Juliet spun to see who had fired the killing shot, but strangely she saw no one.
Book II, elvis and love machine all dived together behind a lab bench just as the benchtop was raked with gunfire. They returned fire, aiming at three Air Force commandos taking cover among the test booths.
But it quickly became clear that the Marines' makeshift assortment of shotguns and pistols was going to be no match for the rapid-fire P-90 machine guns of the 7th Squadron troops. The shelves around them shattered and splintered under the phenomenal weight of enemy fire.
Elvis ducked for cover. "Goddamn!" he yelled. "This is seriously fucked up!"
"No kidding," Book II shouted. He shucked his pump action and snapped up to fire, but when he appeared above the benchtop and loosed a couple of shots, he saw a very strange thing happen: he saw all three of the shadowy 7th Squadron shooters get yanked clean off their feet from behind.
Their guns went silent, and Book II found himself staring at an empty area of the battlefield.
"What the...?"
From his own position near the stairwell door, Alpha Unit's leader, Kurt Logan, saw what was happening.
"Fuck! There's someone else in here!" he yelled angrily into his microphone. "Somebody's picking us off!"
Suddenly the trooper beside Logan took a hit to the side of the head and half his skull exploded, spraying blood and brains everywhere.
"Fuck!" Logan had expected to lose maybe two of his men in the Shootout - but now he had lost six. "Alpha Unit, pull out! Everybody back to the stairwell now! Take emergency evac measures!"
He threw open the stairwell door, just as a line of bullets punctured the wall all around it, almost taking his head off. His remaining men dashed past him, out through the door, into the shelter of the eastern stairwell - but not before they had brutally fired down at their fallen comrades' bodies, peppering the corpses and the floor all around them with bullets.
Logan himself mercilessly strafed the body of a dead 7th Squadron man on the ground beside him. Then, when he was done, he disappeared through the doorway after the others and abruptly there was silence.
Book II was still crouched behind his lab bench with Elvis and Love Machine, acrid gunsmoke rising into the air all around them.
Silence.
Deafening silence.
Juliet Janson and the President lay on the floor five feet away from Book and the others, shielded by another bench, covered in dust and broken bits of plastic. Juliet still had her gun raised...
Whump!
A pair of boots landed with a loud thud on the benchtop above them.
They all snapped to look up - and found themselves staring at Captain Shane M. Schofield, USMC, dressed in full dress uniform, with two nickel-plated Berettas gripped in his hands.
He smiled at them. "Hey there."
Meanwhile, in bars and offices and homes around America and the world, people sat glued to their television sets.
Because there was so little footage, CNN and the overseas news networks just kept broadcasting the existing few minutes' worth of tape over and over again. Experts were brought in to give their opinions.
Government people sprang into action, although no one could really do anything substantive, since the exact location of the nightmarish affair was known only to a select few.
In any case, in a few minutes it would be eight o'clock Mountain Daylight Time and the people of the world tensely awaited the next hourly update.
THIRD CONFRONTATION
3 July, 0800 Hours
Space division, that part of the defense intelligence Agency which deals with foreign powers' space capabilities, is located on the second-to-bottom floor of the Pentagon, three stories directly below the famous Pentagon Situation Room.
And although its title may sound exotic and exciting, as David Fairfax knew, such a perception couldn't have been further from the truth.
In short, you got sent to Space Division as punishment, because nothing ever happened in Space Division.
It was nearly 10.00 a.m. on the East Coast as Fairfax - oblivious to any commotion going on in the outside world - tapped away on his computer keyboard, trying to decipher a collection of phone taps that the DIA had picked up over the past few months. Whoever had been using the phones in question had fitted them with sophisticated encoders, masking their content. It was up to Fairfax to crack that code.
It's funny how times change, he thought.
David Theodore Fairfax was a cryptanalyst, a code breaker. Of medium height, lean, with floppy brown hair and thin wire-frame glasses, he didn't look like a genius. In fact, in his Mooks T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, he looked more like a gawky university student than a government analyst.
It was, however, his brilliant undergraduate thesis on theoretical nonlinear computing that had brought him to the attention of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense's chief intelligence-gathering organization. The DIA worked in close consultation with the NSA, America's chief signals gatherer and code breaker. But that didn't prevent it from running its own team of code crackers – who often spied on the USA - of which Dave Fairfax was a part.
Fairfax had taken to cryptanalysis immediately. He loved the challenge of it, the battle between two minds: one which hopes to conceal, the other which hopes to reveal. He lived by the maxim: No code is unbreakable.
It didn't take him long to get noticed.
In the early 1990's, U.S. authorities were confounded by a man named Phil Zimmerman and his unbreakable encryption software, "PGP." In 1991, Zimmerman had posted PGP on the Internet, to the great consternation of the U.S. government - principally because the government couldn't crack it.
PGP employed a cryptographic system known as the "public key system," which involved the multiplication of very large prime numbers to obtain the code's all-important "key." In this case "very large prime numbers" meant numbers with over 130 digits. It was unbreakable.
It was claimed that it would take all the supercomputers in the world twelve times the age of the universe to check all the possible values for a single message.
The government was annoyed. It became known that certain terrorist groups and foreign governments had started using PGP to encrypt their messages. In 1993, a grand jury investigation into Zimmerman was initiated on the basis that by uploading PGP onto the Internet, he had exported a weapon out of the United States, since encryption software came under the government's definition of a "munition."
And then strangely, in 1996, after hounding Zimmerman for three years, the U.S. Attorney General's office dropped the case.
Just like that.
They claimed that the horse had bolted and the case wasno longer worth pursuing, so they closed the file.
What the Attorney General never mentioned was the call she had received from the Director of the DIA on the morning she dropped the case, saying that PGP had been cracked.
And as anyone in cryptography knows, once you crack your enemy's code, you don't let them know you've cracked it.
And the man who cracked PGP: an unknown twenty-five-year-old DIA mathematician by the name of David Fairfax.
It turned out that Fairfax's theoretical nonlinear computer was no longer theoretical. A prototype version of it was built for the express purpose of breaking PGP, and as it turned out, the computer, with its unimaginable calculative abilities, could factor extremely large numbers with considerable ease.
No code is unbreakable.
History, however, is tough on cryptanalysts - for the simple fact that they cannot talk about their greatest victories.
And so it was with Dave Fairfax. He might have cracked PGP, but he could never talk about it, and in the great maze of government work, he had simply been given a small pay raise and then moved on to the next job.
And so here he was in Space Division, analyzing a series of unauthorized phone transmissions coming into and out of some remote Air Force base in Utah.
In a similarly isolated roo
m across the hall from him, however, was where all the good stuff was happening today. A joint taskforce of DIA and NSA cryptanalysts were tracking the encrypted signals coming out of the Chinese space shuttle that had launched from Xichang a few days earlier.
Now that was interesting, Fairfax thought. Better than decrypting some phone calls from a stupid Air Force base in the desert.
The recorded phone calls appeared on Fairfax's computer screen as a waterfall of cascading numbers - the mathematical representation of a series of telephone conversations that had taken place in Utah over the last couple of months.
A huge pair of headphones covered Fairfax's ears, emitting a steady stream of garbled static.
His eyes were fixed on the screen.
One thing was clear: whoever had made these calls had encrypted them well. Fairfax had been at this for the last two days.
He tried a few older algorithms.
Nothing.
He tried a few newer ones.
Nothing.
He could do this all month if he had to. He tried a program he had developed to crack Vodafone's newest encryption system –
"...Kan bevestig dot in-enting plaasvind..."
For a brief second, a strange guttural language materialized in his ears.
Fairfax's eyes glowed to life.
Gotcha...
He tried the program on some of the other telephone conversations.
And in a miraculous instant, formless static suddenly became clear voices speaking in a foreign tongue, interspersed with the odd sentence of English.
"...Toetse op laaste paging word op die vier-entwientigste verwag. Wat van die onttrekkings eenheid?..."
"...Reccondo span is alreeds weggestuur..."
"...Voorbereidings onderweg. Vroeg oggend. Beste tyd vir onttrekking..."
"...Everything is in place. Confirm that it's the third..."
"...Ontrekking kan 'n probleem wees. Gestel ons ge bruik die Hoeb land hier naby. Verstaan hy is 'n lid van Die Organisasie..."
"...Sal die instruksies oordra..."
"...Mission is a go..."
"...Die Reccondos is gereed. Verwagte aankoms by be plande bestemming binne nege dae..."
Fairfax's eyes gleamed as he gazed at the screen. No code is unbreakable. He reached for his phone.
* * *
After the short battle in the decompression area, Schofield and the others retreated to the opposite side of Level 4, to the observation lab overlooking the giant cube... locking the doors behind them and then blasting the security keypads with gunshots.
Of all the places Schofield had seen so far, this area was the most easily defended.
Barring the regular personnel elevator, it had only two entrances: the short ramp leading back to the aircraft elevator and the doorway leading to the staircase that went down to the cube.
Juliet Janson flopped to the floor of the lab, exhausted.
The President did the same.
The Marines - Book II, Elvis, Love Machine, Mother and Brainiac - formed a huddle and quickly told each other of their respective adventures inside flooding elevator shafts and runaway AWACS planes.
The last member of their rag-tag group - the lab coat-wearing scientist, Herbert Franklin - took a seat in the corner.
Schofield and Gant remained standing.
They had a few weapons now, gear that they had scavenged from the bodies of the 7th Squadron men in the decompression area... guns, a few radio headsets, three extremely high powered grenades made of RDX compound, and two thumbtack-sized lock-destroying explosives known as Lock-Blasters.
Logan's men, however, had spoiled well.
The brutal gunfire that they had directed at their own fallen men hadn't been intended as kill shots - it had been intended to destroy any weapons the dead men might offer their enemy. Consequently, only one P-90 assault rifle had been salvaged from the battlefield. All the others had been shattered, as had many of the fallen men's semiautomatic pistols.
"Mother," Schofield said, tossing the P-90 to her, "keep an eye on the ramp entrance. Elvis, the stairs going down to the cube."
Mother and Elvis dashed off.
Although just about everyone else in the world would have gone straight over to the President at that time, Schofield didn't. He could see that the President hadn't been injured - still had all his fingers and toes - and so long as his heart was still beating, he was all right.
Instead, Schofield went over to Juliet Janson.
"Update," was all he said.
Janson glanced up at Schofield, looked into the reflective silver lenses of his wraparound antiflash glasses.
She'd seen him around the Presidential helicopters before, but had never really talked to him. She'd heard about him from the other agents, though. He was the one from that thing in Antarctica.
"They ambushed us in the Level 3 common room, just after the message came over the Emergency Broadcast System," she said. "Been right on our tails ever since. We hit the stairwell, made for the Emergency Exit Vent down on Level 6, but they were waiting for us. We came back up the stairs - they were waiting for us again. We diverted through 5 and came up the ramp to 4 - and they were waiting for us again."
"Casualties?"
"Eight agents from the President's Personal Detail killed. Plus the whole Advance Team down on Level 6. That makes seventeen in total."
"Frank Cutler?"
"Gone."
"Anything else?"
Janson nodded at the little lab-coated man. "We picked him up on 5, before we walked into that ambush in the decompression room. Says he's a scientist working here."
Schofield glanced over at Herbert Franklin. Small and bespectacled, the little man just bowed his head in silence.
"What about you?" Janson asked.
Schofield shrugged. "We were up in the main hangar when it went down. Scrambled down the ventilation shaft, arrived in one of the underground hangars, destroyed a Humvee, crashed an AWACS plane."
"The usual," Gant added.
"How did you know about the ambush next door?" Janson asked.
Schofield shrugged. "We were down next to the cube when the lights went out in the decompression area. We were hoping it was someone friendly, trying to hide from the security cameras. So we checked it out from above, from the catwalks. When we saw who it was, saw them surrounding that ramp in the middle of the room, we figured they were waiting for the big score" - he nodded at the President - "so we set up a little counter-ambush of our own."
On the other side of the room, Brainiac sat down next to the President.
"Mr. President," he said with deference.
"Hello," the President replied. "How you feelin', sir?"
"Well, I'm still alive, which is a good start, considering the circumstances. What's your name, son?"
"Gorman, sir. Corporal Gus Gorman, but most of the guys just call me Brainiac."
"Brainiac?"
"That's right, sir," Brainiac hesitated. "Sir, if you don't mind, I was wondering, if it wasn't too much trouble, if I could ask you a question."
"Why not?" the President said.
"Okay, then. Okay. Well, you being' President and all, you'd know certain things, right?"
"Yes..."
"Right. Cool. Because what I always wanted to know was this: is Puerto Rico a United States protectorate because it has the highest number of UFO sightings in the world per annum?"
"What?"
"Well, think about it, why the hell else would we want to hold on to Puerto-fucking-Rico, there ain't nothing there..."
"Brainiac," Schofield said from across the room. "Leave the President alone. Mr. President, you better come and see this. It's almost eight o'clock and Caesar will be giving his hourly update any second."
The President went over to join Schofield - but not before he gave Brainiac a strange look.
* * *
At the tick of eight o'clock, Caesar Russell's face appeared on every television set in Area 7.
"My fellow Americans," he boomed, "after one hour's play, the President is still alive. His cause, however, is not looking good.
"His personal Secret Service Detail has been decimated, with eight of its nine members already confirmed dead. Two more Secret Service units - advance teams, one stationed down in the lowest floor of this facility, another at one of the exterior exits, consisting of nine men each – were also eliminated, bringing the total of presidential losses to twenty-six men. On both occasions, no losses were sustained by my 7th Squadron men."
"That said, some knights in shining armor have arrived on the scene. A small band of United States Marines - members of the President's ornamental helicopter crew, looking very pretty in their dress uniforms - have come to his defen..."
Just then, completely without warning, the television sets throughout Area 7 abruptly died, their screens shrinking to black.
At the same moment, all the lights in the complex blinked out, plunging Area 7 into darkness.
Inside the lab on Level 4, everybody looked up at the sudden loss of power.
"Uh-oh..." Gant said, eyeing the ceiling.
Then, a second later, the lights whirred back to life and the TV system rebooted, Caesar's face still looming large, still talking.
"...Which leaves us with five 7th Squadron units versus a handful of United States Marines. Such is the state of play at eight o'clock. I shall see you again for another update at 0900 hours."
The TV screens cut to black.
"Liar," Juliet Janson said. "That son of a bitch is Distorting the truth. The advance team down on Level 6 was already dead when we got there. They were killed before all this started."
"He also lied about his losses," Brainiac said. "Sneaky bastard."
"So what do we do?" Gant asked Schofield. "They have us outnumbered, outflanked and outgunned. Plus, this is their turf."
Schofield was wondering exactly the same thing.
The 7th Squadron had them completely on the run. They had all the leverage, and more importantly, he thought, looking down at his formal full dress uniform, they had come prepared to fight.
"Okay," he said, thinking aloud. "Know your enemy."
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