Ramondo yanked the first three of them down from their upright positions, strewing the lockers in front of the door.
The prisoners began to shout and cry out.
Like all lifers, they could sense fear instantly, and they took pleasure in heightening it. Some yelled obscenities, others rattled their bars with enamel drinking mugs, others still just wailed a constant ear-piercing "Ahhhhhhhhh!"
Juliet bolted through the nightmare, grim-faced and determined.
She saw a gently-sloping ramp off to her right – fenced off by a big barred gate. The ramp seemed to lead up to the next level. She made for it.
"Hey, baby! You wanna go for a spin...on top of my flagpole!"
The President stared wide-eyed at the chaos all around him. Prisoners in blue denim uniforms, unshaven and crazed, leaned out from their cages, trying to grab him.
"Hey, old man. I bet you got a nice soft marshmallow ass..."
"Come on," Juliet yanked the President away from the voices.
They came to the barred gate.
As one would expect on a cell block, its lock was thick and strong. They couldn't shoot through it.
"Curtis," Juliet said crisply. "Lock."
Special Agent Curtis slid to his knees in front of the gate and pulled a high-tech-looking lock picking device from his coat pocket.
As Curtis unfolded his lock-picker, Janson scanned the area around them.
There was movement and noise everywhere. Arms flailed out of cell doors. Snarling faces tried to squeeze through the bars. And the shouting, the constant shouting.
"Ahhhhhhhh!"
None of the prisoners seemed to recognize the President.
They all just seemed to enjoy making noise, inciting fear...
Then abruptly, there came a loud boom from somewhere behind them.
Juliet spun, pistol up.
She was met by the sight of a Marine, his full dress uniform completely saturated, charging toward her with a Remington pump-action shotgun raised.
Behind the first man were three more Marines, also soaked to the skin.
The lead Marine lowered his shotgun when he saw Juliet and the President.
"It's okay! It's okay!" Book II said, coming closer, lowering the shotgun he had pilfered from the arms cabinet in the anteroom. "It's us!"
Calvin Reeves stepped forward, spoke seriously. "What's happened down here?"
Juliet said, "We've lost six people already, and those Air Force bastards are in the next room, right on our asses."
Behind her, Special Agent Curtis inserted his lock picker into the gate's lock, pressed a button.
Zzzzzzzzz!
The lock-picking device emitted a shrill dentist-drill like buzz. The lock clicked loudly and the gate swung open.
"What's your plan from here, Agent Janson?" Calvin asked.
"To be where the bad guys aren't," Juliet said. "First of all, by going up this ramp. Let's move."
Special Agents Curtis and Ramondo headed up the ramp first, followed by Calvin. Juliet pushed the President after them. Love Machine and Elvis went next. Book II fell into step beside Juliet, covering the rear.
Just as they were about to head up the ramp, however, they both heard a voice above the din.
"...Not a prisoner - a scientist! - know this facility - can help you!"
Juliet and Book II spun.
It took them a second to locate the owner of the voice.
Three cells down from the ramp, in the cell closest to the animal cage room.
The owner of the voice was standing up against the bars of his cell - which in the surrounding chaos had only made him look just like all the other prisoners.
But upon closer inspection, he looked considerably different from the others. He wasn't wearing a blue denim inmate uniform. Rather, he wore a white lab coat over shirtsleeves and a loosened tie.
Nor did he look deranged or menacing. Quite the opposite, in fact. He was short, with glasses and thinning blond hair that looked like it had been combed every day of his life.
Juliet and Book came to his cell.
"Who are you?" Juliet shouted above the din.
"My name is Herbert Franklin!" he replied quickly. "I'm a doctor, an immunologist! Until this morning, I was working on the vaccine! But then the Air Force people locked me in here!"
"You know this facility?" Book II yelled. Beside him, Juliet stole a glance at the heavy door leading back to the animal cage room. It was banging from the other side.
"Yes!" the man named Franklin said.
"What do you think?" Book II asked Juliet.
She pondered it for a moment.
Then she shouted up the ramp: "Curtis! Quickly! Get back here! I got another lock I need opened!"
Two minutes later, they were all heading up the ramp, now with a new member added to their group.
As they raced up the sloping walkway, however, making for the next floor, none of them noticed the layer of expanding water that lapped up against the bottom of the ramp.
* * *
When Schofield's runaway AWACS plane had crashed down onto it, the massive aircraft elevator platform had been parked on Level 4 - at the spot where the President's entourage had left it nearly an hour earlier.
Now, the crumpled remains of the Boeing 707 lay sprawled across the width of the elevator platform.
Gnarled pieces of metal lay everywhere. A couple of tires had been thrown clear with the impact. The plane itself lay pointed downwards, tilted over on its side, its nose dented sharply inwards, its left-hand wing broken in half, crushed beneath the plane's tremendous weight. Miraculously, the AWACS plane's thirty-foot flying-saucer-like rotodome had survived the fall completely intact.
Shane Schofield stepped out of the wreck of the plane, followed by Gant, Mother and Brainiac. They jumped over the debris as they ran for the giant steel door that led to Level 4.
A smaller door set into the base of the gigantic door opened easily.
No sooner had they opened it than Schofield raised his gun and fired. The shot smashed into a wall-mounted security camera, blasting it to oblivion in a shower of sparks.
"No cameras," he said as he walked. "That's how they're following us."
The four of them made their way up a short upwardly sloping corridor. A squat solid-looking door loomed at the end of it.
Mother spun the flywheel on it and the big door swung open.
Schofield stepped through the doorway first, his nickel plated pistol leading the way.
He emerged inside a laboratory of some sort. Supercomputers lined the walls, their lights blinking. Keyboard terminals and data screens and clear-plastic experiment boxes occupied the remaining bench space.
Otherwise, the lab was deserted...
Blam!
Gunshot.
Blam!
Another.
It was Gant, exterminating a couple of security cameras.
Schofield continued to scan the wide room.
The most dominant feature of the laboratory was a line of slanted glass windows that lay directly opposite the entrance.
He stepped up to the observation windows and peered out through them - and found himself looking out over a wide, high ceilinged room, in the center of which stood a gigantic glass cube.
The cube was freestanding, occupying the center of the hall-like room, but without touching its ceiling or walls.
The wall on the far side of the cube - a wall which divided this level in two - didn't quite reach the ceiling. Rather, it stopped about seven feet short of it, replaced by thick glass. Through that glass, Schofield saw a series of crisscrossing catwalks suspended above whatever was on the other side of the floor.
But it was the cube in front of him that held his immediate attention.
It was about the size of a large living room. Such a conclusion was easy to come to, given that the glass cube was filled with regular household furniture - a couch, a table, chairs, a TV with PlayStation 2 and, most strangely of all,
a single bed draped with a Jar Jar Binks doona cover.
Some toys lay strewn about the glass-enclosed living room. Matchbox cars. A bright yellow Episode I spaceship. Some picture books.
Schofield shook his head.
It looked like the bedroom of a little boy.
It was at that precise moment that the occupant of the glass cube ambled casually out from a discreetly curtained off corner of the cube - the toilet.
Schofield's jaw dropped.
"What on earth is going on here?" he breathed.
* * *
There was a set of stairs on the northern side of the elevated lab leading down to the cube.
When he reached the base of the stairs, Schofield walked alongside the dividing wall that sealed this section off from the eastern side of the floor. Gant walked with him. Mother and Brainiac stayed up in the observation lab.
Schofield and Gant came to a halt before the giant freestanding cube, gazed into it.
The occupant of the glass cube saw them coming, and casually walked over to the edge of the completely sealed structure.
The occupant arrived at the clear glass barrier in front of Schofield, cocked his head to one side.
"Hey, mister," the little boy said.
* * *
"...Sir, I have complete visual blackout in the labs on Level 4. They've started shooting the surveillance cameras..."
"I'm surprised it took them this long," Caesar Russell said. "Where is the President?"
"Level 5, moving up the ramp to Level 4."
"And our people?"
"Alpha Unit is in position, waiting in the decompression area on Level 4. Delta Unit has been stopped in the animal containment area on Level 5."
Caesar smiled.
Although Delta was momentarily halted, the theory behind its movements was sound. Delta was forcing the President up through the complex - to where Alpha was waiting...
"Tell Delta to get through that doorway and push up the ramp, and cut off the President's retreat."
* * *
He couldn't have been more than six years old.
And with a bowl-shaped shock of brown hair that came down to his eyes, Disneyland T-shirt and Converse sneakers, he looked like any of a million American kids.
Only this kid lived inside a glass cube, in the belly of a top-secret United States Air Force base.
"Hey there," Schofield said warily.
"Why are you frightened?" the boy asked suddenly.
"Frightened?"
"Yes, you're frightened. What are you scared of?"
"How do you know I'm frightened?"
"I just know," the boy said cryptically. He spoke with such a serene, even voice that Schofield felt like he was in some kind of dream. "What's your name?" the boy asked.
"Shane. But most people call me Scarecrow."
"Scarecrow? That's a funny name."
"What about you?" Schofield said. "What's your name?"
"Kevin."
"And your last name?"
"What's a last name?" the boy asked.
Schofield paused.
"Where are you from, Kevin?"
The boy shrugged. "Here, I guess. I've never been anywhere else. Hey, do you want to know something?"
"Sure."
"Did you know that Twinkies give kids half their daily glucose requirement as well as giving them a tasty snack?"
"Uh, no, I didn't know that," Schofield said.
"And that reptiles are so sensitive to variations in the earth's magnetic field that some scientists say they can predict earthquakes? Oh, and nobody knows news like NBC," the boy said earnestly.
"Is that so?" Schofield exchanged a glance with Gant.
Just then, a loud mechanical noise echoed out from the other side of the dividing wall.
Schofield and Gant spun, and through the glass section at the top of the wall, saw the lights on the other side of Level 4 suddenly and unexpectedly go out.
* * *
The president of the United States moved cautiously up the ramp that linked Level 5 to Level 4, surrounded by three Secret Service agents, four United States Marines and a lone bookish scientist.
At the top of the ramp was a large retractable grille - kind of like a garage door mounted horizontally.
Juliet Janson hit a switch on the wall and the horizontal door began to slide open, revealing ominous darkness above it.
* * *
"Ramp door is opening..." One of the Tenth Squadron commandos inside the Level 4 decompression area whispered into his radio mike.
The other nine members of Alpha Unit were arrayed around the eastern section of the floor in various hiding places - their guns focused on the ramp in the center of the room. With their half gas masks and night-vision goggles they looked like a gang of insects waiting for the kill.
The horizontal door slid slowly open, casting a wide beam of light up into the darkened room. The only other light in the area came through the section of glass at the top of the wall which divided this level in two.
"Stay out of sight until they're all up on level ground," Kurt Logan said from his position. "No one gets out alive."
* * *
The two secret service agents Curtis and Ramondo stepped up into the semi-darkness first, armed with their Uzis. They were followed by Calvin Reeves and Elvis.
The President came next, with Juliet Janson by his side. He held a small SIG-Sauer P-228 pistol awkwardly in his hand. Juliet had given it to him, just in case.
Behind them came the scientist, Herbert Franklin, and bringing up the rear, Book II and Love Machine, both armed with pump-action shotguns.
As soon as he stepped up into the semidarkness, Book II didn't like it.
Various structures loomed around them. To his immediate right, on the southern side of the enormous room, was a long hexagonal chamber. To his left, shrouded in deep shadow, he saw eight telephone-booth-sized chambers. In the hazy light filtering through from the other side of the floor, he could just make out a series of catwalks high up near the ceiling, twenty feet above the floor.
As soon as Book II stepped clear of the floor-level doorway, its horizontal door slid smoothly back into place near his feet, sealing the exit.
Calvin had hit a switch in the floor nearby, closing it.
Book II swallowed. He would have preferred to keep that door open.
He flicked on a heavy police flashlight he had taken from the Level 5 anteroom. Holding it under the barrel of his shotgun, he played its beam over the room around them.
Calvin Reeves assumed command of strategy.
"You two," he whispered to Curtis and Ramondo, "check behind those telephone booths, then take the stairwell door. Haynes, Lewicky, Riley" - he said, using Elvis's, Love Machine's and Book II's surnames - "the area behind this decompression chamber, then secure that other door," he pointed toward the dividing wall. "Janson. You and I stay with the Boss."
Curtis and Ramondo disappeared in among the test chambers, then, moments later, reappeared at the stairwell end.
"No one back there," Ramondo said.
Book II, Elvis and Love Machine entered the darkness behind the decompression chamber. A narrow, empty section of floor greeted them. Nothing.
"Clear back here," Book II said, as the three Marines emerged from behind the long hexagonal chamber. They headed for the door in the dividing wall.
Reeves was following standard tactics in close-quarter, indoor engagements - where there is no sign of the enemy, secure all exits, then consolidate your position.
It was his biggest mistake.
Not only because it limited his options for retreat, but because it was exactly what Kurt Logan - already inside the room - was expecting him to do.
While Elvis and Love Machine headed for the dividing wall, Book II played his flashlight over the thirty-foot-long decompression chamber. It was absolutely huge.
At the end of the elongated chamber, he found a small glass porthole, and shone his light in through
it.
What he saw made him jump.
An Asian face stared back at him, a man's face, pressed up against the glass.
The Asian man was smiling cheerfully.
And then he pointed up - toward the roof of the decompression chamber.
Book II followed the man's finger with his flashlight and peered up at the top of the decompression chamber - and found himself staring into the mantislike face of a 7th Squadron commando wearing night-vision goggles and a gas mask!
The flashlight was the only thing that saved Book II's life.
Primarily because it blinded the man hiding on top of the decompression chamber, if only for a moment. The man shied away from the light as his night-vision goggles magnified its beam by a factor of 150.
That was all the time Book II needed.
His shotgun boomed, blasting the commando's goggles to pieces, sending him flying off the top of the chamber.
It was a small victory, for at that exact moment, gunfire erupted around the darkened room as a legion of dark figures emerged from their positions on top of the decompression chamber and inside the telephone-booth-like test chambers and rained hell on Book's hapless group in the center of the floor.
Over by the stairwell door, Curtis and Ramondo were assaulted by a barrage of P-90 gunfire from both flanks. They were cut down where they stood, their bodies riddled with bloody wounds.
Juliet Janson crash-tackled the President, hurling him to the floor at the base of the decompression chamber, just as a volley of rounds whistled past their heads.
Calvin Reeves wasn't so lucky.
The crossfire of bullets ripped into the back of his head, and he jolted suddenly upright, then dropped to his knees, a look of stunned dismay on his face - as though he had done everything right, and still lost. Then his face smacked down hard against the floor, right next to the spot where Herbert Franklin lay with his head in his hands.
Bullets sizzled through the air.
Juliet yanked the President to his feet, firing with her free hand, dragging him toward the cover of the lab benches over by the dividing wall, when suddenly she saw a 7th Squadron commando rise up from the roof of the decompression chamber and take aim at the President's head.
She brought her gun around. Not fast enough...
Blam!
The 7th Squadron man's head exploded, his neck snapping backwards. His body tumbled off the decompression chamber.
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