and was left hanging next to the sheer concrete wall a bare
eighty feet above the elevator platform, breathing hard, his
shoulders and arms aching from the jolt, but alive.
the two maghooks reeled schofield up the shaft
quickly.
"Warning. Six minutes to facility self-destruct."
It was 11:09 when Gant hauled him up over the rim of
the great pit.
"I thought you said the Harbour Bridge was impossible,"
she said dryly.
"Believe me, that was a very nice way to be proved
wrong," Schofield said.
Gant smiled. "Yeah, well I only did it because I wanted
another ..."
She was interrupted by a thunderous line of gunfire cutting
through the air all around them, ripping across both
their bodies.
A ragged bullet wound burst open near Gant's right
foot—shattering her ankle—while another two appeared on
Schofield's left shoulder. More bullets passed so close to his
face he felt their air trails swoosh past his nose.
Both Marines dropped, gritting their teeth, as Caesar
Russell came charging out of the internal building nearby,
his P-90 pressed against his shoulder, firing wildly, his eyes
gleaming with madness.
Schofield—hurt for sure, but far more mobile than
Gant—pushed Gant behind the remains of Bravo Unit's
crate barricade.
Then he grabbed her Beretta and made a loping dash the
other way, through the strobing red-on-black world, toward
the remains of Nighthawk Two over by the personnel elevator,
trying to draw Caesar's fire away from Gant.
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Matthew Reilly
The massive Marine Corps Super Stallion was still
parked in front of the regular elevator's doors--battered and
dented, its entire cockpit section blasted wide open.
Caesar's stream of bullets chewed up the ground at his
heels, but it was loose fire, and in the flashing red light, Caesar
missed wide.
Schofield made it to the Super Stallion, dived into its
exploded-open cockpit, just as the chopper's walls erupted
with bullet holes.
"Come on, hero!" Caesar yelled. "What's the matter? Can't shoot back? What're you afraid of? Go on! Find a gun
and shoot back!"
That, however, was the one thing Schofield couldn't do.
If he killed Caesar, he killed every major city in northern
America.
Goddamnit! he thought.
It was the worst possible situation.
He was being fired upon by a man he couldn't fire back at!
"Fox!" he yelled into his wrist mike. "You okay?"
A stifled grimace over his earpiece. "Yeah ..."
Schofield yelled, "We have to grab him and get him out
of here! Any ideas?"
Gant's reply was drowned out by the complex's electronic
voice.
"Warning. Five minutes to facility self-destruct ..."
Through a small door-window, Schofield saw Caesar
approaching the semi-destroyed helicopter from the side,
pummeling its flanks with his fire.
"You like that, hero?" the Air Force general yelled.
"You like that!"
Inside the blasted-open cockpit, everything was shuddering
and shaking under the weight of Caesar's fire.
Schofield clenched his teeth, gripped his gun. The two bullet
holes in his shoulder hurt like hell, but adrenaline was keeping
him going.
Through the cracked door-window of the Super Stallion
area 7 463
he saw Caesar--crazed and deranged--firing like a yee-ha
cowboy at the chopper, striding cockily around it, heading
toward its open cockpit.
Caesar would have him in about four seconds ...
Then suddenly Gant's voice exploded through his earpiece.
"Scarecrow! Get ready to shoot. There might be another
way ..."
"But I can't shoot!" Schofield yelled.
"Just give me a second here!"
OVER BY THE ELEVATOR SHAFT, GANT WAS CROUCHED OVER
the object she had been searching for earlier--the black box
that she had pilfered from the AWACS plane down on Level
2 ninety minutes earlier, the black box that she had surreptitiously
kicked away from the mini-elevator when she and
the President had arrived in the main hangar before.
In the flashing light of the complex, she pulled a small
red unit with a black stub antenna from the thigh pocket of
her baggy biohazard suit.
It was Russell's initiate/terminate unit--with its two
on-off switches marked "1" and "2."
It was only now that Gant understood why there were two switches on the unit.
This unit not only started and stopped the radio transmitter
on the President's heart, it also started and stopped
the transmitter on Caesar's heart.
caesar was almost at the blasted-open cockpit of the
chopper, his P-90 raised.
In a few seconds, he would have a clear shot at Schofield.
"I'm coming ...!" he cackled.
Schofield lay slumped on the floor inside the Super
Stallion, pinned down, looking out through its exposed forward
section.
Trapped.
"Fox--" he said into his mike.
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Matthew Reilly
"--WHATEVER YOU'RE GOING TO DO ... PLEASE DO IT SOON."
Gant was sweating, the world around her flashing red.
Her ankle throbbed painfully, but she had to concentrate--
"Warning. Four minutes to facility self-destruct ..."
She'd brought up the familiar spike pattern on the black
box's small LCD screen. Now she turned to the I/T unit.
The only question was which switch on the unit controlled
the President's transmitter and which controlled
Caesar's--1 or 2?
Gant had no doubt.
Caesar would make himself Number 1.
Then--in time with the spike screen on the black box,
in between its recurring search and return signals--she flicked the switch marked "1" on the initiate/terminate unit, switching off Caesar's microwave signal.
As soon as she did that, she switched on the black box's
microwave signal--using it to impersonate Caesar's signal.
If she'd done it right, the satellite in orbit above them
wouldn't be able to tell that it was a new return signal coming
back to it.
A tiny green strobe light on top of the black box started
blinking.
Gant keyed her radio mike.
"Scarecrow! I just took care of the radio signal! Nail the
bastard!"
As soon as gant said it, caesar came into schofield's
view.
The Air Force general smiled at the sight of Schofield,
slumped in the cockpit of the destroyed Super Stallion, defiantly
raising his ornamental pistol in defense.
Caesar wagged a finger at Schofield. "Oh, no, no, no, Captain, you're not allowed to do that. Remember, no shooting Uncle Caesar."
"No?" Schofield said.
"No."
"Oh ..." Schofield sighed.
Area 7 465
Then--blam!--quick as a flash, he snapped his gun up
and shot Caesar square in the chest.
A gout of blood erupted from Caesar'
s torso.
Blam! Blam! Blam!
Caesar reeled with each shot, staggering backwards, his
eyes bulging in astonishment, his face completely aghast.
He dropped his P-90 and fell unceremoniously to the floor,
landing hard on his butt.
Schofield rose to his feet, stepped out of the chopper
and strode over to the fallen Caesar, kicking the general's
P-90 away from his clawing fingers.
Caesar was still alive, but only just.
A trickle of blood gurgled out the side of his mouth. He looked pathetic, helpless, a shadow of his former self.
Schofield stared down at him.
"How ... how ... ?" Caesar stammered through the
blood. "You ... you can't kill me!"
"As a matter of fact, I could," Schofield said. "But I
think I'll leave that to you."
And then he hurried off to rejoin Gant and get the hell
out of Area 7.
"warning. three minutes to facility self-destruct ..."
Schofield carried Gant in his arms onto the detachable
mini-elevator. Her right ankle had been completely shattered
by Caesar's shot, and she couldn't walk on it at all.
But that didn't stop her contributing.
While Schofield carried her, she held the most important
black box in the world in her lap.
Their goal now ... more than saving their own lives ... was to get that flight data recorder out of Area 7 before it
was destroyed in the coming nuclear blast. If its signal
died now, everything they had fought for would be for
nothing.
"Okay, smart guy," Gant said, "how are we gonna get
out of this seven-story nuclear grenade?"
Schofield hit the floor panel of the mini-elevator and it
began to whiz down the wall of the shaft. He looked at his
watch.
11:12:30.
11:12:31.
"Well, we can't get out through the top door," he said.
"Caesar changed the code, and it took my DIA guy ten minutes to crack the lockdown codes. And I don't like our
chances of getting out through the EEV in time. It took
Book and me a good minute to come down through that
vent before. I can't imagine the two of us getting up it in
less than ten. And by then, that Escape Vent is gonna be vapor."
"So what are we going to do?"
Area 7 467
"There's one way," Schofield said, "if we can get to it in
time."
11:12:49.
11:12:50.
SCHOFIELD STOPPED THE MINI-ELEVATOR AT THE LEVEL 2
hangar, and still carrying Gant, hustled down its length,
making for the entry to the stairwell at the other end.
"Warning. Two minutes to facility self-destruct ..."
They reached the stairwell.
11:13:20.
Schofield burst into it, leapt down it with Gant in his
arms, taking the stairs three at a time.
They passed Level 3, the living quarters.
11:13:32.
Level 4, the nightmare floor.
11:13:41.
Level 5, the flooded floor.
11:13:50.
Schofield kicked open the door to Level 6.
"Warning. One minute to facility self-destruct ..."
He saw their escape vehicle right away.
The small X-rail maintenance vehicle still sat right next
to the stairwell door, on the track that led out to Lake Powell,
in the spot where it had been sitting all day.
Schofield remembered what Herbie Franklin had said
about the maintenance car before. It was smaller than the
other X-rail engines, and faster, too--just a round capsule
and four long struts, with room for only two people in its
podlike cabin.
"Forty-five seconds to facility self-destruct ..."
Schofield yanked open the pod's door, heaved Gant
into it, then he clambered up into the small round capsule
after her.
"Thirty seconds ..."
Schofield hit the black start button on the pod's console.
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Matthew Reilly
The compact X-rail engine hummed to life.
"Twenty seconds ... nineteen ... eighteen ..."
He looked at the tracks in front of him. They stretched
away into flashing red darkness, four parallel tracks converging
to a point in the far distance.
"Hit it!" Gant said.
Schofield jammed the throttle forward.
"Fifteen ..."
The small X-rail pod leapt off the mark, thundered forward,
shooting along the length of the underground subway
station, crashing through the strobing red shadows.
"Fourteen ..."
Schofield was thrust back into his seat by the speed.
The pod hit 50 mph.
"Thirteen ..."
The X-rail pod gained speed quickly. Schofield saw the
quartet of tracks both beneath and above the windshield
rushing past them.
100 mph.
"Twelve ... eleven ..."
Then suddenly--shoom!--the X-shaped pod entered
the tunnel leading out to Lake Powell, leaving Area 7 behind
it.
150 mph.
"Ten ..."
250 mph. Two hundred and fifty miles per hour equaled
about 110 yards per second. In ten seconds, they'd be nearly
a mile away from Area 7.
"Nine ... eight ..."
"Seven ... six ..."
He urged the little pod onward.
"Five ... four ..."
Gant groaned with pain.
"Three ... two ..."
The little maintenance pod rocketed through the tunnel,
Area 7 469
shooting away from Area 7, banking with every bend, moving
at phenomenal speed.
"One ...
"... facility self-destruct activated."
boom time.
IT SOUNDED LIKE THE END OF THE UNIVERSE.
The colossal roar of the nuclear explosion inside Area 7
was absolutely monstrous.
For a structure that had been designed in the Cold War
to withstand a direct nuclear strike, it did quite well containing
its own supernuclear demise.
The W-88 self-destruct warhead was situated inside the
walls of Level 2, roughly in the center of the underground
facility. When it went off, the whole underground complex
lit up like a lightbulb, and a white-hot pulse of energy rocketed
through its floors and walls—unstoppable, irresistible.
Everything inside the complex was obliterated in a
nanosecond ... aeroplanes, test chambers, elevator shafts.
Even the bloodied and broken Caesar Russell.
From his position on the floor of the main hangar, the
last thing he saw was a flash of blinding white light, followed
by an instant's worth of the most intense heat he had
ever felt in his life. And then nothing.
But to a large extent, the complex's two-foot-thick titanium
outer wall contained the blast.
The concussion wave that the momentous explosion
generated, however, shook the sandy earth well beyond the
structure's titanium walls, making it shudder and shake for
several miles around Area 7, the wave of expanding energy
fanning outward in concentric circles, like ripples in a pond.
The
first thing to go was the Emergency Exit Vent.
Its tight concrete walls were assaulted by the expanding
wall of energy within a second of the blast. They were
Area 7 471
turned instantly to powder. Had Schofield and Gant been inside
it, they would have been pulverized beyond recognition.
It was then, however, that the most spectacular sight of
all appeared.
Since the entire complex had effectively become a
hollowed-out shell, the superheavy layer of granite above
the underground section caved in on it.
From the sky above Area 7, it looked as if a perfectly
circular earthquake had struck the facility.
Without warning, an eight-hundred-yard-wide ring of
earth around the complex just gave way, turned to rubble,
and Area 7's buildings--the main hangar, the airfield tower,
the other hangars--were just swallowed by the earth, dropping
from sight, until all that remained in the place of Area 7
was a gigantic half-mile-wide crater in the desert floor.
From his position on board a Marine Corps Super Stallion
that had arrived at the complex only ten minutes earlier,
the President of the United States just watched it all go down.
Beside him, Book II, Juliet Janson and the boy named
Kevin just stared in stunned awe at the spectacular end of
Area 7.
DOWN IN THE X-RAIL TUNNEL, IT WASN'T OVER YET.
When the nuke had gone off, Schofield and Gant's
maintenance pod had been shooting through the tunnel like
a speeding bullet.
Then they'd heard the boom of the blast.
Felt the shudder of the earth all around them.
And then Schofield looked out through the rear window
of the two-person pod.
"Son of a ..." he breathed.
He saw an advancing wall of falling rock, rampaging through the tunnel behind them!
The roof of the tunnel was caving in, shattering into
pieces as the expanding pulse of the concussion wave rippled
outward from Area 7.
The problem was, it was catching up with them!
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Matthew Reilly
The X-rail pod shot through the tunnel at two hundred
and fifty miles per hour.
The advancing wall of falling rock shot forward after it,