the vast expanse of open water, swirling maniacally.
It was then that through the veil of wind-hurled sand,
Schofield saw them.
They were rounding the right-hand base of the mesa,
speeding away.
Five boats.
One large white powerboat that looked like a hydrofoil,
and four nimble bipods, also painted sand-yellow.
To Schofield's horror, at least a half-dozen slot canyons
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Matthew Reilly
branched out from the walls of this circular crater, like the
points on a clock, offering a multitude of escape routes.
He hit the gas, charged into the sandstorm, heading for
the southern end of the central mesa, hoping to take the
South Africans by surprise on the other side.
His bipod skipped over the water at incredible speed,
propelled by its powerful minijet engines. Brainiac and Herbie's bipod bounced along beside it, kicking up spray, jouncing
wildly through the horizontal rain of flying sand.
They rounded the left-hand end of the mesa--and saw
the five South African boats heading for a wide vertical
canyon that burrowed into the western wall of the crater.
They gave chase.
The South Africans must have seen them, because right
then two of their bipods peeled away from the main hydrofoil,
turning in a wide 180-degree arc, angling menacingly
toward Schofield's boats, their 7.62 mm machine guns flaring
to life.
Then suddenly--shockingly--the left-hand South African
bipod exploded.
It just blew out of the water, consumed in a geyser of
spray. One second it was there, the next it was replaced by a
ring of foaming water and a rain of falling fiberglass.
For its part, the right-hand South African bipod just
wheeled around instantly, abandoning this confrontation,
and took off after the other South African boats.
Schofield spun. What the--?
SHOOOOOMU
Without warning, three black helicopters came bursting
out of the sandstorm above the crater and plunged into the
canyon system from behind him!
The three choppers swung into the relative shelter of the
crater like World War II dive bombers, banking sharply before
righting themselves without any loss of speed. They
thundered over Schofield and his team, powering toward the
South African boats as they disappeared inside the slot
canyon to the west.
area 7 245
The choppers just shot into the narrow canyon after
them.
Schofield's jaw dropped.
In a word, the three helicopters looked awesome. Sleek
and mean and fast. They looked like nothing he had ever
seen before.
They were each painted gunmetal black and looked like
a cross between an attack helicopter and a fighter jet. Each
helicopter had a regular helicopter rotor and a sharply
pointed nose, but they were also possessed of downwardly
canted wings that extended out from their frames.
They were AH-77 Penetrators--medium-sized attack
choppers; a new kind of fighter-chopper hybrid that combined
the hovering mobility of a helicopter with the superior
straight-line speed of a fighter jet. With their black radar
absorbent paint, swept-back wings and severe-looking cockpits,
they looked like a pack of angry airborne sharks.
The three Penetrators shot forward, banking into the
narrow canyon after the four South African speedboats,
completely ignoring Schofield and his men.
And in a fleeting instant, Schofield had a strange
thought. What the hell were the Air Force people doing out
here? Weren't they after the President? What did they care
about Kevin?
In any case, this was now a three-way chase.
"Sir!" Brainiac's voice came in. "What do we do?"
Schofield paused. Decision time. A tornado of thoughts
whizzed through his mind--Kevin, Botha, the Air Force, the
President, and the unstoppable countdown on the Football
that at some point would force him to give up on this chase
and turn back ...
He made the call.
"We go in after them," he said.
schofield's bipod roared into the canyon the south
Africans and the Penetrators had taken, Brainiac and Herbie's bipod close behind it.
It was a particularly winding canyon, this one--left then right, twisting and turning--but, thankfully, sheltered
from the sandstorm.
About a hundred yards in, however, it forked into two
subcanyons, one heading left, the other right. Little did any of them know that the subcanyons of Lake Powell have a
habit of swinging back on each other, like interweaving
pieces of string, forming multiple intersections ...
Schofield saw the three Air Force choppers split up at
the fork--one going left, two going right. The four South
African rivercraft up ahead of them must have already split
up.
"Brainiac!" he yelled. "Go left! We'll take the right! Remember, all we want is the boy! We get him and then we high-tail it out of here, okay?"
"Got it, Scarecrow."
The two bipods parted--taking separate canyons--Schofield peeling right, Brainiac banking left.
for schofield, it was like entering a fireworks show-- a spectacular display of tracer bullets, missiles and dangerously
exploding rock.
He saw the two black choppers eighty yards up ahead-- trailing the lead hydrofoil and one of the South African
bipods. The two speeding helicopters stayed below the
canyon's rim--the raging sandstorm above the canyon system
area 7 24,
preventing them from going any higher--banking an<
turning with the bends of the winding canyon, their roto
blades thumping.
Tracer bullets streamed out from their nose-mounted
Vulcan cannons. Air-to-ground missiles streaked out from
their wings and blasted into the rocky walls of the canyon all
around the two South African speedboats.
For their part, the South Africans weren't exactly
either.
The men in the bipod had come prepared to protect the
lead hydrofoil--they had a shoulder-mounted Stinger missile launcher. While one man drove the bipod, the gunner
thrust the Stinger onto his shoulder and fired it up at the
trailing Penetrators.
But the Penetrators must have had the same ultrapowerful
electronic countermeasures that the AWACs planes inside
Area 7 had, because the Stingers just shot past them
spiraling wildly, careering into the walls of the canyon
where they detonated, sending showers of car-sized boulders
splashing down into the canal below--boulders which
Schofield had to swerve to avoid.
And then suddenly Schofield saw a long, white object
drop out of a hatch in the belly of one of the black choppers
and, dangling from a small drogue parachute, splash down
into the water.
A second later, the water beneath the chopper churned
into a froth and he saw a finger of bubbles stretch out from
the roiling section of water, heading straight for the South
African bipo
d.
It was a torpedo!
Five seconds later, completely without warning, the
speeding bipod exploded violently.
The force of the blast was so strong that it lifted the fast
moving bipod clear off the water's surface. Indeed, such was
the bipod's velocity that it tumbled end over end, totally out
of control, bouncing across the water's surface like a skimming
stone until it slammed--top-first--into the hard rock
wall of the canyon and blew apart.
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Matthew Reilly
Schofield drove hard, closing in, now fifty yards behind
the action. He needed to catch up, but the South Africans
had had too much of a head-start.
And then abruptly the canyon turned ...
... and intersected with its twin from the left--the subcanyon that Brainiac and Herbie had taken in pursuit of the
other two South African bipods--so that now the two
canyons formed a giant X-shaped junction.
And it happened.
the white south african hydrofoil shot into the intersection
from the top-right-hand corner of the X--at exactly
the same time as one of its own bipods entered the junction
from the bottom-right.
Speeding rivercraft shot every which way.
The hydrofoil and the bipod swerved to avoid each
other. Both fishtailed wildly on the water, sending a wall of
spray flying into the air--and losing all of their forward momentum
in an instant.
The second South African bipod from Brainiac's
canyon never even had a chance to slow down.
It just shot straight through the X-shaped junction like a
bullet--between the two boats that had been forced to stop,
blasting spectacularly through their spray--before zooming
off down the canyon ahead of it, heading west.
The three Air Force Penetrators--two from Schofield's
canyon, one from the other canyon--were also thrown into
chaos. One managed to haul itself to a halt, while the other
two whipped through the airspace above the junction, crossing
paths, missing each other by inches, and overshooting
the momentarily stalled boats below.
It was all Schofield needed.
Now he could catch up.
in his bipod, brainiac was still eighty yards short of
the X-junction.
He saw the mayhem in front of him--saw the restarting
hydrofoil, and the stalled South African bipod.
area 7 249
His gaze fell instantly on the hydrofoil, which was now
rotating laterally in the water, preparing to resume its run
down the canyon to the bottom-left of the X.
Brainiac cut a beeline for it.
SCHOFIELD ARRIVED AT THE JUNCTION JUST AS THE HYDROFOIL
peeled away to the south and Brainiac's bipod swooped into
the narrow canyon fast behind it.
"I'm going after the hydrofoil, sir!"
"I see you!" Schofield yelled.
He was about to follow when some movement to his
right caught his eye. He spun to look down the long high walled canyonway that stretched away from him to the west.
He saw one of the South African bipods disappearing
down the elongated canyonway--all on its own.
It was the bipod that had shot straight through the intersection,
from the bottom-right corner to the top-left. Curiously,
it was not even trying to return to give aid to the
hydrofoil.
Then, in a blink, the tiny bipod was gone, vanishing
down a narrow side canyon at the far end of the larger
canyonway.
And it hit Schofield.
The boy wasn't in the hydrofoil.
He was in the bipod.
That bipod.
"Oh, no," Schofield breathed as he snapped round and
saw Brainiac's speeding bipod disappear around a bend in
the southern canyon in pursuit of the hydrofoil.
"Brainiac ..."
brainiac's sand-colored bipod was moving fast.
Really, really fast.
It came alongside the speeding South African hydrofoil,
the two rivercraft hurtling down the narrow rock-walled
canal like a pair of runaway stock cars, with two of the Air
Force Penetrators firing wildly down on them as they did so.
"Brainiac, can--you hear--me--?" Schofield's garbled
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Matthew Reilly
voice said in Brainiac's ears, but in the roar of bullets, engines
and helicopter rotors, the young Marine couldn't make
out Schofield's words.
Brainiac got Herbie to use his pod's controls and bring
the bipod in close to the speeding hydrofoil while Brainiac
himself climbed out of his seat.
He watched the hydrofoil as they sped alongside it--saw its two strutlike bow-mounted skids carving through the
water--but he couldn't see inside the big speedboat's
smoked-glass windows.
Then, with a deep breath, he jumped--across the gap
between the two speeding boats--landing on his feet, on the
foot-wide side decking of the moving hydrofoil.
"--ainiac--out--of there!-- "
Schofield's voice was a blur.
Brainiac grabbed a handhold on the roof of the speeding
hydrofoil. He wasn't sure what he expected to happen next.
Perhaps some resistance--like someone throwing open one
of the hydrofoil's side doors and firing on him. But no resistance
Brainiac didn't care. He just dive-rolled onto the hydrofoil's
forward deck and blasted out the vehicle's windshield.
Glass flew everywhere and a second later, when the smoke
cleared, he saw the inside of the boat's cabin.
And he frowned.
The hydrofoil's cabin was empty.
Brainiac climbed inside--
--and saw the hydrofoil's steering controls moving of
their own accord, guided by some kind of computer
controlled navigation system, an anti-impedance system that
directed the vehicle away from all other objects, rock walls
and boats alike.
Then suddenly, in the silence of the cabin, Schofield's
voice was loud and alive in Brainiac's ear.
"For God's sake, Brainiac! Get out of there! The hydrofoil
is a decoy! The hydrofoil is a decoy! "
And at that moment, to his absolute horror, Brainiac heard a shrill beep that would signal the end of his life. [
area 7 251
A second later, the entire hydrofoil blew, its windows
blasting outwards in a shockingly violent explosion.
The force of the blast flipped Herbie's bipod, too, causing
the little speedboat to flip over onto its top and skid in a
gigantic spraying mess across the surface of the canal, before
it smashed into the wall of the canyon and stopped.
After the impact, the crumpled bipod just lay still,
droplets of water raining down all around it.
BACK AT THE X-INTERSECTION, SCHOFIELD WAS ABOUT TO
take off after the rogue South African bipod that had skulked
away from the fight when, from completely out of nowhere,
a line of bullet geysers shattered the water all around his
boat.
It was the fourth and last South African bipod firing on
him.
It had started up again and was now hea
ding eastward, back into the canyon that led to the crater with the mesa in
its middle.
Before Schofield could even think of a response, two
parallel lines of much bigger bullet geysers erupted all
around his sand-colored bipod. They hit so close, their spray
spattered his face.
This barrage of fire came from the third Penetrator helicopter,
which still hovered above the X-shaped junction,
turning laterally in midair, searching for Kevin. The black
chopper's six-barreled Vulcan cannon roared loudly as it
spewed forth a long tongue of bright yellow flames.
Schofield gunned the engine of his bipod, wheeling it
around to the left, away from the Penetrator's gunfire--but
also, unfortunately, away from the rogue bipod that he was
sure contained Kevin--instead taking off after the other South African bipod that had headed back east, toward the
crater with the mesa in it.
The Penetrator gave chase, lowering its nose, powering
forward like a charging T-rex, its thrusters igniting.
Schofield's bipod skimmed across the surface of the
area 7 253
water, its hull barely even touching the waves, trailing the
South African bipod through the winding rock-walled
canyon, the sharklike Penetrator looming in the air behind it.
"Any ideas?" Book II yelled from the gunner's pod.
"Yeah!" Schofield called. "Don't die!"
The Penetrator opened fire and two more lines of geysers
hit the water all around their speeding bipod.
Schofield banked left--hard--so hard that the boat's
left-hand pod lifted clear out of the water, just as a line of
bullets ripped up the choppy surface beneath it.
And then, just then, two torpedoes dropped out of the
bottom of the Penetrator.
Schofield saw them and his eyes widened.
"Oh, man."
One after the other, the torpedoes splashed down into
the water and a second later two identical fingers of bubbles
took off after the two bipods, charging up the water-filled
canyon behind them.
One torpedo immediately zeroed in on Schofield's boat.
Schofield cut right, angling for an oddly shaped boulder
that jutted out from the right-hand wall of the canyon. The
gently sloping boulder looked remarkably like a ramp ...