about themselves, only to be met by the 7th Squadron
unit that had been stationed on the eastern side of the floor.
The White House men and women were cut down
where they stood, hit head-on by a wave of merciless fire.
Their bodies convulsed and shuddered under the weight of
the brutal onslaught.
And then suddenly Book II heard a shout and he looked
up and saw Gunman Grier burst out of the remains of the
northern office, yelling with rage, his nickel-plated Beretta
up and firing.
No sooner had he appeared, however, than Grier's chest
literally exploded in a gout of red as two 7th Squadron
troopers blasted him at the same time.
The force of their fire pummeled Grier's body, keeping
him standing long after he was dead--sending him staggering
backwards, reeling with each impact, until he slammed
into a wall and fell to the ground in a heap.
"This is a real fucked-up situation!" Elvis yelled above
the gunfire. "There's no way out of here!"
"Over there!" Book II pointed at the regular elevator on
the northern side of the hangar. "That's the only way out I
can see!"
"But how do we get there?"
"We drive!" Book n shouted, nodding at one of the big
towing vehicles attached to the tail boom of Nighthawk
Two, ten yards away.
THE FOUR RADIO MEN INSIDE THE CONTROL ROOM SPOKE rapidly
into their headsets.
"--Bravo Unit, close down all remaining hostile agents
inside that northern office--"
Area 7
"--Alpha Unit is in pursuit of Presidential Detail down
the eastern fire stairs--"
"--Charlie Unit, break off from the main hangar, I
have visual on four Marines heading down the primary air
vent--"
"--Delta Unit, be patient, maintain your position--"
"what do you mean, they attached a radio transmitter
to his heart?" Schofield said as he made his way down the
vertical ventilation shaft, his feet splayed wide, pressed
against its silver steel walls.
Gant and Brainiac were farther down, shimmying their
way quickly down the vent, a seemingly bottomless drop beneath
them.
"If his heart stops, the bombs go off, in every major airport,
in every major city," Mother said.
"Jesus," Schofield said.
"And he's got to report in every ninety minutes, to reset
a timer on the Football. Again, if he doesn't, boom"
"Every ninety minutes?" Schofield pressed a button on
his old digital watch, starting a timer of his own. He gave it
a few minutes head-start. It started ticking down from 85:00
minutes--85:00 ... 84:59 ... 84:58--when abruptly, he
heard a clattering noise from somewhere above him and he
snapped his head up--
Bullets sprayed everywhere.
Peppering the metal walls all around him and Mother.
Schofield saw a P-90 rifle sticking over the rim of the
ventilation shaft--held by someone out of sight--firing
wildly down into it.
"Scarecrow!" Gant called from ten feet below them.
She was crouched inside a small horizontal tunnel that
branched off the main vertical shaft. "Down here!"
"Go, Mother! Go!" Schofield yelled.
Both he and Mother released their footholds on the
shaft's walls and let themselves slide down the vertical vent.
Whooosh!
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Matthew Reilly
They shot down the narrow vertical tunnel, sizzling-hot
bullets impacting all around them, before--reeeech!--they
dug their heels into the shaft's walls just short of the horizontal
tunnel.
Mother came to a perfect halt right in front of it.
Schofield, however, overshot the cross-vent, but somehow
managed to throw his hands out and grip it with his fingertips,
a split second before he would have fallen several hundred feet to his death.
Mother stepped inside the cross-vent first, then hauled
Schofield into it after her, not a moment before a long abseiling
rope dropped down the vertical shaft above them.
The 7th Squadron was coming.
Up ahead, Gant ran in the lead, closely followed by
Brainiac. The silver-walled tunnel was about five feet
square, so they all had to crouch slightly to run through it.
Gant came around a slight bend on the tunnel and saw
light up ahead. She sped up--and then lurched to a sudden
halt, clutching desperately for a handhold.
She stopped so suddenly that Brainiac almost bowled
right into her. It was lucky he pulled up in time. A collision
would have sent both of them falling a hundred and eighty
feet straight down.
"Fuck me ..." Brainiac said.
"What's the holdup--?" Mother said as she and
Schofield arrived on the scene. "Oh ..."
Their tunnel ended at the main elevator shaft.
The giant concrete-walled chasm, two hundred feet
across, yawned before them.
On the other side of it, directly opposite them, they saw
an enormous heavy steel door with a black-painted "I" on it.
It looked like a hangar door of some sort.
And nearly two hundred feet below them--parked at
the fourth underground level--they saw the wide hydraulic
elevator platform.
"You know, it's at times like this I wish I had a
Maghook," Schofield said. A Maghook was a combined
Area 7 89
grappling hook and high-powered magnet--the signature
weapon of Marine Recon Units.
"There are a couple upstairs in Nighthawk Two,"
Mother said.
"Wouldn't do us any good," Gant said. "Distance is too
far. A Maghook has a maximum rope length of a hundred
and fifty feet. This is at least two hundred."
"Well, we better think of something," Brainiac said,
looking back down the cross-vent, listening to the whizzing
sounds of the 7th Squadron men abseiling down the main
vertical shaft beyond it.
Schofield looked at the wide concrete chasm in front of
them. It was clearly well used--covered in grime and
grease.
Indented at regular intervals on its walls, however, were
a series of thin rectangular conduits--small horizontal gutters
cut into the shaft's concrete walls. Each gutter was
about six inches deep and ran right around the enormous elevator
shaft, circling it. They were designed, it seemed, to
house wires and cabling without hindering the elevator platform's
upward and downward movement.
But right now, they afforded Schofield no escape.
Boom!
He spun. It was the sound of heavy boots clanging on
metal.
The 7th Squadron men had arrived at the other end of
the horizontal tunnel.
the air force men moved fast, racing half-crouched
down the cross-vent, guns up.
There were four of them--all wearing black combat
gear: helmets, gas masks, body armor. Unsure of which
cross-tunnel Schofield's group had taken, the others in their
unit had gone farther down the vertical vent to check the
other levels.
The two lead men rounded the bend in the tunnel--and
stopped.
Matthew Reilly
They had come to the end of the horizontal cross-vent,
to the point where it met the massive elevator shaft.
But there was no one there.
The end of the tunnel was empty.
when the president of the united states visits a certain
venue, the Secret Service has always plotted in advance at
least three alternate exit routes, in case of emergency.
In big-city hotels, this usually comprises a back entrance,
a service entrance--say, through the kitchen--and
the roof, for lift-out via helicopter.
At Area 7, the Secret Service had sent two advance
teams to secure and then guard the alternate exit points that
they had chosen.
Alternate Exit Point 1 was on the lowest level of Area 7--
Level 6. The exit itself was the eight-hundred-yard-long Emergency
Exit Vent that opened onto the desert floor about half a
mile from the low mountain that covered the base. The first Secret
Service advance team was stationed down on Level 6, the
second up at the Vent's exit on the desert floor itself.
fire stairs, a hailstorm of bullets sizzling past their cheeks,
shooting right through their flailing coats. The 7th Squadron's
first unit--Alpha Unit, led by Major Kurt Logan--was close
behind them.
They came to a firedoor that read: level 4: laboratory
facilities. Dashed past it.
More stairs, another landing, another door. This one had
a larger sign on it:
LEVEL 5: ANIMAL CONTAINMENT AREA
NO ENTRY
THIS DOOR FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY
ENTER VIA ELEVATORS AT OTHER END OF FLOOR
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Matthew Reilly
The President ran right past it.
They arrived at the bottom of the stairwell--at a door
marked: level 6: x-rail station.
Frank Cutler was running in the lead. He came to the
door, yanked it open--
--and was immediately assaulted by a ferocious barrage
of automatic gunfire.
Cutler's face and chest became a ragged bloody mess
as a relentless wave of bullets rammed into it. The Chief of
the Detail went flying back into the stairwell, skidding
across the floor, the man immediately behind him also going
down.
Another agent--a young female named Juliet Janson-- dived forward and slammed the door shut again, but before
she did she got a fleeting, horrifying glimpse of the area beyond
it.
The sixth and lowest level of Area 7 looked like an underground
subway station--with a flat, raised platform sitting
in between two sets of extra-wide railway tracks. The
door to the Emergency Exit Vent--their goal--lay buried in
the concrete wall of the right-hand track.
Positioned on the train tracks in front of that door, however,
and covered by the station's chest-high platform, was a
whole other unit of 7th Squadron soldiers, all with their
P-90's trained on the fire escape.
In front of the 7th Squadron men, lying facedown in
their own blood, lay the bullet-riddled bodies of the nine
members of the Secret Service's Advance Team One.
The door slammed shut and Special Agent Juliet Janson
turned.
"Quickly!" she shouted. "Back up the stairs! Now!"
"--ALL UNITS, BE AWARE, DELTA UNIT HAS ENGAGED THE
enemy--" one of the radio men in the control room said.
"Repeat, Delta Unit has engaged the enemy--"
shane schofield tried not to breathe, tried not to make a sound.
Area 7 93
All they had to do was look over the edge.
He was hanging by his fingertips from one of the horizontal
cabling gutters carved into the concrete wall of the elevator
shaft, a bare three feet below the mouth of the
cross-vent he had been standing in only moments before.
Standing in that cross-vent right now were the four
heavily armed 7th Squadron men who had stormed it only
seconds earlier.
Beside him, Mother, Gant and Brainiac were also clinging
to the cabling gutter with their fingers.
Above them, they could hear one of the 7th Squadron
men speaking into his helmet mike.
"Charlie Six, this is Charlie One, they're not in the
Level 1 cross-vent. Copy that, we're on our way."
Heavy footsteps, then nothing.
Schofield sighed with relief.
"Where to now?" Brainiac asked.
"There," Schofield said, jerking his chin at the giant
steel hangar door on the opposite side of the wide elevator
shaft.
"YOU READY?" BOOK II YELLED TO ELVIS.
"Ready!" Elvis shouted back.
Book II looked out at the big white-painted Volvo towing
vehicle attached to the tail boom of Nighthawk Two ten
yards away. With its oversized tires, low-slung body and
small two-man driver's cabin, it looked like either a brick on
wheels or a giant cockroach. Indeed, it was this resemblance
that had earned the towing vehicle the nickname "cockroach"
among airport workers around the world.
At the moment, Nighthawk Two's cockroach was facing
outwards, pointed at the armor-plated titanium door that had
hangar.
Book II was now holding two nickel-plated Berettas in
his hands, one his own, the other pilfered from a dead Marine
nearby. He shouted to Elvis, "You take the wheel! I'll
go for the other side!"
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Matthew Reilly
"You got it!"
"Okay! Now."
The two of them leapt to their feet and dashed out into
the open together, their legs moving in time.
Almost instantly, a line of bullets raced across the
ground behind them, nipping at their heels.
Elvis flung himself into the driver's seat, slammed the
door shut behind him. Book II made for the passenger side,
but he was met with a brutal volley of gunfire, so instead he
just dived onto the towing vehicle's flat steel roof and yelled,
"Elvis! Punch it!"
Elvis keyed the ignition. The Volvo's big 600horsepower
engine roared to life. Then Elvis jammed it into gear
and floored it.
The towing vehicle's tires squealed as they shot off the
mark, heading straight for the armored door that cut the
hangar off from the outside world, taking Nighthawk Two,
a full-sized CH-53E Super Stallion transport helicopter,
with it!
The two remaining units of 7th Squadron men in the
hangar--twenty men in total--swept across the hangar on
foot, pursuing the speeding cockroach with their guns.
A wave of supercharged bullets pummeled the big
Volvo's sides.
Elvis yanked on the steering wheel and the big cockroach
swung around, rocketing toward the southern glass
walled office.
On its roof, Book II raised himself on one knee and fired
both his pistols
at the oncoming 7th Squadron commandos.
It didn't do much good--the Air Force assassins had
him outgunned. It was like attacking a battery of Patriot missiles
with a peashooter. He ducked back behind the cockroach's
cabin amid a flurry of return fire.
"Oh, crap!" Elvis shouted from the driver's cabin.
Book II looked up.
A lone 7th Squadron commando stood about thirty
yards in front of them--right in their path--on the southern
Area 7 95
side of the central elevator shaft, with a Predator antitank
rocket launcher hefted onto his shoulder!
The commando pulled the trigger.
There was a puff of smoke before a small cylindrical
object came blasting out of the launcher, shooting toward
the speeding cockroach at phenomenal speed, leaving a
dead-straight vapor trail in the air behind it.
Elvis reacted quickly, did the only thing he could think
to do.
He yanked his steering wheel hard to the left.
The massive Volvo towing vehicle rose onto two wheels
as it swung violently left--and for a moment it looked like it
was going to drive straight into the yawning chasm that was
the elevator shaft.
But it just kept turning ... turning ... wheels screeching
... until suddenly it was heading north, along the narrow
section of floor in between Marine One and the elevator
shaft.
Nighthawk Two wasn't so lucky.
Since it was bouncing along--in reverse--behind the
runaway cockroach, Elvis's sudden turn had brought it directly
into the missile's line of fire.
The Predator hit it, slamming into Nighthawk Two's reinforced
glass cockpit at tremendous speed.
The result was nothing short of spectacular.
The whole front section of the CH-53E Super Stallion
exploded magnificently--blasting out in an instant, showering
the area behind the quickly moving helicopter with glass
and twisted metal, leaving the chopper with a jagged metal hole where the glass bubble of its cockpit was supposed to be!
The impact of the missile had also destroyed the landing
wheels under the nose of the chopper. So now the giant
helicopter was being hauled behind Elvis's towing vehicle
with its nose--or what was left of it--dragging wildly on