Area 7

by Matthew Reilly

  It was 9:06 a.m.

  * * *

  "...Bravo leader, come in. Report..." one of the radio operators said into his microphone.

  "...Control, this is Bravo Leader. We have suffered serious casualties on the X-rail platform. Five dead, two wounded. One of their guys had an RDX grenade and did a fucking kamikaze..."

  "...What about the President?" the radio man cut in.

  "...The President is still in the complex. I repeat: The President is still in the complex. Last seen heading back up the fire stairs. Some of his Marine bodyguards, though, took off down the tunnel in the second X-rail train..."

  "...And the Football?"

  "...No longer with the President. One of my boys swears that he saw that Schofield guy with it on the train..."

  "...Thank you, Bravo Leader. Bring your wounded up to the main hangar for treatment. We'll get Echo to flush the lower floors for the President now..."

  * * *

  "Gunther Botha used to be a colonel in south africa's Medical Battalion," Herbie said, as the X-Rail car hurtled down the tunnel toward the desert lake.

  "The Meds," Schofield said distastefully.

  "You've heard of them?"

  "Yes. Not a very nice group to be involved with. They were an offensive bio-medical unit, a specialized subdivision of the Reccondos. Elite troops who used biological weapons in the field."

  "That's right," Herbie said. "See, before Mandela, the South Africans were the world leaders in biowarfare. And, boy, did we love them. Ever wondered why we didn't do all that much about defeating apartheid? Do you know who brought us the Soviet flesh-eating bug, necrotizing fasciitis? The South Africans."

  "But as good as they were, one thing still eluded them. They'd been trying for years to develop a virus that would kill blacks but not whites, but they never found it. Botha was one of their leading lights and apparently he was on the verge of a breakthrough when the apartheid regime was overthrown."

  "As it turned out," Herbie said, "Botha's core research could be adapted for use on something the American government was working on - a vaccine against the Sinovirus, a virus that distinguishes between races."

  "So we brought him here," Schofield said.

  "That's right," Herbie said.

  "And now it seems we're discovering that Professor Botha isn't all that trustworthy."

  "It would seem so."

  Schofield paused for a moment, thinking.

  "And he's not working alone," he said.

  "How do you know?"

  Schofield said, "All those dead 7th Squadron men we saw when we arrived on Level 6 earlier. I've never met Gunther Botha before, but I'm pretty sure he couldn't wipe out an entire 7th Squadron unit all by himself. Remember, Botha opened three doors, the two X-Rail doors and the Emergency Escape Vent - which opens onto Level 6."

  "He let a team of men in through that vent. They were the ones who killed the 7th Squadron men there. Judging by the bullet wounds in their backs and the amount of slashed throats, I presume Botha's friends caught the 7th Squadron men from behind." Schofield bit his lip. "But that still doesn't tell me what I want to know."

  "And what is that?"

  Schofield looked up. "If Botha is selling us out, what I want to know is: who is he selling us out to?"

  * * *

  "It was a security risk from the start, but we couldn't have done it without him," the President said.

  He and the others were sitting in the observation lab overlooking the smashed glass cube on Level 4, catching their breath.

  When they'd arrived moments earlier, they'd been confronted by the sight of a thick circular ceiling hatch lying on the floor of the lab.

  The 7th Squadron had been through here.

  Which hopefully meant they wouldn't be coming back soon. It would be a good place to hide, for a while.

  Libby Gant was the only one who stood - still on edge - gazing down at the destroyed cube. The underground complex had grown strangely silent since Caesar's last update, as if the 7th Squadron weren't prowling around it anymore, as if they had stopped hounding the President, at least for the moment.

  Gant didn't like it.

  It meant something was up.

  And so she had just asked the President about Gunther Botha, the man who had taken Kevin.

  "Botha knew more about racially targeted viruses than all of our scientists put together," the President went on. "But he had a history."

  "With the apartheid regime?"

  "Yes, and beyond that. What we feared the most were his links with a group called Die Organisasie, or the Organisation. It's an underground network comprising former apartheid ministers, wealthy South African landowners, former elite troops from the South African armed forces, and ousted military leaders who fled the country when apartheid collapsed, rightfully fearing that the new government would have their heads for past crimes. Most intelligence agencies believe that Die Organisasie only wants to retake South Africa, but we're not so sure."

  "What do you mean?" Gant asked.

  The President sighed. "You have to realize what's at stake here. Ethnically selective bioweapons like the Sinovirus are like no other weapon in the history of mankind. They are the ultimate bargaining tool, because they have the power to sentence a defined population to death while absolutely, without question, protecting another."

  "Our fears about Die Organisasie don't just relate to what they'd do to the Republic of South Africa. It's what they'd do to the entire African continent that frightens us."

  "Yes..."

  "Die Organisasie is a racist organization, pure and simple. They actually believe white people are genetically superior to black people. They believe that black people should be slaves to whites. They don't just hate South African black people, they hate all black people.

  "Now, if Die Organisasie has the Sinovirus and the vaccine to it, they could release it Africa wide, and give the cure only to those white groups who supported them. Black Africa would die, and the rest of the world wouldn't be able to do a thing about it, because we wouldn't have the vaccine to the Sinovirus.

  "Do you remember in 1999 when Ghaddafi spoke of uniting Africa like never before? He spoke of creating 'the United States of Africa,' but it was regarded as a joke. Ghaddafi could never have made that happen. There are far too many tribal issues to overcome to unite the various black African nations. But," the President said, "an organization that had the Sinovirus and its cure in its possession could rule Africa with an iron fist. It could turn Africa - resource rich Africa, complete with a billion-strong black slave workforce - into its own private empire."

  * * *

  Schofield's battered X-Rail car raced through the underground tunnel.

  They had been traveling for ten minutes now and Schofield was beginning to feel anxious.

  They would be arriving at the loading dock adjoining the lake soon and he didn't know what to expect.

  One question about Area 7, however, was still bothering him. "Herbie, how did the Air Force get a sample of the Sinovirus?"

  "Good question," Herbie said, nodding. "It took a while, but eventually we managed to turn two Chinese lab workers at the biowarfare facility in Changchun. In return for a one-way trip to America and twenty million U.S. dollars each, they agreed to smuggle several vials of the virus out of China."

  "The guys in the decompression chamber," Schofield said, recalling the Asian faces he had seen inside the chamber on Level 4 earlier.

  "Yes."

  "But there were four men inside the chamber."

  "That's right," Herbie said. "As you'd probably understand, in China, top-secret government lab workers can't just up and leave the country that easily. We had to get them out. The other two men inside that quarantine chamber were the two 7th Squadron soldiers who extracted them from China - two Chinese-American officers named Robert Wu and Chet Li. Wu and Li used to be a part of Echo Unit, one of the five 7th Squadron teams based at Area 7, which was why they were chosen..."
>
  Abruptly, Schofield held up his hand, moved to the front windshield.

  "Sorry, Dr. Franklin," he said, "but I'm afraid that'll have to do for the moment. I have a funny feeling that things are about to get a little hairy."

  He nodded at the tunnel ahead of them.

  At the end of the long concrete tunnel, beyond its rapidly streaking gray walls, was a tiny luminous speck of light - growing larger as they approached it - the familiar glow of artificial fluorescent lighting.

  It was the loading dock.

  They had arrived at the end of the tunnel.

  "Don't go in," Schfield said to Book. "They could be waiting for us inside. Stop in the tunnel. We'll walk the rest of the way."

  The bullet-riddled X-Rail train slowed to a halt in the darkness of the tunnel, a hundred yards short of the illuminated loading dock.

  Schofield was out of it in an instant - Desert Eagle in one hand, the Football flailing from his waist – leaping down to the concrete next to the tracks. Brainiac, Book II and Herbie followed close behind him.

  They ran down the tunnel toward the light, guns up.

  Schofield came to the end of the tunnel, peered around the concrete corner.

  Brilliant white light assaulted his eyes. He found himself staring at a giant rocky cavern that had been converted into a modern loading dock - a curious mix of flat concrete and uneven rocky surfaces.

  Two sets of X-Rail tracks lay on either side of a long central platform. The track on Schofield's side of the platform was empty, while the track on the other side was occupied by another X-Rail train... Botha's.

  It lay still, unmoving.

  Some black steel cranes ran on wall-mounted rails, leading from the X-Rail tracks to a wide pool of water at the far end of the enormous rocky cavern.

  The water in the pool glowed a brilliant aquamarine green, enriched by the minerals of Lake Powell. The pool itself disappeared to the west, winding its way into a twisting black cave that Schofield could only assume led out to the lake. Three ordinary-looking houseboats and a couple of strange-looking sand-colored speedboats bobbed on its surface, tied to the loading bay's concrete dock.

  There was one other thing that Schofield noticed about the immense underground loading bay.

  It was empty.

  Completely and utterly empty.

  Deserted.

  Schofield stepped cautiously out from the tunnel, and climbed up onto the central platform between the two X-Rail tracks, dwarfed by the sheer size of the cavern.

  And then he saw it.

  Standing at the other end of the platform, over by the pool of water leading out to the lake.

  It looked like some bizarre kind of supermarket display: a small chest-high "pyramid" of yellow ten-gallon barrels, in front of which sat a chunky Samsonite trunk - black and solid and high-tech. The trunk's lid was open.

  As he approached them, Schofield saw that the yellow barrels had words stenciled on their sides.

  "Oh, damn..." he said as he read them.

  AFX-708: EXPLOSIVE FILLER.

  AFX-708 was a shockingly powerful explosive epoxy, used in the famous BLU-109 bombs that had ripped Saddam Hussein's bunkers to shreds in the Gulf War. A 109's super hardened nose would drive down into a solid concrete bunker and then the AFX-708 warhead inside it would detonate - hard - and blow the bunker up from the inside.

  With Book II, Brainiac and Herbie behind him, Schofield looked inside the open Samsonite trunk that sat in front of the collection of AFX barrels.

  A timer display stared back up at him.

  00:19.

  00:18.

  00:17.

  "Mother of God..." he breathed. Then he turned to the others, "Gentlemen! Run!"

  Seventeen seconds later, a bone-crunching explosion ripped through the loading bay.

  The cluster of AFX-708 barrels sent a devastating ball of white-hot light shooting out in every direction, expanding radially.

  The rock-and-concrete walls of the loading bay cracked under the weight of the explosion, blasting outwards in a million lethal chunks, one entire wall just disintegrating to powder in the blink of an eye. Gunther Botha's X-Rail train - so close to the source of the blast - was simply vaporized.

  Schofield never saw it.

  Because by the time the explosives went off, he and the others were no longer inside the loading bay. They were outside.

  FOURTH CONFRONTATION

  3 July, 0912 Hours

  The heat hit them like a blast furnace.

  Blistering desert heat.

  It was everywhere. In the air. In the rock. Against your skin. Enveloping you, surrounding you, as if you were standing in an oven. The complete opposite of the subterranean cool of Area 7 and the X-Rail tunnel.

  Out here, the blazing desert sun ruled.

  Shane Schofield sped down a narrow water-filled canyon at breakneck speed, blasting through the heat, sitting at the controls of a very odd-looking - but very fast - speedboat.

  With him in the boat was Book II, while behind them, in a similar craft of their own, were Brainiac and Herbie.

  Technically, Schofield's boat was called a PCR-2 - patrol-craft, river, two-man - but it was more commonly known as a "bipod," a small two-man jet-propelled rivercraft built by the Lockheed Shipbuilding Company for the U.S. Navy. The bipod was known for its unique design configuration. Basically, it looked as if someone had joined two small bullet-shaped jet boats with a thin seven-foot crossbeam, in effect creating a catamaran-type vehicle with two pods at either end of the beam. Since both open-topped pods were possessed of powerful twohundred-horsepower Yamaha pump-jet engines, it made for an extremely fast - and extremely stable - boat frame.

  Schofield's bipod was painted in desert camouflage colors - brown blobs on a sandy yellow background - and it shot over the water at incredible speed, kicking up twin ten foot sprays of water behind it. Schofield sat in the left-hand pod, driving, while Book II sat in the right-hand one, manning the boat's sinister bow-mounted 7.62 mm machine gun.

  The sun shone - burning hot.

  It was already 100 degrees in the shade.

  "How you guys doing over there?" Schofield said into his wrist mike as he looked back at the other bipod behind him - Brainiac was driving, Herbie sat in the gunner's pod.

  Brainiac's voice: "I'm okay, but I think our scientist friend here is turning green."

  They were speeding down a twenty-foot-wide slot canyon that wended its way southward, toward the main body of Lake Powell.

  The pool of water at the far end of the loading bay had indeed led out to the lake, a tight, dark, winding cave whose exterior door - a brilliantly camouflaged plate-steel gate designed to look like a wall of rock - had been left open by the escaping thieves.

  Schofield and his men had emerged from the cave at the end of a dead-end canyon and powered off not a moment before the entire wall of rock behind them had been blasted outward by the monstrous AFX explosion.

  The two bipods sped around a wide bend in the water filled canyon.

  When viewed from above, this canyon resembled a race-car track, a never-ending series of twists, turns and full 180-degree bends.

  That wasn't so bad.

  The trouble started when it met up with all the other narrow canyons of Lake Powell - then the canyon system resembled a giant high-walled maze of interconnecting natural canals.

  They came to an intersection of three canyons, arriving at it from the northeast.

  At first Schofield didn't know what to do.

  Two rock-walled canals stretched away from him – a fork in the watery road. And he didn't know where Botha was going. Presumably the South African scientist had a plan - but what?

  And then Schofield saw the waves. Saw a collection of ripples lapping against the sheer stone walls of the canyon branching away to the left - barely perceptible, but definitely there - the residual waves of a motorboat's wash.

  Schofield gunned it, swinging left, heading south.

&nb
sp; As he traveled down the canyonways, banking with the bends, he looked upward. The rocky walls of these canyons rose at least two hundred feet above the water level. At their rims, Schofield saw clouds of billowing sand, blowing viciously, offering sporadic relief from the blazing sun.

  It was the sandstorm.

  The sandstorm that had been forecast to occur that morning, but which the members of HMX 1 had expected to miss.

  It was absolutely raging up there, Schofield saw, but down here, in the shelter of the canyons, it was relatively calm - a kind of meteorological haven below the canyon system's high rocky rim.

  Relatively calm, Schofield emphasized.

  Because at that moment, he rounded a final corner and, completely unexpectedly, burst out into wide open space - into an enormous craterlike formation with a giant flat topped mesa rising out of the water in its center.

  Although the crater was bounded by magnificent sheer rock walls, it was too wide to offer total protection from the wild sandstorm above. Flurries of sand whipped down into 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 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.