Area 7

FIFTH CONFRONTATION

About ten minutes before the power went out at Area 7, a chunky CH-53E Super Stallion transport helicopter was sinking slowly through the aqua-green water of Lake Powell.

It made for a peculiar sight.

With its tail section completely blown apart, the chopper sank rear end first, almost vertical, its open loading ramp swallowing water by the ton. Against the hazy green backdrop of the water all around it, it looked as if the Super Stallion was free-falling in silent ultra-slow motion.

Thin streams of bubbles weaved their way to the surface above it — the same bubbles that were being watched by the two Air Force Penetrators hovering above the lake.

Shane Schofield and Buck Riley Jr. stared out through the sinking helicopter's Lexan windshield — looking straight up.

They saw the water's surface high above them, rippling like a glass lens, fifty feet away and getting more and more distant.

Beyond the distorted lens of water they could make out the twin images of the Penetrator attack choppers hovering above the surface, waiting for them to emerge, if they dared.

In the water all around them, a bizarre yet extraordinary underwater landscape revealed itself. Giant boulders rested on the lakebed, desert trails that had once been dry land twisted and turned, there was even a giant submerged cliff that soared upward, disappearing above the water's surface. The submerged desert world appeared as a ghostly pale green.

Book II turned to Schofield. "If you've got any more magic escape plans, now would be the time to use them."

"Sorry," Schofield said. "I'm all out."

Behind them — or rather, below them — water was flooding up into the cargo bay. It rose quickly through the hold, entering the helicopter via the wide-open loading ramp and any other orifice it could find.

Thankfully, the cockpit was airtight, so at seventy feet down, the still-sinking helicopter reached equilibrium — and an air pocket formed in the upturned cockpit, the same way a drinking cup submerged upside-down in a bathtub will form an air bubble.

The helicopter glided downwards until, at ninety feet, it hit the bottom.

A billowing cloud of silt exploded all around the Super Stallion as its destroyed tail section impacted against the floor of the lake and came to rest — still upright — against a massive submerged boulder.

"We haven't got much time," Schofield said. "This air will go bad real fast."

"What do we do?" Book II said. "If we stay, we die. If we swim to the surface, we die."

"There has to be something…" Schofield said, almost to himself.

"What do you mean?"

"There has to be a reason…"

"What are you talking about?" Book II said angrily. "A reason for what?"

Schofield spun to face him. "A reason why Botha stopped here. In this spot. He didn't stop here for the hell of it. He had a reason to drop anchor here…"

And then Schofield saw it.

"Oh, you cunning bastard…" he breathed.

He was staring out over Book II's shoulder, out into the murky green haze of the underwater world.

Book II spun, and he saw it, too.

"Oh my God…" he whispered.

There, partially obscured by the aqua-green mist of the water, was a structure — not a boulder or a rock formation, but a distinctly man-made structure — a structure which looked totally out of place in the green underwater world of Lake Powell.

Schofield and Book saw a wide flat awning, a small glass-windowed office, and a wide garage door. And underneath the awning: two old-style petrol pumps.

It was a gas station.

An underwater gas station.

It was nestled up against the base of the cliff, at the point where the enormous circular crater containing the small mesa met a wide canyon stretching westward, right on the corner.

It was then that Schofield remembered what this gas station was.

It was the rest-stop petrol station that had been flooded over when Lake Powell had been created in 1963 by the damming of the Colorado River — the old 1950's-era gas station that had been built on the site of an old trading post.

"Let's move," he said. "Before we use up all the oxygen in here."

"To where?" Book II asked incredulously. "The gas station?"

"Yep," Schofield said, looking at his watch.

It was 9:26.

Thirty-four minutes to get the Football back to the President.

"Gas stations have air pumps," he said, "for inflating tires. Air that we can breathe until those Penetrators go away. Maybe when the government compensated him, the guy who owned this station just upped and left everything behind."

"That's your magic escape plan? Any air left in those pumps will be forty years old. It could be rancid, or contaminated by God-only-knows what."

"If it's air-sealed," Schofield said, "then some of it may still be good. And right now, we don't have any other options. I'll go first. If I find a hose, I'll signal you to come over."

"And if you don't?"

Schofield unclipped the Football from his webbing and handed it to Book II. "Then you'll have to come up with a magic plan of your own."

The Super Stallion lay on the bottom of the lake, surrounded by the silent underwater world.

Abruptly, a finger of bubbles issued out from its open rear section — trailing the figure of Shane Schofield, still dressed in his black 7th Squadron battle uniform, as he entered the water from within the sunken helicopter.

Schofield hovered in the void for a moment, looked about himself, saw the gas station, but then suddenly he saw something else.

Something resting on the lakebed directly beneath him about three feet away.

It was a small silver Samsonite container — heavy duty obviously designed to protect its contents from strong impacts; about the size of two videocassettes placed side by side. It sat on the silty lake floor, perfectly still, weighed down by a small anchor.

It was the object Gunther Botha had tossed over the side of his bipod when Schofield and Book had interrupted him.

Schofield swam down to it, cut away the anchor with a knife, and then attached the silver container's handle to the clip on his combat webbing.

He'd look at its contents later.

Right now he had other things to do.

He headed for the underwater gas station, pulling himself through the water with long powerful strokes. He covered the distance between the Super Stallion and the gas station quickly, and soon found himself hovering in front of the ghostlike submerged structure.

His lungs began to ache. He had to find an air hose soon…

There.

Beside the open doorway of the gas station's office.

A black hose, connected to a large pressurized drum.

Schofield swam for it.

He came to the hose, grabbed it and pressed down on its release valve.

The hose's nozzle sputtered to life, spewing out some pathetically small bubbles.

Not a good sign, Schofield thought.

And then, in a sudden billowing rush, a wash of big fat bubbles came bursting out of the hose.

Schofield quickly put his mouth over it and, without a second thought, breathed in the forty year-old air.

At first, he gagged, and coughed awfully. It tasted bitter and stale, foul. But then it got cleaner and he began to breathe it in normally. The air was okay — just.

He waved to Book in the helicopter, gave him the thumbs-up.

As Book swam over with the Football, Schofield pulled the air hose into the gas station's little office, so that any stray bubbles got trapped against the office's ceiling rather than rising to the lake's surface and alerting the Penetrators to their new air source.

While he did so, he looked at the submerged gas station all around him.

He was still thinking about Botha.

The South African scientist's escape plan couldn't have involved just coming to this sunken petrol station. It had to be something more than that…

Schofield looked around the gas station's office and the garage adjoining it. The whole structure was nestled up against the base of the sunken cliff.

Just then, however, through the rear window of the little office, Schofield saw something built into the base of the cliff behind the gas station.

A wide boarded-up doorway.

It was constructed of thick wooden beams, and it appeared to burrow into the cliff face. A pair of mine-car tracks disappeared underneath the planks that sealed its entrance.

A mine.

Botha's plan was beginning to make more sense.

Thirty seconds later, Book II joined him inside the office and gulped in some air from the hose.

Another minute and Schofield leaned outside the office and saw the blurred rippling outlines of the Air Force Penetrators above the surface wheel around in the air and depart heading back for Area 7.

As soon as they were gone, he got Book's attention and pointed at the mine entrance behind the gas station, signalling, I'm going there. You wait here.

Book nodded.

Schofield then flicked on the small barrel-mounted flashlight on his Desert Eagle pistol and swam out through the rear window of the office, heading for the mine entrance at the base of the cliff.

He came to the boarded-up mine, and found that some of its rotting planks had been removed — possibly recently.

He swam inside.

Darkness met him. Impenetrable underwater darkness.

The narrow beam of his flashlight revealed rough rocky walls, submerged support beams, and the pair of mine-car tracks on the floor, disappearing into the shadows.

Schofield swam quickly through the mine tunnel, guided by the beam of his flashlight.

He had to keep track of how far he had gone. There would come a time very soon when he would have to make a choice: go back to Book and get some more air from the hose, or keep going, and hope he made it to a part of the mine that wasn't filled with water.

The only thing that convinced him that he would find such an air source was Botha. The South African scientist wouldn't have come here if he couldn't…

Suddenly Schofield saw a narrow vertical shaft branching off his tunnel. A rung ladder ran up its length.

He swam over to the shaft, pointed his flashlight up into it. The shaft went both up and down, disappearing into blackness in both directions. It was an access shaft of some sort, allowing quick and easy movement to all levels of the mine.

Schofield was running out of air.

He did the math.

The lake was about ninety feet deep here. Hence, ninety feet up that rung ladder, the water should level out.

Screw it.

It was the only option.

He turned back to get Book.

Two minutes later, he returned to the mine tunnel, this time with Book II — and the Football — beside him, plus a new lungful of air.

They headed straight for the vertical access shaft, used its rung ladder to pull themselves up it.

The shaft was a tight cylinder, with earthen doorways opening off it every ten feet or so.

Climbing it was like climbing up a very narrow sewer pipe.

Schofield led the way, moving quickly, counting the rungs as he climbed, calculating one foot for every rung.

At fifty rungs, his lungs began to burn.

At seventy, he felt bile crawling up the back of his throat.

At ninety, he still saw no sign of the surface, and he started to worry that he had got it all wrong, that he had made a fatal mistake, that this was the end, that he was about to black out — then suddenly, gloriously, Schofield's head exploded out of the water into beautiful cool air.

He immediately swung his body to the side to allow Book II to surface next to him. Book burst out of the water and both of them gulped in the fresh air as they hung from the ladder in the tight vertical well.

The shaft still rose into darkness above them — only now it was no longer filled with water.

Once he had regained his breath, Schofield climbed up out of the water and stepped through the nearest earthen doorway.

He emerged inside a wide flat-floored cavern, an old administration chamber for the mine.

What he saw inside the chamber, however, stopped him cold.

He saw boxes of provisions — food, water, gas cookers, powdered milk — hundreds of boxes.

Hundreds and hundreds of boxes.

A dozen fold-out cots lined the walls. A table covered with fake passports and drivers' licenses stood in one corner.

It's a camp, Schofield thought. A base camp.

With enough food to last for weeks, months even — for however long it would take for the United States government to stop searching Lake Powell for the men who had stolen the Sinovirus and its prized vaccine source: Kevin.

Then, once the coast was clear, Botha and his men would leave the lake and make their way back to their homeland at their leisure.

Schofield looked at the stacks of boxes. Whoever had done this had been bringing stuff here for a long time.

"Geez." Book II joined Schofield in the chamber. "Somebody came prepared."

Schofield looked at his watch.

9:31 a.m.

"Come on. We've got twenty-nine minutes to get this briefcase back to the President," Schofield said. "I say we go for the surface, and see if there's a way to get back to Area 7."

Schofield and Book II climbed.

As fast as they could. Up the vertical access shaft. Schofield with Botha's small Samsonite container. Book II with the Football.

Within a minute, they reached the top of the ladder and stepped up into a wide aluminum building of some sort, kind of like an oversized shed.

A set of mine-car tracks began over on the far side of the shed, disappearing into the earth. They were flanked by a collection of rusty loading trays and old conveyor belts. Everything was covered in dust and cobwebs.

Schofield and Book raced for the external door, kicked it open.

Brilliant sunlight assaulted their eyes, wind-blown sand blasted their faces. The sandstorm was still raging.

The two tiny figures of Schofield and Book II stepped out of the mine shed…and they found themselves standing on a gigantic flat-topped desert peninsula that stretched out into Lake Powell. They looked like ants against the magnificent Utah landscape — the magnitude of the earth around them dwarfing even the large aluminum shed from which they had emerged.

Strangely, though, there was another structure on this vast flat-topped peninsula. It stood a bare fifty yards away from the mine shed: a small farmhouse, with a barn attached to its side.

Schofield and Book ran for it through the storm-tossed sand.

The letterbox at the gate read: Hoeg.

Schofield bolted past it, into the front yard. He came to the side of the farmhouse, crouched underneath a window, peered inside, just as the wall beside him exploded with automatic gunfire. He spun to see a man dressed in denim overalls come charging around the corner of the farmhouse with an AK-47 assault rifle in his hands.

Blam!

Another shot rang out above the sandstorm and the farmer dropped to the dusty ground, dead.

Book II appeared at Schofield's side, his M9 pistol smoking.

"What the hell is going on here?" he yelled.

"I'm guessing," Schofield said, "that if we live through this, we'll find that Mr. Hoeg is a friend of Gunther Botha's. Come on."

Schofield ran for the barn, threw open its doors, hoping against hope that he would find some kind of transportation inside it…

"Well, it's about time we had a bit of luck," he said. "Thank you, God. We deserved a break."

Standing there before him — glistening like a new car in a showroom — was a vehicle common to the farms in these parts: a beautiful lime-green biplane, a crop duster.

Three minutes later, Schofield and Book were shooting through the sky, soaring high over the snakelike canyons of Lake Powell.

It was 9:38 a.m.

This is going to be close, Schofield thought.

The plane was a Tiger Moth — an old World War II biplane often used for crop dusting in the dry southwest. It had two parallel wings, one above the fuselage and one below, that were joined by vertical struts and criss-crossing wires. Two spindly landing wheels stretched down from the forward end of its body, like the elongated legs of a mosquito, and an insecticide sprayer was attached to its tail.

Like most biplanes, it was a two-seater — the pilot sitting in the backseat, the co-pilot up front.

And it was a good plane, too, well looked after. Mr. Hoeg, it seemed, in addition to being a goddamned spy, was obviously an airplane enthusiast.

"What do you think?" Book said into his flight helmet's microphone. "Do we go for the X rail?"

"Not now," Schofield replied. "There's not enough time. We head straight for Area 7. For the Emergency Exit Vent."

Dave Fairfax's heart was racing.

This had turned into quite an eventful day.

After he'd heard Dave's assessment of the situation at Area 7 and the presence of a rogue unit there, the DIA assistant director in charge of surveilling the Chinese space shuttle had ordered a blanket tap of a one-hundred-mile circle surrounding Areas 7 and 8. Now, any signal coming out of that zone would be picked up by the DIA's surveillance satellites.

Impressed by Fairfax's work on the matter thus far, the assistant director also gave the young cryptanalyst free rein to further pursue the case. "Do whatever you have to, young man," he'd said. "You report directly to me now."

Fairfax, however, was still puzzled.

Perhaps he was just excited, but something still nagged at him. The pieces still didn't quite add up.

The Chinese had a shuttle up in space, communicating with a rogue unit at a U.S. Air Force base.

Okay.

So there was something at this base that the Chinese wanted. Fairfax guessed it was the virus vaccine that kept getting mentioned in all the decoded messages.

Okay…

And the shuttle was the best way to communicate directly with the men on the ground.

No.

That wasn't right. The Chinese could use any of a dozen different satellites to communicate with men on the ground. You didn't need a whole shuttle to do that.

But what if the shuttle had another purpose…

Fairfax turned to one of the Air Force liaison people the DIA had called in. "What sort of hardware does the Air Force keep at Area 7?"

The Air Force guy shrugged. "Couple of Stealths, an SR-71 Blackbird, a few AWACS birds. Apart from that, it's mainly used as a biological facility."

"What about the other complex then? Area 8?"

The Air Force man's eyes narrowed. "That's another story altogether."

"Hey. This is need-to-know. Believe me, I really need to know."

The Air Force man hesitated for a moment.

Then he said, "Area 8 contains two working prototypes of the X-38 space shuttle. It's a satellite killer — a smaller, sleeker version of the standard shuttle that gets launched off the back of a high-flying 747."

"A satellite killer?"

"Carries special zero-gravity AMRAAM missiles on its wings. It's designed for a quick launch and short target oriented missions: flying up into a low-earth orbit, knocking out enemy spy satellites or space stations, then coming home."

"How many people can it hold?" Fairfax asked.

The Air Force man frowned. "Three command crew. Maybe ten or twelve in the weapons hold, at the very most. Why?"

Now Fairfax was thinking fast.

"Oh, no way…" he breathed. "No way!"

He lunged for a nearby printout.

It was the printout of the last message he had decoded, the same one he had used to reveal the men of Echo Unit as traitors. It read:

Fairfax read the line: "Names of my men who will need to be extracted."

"Extracted…" he said aloud.

"What are you thinking?" the Air Force liaison man asked.

Fairfax was in a world of his own now. He saw it clearly.

"If you wanted to get a top-secret vaccine out of a top secret Air Force base in the middle of the U.S. desert, how would you do it? You couldn't fly it out, because the distance is too far. You'd be shot down before you even made it to California. Same for an overland extraction. You'd never make it to the border before we caught you. By sea? Same problem. But these Chinese bastards have figured it out."

"What do you mean?" "You don't get something out of America by going north, south, east or west," Fairfax said.

"You get it out by going up. Into space."

Schofield looked at his watch.

9:47 a.m.

Thirteen minutes to get the Football to the President.

He and Book II had been flying for several minutes now, soaring over the desert landscape in their gaudy lime green biplane at a swift 190 miles an hour.

In the distance ahead of them — rising up out of the flat desert plain — they could just make out the low mountain, the runway, and the small cluster of buildings that was Area 7.

Immediately after they had taken off, Schofield had taken the opportunity to open the silver Samsonite container that he had found on the lake floor.

Inside it, he saw twelve shiny glass ampules, sitting in foam-lined pockets. Each tiny glass bulb was filled with a strange blue liquid. A white stick-on label on each ampule read:

Schofield's eyes widened.

It was a field vaccination kit — measured doses of the vaccine that Kevin's genetically constructed blood had provided, doses that could be administered by syringe. And created only this morning.

It was Gunther Botha's masterwork.

The antidote to the latest strain of the Sinovirus.

Schofield stuffed six of the little glass ampules into the thigh pocket of his 7th Squadron fatigues. They might come in handy later.

He tapped Book II on the shoulder, handed him theother six. "Just in case you catch a cold."

Still sitting in the forward seat of the biplane, for the whole trip thus far Book II had been staring silently forward.

He took the ampules Schofield offered him, pocketed them in his stolen 7th Squadron uniform. Then he just resumed his brooding forward gaze.

"Why don't you like me?" Schofield asked suddenly, speaking into his helmet mike.

Book II's head cocked to the side.

A moment later, the young sergeant's voice came through Schofield's helmet. "There's something I've been wanting to ask you for a long time, Captain." His voice was low, cold.

"What's that?"

"My father was on that mission to Antarctica with you. But he never came back. How did he die?"

Schofield fell silent. Book II's father — Buck Riley Sr., the original "Book" Riley — had died a horrific death during that terrible mission to Wilkes Ice Station. A murderous British SAS commander named Trevor Barnaby had fed him, live, to a pool of ferocious killer whales.

"He was captured by the enemy. And they killed him."

"How?"

"You don't want to know."

"How?" Schofield shut his eyes. "They hung him upside-down over a pool of killer whales and lowered him in."

"The Marine Corps never tells you how," Book II said softly, his voice tinny over the radio. "They just send you a letter, telling you what a patriot your dad was, and informing you that he was killed in action. Do you know, Captain, what happened to my family after my father died?"

Schofield bit his lip. "No. I don't."

"My mother used to live on the base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. I was in basic training at Parris Island. You know what happens to a Marine's wife when her husband is killed in action, Captain?"

Schofield knew. But he said nothing.

"She gets moved off the base. Seems the wives of living soldiers don't like the presence of newly single widows on the base — widows who might go stealing their husbands.

"So my mother, after losing her husband, got moved out of her home. She tried to start over, tried to be strong, but it didn't work. Three months after she was moved off the base, they found her in the bathroom of her new shoebox apartment. She'd taken a whole bottle of sleeping pills."

Book II turned in his seat, looked Schofield straight in the eye.

"That's why I was asking you about using risky strategies before. This isn't a game, you know. When someone dies, there are consequences. My father is dead, and my mother killed herself because she couldn't live without him. I just wanted to make sure my father didn't die because of some high-risk tactical maneuver of yours."

Schofield was silent.

He'd never really known Book II's mother.

Book Sr. hadn't really socialized with his fellow Marines, preferring to spend his downtime with his family. Sure, Schofield had met Paula Riley at the odd lunch or dinner, but he'd never really gotten to know her. He'd heard about her death — and at the time he'd wished that he'd done more to help her.

"Your father was the bravest man I have ever known," Schofield said. "He died saving another person's life. A little girl fell out of a hovercraft and he dived out after her, shielded her from the fall. That's how they caught him. Then they took him back to the ice station and killed him. I tried to get back in time, but I…I didn't make it."

"I thought you said you'd never lost to a countdown."

Schofield said nothing.

"He talked about you, you know," Book II said. "Said you were one of the finest commanders he'd ever served under. Said he loved you like his own son, like me. I don't apologize for being a little cold toward you, Captain. I just had to get your measure, make my mind up for myself."

"And your decision?"

"I'm still making up my mind."

The plane swooped down toward the desert floor.

It was 9:51 when the lime-green Tiger Moth touched down on the dusty desert plain, kicking up a cloud of sand behind it, in the midst of the raging sandstorm.

As soon as the biplane skidded to a halt, Schofield and Book II were out of it — Schofield holding the Football and his Desert Eagle pistol, Book with two nickel-plated M9's… charging toward the trench carved into the earth that housed the entrance to the Emergency Exit Vent.

Bodies lay everywhere, half-covered in sand.

Nine Secret Service people, all dressed in suits. And all dead. Members of Advance Team 2.

Four dead Marines littered the ground as well. All in full dress uniform. Colt Hendricks and the men of Nighthawk Three, who had come out here to check on the Escape Vent.

Christ, Schofield thought as he and Book II hurdled the bodies, heading for the Vent's entrance.

All this death… and all of it will have consequences.

9:52 a.m.

Schofield and Book hit the entrance to the Emergency Exit Vent on the fly — it was still open from the Reccondos' entry before — and entered a narrow concrete tunnel and the cool shade of the Area 7 complex.

They came to a rung ladder that stretched down into darkness — grabbed it and slid down it for a full five hundred feet. There were no lights here, so they slid by the light of Schofield's small barrel-mounted flashlight. Armed with his two ornamental pistols, Book II didn't have a flashlight.

9:53 a.m.

They hit the bottom, and saw a long one-man-wide concrete tunnel stretching away from them, gradually sloping downward — again, no lights.

They took off down it, running hard.

Schofield spoke into his Secret Service wrist mike as he ran: "Fox! Fox! Can you read me? We're back! We're back inside the complex!"

His earpiece fizzled and crackled.

No reply.

Maybe Secret Service radios weren't designed to withstand long underwater swims.

9:54.

After several hundred yards of running down the ultra narrow passageway, they burst out through the Emergency Exit Vent's door on Level 6, and found themselves standing on the northern tracks of the X-rail station.

The underground station was pitch-black.

Total darkness.

Frightening.

By the beam of his gunlight, Schofield could make out a score of dead bodies, plus a charred, blasted-open section in the middle of the central platform — the spot where Elvis's RDX grenade had gone off earlier.

"The stairs," he said, pointing his beam at the door leading to the fire stairs on their left. They leapt up onto the platform, charged for the door.

"Fox! Fox! Can you read me?"

Fizzle. Crackle.

They came to the stairwell door. Schofield threw it open — and immediately heard the rapid clang-clang-clang of more than a dozen pairs of combat boots booming down the stairs… and getting louder.

"Quickly, this way," he said, diving down onto the tracks on the southern side of the platform, taking cover underneath the struts of the small X-rail maintenance vehicle sitting there.

Schofield killed his flashlight as Book II landed on the tracks beside him — not a second before the stairwell door burst open and Cobra Carney and the men of Echo Unit came charging out of it, a gaggle of wobbling flashlight beams moving quickly through the darkness.

Schofield immediately saw Kevin among them, surrounded by four men of Asian extraction.

"What is this?" Book II whispered.

Schofield stared at the four men flanking Kevin.

They were the four men he had seen inside the decompression chamber earlier, the ones who had brought the Sinovirus back from China.

His mind raced.

What was going on?

Kevin had only just been returned to Area 7 on the Penetrators. Yet now he was being moved again. Had Caesar instructed this team of commandos to take him to another, more secure location?

And yet again the question nagged Schofield: What did Caesar Russell care for Kevin? Wasn't he after the President?

Cobra and his men leapt down onto the tracks on the other side of the platform, moving with purpose.

It was then — by the light of Echo Unit's flashlights — that Schofield saw that the blast doors sealing the X-rail tunnel on the other side of the platform were open. They were the doors that sealed off the tunnel that led to Area 8.

Cobra and his men, with Kevin and the four Asian men among them, disappeared inside the eastern tunnel, looking behind themselves as they went.

Looking behind themselves… Schofield thought.

And then he saw Cobra Carney take one last anxious glance over his shoulder before he entered the tunnel, and suddenly Schofield knew.

These men were stealing Kevin… from Caesar.

Up in the darkened hangar on Level 2 Gant looked nervously at her watch.

9:55 a.m.

Five minutes until the President had to place his palm on the Football's analyzer plate.

And still no word from Scarecrow.

Shit.

If he didn't come back soon, this show was over.

Gant and Mother — with Juliet, the President, Hagerty and Tate — had left the AWACS plane on Level 2, and guided by the flashlights on their gun barrels, had made their way across the underground hangar toward the wide aircraft elevator shaft.

Still carrying the black box that she had pilfered from the AWACS's belly, Gant was heading for Caesar Russell's command center up on ground level to carry out her plan.

But if Schofield didn't get back with the Football soon, any plan she had would become academic.

The complex was eerily silent.

When combined with the pitch darkness that now shrouded the underground facility, it made for a very haunting atmosphere

For a moment, Gant thought she heard her earpiece crackle: "…ox?…ead me?"

Juliet heard it, too. "Did you hear that…?"

And then so suddenly that it made them all jump, a gunshot echoed up through the elevator shaft.

Loud and booming.

The blast of a pump-action shotgun.

What followed the gunshot, however, was infinitely more terrifying.

A cackle of laughter.

An insane cackle that floated up the shaft, cutting through the air like a scythe.

"Nah-ha-haaaaaaaah! Hellooooo everybody! We're coming to get you!"

This was followed by a man's voice howling like a wolf. "Arrooooo!"

Even Mother gulped. "The prisoners…"

"They must have found the arms cabinet down in the cell bay," Juliet said.

Abruptly, a loud mechanical clanking noise reverberated up through the elevator shaft.

Gant looked out over the edge.

The giant aircraft elevator platform lay at the bottom of the shaft on Level 5, the remains of the destroyed AWACS plane on its back half-submerged in a wide body of water.

At various places on the elevator platform, Gant saw torches — flaming torches, about twenty of them — moving all around, flickering in the darkness. Torches held aloft by men.

The escaped prisoners.

"How many do you see?" Juliet asked.

"I don't know," Gant said. "Thirty-five, forty. Why, how many are there?"

"Forty-two."

"Oh, perfect."

Then, abruptly, with a great groaning lurch, the elevator platform lifted up out of the lake at the base of the shaft, dripping water.

"I thought the power…" Mother began.

Juliet shook her head. "It has a stand-alone hydraulic engine, for use in a power blackout like this."

The elevator lumbered up the shaft, its massive form moving steadily through the darkness.

"Quickly. Away from the edge." Gant pushed the President back behind the landing gear of one of the AWACS planes nearby. She and Mother and Juliet clicked off their barrel-mounted flashlights.

The gigantic elevator platform rumbled past the open doorway of Level 2, continued slowly upward. As it did so, Gant peered around the landing gear of the AWACS.

The scene looked like something out of a horror movie.

They were standing on the rising elevator platform — holding flaming torches above their heads; shotguns and pistols in their spare hands — and they howled like animals, whooping it up, their shrill calls grating like fingernails on a chalkboard in the dark silence of the complex.

The prisoners from the Level 5 cell block.

Half of them were not wearing shirts — their bare chests shone in the firelight of their torches.

Others wore bandannas wrapped around their heads and biceps.

All of them, however, wore soaking-wet trousers, caused by the rising water on Level 5.

Then the elevator rose out of Gant's view, and she emerged from her hiding spot to watch its underside climb and climb until it arrived at the main hangar with an ominous, thunderous boom.

Caesar Russell strode purposefully across the control room overlooking the main hangar.

He had just seen the aircraft elevator platform — with its cargo of howling and shotgun-firing prisoners — rise into view. No sooner had it stopped than prisoners bolted off it, scattering in every direction.

"Get on the handhelds," Caesar ordered coolly. "Tell Charlie to wait at the top door and prepare for evacuation to the secondary command post. We'll come to them. Where's Echo?"

"I can't raise them, sir," the nearest radioman replied.

"Never mind. We'll contact them later. Let's go."

Everyone started moving. Logan and his three Alpha men. Boa McConnell and his four Bravo men.

Caesar used a keypad to unlock a small pressure door set into the northern wall of the control room, hurled it open.

A smooth concrete passageway stretched away from him, sloping down and to the left, where it would ultimately connect with the top door's passageway.

The three Alpha men led the way. They charged into the passageway, guns first. Caesar himself went next, followed by Logan.

Colonel Jerome Harper was next in line, but he never got the chance.

For just as Logan disappeared inside the passageway's entrance, the regular door on the other side of the control room flew open, revealing five shotgun-toting prisoners!

Boom!

An entire console was blasted to pieces.

In the escape passageway, Logan spun — and saw the intruders, and realized that the others weren't going to make it into the tunnel — and with a look to Harper, he made the call and slammed the escape door shut behind him, sealing off the passageway, sealing Harper and the remaining Air Force men inside the control room.

Eleven men in total were left behind: Harper, Boa McConnell, Boa's four Bravo Unit men, the four radio operators, and the unseen man who had been observing the morning's events from the shadows.

All were left in the control room, at the mercy of the murderous prisoners.

Down in the Level 6 X-Rail station, Schofield and Book II hurried out from their hiding spot underneath the compact maintenance vehicle, leapt up onto the platform and dashed for the door to the fire stairs.

9:56.

Schofield yanked open the door and instantly heard shotgun fire echoing down the stairwell, followed by a loud "Arroooo!"

He shut the door quickly.

"Well, it's official," he said. "We have just arrived in hell."

"Four minutes to find the President," Book II said.

"I know. I know," Schofield looked about himself. "But to do that we have to get up into the complex somehow."

He stared out into the darkness of the underground railway station.

"Quickly, this way," he started racing down the platform.

"What?" Book II said, chasing after him.

"There's another way up into the complex. Those 7th Squadron guys used it before — the air vent at the other end of the platform!"

9:57.

The two of them reached the air vent.

Schofield tried his mike again, hoping he hadn't busted it during that swim through Lake Powell.

"Fox! Fox! Can you read me?"

Pop. Fizz. Nothing.

He and Book clambered into the air vent, hurried down its length, their boots reverberating with every step.

They came to the base of the vent's four-hundred-foot tall vertical shaft.

"Whoa," Book II said, looking up the shaft. It disappeared into black infinity.

9:58.

Schofield said, "Quickly, up the air vent. We use the cross-vents to reach the aircraft elevator shaft and then we cut across the platform and see if we can find them."

Schofield fired his Maghook up into the darkened air vent, delaying the activation of its magnet. The grappling hook boomed up the shaft, flying fast, before Schofield initiated its magnetic charge and immediately — whump! — the hook snapped left in midair, dragged sideways by its powerful magnetic pull, and attached itself to the vertical wall of the vent.

9:58:20.

Schofield went first, whizzing up into the shaft on the Maghook's rope. Book II came up behind him.

9:58:40.

They hurried into the nearest horizontal cross-vent, charged down it, the Football flailing in Schofield's spare hand.

9:58:50.

They came to the enormous aircraft elevator shaft. It yawned before them, shrouded in black.

The only light: some orange firelight way up at the top of the shaft winking through the tiny square aperture that usually contained the mini-elevator. The main platform, it seemed, was right up at ground level, up in the hangar there.

Schofield and Book II stood at the mouth of the cross vent. They were on Level 3.

Schofield brought his mike to his lips.

"Fox! Fox! Where are you!"

"Hey!" a familiar female voice echoed down through the shaft.

Schofield snapped to look up, brought his gunlight around.

And saw a small white spot — the beam of another barrel-mounted flashlight — blinking back at him from the other side of the shaft, but from one level above, from the massive hangar doorway of Level 2.

And above the flashlight, in the glow of its beam, Schofield saw the very anxious face of Libby Gant.

9:59:00.

"Fox!"

"Scarecrow!"

Gant's voice came through Schofield's earpiece loud and clear now. The water damage must have only affected its range.

"Damn it!" Schofield said. "I thought the elevator platform would be here!"

"The prisoners took it up to the main hangar," Gant said.

9:59:05.

9:59:06.

"Jesus, Scarecrow. What do we do? We only have a minute left…"

Schofield was thinking the same thing.

Sixty seconds.

Not enough time to go down to the bottom of the shaft, swim across, and come back up again.

And not enough time to shuffle hand-over-hand around the walls of the shaft, either. And they couldn't swing across on a Maghook — it was too far.

Damn, he thought.

Damn-damn-damn-damn-damn-damn-damn-damn.

"What about a Harbour Bridge? " Mother's voice came in over Schofield's earpiece.

The "Harbour Bridge" was a legendary Maghook trick. Two people fired two oppositely charged Maghooks in such a way that the two hooks hit in midair and stuck together. It was named after the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the famous Australian landmark that was built from opposite sides of Sydney Harbour, two separate arcs that ultimately met in the middle. Schofield had seen a number of Marines try it. None of them had succeeded.

"No," he said, "the Harbour Bridge is impossible. I've never seen anyone hit another Maghook in mid-flight. But maybe…"

9:59:09.

9:59:10.

He looked over at the President and Gant standing in the doorway to Level 2, gauged the distance.

Then he looked up — and saw the darkened underside of the aircraft elevator platform, way up at the top of the shaft.

Mother's suggestion, however, had given him an idea.

Maybe with two Mag hooks they could…

"Fox! Quickly!" he said. "Where is the mini-elevator?"

"Where we left it before, up on Level 1," Gant said.

"Go up to Level 1. Get on it. Take it up the shaft and stop it a hundred feet below the main elevator platform. Go! Now!"

Gant knew not to argue. There was no time. She grabbed the President and dashed out of Schofield's sight.

9:59:14.

9:59:15.

Schofield dashed past Book II, heading back along the horizontal cross-vent to the main vent.

He came to the vertical ventilation shaft and without even a blink, fired his Mag hook up into it again.

This time he waited until the Maghook had played out its entire one hundred and fifty feet of rope before initiating the grappling hook's magnetic pull.

As before, the Maghook's powerful magnetic charge yanked the upwardly flying hook sideways in midair, and it thunked hard against the metal wall of the vent, and held fast.

9:59:22.

9:59:23.

Schofield whizzed up the shaft again.

This time Book II didn't go with him — Schofield didn't have the time to send the Maghook back down for him. He'd have to do this alone, and besides, he needed the Maghook…

Schofield shot up the shaft on the Maghook's rope, the air vent's close steel walls rushing past him on all four sides. He stopped the hook's reeling mechanism as he came to another crossvent three levels up — but still a hundred feet below the main hangar. He charged into the cross-vent.

9:59:29.

9:59:30.

Came to the aircraft elevator shaft again. The underside of the giant elevator platform loomed closer now, only a hundred feet above him. He could hear the gunshot blasts and catcalls of the prisoners up in the hangar and wondered for the briefest of moments what on earth they were doing up there.

9:59:34.

9:59:35.

And then, by the light of his barrel-mounted flashlight, he saw the mini-elevator whizzing up the concrete wall on the other side of the massive elevator shaft. The small figures of Gant, Juliet, Mother and the President were on it.

9:59:37.

9:59:38.

As the mini-elevator drew level with him, Schofield said, "Okay! Stop there!"

The mini-elevator jolted to a halt, now diagonally opposite Schofield but separated from him by a sheer concrete chasm two hundred feet wide.

And so they faced each other, from opposite sides of the enormous shaft.

9:59:40.

"Okay, Fox," Schofield said into his radio. "I want you to fire your Maghook into the underside of the elevator platform."

"But it's not long enough to swing across on…"

"I know. But two Maghooks will be," Schofield said. "Try and hit the platform about a quarter of the way across. I'll do the same from this side."

9:59:42.

Schofield fired his Maghook. With a loud, puncturelike whump, the hook flew into the air, flying diagonally up into the shaft.

And then — clunk! — the magnetic head of the hook affixed itself to the underside of the elevator platform.

9:59:43.

Clunk! A similar noise came from the other side of the shaft. Gant had done the same with her Maghook.

9:59:45.

9:59:46.

Schofield held his Maghook with one hand. Then he opened the Football, revealing the countdown timer inside it — 00:00:14…00:00:13 — and held it by its handle, folded open.

"Okay, Fox," he said into his mike. "Now give the rope to the President. We've got twelve seconds now, so we'll only get one shot at this."

"Oh, you have got to be kidding," Mother's voice said.

On the other side of the shaft, Gant gave the Maghook's launcher to the President of the United States. "Good luck, sir."

Now, Schofield and the President stood on opposite sides of the great concrete elevator shaft, holding on to the diagonally stretched ropes of their respective Maghooks, looking like a pair of trapeze artists about to perform their act.

9:59:49.

9:59:50.

"Go!" Schofield said.

And they swung.

Out over the shaft.

Two tiny figures, on two equally tiny threadlike ropes.

Indeed, as the two of them swung in mirroring pendulum like arcs, they did look like trapeze artists — swinging toward each other, aiming to meet in the middle, Schofield holding out the open briefcase, the President reaching forward with his outstretched hand.

9:59:52.

9:59:53.

Schofield reached the base of his arc, started coming up.

In the dim light, he saw the President swooping in toward him, a look of sheer terror plastered across his face. But the chief executive swung well, gripping his rope tightly, reaching forward with his right hand.

9:59:54.

9:59:55.

And they came close, rising in their pendulum motion, reaching the extremities of their arcs…

9:59:56.

9:59:57.

…and, four hundred feet above the base of the elevator shaft, swinging in near total darkness, they came together, and the President pressed his outstretched palm against the analyzer plate in Schofield's hand.

Beep!

The timer on the Football instantly reset itself.

00:00:02 became 90:00:00 and the clock immediately began counting down once more.

As for Schofield and the President, having briefly shared the same space of air four hundred feet above the world, they now parted, swooping back toward their respective starting points.

The President arrived back at the mini-elevator platform, where he was caught by Gant, Mother and Juliet.

On the other side of the elevator shaft, Schofield swung back to his cross-vent.

He landed lightly on the edge of the tunnel, breathing deeply with relief, the stainless-steel Football hanging open in his hand.

They'd done it. At least for another ninety minutes.

Now all he had to do was get himself and Book over to the President. Then they'd be back in business.

Schofield reeled in his Maghook, then turned to head back down the cross-vent to get Book -

Shuck-shuck

Three men were blocking his way — men wearing blue jeans but no shirts. They also brandished pump-action Remingtons and they variously had tattooed chests, bulging biceps, or no front teeth.

"Reach for the sky, pardner," one of the shotgun-toting prisoners said.

Caesar Russell charged through the low concrete Escape tunnel.

The three remaining men from Alpha Unit ran in front of him. Kurt Logan hurried along behind.

They'd just left Harper and the others in the control room to be captured by the escaped inmates, and were now bolting down the escape-passageway, racing for the point where it met the top door exit.

They rounded a bend, came to a heavy steel door half buried in concrete, keyed the code. The door opened.

The top door's exit tunnel appeared before them, heading right and left.

To the right… freedom, via the exit that opened onto one of the exterior hangars here at Area 7.

To the left, around a bend, the regular elevator shaft, and… something else.

Caesar froze. He saw a combat boot protruding around the corner that led to the regular elevator shaft.

The black combat boot of a dead commando.

Caesar stepped closer.

And saw that the boot belonged to the horribly bloodied body of Python Willis — the commanding officer of Charlie Unit, the 7th Squadron unit that had been bringing Kevin back to Area 7.

Caesar's face darkened.

Charlie Unit lay dead before him. And Kevin was nowhere to be seen.

Then Caesar saw the mark on the wall next to Python Willis's dead fingers, a symbol scrawled in blood, a final gesture from Charlie Unit's commander before he'd died.

A single capital "E".

Caesar just stared at it, pursing his lips.

Logan came up beside him. "What is it?"

"Let's get to the secondary command post," Caesar said flatly. "And when we get there, I want you to find out what's happened to Echo Unit."

Shane Schofield emerged from the air vent hatch underneath Marine One, flanked by the four heavily armed prisoners. He no longer carried the Football. One of his captors now held it like a new toy.

As he slid out from underneath the Presidential helicopter, he thought he heard clapping and shouting… and then suddenly — boom! — a gunshot made him start. The shot was quickly followed by a loud roar of approval.

Then another booming gunshot — and more cheers and applause.

Schofield felt his blood run cold.

What the hell was he walking into?

He emerged from beneath Marine One and immediately saw about thirty prisoners, their backs to him, gathered around the central aircraft elevator platform.

In the time since his capture in the air vent down below, the massive platform — with the tangled remains of the destroyed AWACS plane still on it — had been lowered about ten feet below the floor-line of the hangar and halted, so that now it formed a gigantic square-shaped pit in the center of the hangar.

The mob of inmates was crowded around the makeshift pit, looking intently down into it like gamblers at a cockfight, shaking their fists, shouting and cat-calling. One shaggy-looking individual was screaming, "Run, little man! Run! Run! Ha-haaaaa."

They were the most motley crew Schofield had ever seen.

Their angry faces were covered in scars and tattoos. Each prisoner's uniform had been tailored to his own personal tastes — some had ripped off their shirtsleeves and turned them into headbands, others wore their shirts open, others still, wore no shirts at all.

Schofield was marched over to the edge of the pit. He looked down into it.

Amid the maze of AWACS plane pieces that littered the square concrete hole, he saw two blue-uniformed Air Force men — young men and, judging by their perfectly pressed uniforms, office bunnies, radio operators probably — running like frightened animals.

In the pit with them were five burly inmates — all armed with shotguns — prowling through the maze, hunting the two hapless radio operators.

Schofield saw the bodies of two more radiomen lying in pools of blood in separate corners of the pit: the cause of the cheers he had heard moments before.

It was then, however, that to Schofield's horror, a small band of prisoners emerged from the other side of the hangar.

In the midst of this new group of inmates, Schofield saw Gant, Mother, Juliet… and the President of the United States.

"Tell me this isn't happening," he breathed to himself.

Down in the darkness of the Level 1 hangar, Nicholas Tate III, Domestic Policy Adviser to the President of the United States, gazed nervously up into the elevator shaft.

The President and his three female protectors hadn't returned from their trip up the shaft on the detachable minielevator, and now Tate was worried.

"Do you think the inmates got them?" he asked Hot Rod Hagerty.

They could hear the shouts and gunshots from up in the main hangar. It was like standing outside a stadium during a football match.

"I hope not," Hagerty whispered.

Tate continued to stare up into the shaft, a thousand thoughts flickering through his mind, most of them relating to his own self-preservation. A minute passed.

"So what do you think we should do?" he said at last, without turning around.

There was no reply.

Tate frowned, spun around. "I said…" He froze.

Hagerty was nowhere to be seen.

The Level 1 hangar stretched away from him, shrouded in darkness, the only presence, the shadows of the gigantic planes inside it.

Tate's face went blank.

Hagerty was gone.

Vanished… silently, instantly… in the space of a single minute.

It was as if he'd just been erased from existence.

A lightning bolt of fear shot through Nicholas Tate.

Now he was alone, down here, in a locked-down facility filled with treacherous Air Force commandos and the nastiest collection of murderers known to man.

And then he saw it.

Saw a glint of light on the floor a few yards away from him, at the spot where he had last seen Hagerty standing. He went over to it, picked it up.

It was a ring.

A gold officer's ring.

Hagerty's graduation ring from Annapolis.

The last two radio operators didn't last long.

As the final shots rang out from within the pit, Schofield and Gant were shoved together, the others beside them.

"Hey there," Gant said.

"Hi," Schofield said.

After Schofield and the President's daring trapeze act, Gant and her team hadn't fared any better than Schofield had.

No sooner had the President swung back onto the mini elevator than the little platform had jolted suddenly and whizzed up the shaft — called by someone up in the main hangar.

They had risen up into the hangar and found themselves in the middle of a whole new nightmare.

The prisoners — the former test subjects for Gunther Botha's vaccine — were now in charge of Area 7.

Although there was no way she could have hidden their meager supply of guns, Gant did manage to hide her Maghook on their short ride up the shaft. It now lay clinging magnetically to the underside of the detachable mini elevator.

Unfortunately, when the little platform had arrived up in the ground-level hangar — rising up through the matching square hole in the corner of the main platform — Gant had still had the black box from the AWACS plane in her possession.

But she hadn't wanted to alert any of the prisoners to its significance, so she'd placed it on the floor of the mini elevator, and as soon as the platform had come flush against the floor of the main hangar, she'd "accidentally" kicked it clear, sending it tumbling out onto the hangar floor, a short way from the elevator shaft.

With the hunt in the pit now over, the prisoners gathered around the aircraft elevator shaft turned their attention to the President and his guardians.

An older prisoner stepped out of the larger group of inmates, a shotgun held lazily in his hand.

He was a very distinctive-looking individual.

He appeared to be about fifty, and judging from the confidence of his stride, he clearly had the respect of the group. Although the top of his head was bald, long gray-black hair flowed down from its sides, growing past his shoulders. A narrow angular nose, pale white skin, and hollow bloodless cheeks completed his very Gothic appearance.

"Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly," the long-haired man said as he stepped in front of the President. He had a soft silky voice, menacing in its slow articulation.

"Good morning, Mr. President," he said pleasantly. "How nice of you to join us. Remember me?"

The President said nothing.

"But of course you do," the prisoner said. "I'm an 18–84. In one way or another, you've met all nine of the people who during your presidency have been convicted under Title 18, Part I, Chapter 84 of the United States Code. It's that part of the Code that prohibits ordinary Americans from attempting to assassinate their President.

"Grimshaw, Seth Grimshaw," the long-haired prisoner said, offering his hand. "We met in February, just a couple of weeks after you — became President, as you were leaving the Bonaventure Hotel in LA viaits underground kitchen. I was the one who tried to put a bullet in your skull."

The President said nothing.

And he didn't take Grimshaw's proffered hand.

"You managed to keep that whole incident quiet," Grimshaw said. "Very impressive.

Especially since all someone like me really wants is publicity. And besides, it's not wise to scare the nation, is it? Better to keep the ignorantmasses unaware of these troublesome little attempts on your life. As they say, ignorance is bliss."

The President said nothing.

Grimshaw looked him up and down, cast a bemused eye over the black combat clothing that the Chief Executive now wore. The President, Juliet and Schofield were all still dressed in their black 7th Squadron combat attire. Gant and Mother, on the other hand, still wore their formal — but now very dirty — Marine dress uniforms.

Grimshaw smiled, a thin, satisfied smile.

Then he strolled over to the inmate holding the Football and took the silver briefcase from him. He opened it, then glanced from its countdown display screen to the President.

"It would appear that my recently liberated associates and I have intruded upon something rather interesting. A game of cat-and-mouse, it would seem, judging by your clothes and the way you unceremoniously scampered through my cell block earlier." He clucked his tongue reproachfully. "Really, Mr. President, I must say, this is not at all presidential. Not at all."

Grimshaw's eyes narrowed.

"But who am I to stop such an imaginative spectacle? The President and his loyal bodyguards versus the treacherous military-industrial complex." Grimshaw turned. "Goliath. Bring the other captives over here."

At that moment, an extraordinarily large prisoner — Goliath, Schofield guessed — stepped out from behind Grimshaw and headed off in the direction of the hangar's internal building. He was an absolute giant of a man, with massive tree-trunk-sized biceps and a squared-off head reminiscent of Frankenstein's monster. He even had a flat square bulge that protruded from his forehead — the signature mark, Schofield knew, of someone who'd had a steel plate inserted in his skull. Goliath carried a P-90 assault rifle in one massive fist and Schofield's Maghook in the other.

He returned moments later.

Behind him came the seven Air Force men who — along with the four unfortunate radio operators — had been captured inside the control room earlier: Colonel Jerome T. Harper.

Boa McConnell and his four Bravo Unit men, two of whom were badly wounded.

And the lone individual who had been observing the morning's events from the shadows of Caesar Russell's control room.

Schofield recognized him instantly.

So did the President.

"Webster…" he said softly.

Warrant Officer Carl Webster, the official guardian of the Football, stood with the Air Force people, looking very uncomfortable. Beneath his thick hairy eyebrows, his eyes darted left and right, as if searching for an escape.

"You cocksucking little bastard," Mother said. "You gave the Football to Russell. You sold out the President."

Webster said nothing.

Schofield watched him. He had wondered whether Webster had been abducted by the 7th Squadron earlier that morning. More than anything else, Caesar Russell had needed the Football to carry out his presidential challenge, and Schofield had speculated as to how he had obtained it from Webster.

Quite clearly, force hadn't been necessary — the blood on the Football's handcuffs had obviously been a ruse. Webster, it seemed, had been bought long before the President had arrived at Area 7.

"Now, now, children," Seth Grimshaw said, waving the Football in his hand. "Save your strength. You'll be able to settle all your scores in a moment. But first" — he turned to the Air Force colonel, Harper — "I have a question that needs answering. The exit to this facility. Where is it?"

"There is no exit," Harper lied. "The facility is in lock down. You can't get out."

Grimshaw raised his shotgun, pointed it at Harper's face, shucked the pump action. "Perhaps I'm not being specific enough."

He then turned and fired two booming shots into the two injured Bravo Unit men standing next to Harper. They were blasted off their feet.

Grimshaw turned the gun back to Harper, raised his eyebrows expectantly.

Harper's face went white. He nodded over at the regular elevator: "There's a door that branches off the personnel elevator shaft. We call it the top door. It leads outside. Keypad code is 5564771."

"Thank you, Colonel, you really are too kind, Grimshaw said. "Now then, we must let you children finish what you've started. As I'm sure you'll understand, once we depart this dreadful place, we can't allow any of you to leave it alive. But as a final gesture of good will, I am going to offer you all one last favor — albeit one that is more for my entertainment than ours."

"I am going to give you all one last chance to kill each other. Five against five. In the killing pit. So at least the winner will die knowing who won your impromptu civil war." He turned to Goliath. "Put the Air Force people in here. Stand the President's little posse on the other side."

Schofield and the others were marched at gunpoint to the far side of the pit, the eastern side.

The five remaining Air Force men — Jerome Harper, Boa McConnell, the last two men from Bravo Unit, and the traitor, Warrant Officer Webster — stood directly opposite them, separated by the two-hundred-foot-wide sunken aircraft elevator platform.

"Let the battle begin," Seth Grimshaw bared his teeth. "To the death."

Schofield dropped down into the pit and immediately found himself confronted by a twisted metal maze — the enormous broken pieces of the smashed AWACS plane.

The Boeing 707's wings lay at all angles, snapped and broken and still dripping with water. Its gigantic barrel-like jet engines stood on their ends. And in the very center of the pit — easily the largest single piece of the destroyed plane — stood the AWACS's horribly broken fuselage. Long and cylindrical, it lay diagonally across the pit, nose down, like a massive dead bird.

The darkness of the main hangar didn't help things.

The only light was the firelight from the inmates' torches — they cast long shadows down into the maze, turning it into a dark metal forest where you couldn't see more than a few feet in front of your face.

How the hell did we get into this? Schofield thought.

He and the others stood on the eastern side of the pit, up against its solid concrete wall, not sure what to do.

Abruptly, a shotgun round blasted into the wall above Schofield's head.

Seth Grimshaw called: "The two teams will engage each other immediately! If you do not begin eliminating one another soon, we will start eliminating you from up here!"

"Christ…" Juliet Janson gasped.

Schofield turned to face his group. "Okay, we don't have much time, so listen up. Not only do we have to survive this, but we have to find a way out of here afterwards."

"The mini-elevator," Gant nodded to their right, to the northeastern corner of the pit where the detachable mini platform now lay flush against the pit's floor, albeit covered by five armed prisoners.

"We're going to need a diversion," Schofield said, "something to…"

The flying piece of metal nearly took his head clean off.

Schofield saw it at the very last second and on a reflex, he ducked, just as the jagged piece of steel slammed like an axe into the concrete wall behind him.

He spun, searching for the source of the projectile — and he saw it in the shapes of the two commandos from Bravo Unit, bursting out of the darkness, hurdling the pieces of broken plane, each man holding a length of jagged metal like a sword, and charging at Schofield's group at speed!

"Scatter!" Schofield yelled as the first commando came storming toward him, swinging down hard with his "sword."

Schofield blocked the blow by grabbing the man's downward-moving wrist, while Gant engaged the other commando.

"Go!" Schofield yelled to Juliet, Mother and the President. "Get out of here!"

Juliet and the President dashed off into the darkness.

But Mother hesitated.

Schofield saw her. "Go! Stay with the President!"

The prisoners cheered with delight as over by the eastern wall of the pit, Schofield fought with the first 7th Squadron commando, while behind him, Gant grappled with the second Bravo Unit man.

The President and Juliet — with Mother a short distance behind them — dashed north through the darkened maze, heading for the mini-elevator at the northeastern corner.

From above them, however, the chanting prisoners saw what Juliet and the President and Mother could not: three figures closing in on them from their left, moving quickly along the northern wall of the pit — Jerome Harper, Carl Webster, and coordinating the assault, Captain Boa McConnell.

Schofield and Gant stood back to back, fighting their own separate battles.

Gant had taken up a length of piping from the floor, and was now wielding it like a quarterstaff against the blows of her Bravo Unit commando.

The Bravo man swung his piece of steel viciously, two fisted, but Gant parried well, holding her length of pipe sideways, blocking the blow.

"How you doing back there?" Schofield asked, between blows with his own enemy.

"Just… frigging… dandy," Gant said, gritting her teeth.

"We have to get to the President."

"I know," Gant said, "but first… I have to… save your ass."

She glanced over her shoulder at him and smiled, and in a fleeting instant, she saw his opponent move in for another blow and she shouted, "Scarecrow! Duck!"

Schofield dropped like a stone.

His opponent's sword swooshed over his head, and the man overbalanced, and stumbled right toward Gant.

Gant was waiting.

Turning her attention from her own assailant for the briefest of moments, she swung her length of pipe hard, baseball-style.

Shwack!

The sound of her pipe hitting the Bravo Unit man's head was absolutely sickening. The commando collapsed in a heap just as Gant spun again — pirouetting like a ballet dancer — returning just in time to block the next blow from her own attacker.

"Scarecrow! Go!" she yelled.

"Get to the President!" And with a final look at her, Schofield dashed off into the darkened wreckage.

About twenty yards to the north of Schofield and Gant, Juliet Janson and the President were running hard, weaving their way through the debris-cluttered maze, heading for the northeastern corner, but unaware of the three men closing in on them from the left.

They went for Juliet first.

Two figures came bursting out of the darkness, from behind the destroyed rear end of the AWACS plane — Boa McConnell and Warrant Officer Carl Webster. They crash-tackled Juliet hard, hurling her to the floor.

The President spun to see her hit the floor, held down by Boa and Webster. Then he turned again, and saw Colonel Jerome Harper, standing amid the AWACS wreckage, watching from a distance.

The President was hurrying to help Juliet when- whoosh — a large blurring shape came exploding out of the nearby wreckage, missing him by inches.

Mother.

Flying through the air, out of the darkness, linebacker style.

Crunchhhh!

She shoulder-charged Boa McConnell so hard that she almost snapped his neck. The 7th Squadron commander was thrown off Juliet's body, visibly dazed.

Carl Webster was momentarily startled by the sudden loss of his fellow attacker, and he turned to see what had happened — just in time to receive a powerful punch from Mother.

Even though he was a bulky man, Webster was thrown right off Juliet by the blow and went crashing into a collection of plane pieces. Without a pause, he snatched up a wicked-looking four-foot strip of metal and brandished it at Mother.

Mother growled.

Webster charged.

The fight was as brutal as they come. They couldn't have been more evenly matched — both were experienced in hand-to-hand combat, both were over six feet tall, and they both weighed in at over two hundred pounds.

Webster roared as he swung his makeshift metal sword.

Mother ducked, then quickly grabbed a busted piece of the AWACS's wing flap to use as a shield. Webster's blows clanged down against her shield as he forced her back toward the battered wing of the plane.

As she danced backwards, staving off Webster's slashes, Mother bent down and scooped up a jagged sword of her own.

She tried to strike back, but Webster had all the momentum. He swung again, cutting deep into her shoulder, tearing open the sleeve of her dress coat, drawing blood.

"Arrgh!" Mother shouted, dropping her shield, fending off the next three blows with only her sword.

Damn it, all she needed was one opening, one chance…

"Why did you betray the President!" she yelled as she stumbled backwards, trying to distract him.

"There comes a time when a man has to make a decision, Mother!" the Army warrant officer barked back, yelling between blows. "When he has to choose a side! I have fought for this country! I have had friends who died for it, only to be fucked over later by politicians like him! So when the opportunity arose, I decided that I was no longer going to stand by and watch yet another two-bit, whore-banging, draft-dodging fuck drive this country into the ground!"

Webster swung — a lusty, sideways swipe.

Mother jumped backwards, avoiding the blow, leaping up onto the wing of the plane, so that she was now three feet off the ground.

But the wing wobbled slightly under her weight, and she lost her balance for a split second and Webster slashed viciously with his sword — once again slicing sideways — aiming for her now-exposed ankles, way too fast for her to block in time.

And the vicious blow hit home — Clang!!!

Webster's weapon hand vibrated monstrously as his jagged metal sword slammed into Mother's dress-uniformed pants leg, just below the knee.

Webster blanched.

"What…?"

Mother smiled.

He'd hit her prosthetic lower leg — her titanium-alloy prosthetic lower leg!

Seeing her opponent's confusion, Mother took her one and only opportunity, and swung her own makeshift sword with all her might.

Slash!

A fountain of blood sprayed out from Webster's throat as Mother's blade sliced across his neck, severing his carotid artery.

Webster's blade fell from his hand, and he dropped to his knees, clutching his bleeding throat. He held his hands out in front of him, gazing at the blood on them in disbelief. Then he took one final horrified look up at Mother, after which he fell face-first into a pool of his own blood.

The crowd of inmates roared with delight.

By now, the assembled mob — Seth Grimshaw included — had moved around to the northern side of the pit in an effort to find better spectating positions.

Some of them had started cheering for the President, a happily deranged chant in the tradition of American Olympic supporters: "U-S-A! USA!"

On the eastern side of the pit, Gant was still engaged in the fight of her life.

Her 7th Squadron opponent's swordlike length of steel clanged against her own quarterstaff pipe.

They fought amid the wreckage, trading blows, the Bravo Unit commando driving her backwards. As he did so, he began to smile with every raging swing. Clearly, he felt he had the edge.

And so he swung harder, but as Gant saw, this only served to wear him out more with every blow.

So she feigned fatigue, staggered backwards, "desperately" fended off his swings.

And then her assailant swung — a lunging sloppy effort, the swipe of a tiring man — and quick as a flash, belying her apparent fatigue, Gant ducked beneath the blow and launched herself upward, thrusting her pipe forward — end first — ramming its solid tip right into the throat of her stunned opponent, crushing his Adam's apple, ramming it two inches back into his windpipe, stopping him dead in his tracks.

The man's eyes went instantly wide with disbelief. He wobbled unsteadily, wheezing, choking. He may have been standing up, but he was already dead. Staring stupidly at Gant, he crumpled to the ground.

The crowd of prisoners was oddly silent — stunned, it seemed, by Gant's lightning-fast death blow.

Then they cheered their approval. Wolf whistles rained down on Gant. Claps and cheers.

"Whoa, baby!"

"Now that is what I call a woman!"

At the northern end of the pit, the President slid to the ground beside Juliet Janson, hauled her up, but when they both got to their feet, they froze.

Before them, standing next to one of the upturned engines of the AWACS plane — alone but closer now — stood Colonel Jerome T. Harper.

On the ground to his left, lying on the floor, was Boa McConnell. He was groaning painfully, still reeling from Mother's crunching shoulder-tackle earlier.

The hoots and hollers from the prisoners enveloped them.

"Come on, Mr. Prez! Get some blood on your hands! Kill the fucker!"

"Eat shit, Harper!"

"U-S-A! USA!"

Harper knew the score. All his men were either dead or useless.

And yet still he seemed strangely confident…

It was then that he pulled something out of his pocket.

It looked like a high-tech grenade of some sort — a small pressurized cylindrical canister with a nozzle on its top and a vertical clear-glass window on its side.

Through the narrow glass window, the President could see the contents of the grenade very clearly.

It was filled with a mustard-yellow liquid.

"Oh, Jesus…" he breathed.

It was a biological grenade.

A Chinese biological grenade.

A pressure-sealed explosive charge filled with the Sinovirus.

An evil grin cracked Harper'ss face.

"I was hoping it wouldn't come to this," he said. "But fortunately for me, like every Air Force man at this complex, I have already been immunized against the Sinovirus. The same, however, cannot be said for you or your brave Marine guardians."

Then, without so much as a blink, Harper pulled the pin on the Sinovirus grenade.

Harper didn't see him until it was too late.

As he pulled the pin on the grenade, all he saw was a flashing blur of movement from the wreckage to his immediate left.

The next thing he knew, Shane Schofield was standing beside him, emerging from the darkness, swinging a length of piping upward like a baseball bat.

The pipe struck Harper on the underside of his wrist, causing the Sinovirus grenade to fly out of his hand and go soaring upwards.

The live biological grenade flew up into the air.

It flew in a kind of bizarre slow motion, tumbling end over end, high above the northern half of the pit.

Schofield watched it, eyes wide.

The prisoners watched it, mouths agape.

The President watched it, awestruck.

Harper watched it, an evil grin forming on his face.

One, one-thousand…

Two, one-thousand…

Three…

At that moment, at the height of its arc, about thirty feet above the floor of the pit — directly above its northernmost section — the Sinovirus grenade went off.

In the firelight of the prisoners' torches, the aerosol explosion of the grenade inside the hangar was almost beautiful.

It looked like the blast of a water-filled firecracker — a giant star-shaped burst of mist — with multiple fingers of watery yellow particles shooting outwards from a central point, showering laterally, fanning out like a giant umbrella over the sunken aircraft elevator platform, orange firelight glinting off every single particle.

And then in wondrous slow motion, the whole misty cloud began to fall, first at its extremities, then in its center, down over the pit.

Like slow-falling snow, the Sinovirus particles descended.

Since it had detonated above the floor line of the hangar, the yellow mist hit the prisoners standing on the rim first.

Their reaction was as sudden as it was violent.

Most of them doubled over where they stood, started hacking, vomiting. Some fell to their knees, dropping their flaming torches, others lapsed instantly into involuntary fits.

Within a minute, all but two were on the floor, writhing in agony, screaming as their insides began to liquefy.

Seth Grimshaw was one of the two.

Along with Goliath, he stood unaffected by the falling yellow mist, while everyone around him lay dying.

Although only they and the now-dead Gunther Botha knew it, Grimshaw and Goliath had been the original test subjects for the vaccine against the Sinovirus the previous afternoon.

Unlike the others, they had Kevin's vaccine coursing through their veins.

They were immune.

The yellow mist fell through the darkness.

It was now about fifteen feet above the lowered elevatorplatform — five feet above the rim — and still falling steadily.

Alone on the eastern side of the pit, Libby Gant had seen the grenade detonate, had seen the spectacular aerosol explosion high above the pit. She didn't have to be a rocket scientist to guess what it was.

A biological agent.

The Sinovirus.

Move!

Gant spun. She was standing right next to the eastern wall of the pit, ten feet below the rim.

The rim itself was now empty, all the inmates having moved around to the northern side earlier.

Gant didn't waste a second.

She was still wearing her full dress uniform, which meant she had no gas-mask — so she definitely didn't want to be here when the Sinovirus descended into the pit.

The particles were fourteen feet off the floor.

And falling…

Gant pushed one of the AWACS plane's big black tires up against the concrete wall, jumped up onto it, hauled herself out of the ten-foot-deep pit.

She rolled up onto the hangar's floor, careful to stay low, beneath the layer of descending Sinovirus particles.

She saw the hangar's internal building about twenty yards away from her, saw the slanted observation windows of its upper level.

The control room, she thought. Caesar's command center.

Staying low but moving fast, Gant hurried for the doorway at the base of the internal building.

The yellow haze continued to fall.

Having consumed the prisoners on the northern edge of the pit, its particles now dipped below the rim, drifting down into the pit itself.

Schofield looked anxiously about himself.

In the pandemonium of the grenade blast and the ensuing wails of the dying prisoners — as they fell, they dropped their torches, plunging the pit into even thicker darkness — he had lost sight of Jerome Harper.

After the blast, Harper had dashed off into the darkened forest of the AWACS wreckage, disappearing. Schofield didn't like the idea of him lurking somewhere in the area.

But right now, he had other things to worry about.

The mist was now inside the pit — nine feet off the floor — and still falling.

He looked over at the President and Juliet.

Like him, they were still wearing their stolen 7th Squadron uniforms — complete with ERG-6 half-face gas masks wrapped around their necks.

"Captain! Your gas mask! Put it on!" the President yelled, pulling on his own mask. "If you breathe the virus into your lungs directly, it'll kill you in seconds! With the mask on, it's a lot slower!"

Schofield lifted his mask over his face.

Juliet, however, yanked her mask up and over her head and threw it over to Mother, just back from her fight with Webster. Unlike the other three, Mother was still dressed in her maskless full dress uniform.

"But what about you…?" she said.

Juliet indicated her Eurasian features. "Asian blood, remember. It won't hurt me. But it'll kill you if you don't put that on!"

"Thanks!" Mother said as she clamped the mask over her nose and mouth.

"Quickly!" Schofield said. "This way!"

Gas mask on, he charged into the darkened maze of wreckage, heading for the northeastern corner, for the mini elevator parked there.

The others took off after him, racing into the darkness.

After several seconds of running, Schofield came to the mini-elevator, lying flush against the floor in the corner of the pit.

A flaming torch lay on it. One of the dying prisoners up on the rim must have dropped it into the pit when the virus had struck him down.

Schofield snatched it up and turned to see the President and Mother arrive at his side.

It was only then that any of them noticed.

No Juliet.

Juliet Janson lay sprawled on the ground back near the AWACS's fuselage.

Just as she had been about to charge into the maze after Schofield and the others, a strong hand had appeared from completely out of nowhere and grabbed her ankle, causing her to trip and fall.

The hand belonged to Boa McConnell, lying spread eagled on the floor, still dazed from Mother's tackle earlier, but alert enough to recognize one of his enemies.

Now, he held on to Juliet's ankle, refusing to let go.

Juliet struggled.

Boa extracted a long K-Bar knife from his boot, raised it. Juliet's eyes went wide as he made to plunge the knife into her ankle…

Blam! McConnell's head exploded like a burst balloon, shot from somewhere above them. He flopped to the floor, dead.

Juliet scrambled away from the body. She looked upward, searching the darkness for the source of the gunshot.

She found it in the shape of a flaming torch over on the southern side of the pit, being waved from side to side, accompanied by a voice that called: "Janson! Agent Janson!"

Juliet squinted to see the owner of the torch.

In the flickering glow of the torch's flames, she could just make out the man holding it — a man in 7th Squadron clothing brandishing a nickel-plated pistol in his spare hand.

Book II.

"Janson! Where are you?" Schofield said into his radio mike, as he waited impatiently on the detachable mini elevator.

Book II's voice answered him. "Scarecrow, it's Book. I've got Janson. You get out of here."

"Thanks, Book. Fox, you still alive?"

No reply.

Schofield's whole body froze.

And then: "I'm here, Scarecrow."

He started breathing again. "Where are you?"

"I'm inside the building at the eastern end of the hangar. Get the President out of here. Don't worry about me."

"All right…" Schofield said. "Listen, I have to get to Area 8. The bad guys have taken Kevin there. I'm going to take the President with me. Rendezvous with us there when you — oh, shit!"

"What is it?"

"The Football. It's still up in the hangar somewhere. Grimshaw had it."

"Leave that to me," Gant said. "You just get the President out of here. I'll meet you at Area 8 as soon as I can."

"Thanks," Schofield said. "And Fox…"

"Yeah?"

"You be careful."

There was a pause at the other end. "You too, Scarecrow"

And with that, Schofield pressed a button and the mini elevator whizzed him, Mother and the President swiftly down the shaft.

As thes descended quickly, Mother touched Schofield on the shoulder, spoke through her gas mask.

"Area 8?"

Schofield turned to face her. "That's right."

No matter how he looked at it, his mind kept coming back to the same image: the image of the 7th Squadron unit down on the Level 6 platform taking Kevin into the X-rail tunnel, heading for Area 8.

Kevin…

The little boy was at the center of all of this.

Schofield said, "I want to find out what this whole thing has been about. But to do that, I need two things."

"What?"

He indicated the President. "First: him."

"And second?"

"Kevin," Schofield said firmly. "Which is why we have to get to Area 8 fast."

Caesar Russell, Kurt Logan and the three surviving commandos from Logan's Alpha Unit charged across the runway of Area 7 in the glare of the blazing desert sun, raced into the four story airfield control tower that stood about a hundred yards from the main complex.

Having emerged from the top door exit inside a small side hangar, they'd made their way to the tower, which doubled as the base's secondary control room.

They hurried into the tower's command center — it was a replica of the one inside Area 7 — and started flicking switches. Television monitors came to life. Console lights flicked on.

Caesar said, "Get me a fix on Echo Unit's personnel locators."

It didn't take long for Logan to find Echo. Every 7th Squadron member had an electronic locator surgically implanted beneath the skin on his wrist.

"They're on the X-rail. Arriving at Area 8 right now."

"Fire up the Penetrators," Caesar said. "We're going to Area 8."

Down on Level 1 of the underground complex, Nicholas Tate was wandering around in a terrified daze.

After the sudden and mysterious disappearance of Hot Rod Hagerty, he didn't know what to do.

Flashlight in hand, he walked absently to the far end of the darkened hangar, searching for Hagerty. But he stopped twenty yards short of the ramp there when he saw something emerging from it. Already somewhat muddled, now his mind reeled at the sight that met him.

It was almost surreal.

A family of bears — yes, bears — stepped out from the ramp and onto the floor of Level 1.

One gigantic male, a smaller female, and three awkward-looking little cubs ambled out onto the hangar floor. They were all hunched forward, padding along on all fours, sniffing the petrol-soaked air all around them.

Tate wobbled unsteadily.

Then he turned and ran back toward the main elevator shaft.

The detached mini-elevator whipped down the aircraft elevator shaft in near total darkness, with Schofield, Mother and the President on its back, the orange glow from Schofield's torch the only light.

As they descended, Schofield yanked a couple of Gunther Botha's glass ampules from his thigh pocket — the small glass bulbs containing the antidote to the Sinovirus.

He turned to the President, spoke through his gas mask: "How long do we have?"

"Half an hour till the first symptoms set in," the President said, "when it invades the body through the skin. Dermal infection is slower than direct inhalation. That antidote, however, will neutralize the virus in its tracks."

Schofield handed a glass bulb to both Mother and the President, then pulled out another one for himself. "We need to find some hypodermic needles before we head to Area 8," he said.

They rode the mini-elevator down to Level 1.

When they arrived there, however, they were met by Nicholas Tate, bursting forth from the darkness wide-eyed and alarmed. He stepped straight onto the mini-elevator.

"I… er… don't think you want to go that way," he said.

"Why not?" Schofield asked.

"Bears," Tate said dramatically.

Schofield frowned, looked to the President. Clearly, Tate had lost it.

"Where's Ramrod?" Mother asked.

"Gone," Tate said. "Just — poof — disappeared. One minute he was standing here behind me, the next he was just missing. All he left was this."

Tate held up Hagerty's Annapolis graduation ring.

Schofield didn't get it.

The President did.

"Oh, Jesus," he said. "He's out."

"Who's out?" Mother asked.

"There's only one person in this complex who is known to leave a person's jewelry at the site of an abduction," the President said. "The serial killer, Lucifer Leary."

"The Surgeon of Phoenix…" Schofield whispered, recalling the name and the horror that went along with it.

"Oh, super," Mother spat. "Just what we need. Another fucking wacko running around this place."

The President turned to Schofield. "Captain, we don't have time for this. If Caesar Russell's got that boy…"

Schofield bit his lip. He didn't like leaving anybody behind, even Ramrod Hagerty.

"Captain," the President said, his face hard, "as I said earlier this morning, sometimes in this job I have to make difficult decisions — and I'm going to make one now. If he's still alive, Colonel Hagerty is going to have to look after himself. We can't spend the next hour searching this facility for him. There's something bigger at stake here. Much bigger. We have to get that boy back."

They took the mini-elevator to the second underground hangar, Level 2, and — now accompanied by the confused Nicholas Tate — dashed down its length.

Thankfully, there were no bears in this hangar.

They hit the fire stairwell at a run and rushed down it, guided by the light of Schofield's flaming torch. Since they had come direct from their fight in the pit, they had no weapons, no flashlights, no nothing.

They came to the bottom of the stairwell, and the door to Level 6.

Cautiously, Schofield opened it.

The Level 6 X-rail platform was completely dark.

No sound. No sign of life.

Schofield edged out onto the platform. Dark shapes littered the area — bodies from the three separate gunfights that had taken place down there over the course of the morning, the charred remains of Elvis's RDX explosion.

Schofield and Mother ran straight over to the bodies of some Bravo Unit men. They grabbed a P-90 assault rifle each, plus SIG-Sauer pistols. Schofield even found a first aid field kit on one of the men which contained four plastic wrapped hypodermic needles.

Perfect.

He tossed a SIG to the President, but didn't offer a gun to the unstable Tate.

"This way," he said.

He hurried along the platform, heading for the X-rail engine that sat on the northern tracks of the underground railway station, pointing toward the open tunnel that led to Area 8.

Up in the main hangar, Book II was pulling Juliet Janson out of the ten-foot-deep pit that was the aircraft elevator platform. He was wearing his uniform's ERG-6 gas mask.

A thin residual mist hung over the area, the lingering cloud of the Sinovirus.

Juliet came out of the pit, and with a shout, she saw them: Seth Grimshaw and the giant Goliath disappearing inside the personnel elevator. And Grimshaw was still holding the Football.

"Over there!" she pointed. "They're going for the exit in the elevator shaft. That Air Force guy Harper gave Grimshaw the exit code."

"Do you know the code?" Book II asked.

"Do I ever," Juliet leapt to her feet. "I was there when Harper said it. Come on."

Libby Gant was on her own.

She was standing in a dark hallway inside the command building at the eastern end of the hangar, at the base of a set of stairs — unarmed but alert as hell.

In the hangar outside, the Sinovirus was loose, and she didn't have a gas mask.

Okay, she thought, surely in a facility like this, there would have to be some…

She found them in a cupboard underneath the stairs: biohazard suits. Great big yellow Chemturions — with large, baggy plastic helmets, balloonlike yellow coveralls, and self contained air packs.

In the same cupboard, Gant also found a chunky Maglite flashlight. Very handy.

She slipped into one of the Chemturion suits as fast as she could, pulling its Ziploc zipper shut, turning on its self contained air supply. The suit immediately inflated and she started hearing her own breathing as a Darth Vader-like wheeze.

Now safe from the Sinovirus, she had something else she wanted to do.

She recalled her previous plan: find Caesar Russell's command center — get the initiate / terminate unit that he'd used to start the transmitter on the President's heart — then use the black box that she'd taken from the AWACS plane earlier to impersonate the President's radio signal.

The black box.

So far as she knew, it was still on the floor of the main hangar, in the spot where she had kicked it away from the mini elevator.

She decided to search the command center for the I/T unit first. Then she'd go back for the black box.

Guided by the light of her newfound flashlight, she climbed the stairs, came to the command room's doorway.

The door was ajar.

Slowly, Gant pushed it open, to reveal a very battered looking room.

It looked like a war had been fought in there.

The room's plasterboard walls were shredded with bullet holes. The slanted windows overlooking the main hangar were cracked or completely shattered. Several computer consoles bore fat round holes in their monitors. Others just sat there blank, lacking a power source.

Dressed in her yellow biohazard suit, Gant entered the room, stepping over a pair of dead 7th Squadron men lying all shot up on the floor. Their weapons were gone, presumably taken by the inmates who had stormed through here.

Through the faceplate of her airtight suit, Gant's eyes swept the control room, searching for the…

Yes.

It was sitting on top of one of the computer monitors and it was just as the President had described it: a small red hand held unit, with a black stub antenna sticking out of its top.

The initiate / terminate unit.

Gant picked it up, examined it. It looked like a miniature mobile phone.

She saw two switches on its face. Beneath each switch was a crude length of tape marked with a handwritten "1" and "2".

Gant frowned. Why would Caesar need…?

She shook the thought away, stuffed the IT unit into the chest pocket of her biohazard suit.

As she did so, she peered out over the darkened hangar to see if she could spot the black box down by the pit.

The vast hangar floor stretched away from her, veiled by the unearthly mist of the Sinovirus.

Except for the flickering flames of the prisoners' discarded torches, nothing moved.

The area was awash with irregularly shaped objects: slumped bodies, Marine One, a crashed cockroach, one battered helicopter, even Bravo Unit's busted-open barricade of crates and boxes.

Gant's flashlight had a powerful beam, and in the middle of some bodies and debris on the near side of the pit, it illuminated the bright-orange outline of the AWACS's black box. Excellent…

Gant made to leave, when abruptly, a glint of pale-blue light caught her eye.

She paused. It seemed that not every monitor in the control room had been shot or lost power.

Hidden underneath a fallen piece of shredded plasterboard, a lone screen was still glowing.

Gant frowned.

The complex's power was out — which meant this system must be operating on an independent power source. Which meant it must be pretty important…

She lifted the broken piece of wall off the screen. The screen read:

Gant's eyes went wide.

Facility self-destruct sequence…

No wonder this system operated on an independent power source.

But for whatever reason — presumably the sudden intrusion of the inmates — Caesar Russell's people had failed to enter the appropriate lockdown extension code during the window period after 10:00 a.m.

So now, if no one entered an extension or termination code before 11:05 a.m., Area 7's self destruct sequence would begin — a ten-minute procedure that would culminate in the hundredmegaton thermonuclear warhead buried in the earth beneath the complex going off.

"Holy mother of God…" Gant breathed. She looked at her watch.

It was 10:15 a.m.

She turned to go — at the same moment as a long length of steel piping crashed down against the back of her suit-hooded head.

Gant dropped to the floor, out cold.

She never saw her attacker.

Never saw him heft her onto his shoulder.

Never saw him carry her out of the control room.

The X-Rail train boomed through the tunnel system, rocketing along on its quartet of tracks at tremendous speed, heading toward Area 8.

It wouldn't be a long trip. At two hundred miles per hour, they'd cover the twenty miles in about six minutes.

Although he didn't know exactly where Echo Unit was going with Kevin, Schofield at least knew they had come this way.

It was better than nothing.

Having set the train's autopilot, he walked back into the main cabin and sat down with Mother and the President. Nick Tate was off at the other end of the carriage, still somewhat out of it, staring with great concentration at the buttons on his cellular phone.

Schofield sat down. As he did so, he pulled out his newfound syringe and the antidote to the Sinovirus, and set about injecting himself with it. Mother and the President did the same.

As he jabbed the needle into his arm, Schofield looked up at the President. "Now, sir, if you don't mind, would you please tell me what the hell is going on at this base?"

The President pursed his lips.

"You could start," Schofield prompted, "with why an Air Force Lieutenant General wants to kill you in front of the nation. Then you could tell me why he also wants to keep his hands on a genetically engineered boy who is the vaccine to an ethnic bullet."

The President bowed his head, and nodded.

Then he said, "Technically, Caesar Russell is no longer a lieutenant general in the Air Force.

Technically, he is dead. On the twentieth of January this year, the day of my inauguration, Charles Samson Russell was executed by lethal injection at Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary for the crime of high treason."

"What he wants," the President said, "is what he wanted before he was executed. To radically change the face of this country. Forever. And the two things he needs to do to effect that are: one, kill me, in a highly visible, highly embarrassing way. And two, retain control of the Sinovirus vaccine."

"To understand why he's doing this, however, you have to understand Russell's history, in particular his links with a clandestine Air Force society known as the Brotherhood."

"Yes…" Schofield said cautiously.

The President leaned forward. "Over the past thirty years, various Congressional Armed Services Committees have heard about the existence of certain undesirable societies within the branches of our armed forces; informal underground organizations with less-thanacceptable common interests. Hate societies."

"For example?"

"In the eighties there was a secret group of men in the Army known as the Bitch Killers. They opposed the presence of women in the Army, so they engaged in activities to drive them out of the service. More than eighteen sexual assaults in the Army were attributed to members of this group, even if actual proof was difficult to establish. The extent of its membership was never fully ascertained, but then, that's the problem with these sorts of societies: there is never any physical proof of their existence. They're like ghosts, existing in non-tangible ways — a knowing look during a salute, a nod in a hallway, a subtle promotion over a non-member."

Schofield was silent.

While he had never been approached by anyone linked with such a group in his career, he had heard of them. They were like hardcore college fraternities, small groups with their own secret handshakes, their own "codes," their own disgusting initiation ceremonies. For officers, they started at places like West Point and Annapolis; for enlisted men, at training camps around the country.

The President said, "They form for various reasons: some have religious skews — for example, anti-Semitic groups like the old 'Jewboy League' in the Navy. Or the sexist ones, like the BItch Killers. The formation of groups like this in high-risk occupations is well documented — even police forces like the L.A.P.D. are known to have secret hate societies within their ranks."

"But in terms of sheer violence, the worst groups were always the racist societies. There used to be one in every service. In the Navy, it was the Order of White America. In the Army, the Black Death. In the Air Force, it was a group known only as the Brotherhood. All three displayed a particular hostility toward black Americans in their ranks."

"But the thing is," the President said, "they were all thought to have been wiped out during a Department of Defense-initiated purge in the late 1980's. Now while we haven't heard about a resurgence of racist elements in either the Army or the Navy, it was discovered recently that the Brotherhood is indeed alive and well, and one of its key figures was none other than General Charles 'Caesar' Russell."

Schofield said nothing.

The President shifted in his seat. "Charles Russell was tried and convicted for ordering the murder of two Navy admirals, advisers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Turned out, Russell had approached them shortly after my announcement to run for President and asked them to join him in some kind of treasonable endeavour that would change America forever. The only details he told them were that the plan would involve the removal of the President, and that it would rid America of its 'human waste products. The two admirals refused his offer, so Caesar had them eliminated. What he didn't know was that one of those admirals had secretly taped his offer and tipped off the FBI and the Secret Service."

"Russell was arrested and tried for murder and treason. Since it was a military proceeding, the trial was held immediately, albeit in closed session. During the case the question was, to what America's 'human waste products' actually were was debated at length. Equivocal evidence was brought that Russell was a member of the Brotherhood — a secret cabal of high-ranking USAF officers, mainly from the Southern belt, who intentionally hinder the rise of black Americans through the ranks of the Air Force. It didn't help that the military prosecutor was black, but in any case the issue was never resolved. On the basis of the taped evidence, Russell was found guilty and sentenced to death. When he decided not to lodge any appeals whatsoever, his execution was fast tracked — and he was 'executed' in January of this year. And that was that. Or so we thought."

Schofield said, "I get the feeling that you knew what Caesar was planning, even if it didn't come out in the court case."

The President nodded.

"Over the past ten years, Caesar Russell has been in charge of every major United States Air Force base between Florida and Nevada. The 20th at Warren in Wyoming, which looks after our ICBM stockpile. Space Warfare at Falcon, Colorado, which controls defense satellites and space missions. Area 7, of course. Hell, he even spent a year at AFSOC at Hurlbut Field in Florida, supervising the Air Force's crack special ops teams, including the 7th Squadron. He has loyal followers at each of those bases, senior officers who owe their positions to him, a small but powerful clique of base commanders who we now suspect are also members of the Brotherhood."

"What Russell also knows, however, is what's inside every one of our most secret bases. He knew of the Sinovirus from its earliest development phases, knew of its potential uses, and he knew of our response to it — a genetically constructed virus-resistant human being — right from the very beginning.

"The thing is, Charles Russell is smart, very smart. He thought of other possibilities for the one person in the world in possession of the ultimate ethnic bullet and its vaccine. Judging by this transmitter attached to my heart, it looks like he's been planning a revolution for some time now, but it's only the advent of the Sinovirus that makes it totally perfect for him."

"How so?"

"Because Caesar Russell wants to take America back to its pre-Civil War state," the President said simply.

There was a silence.

"Did you hear the names of the cities he's put his plasma bombs in? Fourteen devices, in fourteen airports, all around the country. Not true. They're not placed all around the country. They're only placed in northern cities. New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Seattle. The furthest south those bombs get is St. Louis. No Atlanta, no Houston, no Miami even. Nothing below the Tennessee-Kentucky state line."

"Why those cities, then?" Schofield asked slowly.

The President said, "Because they represent the North, the liberals, the dandies of America who talk a lot, produce nothing, and yet consume everything. And Caesar wants an America without the North.

"For with the Sinovirus and its cure in his possession, he will have what's left of the nation at his mercy. Every man, woman and child — black and white — will owe their life to him and his precious vaccine."

The President winced.

"I imagine the black population would be eliminated first, with the vaccine being administered only to white Americans. Considering Caesar's racist tendencies, I assume it was the black population he was talking about when he mentioned 'human waste products.'"

"But remember what I said before: he has to do two things to get what he wants: he has to have Kevin in his possession, and he also has to kill me. For no revolution — no true revolution — can take place without the visible and humiliating destruction of the previous regime. The execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in France; the imprisonment of the Czar in Russia in 1918; Hitler's complete 'Nazification' of Germany in the thirties."

"Anybody can kill a President, if they are determined enough. A revolutionary, however, has to do it in front of the people he desires to rule — showing them that the previous ruling system no longer deserves their respect."

"And don't be mistaken, Caesar Russell isn't doing this in front of America. He's doing it in front of the most extreme elements of America — the Timothy McVeighs of the country; the poor, the angry, the disenfranchised, the white supremacists, the white trash, the antifederal militias — those parts of the nation, located mainly in the Southern states, that wouldn't give two shits if the cappuccino-drinking liberals in New York, Chicago and San Francisco were blasted off the face of the earth."

"But the country would be decimated…" Schofield said. "Why would he want to rule a destroyed country?"

"Yes, but you see, Caesar doesn't see it that way," the President said. "To his mind, the country wouldn't be destroyed. It would merely be purified, renewed, cleansed. It would be a new beginning. The southern city centers would be intact. The Midwest would still be largely intact, able to provide sustenance."

Schofield asked, "What about the other armed forces? What would he do about them?"

"Captain, as you would well know, the U.S. Air Force receives more funding than all the other armed services combined… Sure, it may have only 385,000 personnel, but it has more missiles and strike capability than all the other services combined. If, by virtue of the Brotherhood and his previous commands, Caesar has even a fiftieth of the Air Force behind him, he could scramble his bombers and take out every key Army and Navy installation in this country — plus every Air Force base that was not allied with him — before they could even raise a small counteroffensive effort."

"Foreign defense would be the same. With its Stealth bombers, strike fighters and a stockpile of nuclear missiles greater than that of any other country in the world, Caesar's new Air Force, acting alone, would be more than capable of handling any hostile foreign incursion."

"Captain, make no mistake, to Caesar's warped mind, this scenario would be perfect: America would be isolationist once again, completely self-sufficient, and governed by an absolutely lily-white regime. Back to its pre-Civil War state."

"Motherfucker…" Mother breathed.

Schofield frowned.

"Okay, then," he said, "so what if Russell can't pull this off? What if he fails? Surely he isn't just going to accept defeat and walk away. I can't see him simply disarming his bombs if he loses and saying, 'Oh well, I was wrong, you win.'"

"No," the President said seriously. "That worries me, too. Because if by some miracle we do survive all this, the question becomes: what has Caesar got in store for us then?"

After prising apart the personnel elevator's exterior doors, Book II and Juliet Janson came to the "top door" exit.

Juliet entered the code Harper had revealed earlier: 5564771.

With a sharp hiss, the heavy titanium door opened.

They raced down the concrete corridor beyond it, each holding one of Book's pistols.

They ran for about forty yards before, abruptly, they burst through another door and found themselves standing inside an ordinary-looking aircraft hangar. Shafts of brilliant sunlight slanted in through the hangar's wide-open doors. The hangar was completely empty: no planes, no cars, no…

Goliath must have been waiting behind the door.

Juliet stepped out first, only to feel the barrel of a P-90 press up against the side of her head.

"Bang-bang, you're dead," Goliath said oafishly.

He squeezed the trigger just as Book II — whom Goliath hadn't seen yet — lunged forward and with lightning speed swiped back the P-90's charging handle, ejecting the round that was in its chamber.

Click!

The gun against Juliet's head fired nothing.

"Wha…?" Goliath snapped to look at Book II.

And then everything happened very fast.

In one movement, Juliet grabbed the barrel of Goliath's P-90 and whipped up her own gun, at the same moment as Goliath's other enormous fist — which still held Schofield's Maghook — came rushing at her face. The Maghook hit Juliet on the side of the head, and she and the P-90 went sprawling to the floor. Juliet hit the ground hard. The P-90 clattered away.

Book raised his Beretta — but not fast enough. Goliath caught his gun hand… and growled at him.

Now the two men were holding the same gun.

Goliath thrust his Frankensteinian chin right up close to Book II's face as he began depressing Book's own trigger finger.

Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

As the gun boomed, Goliath brought it around in a wide arc, angling it so that in a few shots' time, it would be pointed at Book's head.

It was like an arm wrestle.

Book II tried with all his might to stop the movement of the gun, but Goliath was far too strong.

Blam! Blam! Blam!

The gun was now pointed at Book's left arm…

Blam!

Book's left bicep exploded. Blood sprayed all over his head. He roared with pain.

Then before he knew it, the gun barrel was pointing directly at his face and…

Click.

Out of ammo.

"That's better." Goliath grinned. "Now we can have a fair fight."

He discarded the gun and — onehanded — grabbed Book by the throat and thrust him up against the wall.

Book's feet dangled twelve inches off the ground.

He struggled uselessly in Goliath's grip, his wounded arm burning. He let fly with a weak punch that hit Goliath square on the forehead.

The big man didn't even seem to feel the blow. Indeed, Book's fist seemed to just bounce off his skull.

Goliath chuckled stupidly. "Steel plate. May not make me too bright, but it sure makes me tough."

Goliath brought up the Maghook in his spare hand, so that it was now pointed at Book's eyes.

"What about you, soldier boy? How strong is your skull? You think this little hook gun could crush it? What do you say we find out…"

He pressed the Maghook's cold magnetic head up against Book II's nose.

Book, held up by his neck, grabbed the Maghook with both hands, and despite his wounded arm, pushed it back toward Goliath. The Maghook went vertical, but then to Book's horror, it started to come back toward his face. Goliath was going to win this arm wrestle, too.

Then suddenly Book saw the way out.

"Aw, what the hell," he said.

And so he reached forward, gripped the Maghook's launcher and pressed the button marked "m" on it, initiating the grappling hook's powerful magnetic charge.

The response was instantaneous.

The lights on the Maghook's magnetic head burst to life, and the now-charged head began searching for a metallic source nearby.

It found it in the steel plate inside Goliath's forehead.

With a powerful thud! the Maghook lodged itself against the big man's brow. It stuck hard, as if it were being sucked against the prisoner's very skin.

Goliath roared with rage, tried to extract the Maghook from his forehead, in doing so, releasing Book.

Book II dropped to the floor, gasping, clutching the ragged red hole in his biceps.

Goliath was spinning around, wrestling like an idiot with the Maghook attached to his face.

Book II kept his distance, at least until the staggering Goliath had his back to the wall. Then Book just stepped forward, grabbed the handgrip of the Maghook with his good hand and, without mercy, pulled the trigger.

The Maghook discharged with a gaseous whump! And Goliath's head was sent thundering backwards — his neck snapping almost ninety degrees the wrong way — his skull smashing against the wall behind him, creating a basketball-sized crater in the concrete. For his part, Book II was hurled several yards in the other direction, care of Newton's Third Law.

Still, he fared far better than Goliath. The gigantic prisoner now slid slowly to the floor, his eyes wide with shock and his head cracked open like an egg, a foul soup of blood and brains oozing out of it.

While Book II had been fighting with Goliath, the still dazed Juliet had been trying to regather her pistol from the floor nearby.

When at last she got it and stood up, she stopped dead.

He was just standing there. Twenty yards away. On the other side of the hangar — Seth Grimshaw.

"I remember you now," Grimshaw said, stepping forward.

Janson said nothing, just stared at him. She saw that he was still holding the Football…and a P-90 assault rifle, held low, one-handed, aimed right at her.

"You were at the Bonaventure when I tried to take out His Majesty," Grimshaw said. "You're U-triple-S. One of those chirpy little fucks who think that throwing their bodies in front of a corrupt President is in some way honorable."

Janson said nothing.

She held her nickel Beretta by her side, down by her thigh.

Grimshaw had his rifle leveled at her. He smiled.

"Try and stop this." He began to squeeze the trigger on his P-90.

Janson was ice-cool. She had one chance, and she knew it. Like all members of the Secret Service, she was an expert marksman. Grimshaw, on the other hand — like nearly all criminals — was shooting from the hip. The Secret Service had actually done probability Scales on this sort of thing: in all likelihood, Grimshaw would miss with at least his first three shots.

Taking into account the time it would take for her to raise her own gun, Janson would have to hit him with her first.

Back the odds, she told herself. Back the odds.

And so as Grimshaw pulled his trigger, she whipped out her pistol.

She brought it up fast, superfast, and fired… at exactly the same time as Grimshaw loosed three short rounds himself.

The odds, it seemed, were wrong.

Both shooters fell — like mirror images — snapping backwards on opposite sides of the hangar, dropping to the ground in identical splashes of blood.

Janson lay on her back on the shiny polished floor of the hangar — gasping, breathing fast, looking up at the ceiling — a bloody red hole in her left shoulder.

Grimshaw, on the other hand, didn't move.

Didn't move at all.

He lay completely still, on his back.

Although Janson didn't know it yet, her single bullet had punctured the bridge of Grimshaw's nose, breaking it, creating a foul blood-splattered hole in his face. The exit wound that had blasted out the back of his head, however, was twice as big.

Seth Grimshaw was dead.

And the Football lay neatly at his side.

The X-Rail train shot through the tunnel system.

After his talk with the President, Schofield had moved into the driver's compartment. They'd be arriving at Area 8 in a couple of minutes, and he wanted a short moment's peace.

With a soft shooshing sound, the compartment's sliding door opened and Mother entered.

"How you doing?" she said as she sat down beside him.

"To be honest," he said, "when I woke up this morning, I didn't think the day would turn out like this."

"Scarecrow, why didn't you kiss her?" Mother asked suddenly.

"What? Kiss who?"

"Fox. When you took her out to dinner and dropped her home. Why didn't you kiss her?"

Schofield sighed. "You'll never make it in the diplomatic corps, Mother."

"Blow me. If I'm going to die today, I'm sure as hell not going to die wondering. Why didn't you kiss her? She wanted you to."

"She did? Ah, damn it." "So why didn't you?"

"Because I…" he paused. "I guess I got scared."

"Scarecrow. What the fuck are you talking about? What were you afraid of? The girl is crazy about you."

"And I'm crazy about her, too. I have been for a long time. Do you remember when she joined the unit, when the selection committee put on that barbecue at the base in Hawaii? I knew it then — as soon as I saw her — but back then I figured she could never be interested in me, not with these… things."

He touched the twin scars running vertically down his eyelids.

He snuffed a laugh. "I didn't talk much at that lunch. I even think she caught me staring off into space at one point, I wonder if she knows I was thinking about her"

"Scarecrow," Mother said. "You and I both know Fox can see beyond your eyes."

"See, that's the thing. I know that," Schofield said. "I know that. I just don't know what I was thinking last week. We were finally going out on a date. We'd gotten along so well all night. Everything was going great. And then we arrived at her front door and suddenly I didn't want to screw everything up by doing the wrong thing… and well, I don't know… I guess… I guess I just froze up."

Mother started nodding sagely — then she burst out laughing.

"I'm glad you think this is funny," Schofield said.

Mother kept laughing, clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Scarecrow, you know, every now and then, it's nice to see that you're human. You can leap off ice cliffs and swing across giant elevator shafts, but you still freeze up when it comes to kissing the girl. You're beautiful."

"Thanks," Schofield said.

Mother stood up to go.

"Just promise me this," she said kindly. "When you see Fox next, kiss the fucking girl, will you!"

While Schofield, mother and the president were shooting through the X-rail tunnel under the desert floor toward Area 8, Caesar Russell and his four remaining 7th Squadron men were zooming through the air above the desert in their two Penetrator attack choppers, heading in the same direction, a few minutes ahead of the X-rail train.

The small cluster of buildings that was Area 8 rose up out of the sandy landscape in front of the two helicopters.

Area 8 was essentially a smaller version of Area 7: two box-shaped hangars and a three-story airfield control tower sat alongside the facility's black bitumen runway, complete with its sand-covered extensions that Schofield had observed earlier that day.

As the two Penetrators approached it, Caesar saw the gigantic doors to one of the complex's hangars suddenly part in the middle, and open.

It took the doors a long while to open fully, but once they had, Caesar's jaw dropped.

One of the most amazing-looking flying objects known to man rolled slowly out of the hangar.

Truth be told, what Caesar saw was actually two flying objects. The first was a massive Boeing 747 jumbo jet, painted in glistening silver. The jumbo, with its imperious nose and outstretched swanlike wings, edged out from the shadows of the hangar.

It was, however, the smaller aircraft mounted on the back of the 747 that seized Caesar's attention.

It looked incredible.

Its paint scheme was like that of NASA's regular space shuttles: mainly white, with the American flag and "United sstates" written in bold lettering on its side, and with the distinctive black-painted nose and underbelly.

But this was no ordinary space shuttle.

It was the X-38.

One of two sleek mini-shuttles purpose-built by the United States Air Force for the tasks of satellite killing and, where necessary, the boarding, takeover or destruction of foreign space stations.

In shape, it was similar to the standard shuttles — delta platform, with flat triangular wings, a high aerodynamic tail, and three conical thrusters on its rear end — but it was smaller, much more compact. For where Atlantis and her sister shuttles were heavy long-haul vehicles designed for ferrying bulky satellites into space, this was the sports version, designed for blasting them out of existence.

Four specially designed zero-gravity AMRAAM missiles hung from its wings, on the outside of two enormous Pegasus II booster rockets — massive cylindrical thrusters filled to the brim with liquid oxygen — that were attached to the underbelly of the bird.

What a lot of people don't realize is that many of today's space flights are conducted with what is essentially late 1960's technology. Saturn V and Titan II boosters were used in the original U.S.-Soviet space race in the sixties.

The X-38, however, with its 747 launch platform and its stunning Pegasus II boosters, is the first orbiter to truly bring space flight into the twenty-first century.

Its specially configured 747 launcher — fitted with new extra-powerful Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines, enhanced pressurization systems and extra radiation protection for the pilots — can carry the X-38 to a release height of around 67,000 feet, 24,000 feet higher than a commercial jumbo can fly. Air launch saves the shuttle one-third of its first stage power/lift ratio.

Then the Pegasus II boosters kick in.

More powerful than Titan III by a whole order of magnitude, the boosters provide enough lift after the high altitude launch to carry the shuttle into a low-earth orbit. Once expended, they are jettisoned from the shuttle. The X-38 — now in a stationary orbit about two hundred and ten miles above the earth — can then maneuver freely in space, killing enemy satellites at will, and coordinate its landing, all under its own power.

Caesar Russell gazed at the mini-shuttle.

It was absolutely magnificent.

He turned to Kurt Logan. "That shuttle cannot be allowed to get off the…"

He didn't get to finish the sentence, for at that moment — completely without warning — five Stinger missiles came rocketing out from the darkened hangar behind the silver 747, swooping in a wide arc around its wings before rising sharply into the air, heading straight for Caesar's two Penetrators.

Echo Unit had seen them.

The underground X-Rail station of Area 8 was identical to the one at Area 7: two tracks on either side of an elongated central platform, with an elevator sunk into the northern track's wall.

After about" seven minutes of superfast travel, Schofield's X-rail car zoomed into the station, bursting into the white fluorescent light of Area 8. The bullet-shaped engine decelerated quickly, stopped on a dime.

Its doors hissed open and Schofield, Mother and the President of the United States came charging out of it, heading straight for the elevator set into the northern wall. Trailing behind them — looking completely lost and now holding his cell phone to his ear — was Nicholas Tate in.

Schofield hit the elevator's call button.

As he waited for the lift to arrive, he noticed Tate for the first time. The White House suit was clearly rattled, freaked out by the morning's events. But it was only then that Schofield realized that Tate was speaking into his cell phone.

"No," Tate said irritably into the phone, "I want to know who you are! You have interrupted my phone call to my stockbroker. Identify yourself."

"What on earth are you doing?" Schofield asked.

Tate frowned, spoke very seriously — in doing so, indicating that he had gone completely bonkers. "Well, I was calling my broker. I figured by the way things are going today, I'd sell off my U.S. dollars. So, after we got out of that train tunnel, I called him up, but no sooner do I get him on the line than this asshole cuts across the connection."

Schofield snatched the phone from Tate's hand.

"Hey!"

Schofield spoke into it. "This is Captain Shane M. Schofield, United States Marine Corps, Presidential Detachment, serial number 358-6279. ho is this?"

A voice came through the phone: "This is David Fairfax of the Defense Intelligence Agency. I'm speaking from a monitoring station in D.C. We have been scanning all transmissions emanating from two Air Force bases in the Utah desert. We believe that there may be a rogue Air Force unit at one of those bases and that the President's life may be in danger. I just enacted an emergency breakthrough on your friend's telephone call."

"Believe me, you don't know the half of it, Mr. Fairfax," Schofield said.

"Is the President safe?"

"He's right here." Schofield held the phone out for the President.

The President spoke into it: "This is the President of the United States. Captain Schofield is with me."

Schofield added, "And we are currently in pursuit of that rogue Air Force unit you just mentioned. Tell me everything you know about it…"

Just then, the elevator pinged.

"Hold on." Schofield raised his P-90 toward the elevator.

The doors opened… revealing horribly blood-splattered walls and a particularly grisly sight.

The gunned-down bodies of three dead Air Force men lay strewn about the elevator — no doubt members of the skeleton crew stationed at Area 8.

"I think we got a fresh trail," Mother said.

They hurried into the lift.

Tate stayed behind, determined not to go near any more danger. The President, however, insisted on going with Schofield and Mother.

"But, sir…" Schofield began.

"Captain. If I'm going to die today as the representative of this country, I'm not going to do it cowering in some corner, waiting to be found. It's time to stand up and be counted. And besides, it looks like you could do with some numbers."

Schofield nodded. "If you say so, sir. Just stay close and shoot straight."

The elevator doors closed and Schofield hit the button for ground level.

Then he brought Tate's cell phone back to his ear.

"Okay, Mr. Fairfax. Twenty-five words or less. Tell me everything you know about this rogue Air Force unit."

In his subterranean room in Washington, Dave Fairfax sat up straighter in his chair.

Events had just gotten a lot more real.

First, he had picked up the cell phone call coming out of Area 8. Then he had cut across the line — interrupting some moron — and now he was speaking to this Schofield character, a Marine on the President's helicopter detail. As soon as he had heard it, Fairfax had punched Schofield's serial number into his computer. Now he had Schofield's complete military history — including his current posting on Marine One — right in front of him.

"Okay," Fairfax said into his headset mike. "As I said, I'm DIA, and recently I've been decoding a set of unauthorized transmissions coming out of those bases. Now, first of all, we think a team of former South African Reccondos are heading there…"

"Don't mind them. Killed them already," Schofield's voice said. "The rogue unit. Tell me about the rogue unit."

"Oh… okay," Fairfax said. "By our reckoning, the rogue unit is one of the five 7th Squadron units guarding the Area 7 complex: the unit designated 'Echo'…"

At Area 8, the elevator whizzed up the shaft.

Fairfax's voice came through the cell phone."…I believe that this unit is aiding Chinese agents in an attempt to steal a biological vaccine that was being developed at Area 7."

Schofield said, "Do you have any idea how they're going to get the vaccine out of America?"

"Uh, yeah…yeah I do," Fairfax's voice said. "But you might not believe it…"

"I'll believe just about anything, Mr. Fairfax. Try me."

"Okay…I believe they're going to load the vaccine onto a satellite-killer shuttle based at Area 8 and fly it up into a low orbit where they will rendezvous with the Chinese space shuttle that launched last week. They will then transfer both themselves and the vaccine onto the Chinese shuttle and land it back inside Chinese territory where we can't get to it or them…"

"Son of a bitch," Schofield breathed.

"I know it sounds crazy, but…"

"…but it's the only way to get something out of the United States," Schofield said. "We could stop any other extraction method — car, plane, boat. But if they went up into space, we'd never be able to follow them. They'd be home by the time we got a chase shuttle onto the pad at Canaveral."

"Exactly"

"Thanks, Mr. Fairfax. Call the Marines and the Army, and get them to mobilize whatever air capable units they have — carriers, choppers, anything — and send them directly to Areas 7 and 8. Do not use the Air Force. Repeat: Do not use the Air Force. Until further notification, treat all Air Force personnel as suspicious."

As he spoke, Schofield saw the illuminated numbers on the elevator ticking upward: "SL-3…

SL-2…" "As for us," Schofield said, "we have to go now."

"What are you going to do? What about the President? "

"SL-1" became "G" and suddenly Schofield heard muffled gunfire beyond the elevator doors.

Ping!

The elevator had reached the ground floor.

"We're going after the vaccine," he said. "Call you later."

And he hung up.

A second later, the elevator's doors opened…