.

Then, abruptly, he hit the talk button on his console. "Penetrator gunship, this is Captain Shane Schofield, United States Marine Corps, Presidential Detachment. I am now in command of this helicopter. I've only got one word to say to you."

"And what is that?"

"Draw," Schofield said flatly.

Silence.

Then: "Okay…"

"What the hell are you doing?" Book II said.

Schofield didn't reply. He just kept his eyes locked on the Penetrator's wings.

A moment later, with a flash of light, an AIM-9M Sidewinder missile blasted forward from the left-hand wing of the Penetrator.

"Oh, shit…" Book II breathed.

Schofield saw the charging missile from head-on — saw its domed nose, saw the star-shaped outline of its stabilizing fins, saw the looping smoke trail issuing out behind it as it rolled through the air heading straight for them!

"What are you doing!" Book II exclaimed. "Are you just going to sit there…?"

And then Schofield did the strangest thing.

He jammed his finger down on his control stick's trigger. With the Sidewinder missile hurtling toward it — and only a bare second away from impact — the Super Stallion's nose-mounted Gatling gun came to life, spewing forth a line of glowing orange tracer bullets.

Schofield angled the line of laserlike bullets toward the oncoming missile, and just as the missile came within twenty yards of his helicopter — boom! — his bullets hit the Sidewinder right on its forward dome, causing it to explode in midair, fifteen yards short of the hovering Super Stallion.

"What the…?" Book II said.

But Schofield wasn't finished.

Now that the Sidewinder was out of the way, he swung his line of tracer bullets back up toward the Penetrator.

In the near distance, he could see the Penetrator's two pilots fumbling to launch another missile, but it was too late.

Schofield's tracer bullets rammed into the canopy of the Penetrator — one after the other after the other — pummeling it, pounding it, causing the entire attack helicopter to recoil helplessly in the air.

Schofield's relentless stream of bullets must have gone right through the Penetrator's cockpit, because an instant later, one of the chopper's fuel tanks ignited and the whole attack helicopter spontaneously exploded, bursting into a billowing ball of flames before the entire flaming chopper just dropped out of the sky and crashed into the water below.

With the Penetrator out of the way, Schofield gunned his Super Stallion down the western canyonway, heading for the narrow slot canyon into which the rogue bipod had disappeared.

"What the hell did you do back there?" Book II asked.

"Huh?"

"I didn't know you could shoot down a missile with tracer bullets."

"Only Sidewinders," Schofield said. "Sidewinders are heat-seekers — they use an infrared system to lock in on their targets. But to accomplish that, the forward seeker dome on the missile has to allow infrared radiation to pass through it. That means using a material other than plate steel. The seeker dome of a Sidewinder is actually made of a very fragile transparent plastic. It's a weak point on the missile."

"You shot it at its weak point?"

"I did."

"Pretty risky strategy."

"I saw it coming. Not many people get to see a Sidewinder from head-on. It was worth taking the chance."

"Are you always this risky?" Book II asked evenly.

Schofield turned at the question.

He paused before answering, appraised the young sergeant beside him.

"I try not to be," he said. "But sometimes… it's unavoidable."

They came to the narrow slot canyon into which the South African bipod had fled.

The little canyon was cloaked in shadow, and it was a lot narrower than Schofield thought it would be. His Super Stallion's whizzing rotor blades only just fitted between its high rock walls.

The giant helicopter roared along the narrow canyon, moving through the shadows, before abruptly it burst out into brilliant sunshine, out into a wide craterlike lake bounded by threehundred-foot-high vertical rock walls and with a small mesa at its northern end.

As with the other crater, the sandstorm up above the canyon system invaded this open stretch of water. The wind-hurled sand fell like rain, in slanting wavelike sheets. It assaulted Schofield's windshield, drummed against it.

"You see anything?" Schofield yelled.

"Over there!" Book II pointed off to their left, at the vertical outer wall of the crater opposite the mesa, at a point where a particularly wide canyon branched westward, away from the circular mini-lake.

There, Schofield saw a tiny rivercraft sitting on the water's surface, bucking with the mediumsized waves generated by the sandstorm.

It was the rogue South African bipod.

And it was alone.

Schofield's Super Stallion zoomed over the water filled desert crater, flying low and fast, its rotors thumping.

Schofield stared at the bipod as they came closer.

It appeared to be stationary, as if it were lying at anchor about twenty yards out from where the sheer rock wall of the crater plunged down into the water.

Schofield swung the Super Stallion to a halt thirty yards away from the bipod, kept it in a hovering pattern ten feet above the choppy surface of the water. Wind-hurled sand pelted the windshield.

He looked at the bipod more closely — a rope of some sort stretched down into the water beneath it.

The bipod was at anchor…

And then suddenly he saw movement.

On the bipod.

Through the veil of flying sand, he saw a pudgy-looking, bald-headed man in shirtsleeves get to his feet inside the left-hand pod, the driver's pod.

Gunther Botha.

Botha had been bent over in his pod, doing something when Schofield's chopper had arrived under the cover of the roaring sandstorm.

In the right-hand section of the bipod, however, Schofield saw someone else.

It was the tiny figure of Kevin, looking very small and out of place in the fearsomely equipped gunner's pod.

Schofield felt relief wash over his body. They'd found him.

Schofield's voice boomed out from the exterior speakers of the Super Stallion: "Dr. Gunther Botha, we are United States Marines! You are now under arrest! Hand over the boy, and give yourself up now!"

Botha didn't seem to care. He just hurriedly tossed something square and metallic over the side of his bipod. It splashed into the water and sank, disappearing. What the hell is he doing? Schofield thought.

Inside the Super Stallion's cockpit, he turned to Book. "Open the loading ramp. Then bring us around, rear-end first."

The Super Stallion turned laterally, rotating in midair as its rear loading ramp folded down, opening.

The giant chopper's rear end came round toward the stationary bipod, hovering ten feet above the water. Schofield stood on the now-open loading ramp, his Desert Eagle pistol in his hand, a hand mike in the other, windblown sand flying wildly all around him.

He raised the microphone to his lips.

"The boy, Botha," his amplified voice boomed.

Still Botha didn't seem to care.

Kevin, however, turned in his seat and saw Schofield, standing in the hold of the Super Stallion. A broad smile appeared across the little boy's face. He waved — a child's wave, his arm swatting rapidly from side to side.

Schofield waved back briefly.

At the moment, he was more concerned with what Botha was up to, for now he could see the fat South African virologist much more clearly.

Botha had a scuba tank strapped to his back, over his white shirtsleeves. He hurriedly threw a full-face diving mask to Kevin and gesticulated for the little boy to put it on.

Schofield frowned. Scuba gear?

Whatever Botha was doing, it was time to stop him.

Schofield raised his gun and was about to fire across Botha's bow to get his attention, when suddenly there came a loud whumping noise from somewhere close above him and completely without warning, he saw the tail rotor of his Super Stallion blast out into a million pieces and separate completely from the rest of the chopper!

Like a tree branch snapping, the Super Stallion's tail boom broke free of the chopper's main body and dropped down into the water, causing the entire helicopter to spin wildly and veer away from the bipod.

With its tail rotor gone, the Super Stallion spun out of control — and wheeled down toward the water's surface below.

Book II wrestled with the chopper's control stick, but the Super Stallion was beyond salvation. It rolled sharply in the air, heading nose-first for the water.

In the rear cargo bay, Schofield was hurled against the side wall, somehow managed to get a grip on a canvas seat there.

The Super Stallion hit the lake.

Water flew everywhere, a gigantic Whitewater splash.

The big helicopter's nose drove down into the water, going under for a full ten seconds before its buoyancy righted it again, and the massive chopper bobbed slowly on the surface.

Book II hit the kill switch and the chopper's engines died instantly. Its rotor blades began to slow.

Water rushed into the cargo hold.

It didn't come in through the open rear loading ramp just yet — since the ramp was designed to rest just above the water's surface in the event of a water landing — but rather it entered the crashed helicopter via the small access hatch that Schofield and Book II had used to enter it earlier.

A Super Stallion is built to stay afloat for a short while in a water crash, but since Schofield and Book had discarded the chopper's floor access hatch when they'd entered it, this Super Stallion wasn't even going to do that.

It was sinking. Fast.

Schofield ran into the cockpit. "What the hell was that? Something hit us!"

"I know," Book II said. He nodded out through the windshield. "I think it was them."

Schofield peered out through the forward windshield.

Hovering above the water in front of their sinking helicopter, partially obscured by the veil of wind-hurled sand — and flanking the anchored South African bipod — were the two remaining Air Force Penetrators.

The Super Stallion sank with frightening speed.

Water gurgled up through the access hatch, expanding outward as it rose up into the cargo hold, pulling the rear end of the chopper down into the lake.

As more water rushed into it, the helicopter dropped lower in the water. Within a minute, the rear loading ramp fell below the waterline and from that moment on, water came flooding in through the wide rear opening.

Up in the cockpit, Schofield and Book II were standing ankle-deep in water when abruptly the entire chopper tilted sharply skyward.

"Any risky ideas now?" Book II shouted, grabbing for a handhold.

"Not a one."

The Super Stallion continued to sink slowly, rear end first.

With the Football still hanging from his side, Schofield looked out through the cockpit's forward windshield.

He saw one of the Penetrators approach Gunther Botha's bipod. It hovered directly in front of the tiny rivercraft, like a gigantic menacing vulture.

Schofield saw Botha stand in his pod and face the black Air Force helicopter — waving. With his arms flailing, he looked like a tiny pathetic figure beseeching an angry bird-god.

Then, without warning, a Stinger missile shot down from the right-hand wing of the Penetrator, trailing a dead straight finger of white smoke.

The missile hit Botha's pod and blasted it out of the water.

One second Botha was there, the next he was gone, replaced by a frothing circle of ripples.

Kevin's pod, however, remained intact — severed cleanly from Botha's by the missile impact.

His pod and the cracked remains of the bipod's crossbeam just bobbed in the water under the steely gaze of the hovering Penetrator.

From his position inside the sinking super stallion, Schofield blanched.

They'd just killed Botha!

Holy shit!

His Super Stallion was now three-quarters underwater — its entire rear section underneath the surface. Only its domelike glass windshield and the tip of one of its rotor blades still protruded above the waterline.

Water began to lap up against the outside of the windshield.

The entire rear cargo hold was now filled with encroaching dark-green liquid — water that wanted to rise into the cockpit, and devour the whole helicopter.

The chopper sank further.

Through the green-tinged waves slapping against the windshield, Schofield saw the Air Force Penetrator swing in above the half-destroyed bipod and lower a rescue harness down to Kevin.

"Ah, damn it," he said aloud.

But the Super Stallion just continued to sink — down and down — and the last thing Schofield saw before the windshield was completely covered over by lapping green water was the image of Kevin being hauled up toward the Penetrator on the harness and being pulled into the rear section of the attack helicopter's three-man cockpit.

Then the windshield was covered over completely-and Schofield saw nothing but green. The two Air Force Penetrators were well aware of who was inside the Super Stallion.

Their calls to "Looking Glass" on- a designated alternate frequency had gone unanswered for the last few minutes. Indeed, it was a transponder trace on the Super Stallion that had led them to this crater — where they had found Botha and the boy.

The two Penetrators hovered above the sinking Super Stallion, watching it founder, watching it drown.

Inside the lead Penetrator sat Python Willis, the commander of Charlie Unit. He gazed intently at the sinking Super Stallion, making sure it disappeared beneath the waves.

The Super Stallion's cockpit went under, followed by the tip of its rotor blade — the last remaining part of the helicopter above the waterline.

A legion of bubbles rose instantly to the surface as every ounce of air inside the sinking helicopter was replaced with water.

The two Penetrators waited.

The Super Stallion disappeared into the inky green depths of the lake, trailing multiple lines of bubbles.

Still Python Willis waited — until the bubbles stopped coming, until he was sure that there could be no air whatsoever inside the sunken helicopter.

After a few minutes, the water surface became calm.

Still the two Penetrators waited.

They lingered another ten minutes, just to be absolutely certain that nobody came up. If anyone did, they would finish them off.

Nobody came up.

At last, Python made the decision and the two Penetrators wheeled around in the air and headed back toward Area 7.

No one could have stayed under that long, not even inside an air pocket. The air in a pocket would have gone bad by now.

No.

Shane Schofield — and whoever else was in that Super Stallion with him — was now, without a doubt, dead.

Gant, Mother, Juliet and the President were still on Level 4, in the semi-darkened observation lab. Hot Rod Hagerty and Nicholas Tate were also still with them.

"We should move," Gant said.

"What are you thinking?" Mother asked.

"No. What are you doing, Sergeant Gant?" Hot Rod demanded.

"We shouldn't stay here," Gant said.

"But this is a perfectly good hiding place."

"We should keep moving. If they're searching for us, and we stay in the same place, they'll eventually find us. We should move at least once every twenty minutes."

"And where exactly did you learn this?" Hagerty asked.

"It's in the training manual for Officer Candidate School," Gant said. "Standard evasive techniques. Surely you read it at some point in your career. Besides, there's something else I'd like to check out…"

Hagerty went red. "I will not be spoken to like that by a sergeant…"

"Yes. You will," Mother stepped up to Hagerty. At six four, she towered over him. She nodded over at Gant: "Because that little chickadee is smarter and cooler in a combat situation than you'll ever be. And, for your information, she ain't gonna be a sergeant for long. Soon she's gonna be an officer. And I'll tell you something, I'd put my life in her hands before I put it in yours."

Hagerty pursed his lips. "Right. That's…"

"Colonel Hagerty," the President said, stepping forward, "Sergeant Gant has saved my life twice this morning — on the train downstairs and then on the platform. In both instances, she was decisive and cool-headed in a situation that would have brought many other people unstuck. I am happy to trust my safety to her judgment."

"Fucking-A," Mother said. "The power of estrogen, man."

"Sergeant Gant," the President said. "What are you thinking?"

Gant smiled, her sky-blue eyes gleaming.

"I'm thinking we do something about that transmitter attached to your heart, sir."

In his sterile windowless room on the second-to-bottom floor of the Pentagon, Dave Fairfax was still hard at work decoding the intercepted telephone conversations that had come out of United States Air Force Special Area (Restricted) No. 7.

Having decrypted the incoming and outgoing messages in Afrikaans, Fairfax was pretty pleased with himself.

There was, however, still one thing that nagged at him. The two messages in English that he had found in amongst the Afrikaans messages.

He played the two messages again, listened intently.

One thing was certain. It was the same voice on both messages.

A man's voice. American. Southern accent. Speaking slowly, deliberately.

Fairfax pushed his glasses up onto his nose, started typing on his keyboard.

He brought up a voice analysis program.

Then he compared the taped voice's digital signature — or "voiceprint" — with the signatures of every other voice in the DIA's mainframe, every voice the Agency had ever secretly recorded.

Spiked displays whizzed across his screen as the program accessed the Agency's massive database of voiceprints. And then the computer beeped:

Okay, Fairfax thought.

He discarded the third and the fourth entries — they were the two messages that he'd just played. Their division designator, spacediv-02, meant his own section, Section 2.

The other four messages, however, were the property of Section 1, the main unit of Space Division located across the hall.

The source file for the Section 1 messages, SAT-SURV, stood for "Satellite Surveillance." Section 1, it seemed, had been tapping into foreign satellite transmissions lately.

Fairfax clicked on the first entry:

Fairfax frowned. The messages in Afrikaans had also mentioned a vaccine. And a successful test. He hit the next entry:

Changchun, Fairfax thought. The Chinese bioweapons production facility.

And a hundred and twenty million dollars, to be divided among twelve men.

This was getting interesting.

Next:

What is this…? Fairfax thought.

Yellow Star?

But that was the… He clicked on the final message:

Fairfax was looking at the names on the last message when suddenly the door to his subterranean office was flung open and his boss — a tall, bald bureaucrat named Eugene Wisher — stormed into the room, followed by three heavily armed military policemen. Wisher was in charge of the operation going on across the hall — the tracking of the newly launched Chinese space shuttle.

"Fairfax!" he bellowed. "What the hell are you doing in here!"

Fairfax gulped, eyed the MP's guns fearfully. "Uh, wha… what are you talking about?"

"Why are you accessing intercepted transmissions from our operation?"

"Your operation?" Fairfax said.

"Yes. Our operation. Why are you downloading information from the mainframe that pertains to the classified operation going on in Section 1?"

Fairfax fell silent, deep in thought, while his boss kept yelling at him.

And suddenly it all became very, very clear.

"Oh, Christ," he breathed.

It took some explaining — at gunpoint — but after five minutes, Dave Fairfax suddenly found himself standing in front of two DIA Assistant Directors in the operations room across the hall from his windowless office.

Monitors glowed all around the room, technicians worked at over a dozen consoles — all of it related to the tracking of the newly launched Chinese Space Shuttle, the Yellow Star. "I need a personnel list for Special Area 7," the twenty-five-year-old Fairfax said to the two high-ranking DLA chiefs standing before him.

A list came.

Fairfax looked at it. It read:

"Anybody else see a pattern here?" Fairfax said.

All of the men named in the intercepted transmission were from the unit designated "E" — or in military parlance "Echo."

"The only man in 'E' who isn't mentioned," Fairfax said, "is this one, 'Carney, LE.' I can only assume that he's the man speaking on the tape."

Fairfax turned to the two DIA chiefs standing beside him. "There's a rogue unit at that base. A rogue unit that has been communicating with the Chinese government and its new space shuttle. All the men in Echo Unit."

"…Echo Unit. Report…"

"…This is Echo leader" the voice of Captain Lee "Cobra" Carney replied.

Cobra spoke with a slow Southern drawl — measured, icy, dangerous. "We're in the Level 3 livin' quarters. Just swept the two underground hangar levels. Nothin' there. Workin' our way down through the complex now, coverin' the stairwell as we go."

"…Copy that, Echo leader…"

"Sir," another of the radio operators turned to Caesar Russell, "Charlie Unit just arrived back from the lake. They're outside, and they have the boy."

"Good. Losses?"

"Five."

"Acceptable. And Botha?" Caesar asked.

"Dead."

"Even better. Let them in through the top door."

Gant and the others headed for the fire stairwell at the eastern end of Level 4.

"I know this isn't exactly relevant to the present situation," Mother said as she and Gant walked side by side, "but I've been meaning to ask you about your little date with the Scarecrow last Saturday. You haven't said anything about it."

Gant gave Mother a crooked grin. "Not looking for gossip, are we, Mother?"

"Why, hell yes. That's exactly what I'm looking for old married hags like me get off hearing about the sexual gymnastics of pretty young things like you. And I was just, you know… interested."

Gant smiled sadly. "It didn't go as well as I would have liked."

"How do you mean?"

Gant shrugged, kept walking, gun in hand. "He didn't kiss me. We had a great dinner at this quiet little restaurant, then we walked along the banks of the Potomac, just talking. God, we talked all evening. And then, when he dropped me home, I was hoping that he'd kiss me. But he… just… didn't. And so we stood there awkwardly and said we'd see each other later, and the date just… ended."

Mother's eyes narrowed. "Oooh, Scarecrow. I'll kick your ass…"

"Please don't," Gant said as they came to the door leading to the stairwell. "And don't tell him I told you anything."

Mother ground her teeth. "Mmm, okay…"

"In any case, I'd rather not think about it right now," Gant said. "We've got work to do."

She opened the firedoor a crack, peered through it, her gun raised beside her face.

The stairwell was dark and silent.

Empty.

"Stairwell's clear," she whispered.

She opened the door fully, took a few steps up the stairs.

Mother moved into position behind her, both of their eyes looking up the barrels of their guns.

They came to the Level 3 landing, saw the door leading into the complex's living quarters.

There was no one here.

That's odd, Gant thought.

There were no soldiers stationed on the landing, not even a sentry left there to block their movement up through the complex.

Very odd, she thought. If she had been in charge of the opposing forces, she would be flushing every floor for the President, and ensuring that she blocked off the stairwell while she did so.

Obviously, the 7th Squadron operated differently.

With the stairwell unguarded, Gant and her team made swift progress upwards, came to the Level 2 hangar bay.

The Level 2 hangar — untouched, so far, by the mayhem of the day — was practically identical to the one above it, the only difference being that the collection of planes inside it was far less exotic. While the Level 1 hangar contained its pair of Stealth bombers and the SR-71 Blackbird, this one only held two AWACS surveillance airplanes.

Which was exactly what Gant wanted.

Two minutes later, she was inside the lower cargo hold of one of the AWACS planes, unscrewing a heavy lead panel in the floor.

The panel came free, revealing an electronics compartment — and in the middle of that compartment, secured firmly in place, was a very sturdy-looking fluorescent orange unit, about the size of a small shoebox. The orange box appeared to be made of some superstrong material.

"What's that?" Juliet Janson asked from behind Gant.

The President answered for her. "It's the plane's flight data recorder. The black box."

"Doesn't look very black," Ramrod Hagerty said sourly.

"They never are," Gant said, extracting the small orange unit from its nook. "It's just the name they're known by. Black boxes are nearly always painted bright orange, for better visibility in a wreck. That said, they're usually found another way…"

"Oh, very good…" the President said.

"What?" Hagerty asked. "What?"

"Ever wondered how they find the black box so fast after an airplane crash?" Gant said. "When a plane goes down, debris is spread all over the place, yet they always find the flight data recorder very quickly, usually within a few hours."

"Yes…"

Gant said, "That's because all black boxes have a battery-powered transponder inside them. That transponder emits a high-powered microwave signal, giving the box's location to crash investigators."

"So what are you going to do with it?" Hagerty asked.

Gant called up through the hatch above her. "Mother!"

"Yeah?" Mother's voice floated back.

"You found that signal yet?"

"I'll have it in two seconds!"

Gant gave Hagerty a look. "I'm going to try to impersonate the signal coming from the President's heart."

In the main cabin of the AWACS plane, Mother sat at a computer console.

She pulled up the screen showing the microwave signal coming into Area 7 from the low orbit satellite. It was the same screen Brainiac had found inside the other AWACS plane earlier, depicting a twenty-five-second rebounding signature.

Gant came up from the cargo hold with the orange colored black box. She plugged a cable into a socket on its side, connecting it to Mother's terminal. Immediately, the spike graph appeared on a small illuminated LCD screen on the black box's top.

"Okay," Gant said to Mother, "see that search signal, the upward spike? I want you to set it as the 'find' frequency on the black box."

When crash investigators search for a black box, they use a radio transmitter to emit a pre-set microwave signal called the 'find' frequency. When the black box's transponder detects that signal, it sends out a return signal, revealing its location.

"Okay…" Mother said, typing. "Done."

"Good," Gant said. "Now set that rebounding frequency — the downward spike — as the return signal."

"Okay, just a minute."

"Will the signal strength from the black box be powerful enough to reach all the way up to the satellite?" the President asked.

"I think it'll work. They used microwave signals to talk to Armstrong on the moon, and SETI uses them to send messages into outer space." Gant smiled. "It's not the size that matters, it's the quality of the signal."

"All right, done," Mother said. She turned to Gant. "So, Fearless Leader, what exactly have I just created?"

"Mother, if you've done it right, when we activate the transmitter inside this black box, we'll be mimicking the signal coming out of the President's heart."

"So what now?" the President asked.

"Yes," Hagerty said meanly. "Do we just switch it on?"

"Definitely not. If we turn it on, the satellite will pick up two identical signals, and that might cause it to detonate the bombs. We can't risk that. No, we've just laid the groundwork. Now it's time for the hard part. Now we have to substitute the black box's signal for the President's."

"And how do we do that?" Hagerty asked. "Please don't tell me that you're going to perform open-heart surgery on the President of the United States with a pocket knife?"

"Do I look like MacGyver to you?" Gant asked. "No. My theory is this: somehow Caesar Russell got that transmitter onto the President's heart…"

"That's right. He did it during an operation I had a few years ago," the President said.

"But I'm figuring he didn't turn it on until today," Gant said. "The White House's scanners would have picked up an unauthorized signal as soon as it was turned on."

"Yes, so…" Hagerty said.

"So," Gant said, "somewhere in this complex, Caesar Russell has a unit that turns the President's transmitter on and off. I'm guessing that that unit — probably just a handheld initiate/terminate unit of some kind — is sitting in the same room as Caesar himself."

"It is," the President said, recalling the small unit that Caesar Russell had turned on at the very start of the challenge. "He had it when he appeared on the television sets before, at the beginning of all this. It's red, handheld, with a black stub antenna."

"Right then," Gant said. "Now all we have to do is find his command center." She turned to Juliet. "Your people have checked out this place. Any ideas?"

Juliet said, "The main hangar. In the building overlooking the floor. There's a whole command-and-control room up there."

"Then that's where we're going," Gant said. "So what we do now is simple. First, we take Caesar Russell's command center. Then, in between the search signals sent down from the satellite, we use his initiate/terminate unit to turn off the transmitter attached to the President's heart, while a second later, we turn on the black box."

She gave the President a wry smile. "Like I said. Simple."

The five remaining members of Charlie Unit were moving quickly through a low concrete tunnel, all running in a half-crouch.

Trotting along with them — and because of his height, not needing to crouch — was Kevin.

Charlie Unit had just returned from Lake Powell, after killing Botha, retrieving Kevin, and watching Schofield's chopper drown.

They had parked their two Penetrators outside and were now reentering the complex through an entrance that connected the main facility with one of the outside hangars, an entrance known as the "top door."

The top door's tunnel opened onto the rear of the personnel elevator shaft, at ground level, by virtue of a foot thick titanium door.

Charlie Unit came to the heavy silver door.

Python Willis punched in the appropriate override code. The top door was a special entrance to Area 7 — if you were senior enough to know the override code, you could open it anytime, even during a lockdown.

The thick titanium door swung open — and Python froze.

He saw the roof of the personnel elevator parked just below his feet, sitting right there in front of him.

And standing on top of it, was Cobra Carney and four members of Echo Unit.

The other half of Echo, Python saw through the hatch in the elevator's roof, were down in the car itself.

"Jesus, Cobra," Python said, "you scared the shit out of me. Wasn't expecting to see you guys here…"

"Caesar told us to come get you," Cobra drawled. "Make sure you all got in okay."

Python shoved Kevin forward, onto the roof of the stopped elevator. "We lost five, but we got him."

"Good," Cobra said. "Very good."

It was then that — through the roof hatch of the elevator — Python saw four more men standing in the elevator car with the Echo men.

Four Asian men.

Python frowned.

They were the four men who had been inside the decompression chamber earlier that morning — 7th Squadron Captain Robert Wu and Lieutenant Chet Li, and the two Chinese lab workers. The men who had brought the latest strain of the Sinovirus back to Area 7.

"Cobra, what's going on?" Python said suddenly, looking up.

"Sorry, Python," Cobra said.

And with that he gave a short nod to his men.

In a flash, the four members of Echo Unit on the elevator's roof raised their P-90's and unleashed a withering storm of fire on Charlie Unit.

Python Willis was hit by about a million rounds. His face and chest were turned instantly to mush. The four Charlie men behind him also dropped like flailing marionettes, one after the other, until the only figure left standing on that side of the elevator's roof was the wide-eyed and terrified Kevin.

Cobra Carney strode forward and grabbed the little boy roughly by the arm.

"Smile, kid, you're coming with me now."

The control room overlooking the main hangar was quiet.

Boa McConnell and the four other surviving members of Bravo Unit sat slumped in the corner, looking bloodied and dirty. Two of Boa's men were seriously wounded. Colonel Jerome T. Harper — the ostensible CO of Area 7, but in reality a minion of Caesar Russell — tended to their wounds.

Another figure sat at the back of the room, shrouded in shadow — he had been sitting inside the control room for the whole morning, never uttering a word. He just watched silently.

Major Kurt Logan and the remainder of Alpha Unit were also in the control room. Logan now stood with Caesar, whispering in hushed tones. His Alpha Unit had fared little better than Bravo Unit: of his original team of ten men, including himself, there were only four left.

Caesar, however, seemed absolutely unperturbed by their losses.

"Any word from Echo Unit?"

"Cobra reports that they are now on Level 4. No sign of the President yet…"

"Damn it, shit!"

It was one of the other radio operators. His computer monitor had just blinked out.

There had been no warning. No dying whine.

"What is it?" the head operator asked.

"Fuck!" another radioman yelled as his monitor also crashed.

It spread around the control room like a virus. All around the command center, one after the other, monitors blinked out.

"…Air conditioning systems just went down…"

"…Water cooling system is gone…"

"What's going on?" Caesar Russell said calmly.

"…Power to the cell bay is falling rapidly…"

"The complex's power supply is crashing," the senior operator said to Russell. "But I don't know why…"

He brought up a system display screen.

"Jesus, we've been running on auxiliary power since eight o'clock!" the senior console operator said.

Colonel Harper stepped forward. "But that should have kept us going for at least three hours, enough time to reboot the main power supply."

While they spoke, Caesar gazed at the computer screen, at the entry:

The "77" prefix indicated a member of the 7th Squadron. "E" stood for Echo Unit; and "01," its leader, Cobra Carney.

Caesar's eyes narrowed. It appeared that during the last lockdown window period, Cobra Carney had opened Door 62-E — the eastern X-rail blast door down on Level 6…

Jerome Harper and the radioman were still debating the power situation.

"It should have, yes," the radioman said. "But it appears the system only had half power: when it kicked in, so it only lasted an hour and a half…"

The senior man's monitor blinked out. It was the last one to go.

Then, all at once, the overhead lights in the control room went out.

Caesar and the console operators were devoured by darkness.

Caesar spun, turned to look out through the windows overlooking the enormous ground-levelhangar. He saw the bright halogen lights running along the length of the hangar shut off in sequence, one after the other after the other.

The hangar — and all its contents: Marine One, the destroyed cockroach towing vehicles, the blasted-open Nighthawk Two, the overhead crane system — was consumed by inky blackness.

"All systems down," someone said in the darkness. "The whole complex has lost power."

Down in the AWACS plane on Level 2, Libby Gant and the others were preparing to head up through the underground base, to locate and take out Caesar Russell's control room, when without warning every single light in the subterranean hangar went out.

The gigantic hangar was plunged into darkness.

Pitch darkness.

Gant flicked on the pencil-sized flashlight attached to the barrel of her MP-10. Its thin beam illuminated her face.

"The power," Mother whispered. "Why would they cut the power?"

"Yeah," Juliet said, "surely that would only make it harder to find us."

"Maybe they had no choice in the matter," Gant said.

"What does this mean for us?" the President asked coming up beside them.

"It doesn't change the plan," Gant said. "We're still going for the command center. What we have to figure out though, is how it affects this environment."

At that moment, from somewhere deep within the bowels of the complex, they heard a scream — a wild scream; human, but at the same time, somehow not human; the terror-inspiring howl of a seriously deranged individual.

"Oh, Jesus," Gant breathed. "The prisoners. They're out."