its door open and snapped his gun up ...
... and immediately saw Gant on the far side, beyond
the shattered remains of Kevin's cube, lying spread-eagled
up against a bizarre steel cross.
SCHOFIELD RAN ACROSS THE OBSERVATION AREA, SLID TO HIS
knees in front of Gant.
As he arrived before her, he dropped his P-90, clasped
her head gently in his hands and, without even thinking,
kissed her on the lips.
At first, Gant was a little stunned, then she realized
what was happening and she kissed him back.
When he pulled away, Schofield saw the two men on either
side of her.
First he saw Hagerty, out cold, similarly crucified.
Then he saw the dead Colonel Harper—saw the raw
pink flesh of his hacked-off lower body, saw his exposed
tailbone.
"Holy Christ ..." he breathed.
"Quickly," Gant said. "We don't have much time, he'll
be back soon."
"Who?" Schofield started unraveling her duct-taped
throat.
"Lucifer Leary."
"Oh, shit ..." Schofield started working faster. The tape
around Gant's neck came free. He started on her wrists ...
There came a loud resonating boom from within the
walls.
Schofield and Gant both looked up, eyes wide.
"The aircraft elevator ..." Schofield said.
"He must have gone upstairs," Gant breathed, "and now
he's back. Hurry ..."
Faster now, Schofield continued untying the tape
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around Gant's left wrist, but it was done too tightly. His fingers
fumbled with the tape. This was taking too long ...
He spun, saw some glass shards lying over by Kevin's
stagelike living area--shards that he could use to cut the
duct tape. He slid over toward them and sifted through them,
trying to find one that was sharp enough. He found one, just
as Gant called, "Scarecrow!" and he stood and turned--
--and found himself confronted by an extremely tall
broad-shouldered figure.
Schofield froze.
The figure just stood there before him--perhaps a yard
away, his face shrouded in shadow--absolutely motionless.
He towered over Schofield, gazing at him silently. Schofield
hadn't even heard him approach.
"Do you know why the weasel never steals from the alligator's
nest?" the shadowy figure asked. Schofield couldn't
even see the man's mouth move.
Schofield swallowed.
"Because," the figure said, "it never knows when the alligator
will return."
And then the giant man stepped into the firelight--
--and Schofield saw the most fearsome, evil-looking
face he'd ever seen in his life. The face was big--like its
owner--and it had a hideous black tattoo covering its entire
left side, a tattoo depicting five ragged claw marks scratched
down the length of the man's face.
Lucifer Leary.
He was absolutely enormous, too, at least six-foot
eight, with massive muscular shoulders and gigantic tree
trunk legs; almost a full foot taller than Schofield. He wore
prison-issue jeans and a sky-blue shirt with the sleeves ripped
off. His black eyes revealed not a trace of humanity--they
just stared at Schofield like empty black orbs.
Then Leary opened his mouth, smiling menacingly, revealing
foul yellow teeth.
The effect was mesmerizing, almost hypnotic.
Schofield shot a glance back over at Gant, at his P-90
lying on the floor in front of her. Then, in what he thought
area 7 441
was a quick draw, he whipped his two pistols from his thigh
holsters.
The guns barely got out of their sheaths. Leary had anticipated
the move.
Quick as a rattlesnake, he lunged forward and clamped
his fists around Schofield's gun hands, seizing them by the
wrists.
And then the bigger man started to squeeze.
Schofield had never felt such intense pain in his life. He
dropped to his knees, teeth clenched--his wrists held in
Leary's giant paws. Blood flow to his hands ceased. It felt as
if his fingers--bulging with redness--were going to burst.
He released his pistols. They clattered to the floor. Leary kicked them away.
Then, with the guns gone, he seized Schofield by the
throat, lifted him clear off the ground and hurled him across
Kevin's living area.
Schofield went crashing across the stage, sliding
through some toys, before he exploded through a still
upright section of glass and went tumbling off the far edge
of the stage.
Lucifer stalked around the elevated platform after him,
his every step crunching on broken glass.
Schofield groaned, tried to stand. He needn't have bothered.
Within seconds, Leary was there.
The massive killer lifted Schofield off the floor by his
combat webbing and punched him hard in the face, sending
his head snapping backwards.
Gant could only watch helplessly from her cross--her
hands still tightly bound, Schofield's P-90 lying on the floor
only inches away from her--as Lucifer pounded Schofield.
The fight was all one-way traffic.
Lucifer hit, Schofield recoiled, collapsed in a heap to
the floor.
Lucifer strode forward, Schofield struggled to stand up.
And then Lucifer hurled Schofield through the doorway
that divided Level 4, sending him sliding into the decompression
area.
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Lucifer followed him in.
Another kick and Schofield rolled--bleeding and gasping --up against the rim of the horizontal doorway in the
floor, filled as it was with lapping water.
And then from out of nowhere, a giant reptilian head
came bursting up out of the water and lunged at Schofield's
head.
Schofield rolled quickly, avoiding the fast-moving jaws
as they snapped down an inch away from his face.
Jesus!
It was a Komodo dragon. The largest lizard in the
world, a known man-eater. The President had said they kept
some of them here--along with the Kodiak bears, in cages
down on Level 5--for use on the Sinovirus project.
The electric locks on their cages, it seemed, hadn't survived
the power shutdown either.
At the sight of the Komodo dragon in the pool, a thin
smile cracked Lucifer's hideous face.
He lifted Schofield off the ground and held him out over
the reptile-infested pool.
As he hung above it, legs kicking, hands grappling at
Lucifer's enormous fists, Schofield saw the dark alligator
like bodies of at least two dragons in the water beneath him.
Then without so much as a pause, Lucifer dropped
Schofield into the pool.
Schofield splashed down into the water in an explosion
of foam, a moment before Lucifer pressed a button in the
floor beside the doorway, causing the hole's sliding garage
style door to close quickly over the ripples that marked the
spot where Schofield had plunged into it.
Within seconds, the leading edge of the door met the
opposite rim.
Ka-chunk.
Sealed. Shut.
Lucifer grunted a laugh as he heard Schofield's fists
banging on the underside of the sliding door, heard the
sloshing of water underneath the closed door--the sound of
the dragons mauling the foolish Marine.
Area 7 443
Lucifer smiled.
Then he headed back toward the other side of Level 4,
where the pleasure of carving up the pretty female soldier
awaited him.
libby gant gasped in horror as lucifer leary returned
alone to the observation area of Level 4.
No.
Lucifer couldn't have ...
No ...
The giant serial killer strode confidently across the wide
hall-like room, his head lowered, his eyes locked on Gant's.
He dropped to his knees in front of her, pushed his face
close to hers. His breath was foul--it reeked of eaten human flesh.
He stroked her hair.
"Such a shame, such a shame," he trilled, "that your
knight in shining armor was not the brave warrior he thought
himself to be. Which only leaves us, now, to get ... better acquainted."
"Not likely," said a voice from behind Lucifer.
The giant spun.
And there, in the doorway that led to the decompression
area, his whole body dripping with water, stood Shane
Schofield.
"YOU'LL HAVE TO GET RID OF ME," HE SAID GRIMLY, "BEFORE
you lay a finger on her."
Lucifer roared, snatched up Schofield's P-90 and let rip
with an extended burst.
Schofield just stepped behind the doorway, out of sight,
as the dividing wall all around the door was shredded by the
hailstorm of gunfire.
Within seconds, however, the gun ran dry and Lucifer
Area 7 445
discarded it and stormed across the observation area, into
the decompression area.
The horizontal door in its floor now lay open, wavelets
still lapping against its rims. The large outlines of the Komodo dragons were still visible beneath the pool's rippling
surface.
But, somehow, they hadn't killed Schofield.
And then Lucifer saw him, standing over by the decompression
chamber, to the right of the pool.
He charged at Schofield, lashed out with a ferocious
right.
Schofield ducked, walked under the punch. He was
calmer now, collected. Not so caught-by-surprise. He had
Lucifer's measure.
Lucifer spun, swung again. Another miss. Schofield
punished the error with a crisp hit to Lucifer's face.
Crack.
Instantly broken nose.
Lucifer seemed more stunned than injured. He touched
the blood that ran down from his nose as if it were an alien
substance, as if no one had ever hurt him before.
And then Schofield hit him again, a great powerful
blow, and for the first time, the big man staggered slightly.
Again, harder this time, and Lucifer took an unsteady
step backwards.
Again, another step backwards.
Again--the most violent punch Schofield had ever
thrown--and Lucifer's back foot touched the rim of the
pool. He turned slightly---just as Schofield nailed him in the
nose, causing the big man to lose his footing completely and
fall backwards ...
... into the Komodo-infested pool.
There was a great splash as Lucifer entered the water,
and as the foam subsided, the Komodos rushed him, swarming
all over his body, turning it into a writhing mass of black
reptilian skin, claws and tails, and in the middle of it all, Lucifer's kicking feet and agonized screams.
Then, abruptly, the pool turned a sickening shade of red
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and Lucifer's legs went still. The Komodos just continued to
eat his body.
Schofield winced at the sight, but then, if anyone deserved
to die such a horrific painful death, Lucifer Leary did.
Then Schofield hit the button that closed the floor door,
obliterating the foul sight, and hurried back to get Gant.
10:59.
Within a minute, Gant was unbound and standing next
to Schofield as he freed the bleary-eyed Hot Rod Hagerty.
Gant said, "You know, this birthday really has sucked." She nodded toward the decompression area. "What happened
in there? I thought Leary had ..."
"He did," Schofield said. "Bastard dropped me in a pool
filled with Komodo dragons."
"So how'd you get out?"
Schofield pulled out his Maghook. "Apparently reptiles
are exceptionally sensitive to magnetic discharges. I only
learned that little fact this morning, from a little boy named
Kevin. So I just flicked on my Maghook and they didn't
want to come near me. Then I opened the floor door up again
from below and came back for you. Sadly, Lucifer didn't
have a supercharged magnetic grappling hook on him when he fell in."
"Nice," Gant said. "Very nice. So where's the President,
"They're safe. They're outside the complex."
"So why are you back in here?"
Schofield looked at his watch.
It was exactly 11:00 a.m.
"Two reasons. One, because in exactly five minutes this
facility's self-destruct mechanism will be activated. Ten
minutes after that, this whole place will be vaporized, and
we can't allow that to happen while Caesar Russell is inside
it. So we either stop it from going off, or, if we can't do that,
we get Caesar Russell out of here before it does."
"Wait a second," Gant said, "we have to save Caesar?"
"It seems our host decided to put a radio chip on his
Area 7 447
own heart as well as the President's. So if he dies, so does
the country."
"Son of a bitch," Gant said. "So what was the second
reason?"
Schofield's face reddened slightly. "I wanted to find you."
Gant's face lit up, but she spoke matter-of-factly: "You
know, we can talk about this later."
"I think that would be good," Schofield said as Hagerty
came free of his bonds, blinking out of his stupor. "What do
you say we do it on another date?"
Gant broke out in a grin. "You bet."
11:01.
Schofield and Gant rode the detachable mini-elevator
swiftly up the main shaft, now armed only with Schofield's pistols ... Gant with the M9, Schofield with the Desert Eagle.
Schofield had sent Hagerty down to Level 6, to escape
via the Emergency Exit Vent. When he'd seen the hacked-up
half-body of Colonel Harper, Hagerty hadn't argued. He was
happy to get out of Area 7 as quickly as possible.
"I don't know if we'll be able to disarm the self-destruct
system," Gant said as Schofield gave her a shot of the
Sinovirus vaccine to protect her against the contaminated
hangar. "You have to enter a lockdown code by 11:05 to call
it off, and we don't know any of the codes."
"I've been working on that," Schofield said, pulling ou
t
his cell phone. He hit redial and Fairfax's voice came on the
line straight away.
"Mr. Fairfax, how goes it?"
"The lockdown termination code is 10502," Fairfax
said. "Hacked into the system from behind, from the source
code. Got it that way. Turns out it's the operator number of
the head dude there, an Air Force colonel named Harper."
"I don't think he'll be needing it anymore," Schofield
said. "Thank you, Mr. Fairfax. If I get out of this alive, I'll
buy you a beer sometime."
He hung up and turned to Gant.
"Okay. Time to turn off this nuclear time bomb. Then all
we have to do is capture Caesar alive."
area 7 449
they rose up the side of the darkened shaft.
Its great square-shaped opening up at ground level
loomed above them, backlit by orange firelight.
It turned out that Lucifer Leary had indeed brought the
main elevator platform down to Level 4. When they'd arrived
at the elevator shaft from the Level 4 observation lab,
Schofield and Gant had found the giant platform sitting right
there in front of them, piled high with no less than fifteen bodies--prisoners, 7th Squadron commandos, Marines and
White House staff--bodies which Leary no doubt planned
to dismember in strange and unusual ways.
As such, the shaft now yawned wide above Schofield
and Gant, open and airy.
As they traveled quickly up it, Gant reached underneath
the moving platform. She emerged with her Maghook, which she'd left attached to the underside of the mini elevator earlier.
"Get ready," Schofield said.
They had arrived at the main hangar.
THE HANGAR LOOKED LIKE HELL.
Literally.
Fires burned all over the place, bathing the enormous
space in a haunting orange glow. Bodies lay everywhere.
Assorted debris littered the area--the remains of blown
up helicopters, crumpled towing vehicles, the pieces of
Bravo Unit's failed barricade over by the internal building.
Nothing, it seemed, lay unscarred.
The slanted windows of the control room overlooking the
hangar were completely shattered. Even one of the giant
wooden crates hanging from the overhead crane system had a