Area 7

by Matthew Reilly

  "No," the President said seriously. "That worries me, too. Because if by some miracle we do survive all this, the question becomes: what has Caesar got in store for us then?"

  * * *

  After prising apart the personnel elevator's exterior doors, Book II and Juliet Janson came to the "top door" exit.

  Juliet entered the code Harper had revealed earlier: 5564771.

  With a sharp hiss, the heavy titanium door opened.

  They raced down the concrete corridor beyond it, each holding one of Book's pistols.

  They ran for about forty yards before, abruptly, they burst through another door and found themselves standing inside an ordinary-looking aircraft hangar. Shafts of brilliant sunlight slanted in through the hangar's wide-open doors. The hangar was completely empty: no planes, no cars, no...

  Goliath must have been waiting behind the door.

  Juliet stepped out first, only to feel the barrel of a P-90 press up against the side of her head.

  "Bang-bang, you're dead," Goliath said oafishly.

  He squeezed the trigger just as Book II - whom Goliath hadn't seen yet - lunged forward and with lightning speed swiped back the P-90's charging handle, ejecting the round that was in its chamber.

  Click!

  The gun against Juliet's head fired nothing.

  "Wha...?" Goliath snapped to look at Book II.

  And then everything happened very fast.

  In one movement, Juliet grabbed the barrel of Goliath's P-90 and whipped up her own gun, at the same moment as Goliath's other enormous fist - which still held Schofield's Maghook - came rushing at her face. The Maghook hit Juliet on the side of the head, and she and the P-90 went sprawling to the floor. Juliet hit the ground hard. The P-90 clattered away.

  Book raised his Beretta - but not fast enough. Goliath caught his gun hand... and growled at him.

  Now the two men were holding the same gun.

  Goliath thrust his Frankensteinian chin right up close to Book II's face as he began depressing Book's own trigger finger.

  Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!

  As the gun boomed, Goliath brought it around in a wide arc, angling it so that in a few shots' time, it would be pointed at Book's head.

  It was like an arm wrestle.

  Book II tried with all his might to stop the movement of the gun, but Goliath was far too strong.

  Blam! Blam! Blam!

  The gun was now pointed at Book's left arm…

  Blam!

  Book's left bicep exploded. Blood sprayed all over his head. He roared with pain.

  Then before he knew it, the gun barrel was pointing directly at his face and…

  Click.

  Out of ammo.

  "That's better." Goliath grinned. "Now we can have a fair fight."

  He discarded the gun and - onehanded – grabbed Book by the throat and thrust him up against the wall.

  Book's feet dangled twelve inches off the ground.

  He struggled uselessly in Goliath's grip, his wounded arm burning. He let fly with a weak punch that hit Goliath square on the forehead.

  The big man didn't even seem to feel the blow. Indeed, Book's fist seemed to just bounce off his skull.

  Goliath chuckled stupidly. "Steel plate. May not make me too bright, but it sure makes me tough."

  Goliath brought up the Maghook in his spare hand, so that it was now pointed at Book's eyes.

  "What about you, soldier boy? How strong is your skull? You think this little hook gun could crush it? What do you say we find out..."

  He pressed the Maghook's cold magnetic head up against Book II's nose.

  Book, held up by his neck, grabbed the Maghook with both hands, and despite his wounded arm, pushed it back toward Goliath. The Maghook went vertical, but then to Book's horror, it started to come back toward his face. Goliath was going to win this arm wrestle, too.

  Then suddenly Book saw the way out.

  "Aw, what the hell," he said.

  And so he reached forward, gripped the Maghook's launcher and pressed the button marked "m" on it, initiating the grappling hook's powerful magnetic charge.

  The response was instantaneous.

  The lights on the Maghook's magnetic head burst to life, and the now-charged head began searching for a metallic source nearby.

  It found it in the steel plate inside Goliath's forehead.

  With a powerful thud! the Maghook lodged itself against the big man's brow. It stuck hard, as if it were being sucked against the prisoner's very skin.

  Goliath roared with rage, tried to extract the Maghook from his forehead, in doing so, releasing Book.

  Book II dropped to the floor, gasping, clutching the ragged red hole in his biceps.

  Goliath was spinning around, wrestling like an idiot with the Maghook attached to his face.

  Book II kept his distance, at least until the staggering Goliath had his back to the wall. Then Book just stepped forward, grabbed the handgrip of the Maghook with his good hand and, without mercy, pulled the trigger.

  The Maghook discharged with a gaseous whump! And Goliath's head was sent thundering backwards - his neck snapping almost ninety degrees the wrong way - his skull smashing against the wall behind him, creating a basketball-sized crater in the concrete. For his part, Book II was hurled several yards in the other direction, care of Newton's Third Law.

  Still, he fared far better than Goliath. The gigantic prisoner now slid slowly to the floor, his eyes wide with shock and his head cracked open like an egg, a foul soup of blood and brains oozing out of it.

  While Book II had been fighting with Goliath, the still dazed Juliet had been trying to regather her pistol from the floor nearby.

  When at last she got it and stood up, she stopped dead.

  He was just standing there. Twenty yards away. On the other side of the hangar – Seth Grimshaw.

  "I remember you now," Grimshaw said, stepping forward.

  Janson said nothing, just stared at him. She saw that he was still holding the Football...and a P-90 assault rifle, held low, one-handed, aimed right at her.

  "You were at the Bonaventure when I tried to take out His Majesty," Grimshaw said. "You're U-triple-S. One of those chirpy little fucks who think that throwing their bodies in front of a corrupt President is in some way honorable."

  Janson said nothing.

  She held her nickel Beretta by her side, down by her thigh.

  Grimshaw had his rifle leveled at her. He smiled.

  "Try and stop this." He began to squeeze the trigger on his P-90.

  Janson was ice-cool. She had one chance, and she knew it. Like all members of the Secret Service, she was an expert marksman. Grimshaw, on the other hand - like nearly all criminals - was shooting from the hip. The Secret Service had actually done probability Scales on this sort of thing: in all likelihood, Grimshaw would miss with at least his first three shots.

  Taking into account the time it would take for her to raise her own gun, Janson would have to hit him with her first.

  Back the odds, she told herself. Back the odds.

  And so as Grimshaw pulled his trigger, she whipped out her pistol.

  She brought it up fast, superfast, and fired... at exactly the same time as Grimshaw loosed three short rounds himself.

  The odds, it seemed, were wrong.

  Both shooters fell – like mirror images – snapping backwards on opposite sides of the hangar, dropping to the ground in identical splashes of blood.

  Janson lay on her back on the shiny polished floor of the hangar - gasping, breathing fast, looking up at the ceiling - a bloody red hole in her left shoulder.

  Grimshaw, on the other hand, didn't move.

  Didn't move at all.

  He lay completely still, on his back.

  Although Janson didn't know it yet, her single bullet had punctured the bridge of Grimshaw's nose, breaking it, creating a foul blood-splattered hole in his face. The exit wound that had blasted out the ba
ck of his head, however, was twice as big.

  Seth Grimshaw was dead.

  And the Football lay neatly at his side.

  * * *

  The X-Rail train shot through the tunnel system.

  After his talk with the President, Schofield had moved into the driver's compartment. They'd be arriving at Area 8 in a couple of minutes, and he wanted a short moment's peace.

  With a soft shooshing sound, the compartment's sliding door opened and Mother entered.

  "How you doing?" she said as she sat down beside him.

  "To be honest," he said, "when I woke up this morning, I didn't think the day would turn out like this."

  "Scarecrow, why didn't you kiss her?" Mother asked suddenly.

  "What? Kiss who?"

  "Fox. When you took her out to dinner and dropped her home. Why didn't you kiss her?"

  Schofield sighed. "You'll never make it in the diplomatic corps, Mother."

  "Blow me. If I'm going to die today, I'm sure as hell not going to die wondering. Why didn't you kiss her? She wanted you to."

  "She did? Ah, damn it." "So why didn't you?"

  "Because I..." he paused. "I guess I got scared."

  "Scarecrow. What the fuck are you talking about? What were you afraid of? The girl is crazy about you."

  "And I'm crazy about her, too. I have been for a long time. Do you remember when she joined the unit, when the selection committee put on that barbecue at the base in Hawaii? I knew it then - as soon as I saw her - but back then I figured she could never be interested in me, not with these... things."

  He touched the twin scars running vertically down his eyelids.

  He snuffed a laugh. "I didn't talk much at that lunch. I even think she caught me staring off into space at one point, I wonder if she knows I was thinking about her"

  "Scarecrow," Mother said. "You and I both know Fox can see beyond your eyes."

  "See, that's the thing. I know that," Schofield said. "I know that. I just don't know what I was thinking last week. We were finally going out on a date. We'd gotten along so well all night. Everything was going great. And then we arrived at her front door and suddenly I didn't want to screw everything up by doing the wrong thing... and well, I don't know... I guess... I guess I just froze up."

  Mother started nodding sagely - then she burst out laughing.

  "I'm glad you think this is funny," Schofield said.

  Mother kept laughing, clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Scarecrow, you know, every now and then, it's nice to see that you're human. You can leap off ice cliffs and swing across giant elevator shafts, but you still freeze up when it comes to kissing the girl. You're beautiful."

  "Thanks," Schofield said.

  Mother stood up to go.

  "Just promise me this," she said kindly. "When you see Fox next, kiss the fucking girl, will you!"

  While Schofield, mother and the president were shooting through the X-rail tunnel under the desert floor toward Area 8, Caesar Russell and his four remaining 7th Squadron men were zooming through the air above the desert in their two Penetrator attack choppers, heading in the same direction, a few minutes ahead of the X-rail train.

  The small cluster of buildings that was Area 8 rose up out of the sandy landscape in front of the two helicopters.

  Area 8 was essentially a smaller version of Area 7: two box-shaped hangars and a three-story airfield control tower sat alongside the facility's black bitumen runway, complete with its sand-covered extensions that Schofield had observed earlier that day.

  As the two Penetrators approached it, Caesar saw the gigantic doors to one of the complex's hangars suddenly part in the middle, and open.

  It took the doors a long while to open fully, but once they had, Caesar's jaw dropped.

  One of the most amazing-looking flying objects known to man rolled slowly out of the hangar.

  Truth be told, what Caesar saw was actually two flying objects. The first was a massive Boeing 747 jumbo jet, painted in glistening silver. The jumbo, with its imperious nose and outstretched swanlike wings, edged out from the shadows of the hangar.

  It was, however, the smaller aircraft mounted on the back of the 747 that seized Caesar's attention.

  It looked incredible.

  Its paint scheme was like that of NASA's regular space shuttles: mainly white, with the American flag and "United sstates" written in bold lettering on its side, and with the distinctive black-painted nose and underbelly.

  But this was no ordinary space shuttle.

  It was the X-38.

  One of two sleek mini-shuttles purpose-built by the United States Air Force for the tasks of satellite killing and, where necessary, the boarding, takeover or destruction of foreign space stations.

  In shape, it was similar to the standard shuttles – delta platform, with flat triangular wings, a high aerodynamic tail, and three conical thrusters on its rear end - but it was smaller, much more compact. For where Atlantis and her sister shuttles were heavy long-haul vehicles designed for ferrying bulky satellites into space, this was the sports version, designed for blasting them out of existence.

  Four specially designed zero-gravity AMRAAM missiles hung from its wings, on the outside of two enormous Pegasus II booster rockets - massive cylindrical thrusters filled to the brim with liquid oxygen - that were attached to the underbelly of the bird.

  What a lot of people don't realize is that many of today's space flights are conducted with what is essentially late 1960's technology. Saturn V and Titan II boosters were used in the original U.S.-Soviet space race in the sixties.

  The X-38, however, with its 747 launch platform and its stunning Pegasus II boosters, is the first orbiter to truly bring space flight into the twenty-first century.

  Its specially configured 747 launcher - fitted with new extra-powerful Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines, enhanced pressurization systems and extra radiation protection for the pilots - can carry the X-38 to a release height of around 67,000 feet, 24,000 feet higher than a commercial jumbo can fly. Air launch saves the shuttle one-third of its first stage power/lift ratio.

  Then the Pegasus II boosters kick in.

  More powerful than Titan III by a whole order of magnitude, the boosters provide enough lift after the high altitude launch to carry the shuttle into a low-earth orbit. Once expended, they are jettisoned from the shuttle. The X-38 - now in a stationary orbit about two hundred and ten miles above the earth - can then maneuver freely in space, killing enemy satellites at will, and coordinate its landing, all under its own power.

  Caesar Russell gazed at the mini-shuttle.

  It was absolutely magnificent.

  He turned to Kurt Logan. "That shuttle cannot be allowed to get off the..."

  He didn't get to finish the sentence, for at that moment - completely without warning - five Stinger missiles came rocketing out from the darkened hangar behind the silver 747, swooping in a wide arc around its wings before rising sharply into the air, heading straight for Caesar's two Penetrators.

  Echo Unit had seen them.

  * * *

  The underground X-Rail station of Area 8 was identical to the one at Area 7: two tracks on either side of an elongated central platform, with an elevator sunk into the northern track's wall.

  After about" seven minutes of superfast travel, Schofield's X-rail car zoomed into the station, bursting into the white fluorescent light of Area 8. The bullet-shaped engine decelerated quickly, stopped on a dime.

  Its doors hissed open and Schofield, Mother and the President of the United States came charging out of it, heading straight for the elevator set into the northern wall. Trailing behind them - looking completely lost and now holding his cell phone to his ear - was Nicholas Tate in.

  Schofield hit the elevator's call button.

  As he waited for the lift to arrive, he noticed Tate for the first time. The White House suit was clearly rattled, freaked out by the morning's events. But it was only then that Schofield realized that Tate was spe
aking into his cell phone.

  "No," Tate said irritably into the phone, "I want to know who you are! You have interrupted my phone call to my stockbroker. Identify yourself."

  "What on earth are you doing?" Schofield asked.

  Tate frowned, spoke very seriously - in doing so, indicating that he had gone completely bonkers. "Well, I was calling my broker. I figured by the way things are going today, I'd sell off my U.S. dollars. So, after we got out of that train tunnel, I called him up, but no sooner do I get him on the line than this asshole cuts across the connection."

  Schofield snatched the phone from Tate's hand.

  "Hey!"

  Schofield spoke into it. "This is Captain Shane M. Schofield, United States Marine Corps, Presidential Detachment, serial number 358-6279. ho is this?"

  A voice came through the phone: "This is David Fairfax of the Defense Intelligence Agency. I'm speaking from a monitoring station in D.C. We have been scanning all transmissions emanating from two Air Force bases in the Utah desert. We believe that there may be a rogue Air Force unit at one of those bases and that the President's life may be in danger. I just enacted an emergency breakthrough on your friend's telephone call."

  "Believe me, you don't know the half of it, Mr. Fairfax," Schofield said.

  "Is the President safe?"

  "He's right here." Schofield held the phone out for the President.

  The President spoke into it: "This is the President of the United States. Captain Schofield is with me."

  Schofield added, "And we are currently in pursuit of that rogue Air Force unit you just mentioned. Tell me everything you know about it..."

  Just then, the elevator pinged.

  "Hold on." Schofield raised his P-90 toward the elevator.

  The doors opened... revealing horribly blood-splattered walls and a particularly grisly sight.

  The gunned-down bodies of three dead Air Force men lay strewn about the elevator - no doubt members of the skeleton crew stationed at Area 8.

  "I think we got a fresh trail," Mother said.

  They hurried into the lift.

  Tate stayed behind, determined not to go near any more danger. The President, however, insisted on going with Schofield and Mother.