Area 7 ss-2
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the floor, kicking up sparks.
"Elvis!" Book II yelled. "Go for the elevator! The regular
elevator!"
Matthew Reilly
The 7th Squadron soldiers dived out of the way as the
speeding cockroach thundered in among them, wildly out of
control.
Elvis saw the elevator doors off to his right, and yanked
the steering wheel hard over. The cockroach responded,
swinging right, cutting the corner of the aircraft elevator
shaft--so that for the briefest of moments, Book II, partially
hanging off the roof of the vehicle, saw nothing but a wide
chasm of emptiness falling away beneath him.
Three seconds later, the cockroach--with the semi
destroyed helicopter behind it--skidded to a squealing halt
right in front of the elevator doors on the northern side of the
hangar.
Book II leapt off the top of the big Volvo and hit the call
button, Elvis joining him, when suddenly two armed men
leapt over the big towing vehicle behind them.
Book II spun, snapping his guns up, triggers half-pulled.
"Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" one of the armed men said,
holding his pistol up.
"Easy, Sergeant," the other one said calmly. "We're
with you."
Book II eased back on his triggers.
They were Marines.
The first was Sergeant Ashley Lewicky, an extraordinarily
ugly career sergeant with a thick monobrow, battered pug
nose, and mile-wide grin. Short and stout, his call-sign was a
slam dunk: "Love Machine." Of roughly equal age and rank,
he and Elvis had been buddies for years.
The second Marine, however, couldn't have been more
different from Love Machine. Tall and handsome in a clean
cut kind of way, he was a twenty-nine-year-old captain
named Tom Reeves. A promising young officer, he'd been
tagged for rapid promotion. Indeed, he'd already been promoted
over several more-experienced lieutenants. Despite
his obvious skills, the men called him "Calvin," because he
looked like a Calvin Klein underwear model.
"Jesus H. Christ, Elvis," Love Machine said, "where the
hell did you learn to drive! A demolition derby?"
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"Why? Where have you two been?" Elvis asked.
"Where do you think, knucklehead? Inside Nighthawk
Two. We both dived in there when the shit hit the fan. And
we were kinda happy there until you guys drove us into the
sights of that rocket laun--"
Just then, a volley of bullets smacked into the wall
above their heads.
Ten 7th Squadron men--Bravo Unit--were charging
across the wide hangar after them.
"I presume you had a plan when you drove over here,
Sergeant," Calvin Reeves said to Book II.
At that moment, the elevator pinged and its metal doors
slid open. Thankfully, it was empty.
"This was it, sir," Book II said.
"I approve," Calvin said and they all rushed inside.
Book II went straight to the control panel and hit "door
close."
The doors began to close. A bullet sizzled inside,
smacked against the back wall of the lift.
"Hurry up ..." Elvis urged.
The doors kept closing.
They heard boots thud onto the roof of the cockroach
outside, heard machine-gun bolts cock--
The doors came together ...
... a bare second before they erupted with domelike
welts from the barrage of bullets outside.
IT HAD TAKEN THEM A WHILE, BUT MOVING HAND OVER HAND,
hanging by their fingertips from the cabling gutter that ran
all the way around the elevator shaft, they had eventually
made it to the wide hangar door on the other side.
Hanging one-handed from the horizontal gutter,
Schofield hit a button on a control panel beside the hangar
door. Instantly, the massive steel door began to rumble upward.
Schofield climbed up onto level ground first, made sure
there were no enemy troops around, then turned to help the
others up behind him.
When they were all up, they gazed at the area before
them.
"Whoa, mama ..." Mother breathed.
A cavernous--completely underground--aircraft hangar
stretched away from them.
IN THE CONTROL ROOM OVERLOOKING THE MAIN GROUND
level hangar, the wall of black-and-white television monitors
flashed an array of images from the underground complex:
Juliet Janson and the President running up the stairwell.
Book II, Calvin Reeves, Elvis and Love Machine inside
the regular elevator, punching out the ceiling hatch and
climbing up through it.
Schofield and the others stepping up into the doorway
of the underground hangar.
"--okay, Charlie Unit, I have them. The ones who were
in the ventilation shaft. Level 1 hangar bay. Four Marines:
two male, two female. They're all yours--"
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"--Bravo Unit, your targets have just exited the personnel
elevator through the ceiling hatch. About to lose visual
contact. But they're in the shaft. Sealing all elevator shaft
doors except yours. Okay, they're shut in. Take them out--"
"--sir, Echo Unit has cleaned out the rest of the main
hangar. Awaiting further instructions--"
"Send them to help Charlie," Caesar Russell said, eyeing
the monitor with Shane Schofield on it.
"--Echo, this is Control, proceed to Level 1 hangar bay
for rendezvous with Charlie Unit--"
"--Alpha Unit, Presidential Detail is climbing the stairs.
Coming right for you. Delta Unit, the Level 6 fire door is unguarded.
You are free to enter the stairwell and engage--"
IT WAS ABSOLUTELY GIGANTIC.
An enormous subterranean hangar, roughly the same
size as the one up at ground level, perhaps even larger.
It had several aircraft in it, too.
One converted Boeing 707 AWACS plane, with the
characteristic flying-saucer-like rotodome mounted on its
back. Two sinister-looking B-2 stealth bombers, with their
black radar-absorbent paint, futuristic flying-wing design,
and angry furrowed-brow cockpit windows. And parked directly
in front of the stealth bombers, one Lockheed SR-71
Blackbird, the world's fastest operational aircraft, with its
sleek super-elongated fuselage and twin rear thrusters.
The massive airplanes towered above Schofield and his
team, dominating the cavernous space.
"What do we do now?" Mother asked.
Schofield was momentarily silent.
He was staring intently at the AWACS plane. It just
stood there silently, pointing toward the wide aircraft elevator
shaft.
Then he said, "We find out if what they're saying about
the President's heart is true."
THE AIR IN THE FIRE STAIRS WAS FILLED WITH FLYING BULLETS.
The Presidential Detail, down to three now, guided their
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charge up the stairs, leading with their guns, a makeshift array
of Uzis, SIG-Sauers and spare ankle revolvers.
A young male agent named Julio Ramondo led the way,
wound to his shoulder.
Special Agent Juliet Janson came after him, having assumed
command of the Detail more by action than protocol.
She guided the President along behind her.
The third and last surviving agent of the Detail--his
name was Curtis--covered their rear, firing down the stairs
behind them as they moved.
At twenty-eight, Juliet Janson was the most junior
member of the President's Detail, but that didn't seem to
matter now.
She had degrees in criminology and psychology, could
run a hundred meters in 13.8 seconds and was an excellent
marksman. The daughter of an American businessman father
and a Taiwanese university lecturer mother, she had a
flawless Eurasian complexion--smooth olive skin, a sharply
defined jawline, beautiful almond-brown eyes and shoulder
length jet-black hair.
"Ramondo! Can you see it!" she shouted above the
gunfire.
After the horror of their attempt to get to Level 6 and
the bloody death of Frank Cutler, the President and his Detail
had been left in the middle of a 7th Squadron sandwich.
The unit down on Level 6 was coming up after them,
while the unit that had chased them out of the common room
on Level 3 was closing in on them from above.
What that had left them with was a race--a race to get
to one of the floors in between Level 6 and Level 3 before
they faced fire from both above and below.
"Yes! I see it!" Ramondo yelled back. "Come on!"
Juliet Janson arrived on the landing next to Ramondo,
with the President beside her. Thumping footfalls echoed
down the stairwell above them, bullets ripped apart the walls
all around them.
Janson saw the nearest door, saw the sign on it:
Area 7 101
LEVEL 5: ANIMAL CONTAINMENT AREA
NO ENTRY
THIS DOOR FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY
ENTER VIA ELEVATORS AT OTHER END OF FLOOR
"I think this qualifies as an emergency," she said, before
blasting the door's locks with three shots from her
SIG-Sauer.
Then she kicked open the door and hauled the President
into Level 5.
BOOK II LOOKED UP INTO THE DARKNESS OF THE REGULAR elevator
shaft, saw the outer doors that led to the ground-level
hangar about fifty feet above him.
He was standing on top of the personnel elevator--now
stopped midway down the shaft--with Calvin, Elvis and Love Machine. A few widely spaced fluorescent lights illuminated
the enclosed concrete elevator well.
"Why did we have to get out of the elevator?" Elvis
asked.
"Cameras," Book II said. "We couldn't stay--"
"We'd have been sitting ducks if we'd stayed inside it,"
Calvin Reeves said, cutting in. "Gentlemen, as the ranking
officer here, I am taking command."
"So what's the plan then, Captain America?" Love Machine
asked.
"We keep moving--" Calvin began, but that was all he
got out, because at that moment, the outer doors above them
burst open and almost immediately three P-90 gunbarrels
appeared, bright yellow flashes bursting forth from their
muzzles.
A flurry of ricochets impacted all around the elevator.
Book II ducked and spun--and saw a series of vertical
counterweight cables running down the wall of the shaft,
disappearing down the side of the stationary elevator.
"The cables!" he yelled, scampering over to the wall,
not caring for the chain of command. "Everybody down! Now!"
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SHANE SCHOFIELD BURST INTO THE FORWARD CABIN OF THE
AWACS plane in the hangar on Level 1.
"Brainiac"
"Already on it," Brainiac headed aft, disappearing inside
the main cabin of the aircraft.
"Close the door," Schofield said to Mother, who had
come in last.
Schofield charged aft. The interior of the AWACS was
very similar to that of a commercial airliner--albeit a commercial
airliner that had had all its seats ripped out and replaced
by large flat-topped surveillance consoles.
Brainiac was already at one of the consoles. It was
whirring to life as Schofield took a seat beside him. Mother
and Gant went straight for the plane's two door-windows,
peered out through them.
Brainiac started typing at the console.
"Mother said it was a microwave signal," Schofield
said. "The satellite beams it down and then the radio chip on
the President's heart bounces the signal back up."
Brainiac typed some more. "Makes sense. Only a microwave
signal could penetrate the radiosphere over this base--and then only if it knew the trapdoor frequency."
"Trapdoor frequency?"
Brainiac kept typing. "The radiosphere over this base is
like an umbrella, a giant hemispherical dome of scrambled
electromagnetic energy. Basically, this umbrella of garbled
energy stops all unauthorized signals from either entering or
escaping the base. But, like all good jamming systems, it has
a designated frequency for use by authorized transmissions.
This is the trapdoor frequency--a microwave bandwidth
that wends its way through the radiosphere, avoiding the
jamming signatures. Kind of like a secret path through a
minefield."
"So this satellite signal is coming in on the trapdoor frequency?"
Schofield said.
"That's my guess," Brainiac said. "What I'm doing now
is using the AWACS's rotodome to search all the microwave
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frequencies inside this base. These birds have the best bandwidth
detection systems around, so it shouldn't take-- bingo. Got it."
He slammed his finger down on the enter key and a
new screen came up.
"Okay, you looking at this?" Brainiac printed out the
screen. "It's a standard rebounding signature. The satellite
sends down a search signal--they're the tall spikes on
the positive side, about 10 gigahertz--and then, soon after,
the receiver on the ground, the President, bounces that signal
back. Those are the deep spikes on the negative side."
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75
100
Brainiac circled the spikes on the printout.
"Search and return," he said. "Interference aside, the rebounding
signature seems to repeat itself once every twenty-five seconds. Captain, that Air Force general ain't lying.
There's something down here bouncing back a secure satellite
microwave signal."
75
100
"How do we know it isn't just a beacon or something?"
Schofield said.
"The irregularity of it," Brainiac said. "See how it isn't
quite a perfectly replicating sequence? See how, every now
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and then, there's a medium-sized spike in between the
search and the return signals?" Brainiac tapped the midsized
spikes inside two of the circles.
"So what does that mean?"<
br />
"It's an interference signature. It means that the source
of the return signal is moving."
"Jesus," Schofield said. "It's real."
"And it just got worse," Gant said from the window set
into the escape door on the left-hand side of the cabin.
"Have a look at this."
Schofield came over to the small window, looked out
through it.
And his blood went cold.
There must have been at least twenty of them.
Twenty 7th Squadron soldiers running quickly across
the hangar outside--P-90 assault rifles in their hands, ERG-6
masks covering their faces--forming a wide circle around
the AWACS plane, surrounding it.
IT WAS THE SMELL THAT HIT THEM FIRST.
It smelled like a zoo—that peculiar mix of animal excrement
and sawdust in a confined space.
Juliet Janson led the way into Level 5, pulling the President
along behind her. The other two Secret Service agents
hurried in after them, jamming the stairwell door shut behind
them.
They were standing in a wide, dark room, lined on three
sides with grim-looking cages—forged steel bars set into
walls of solid concrete. On the fourth side of the room were
some more modern-looking cages: these cages had clear,
floor-to-ceiling fiberglass walls and were filled with inky
black water. Janson couldn't see what lurked inside the
sloshing opaque water.
A sudden grunting sound made her spin.
There was something very large inside one of the steel
cages to her right. In the dim light of the dungeon, she could
make out a big, hairy, lumbering shape moving behind the
thick black bars.
There came an ominous scratching sound from the
cage—like someone dragging a fingernail slowly and deliberately
down a chalkboard.
Special Agent Curtis went over to the cell, peered into
the darkness beyond the bars.
"Don't get too close," Janson warned.
Too late.
A hideous bloodcurdling roar filled the dungeon as an
enormous black head—a blurred combination of matted
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hair, wild eyes and flashing six-inch teeth--burst out from