Area 7

by Matthew Reilly

  Schofield swallowed.

  They were now in the air.

  * * *

  Caesar Russell's helicopter landed softly on the runway far beneath the rising 747, twenty yards away from Mother's crashed cockroach.

  Caesar stepped out of the chopper and just gazed up after the plane.

  Kurt Logan walked over to the torpedoed cockroach. It was a battered, tangled wreck.

  Mangled steel lay everywhere.

  Its driver's compartment was completely flattened, its windshield and roof struts bent shockingly inward. It looked like an aluminum can that had been crumpled flat.

  And then he saw the body. It lay facedown in the sand in front of the smashed towing vehicle - twisted and broken. Only the torso and limbs were visible, the head was not. Mother's head lay somewhere underneath the cockroach's lowered front bumper, crushed flat against the ground. Her left pants leg ended abruptly at the knee - her lower leg wrenched off by the force of the impact.

  Logan returned to Russell's side. Caesar hadn't taken his eyes off the rising silver plane.

  "Echo has the boy," Logan said. "And the Marines have the President."

  "Yes," Caesar said, staring up at the fleeing jumbo. "Yes. So now, regrettably, we move to the alternate plan. Which means we head back to Area 7."

  * * *

  The President landed with a heavy thump inside the open doorway of the 747, absolutely breathless.

  Schofield followed a few seconds later, also breathing hard. He managed to stagger to his knees and pull the door shut behind him. It sealed with a loud whump!

  Both men were lying on the floor, still wearing their protective goggles, when one of the pilots of the 747 - a commando from Echo Unit - came down the stairwell from the upper deck.

  The pilot was wearing a baggy bright-orange flight suit which Schofield immediately recognized as a pressure suit.

  Pressure suits were mandatory on all high-altitude or low-orbital flights. Although baggy on the outside, they were actually quite figure-hugging on the inside, with elasticized cuffs that ran down the wearer's arms and legs. The cuffs squeezed its wearer's limbs to regulate blood flow through the body and to stop blood draining from the head.

  This man's suit had a metal ring around its neck, to which could be attached a space-flight helmet, and a plug-in hose socket on its waist, to which one connected a life support unit.

  "Ah, you made it," the Echo pilot said as he approached them, obviously not seeing beyond their 7th Squadron outfits and filthy sand-covered goggles. "Sorry, but we couldn't wait for you any longer. Cobra made the call. Come on, it's only Coleman and me left. Everyone else is already up in the shutt..."

  Smack!

  Schofield stood quickly and punched him hard in the face, dropping him with one hit.

  "Apology not accepted," Schofield said. Then he turned to the President. "Wait here."

  "Okay," the Chief Executive replied quickly.

  The 747 soared into the sky. Inside it, the world was tilted crazily, at an almost 45-degree angle.

  Schofield hurried up the stairs that led to the 747's upper deck and cockpit. He held his P-90 poised in front of him, searching for the second pilot, the man named Coleman.

  He found him as he was emerging from the cockpit. Another sharp blow later - this time with the butt of his P-90 - and Coleman was also out cold.

  Schofield rushed into the empty cockpit, scanned it quickly.

  He'd been hoping to seize the controls and bring the plane down...

  No dice.

  A screen on the cockpit's display revealed that the plane was flying on autopilot, and heading for an altitude of 67,000 feet - the height at which the 747 would release the space shuttle on its back.

  At the bottom of the screen, however, were the words:

  AUTOPILOT ENGAGED.

  TO DISABLE AUTOPILOT OR ALTER SET COURSE

  ENTER AUTHORIZATION CODE.

  Authorization code? Schofield thought.

  Shit.

  He couldn't switch off the autopilot. Which meant he couldn't bring the plane down...

  So what could he do?

  He looked about himself, saw the clouds outside, saw the unconscious body of the pilot named Coleman lying on the floor just outside the cockpit.

  And as his eyes fell on the pilot's body, he got an idea.

  Schofield came back down to the President, hauling the unconscious Coleman on his shoulder.

  He nodded toward the other knocked-out pilot at the President's feet. "Put on his flight suit," Schofield said as he dropped Coleman's body to the floor and started undressing it.

  Within minutes, Schofield and the President were wearing the two pilots' bright-orange pressure suits - with SIG Sauer pistols concealed in their thigh pockets.

  "Where to now?" the President asked.

  Schofield gave him a serious look. "Where no man has gone before."

  The X-38 Space Shuttle was connected to the launch jumbo by a cylindrical umbilical. Half a dozen titanium struts actually mounted the shuttle onto the back of the 747, but it was the umbilical that allowed human access to and from the spacecraft.

  Basically, the umbilical looked like a long vertical tube that stretched upward from the back of the jumbo into the underside of the shuttle. Its entrance was at the midpoint of the jumbo, halfway along its lower deck.

  Schofield and the President hurried toward it.

  On the way, they found gear that had been waiting for the two Echo Unit pilots: two white briefcase-like life support systems - small self-contained air-conditioners just like those carried by the shuttle astronauts - and a pair of spherical gold-tinted space helmets that clicked onto the neck rings of their pressure suits.

  The reflective gold tint of the helmets' dome-shaped visors - a feature designed to protect the wearer from the brutal quantities of ultraviolet radiation one experiences at extremely high altitudes - completely hid their faces.

  They came to the umbilical's entrance: a tubular vertical tunnel that disappeared into the ceiling. A thin steel ladder rose up through its core.

  Now dressed completely in his space suit, his face hidden by his reflective gold visor, Schofield peered up into it.

  At the top end of the tube, about thirty yards straight up, he could see the illuminated interior of the X-38 shuttle.

  He turned to the President and signaled with his finger: up.

  They climbed the ladder slowly, weighed down by their cumbersome space suits and life support briefcases.

  After about a minute of climbing, Schofield's helmeted head rose up through a circular hatch in the floor of the shuttle.

  Schofield froze.

  The rear cargo compartment of the space shuttle looked like the interior of a high-tech bus.

  It was only a small space, compact, designed to hold anything from men to weapons to small satellites. It had pristine white walls that were lined with life-support sockets, keypads and tie down equipment studs. At the moment, however, the cabin was in personnel-carrying mode: about a dozen heavy-looking flight seats faced forward, grouped in pairs.

  And strapped into those seats, Schofield saw, were the men of Echo Unit and their Chinese conspirators.

  There were five of them inside the cargo cabin, and they all wore identical space suits - gold tinted helmets and baggy orange pressure suits with small U.S. flags sewn onto the shoulders.

  How ironic, Schofield thought.

  They were also strapped tightly into their flight seats, in readiness for the high-G transit into orbit.

  Through the cockpit door at the front of the cargo compartment, he saw three more space suited individuals - the shuttle's flight team. Beyond them he could see the clear open sky.

  As he stood there, sticking half out of the shuttle's floor hatch, Schofield felt his adrenaline surge.

  He knew that their reflective gold helmets prevented him and the President from being recognized. But still he felt self-conscious, certain that he looked like an im
postor stepping into the heart of enemy territory.

  Near the front end of the compartment, there were several empty seats - waiting, presumably, for the two 747 pilots, and the five Echo commandos who had been cut off down in the hangar.

  Slowly, Schofield raised himself up and out of the umbilical tunnel.

  No one paid him any special attention.

  He searched the cabin for Kevin, and at first, to his horror, didn't see him.

  No...

  But then he noticed that one of the five space-suited figures seated inside the cabin didn't quite seem to fill out his oversized suit.

  In fact, it looked almost comical. The suit's gloved arms hung limply on this figure, its booted leggings dangled clumsily to the floor. It appeared that the wearer of this suit was way too small for it...

  It had to be.

  Rather than bunching up the space suit to allow Kevin's hands to reach into its gloves, the Echo men had made sure that the little boy was receiving the full benefit of the pressure suit's blood-regulating cuffs, even if that meant he looked like Charlie Chaplin wearing an oversized outfit.

  All right, Schofield thought as he stepped out of the umbilical's hatch. How am I going to do this?

  Why not just grab Kevin before anyone has a chance to unbuckle themselves, then dive down into the umbilical and get back into the 747 and...

  Just then a hand seized Schofield's arm, and a voice exploded in his ear.

  "Yo, Coleman."

  It was one of the shuttle's pilots, faceless behind his gold visor. He had stepped back into the personnel cabin and grabbed Schofield's arm. His tinny voice came in over Schofield's helmet intercom.

  "Just you two? What happened to the others?"

  Schofield just shook his head sadly.

  "Aw, well," the faceless astronaut said. He pointed with two fingers to a pair of flight seats close to the cockpit door. "Take a seat and strap in."

  Then, with casual efficiency, the astronaut crouched down, helped the President out of the umbilical, and shut the entry hatch behind him!

  Then he just strode forward to the cockpit, speaking into his intercom as he did so: "All personnel, prepare for separation from the launch vehicle in thirty seconds."

  The cockpit door slid firmly shut behind the pilot, sealing it off, and Schofield was left standing in the middle of the cabin, staring at the closed pressure hatch in the floor beneath him.

  Holy shit....

  They were about to go into orbit.

  With the president behind him, Schofield made his way forward, to two empty seats near the cockpit door.

  As he did so, he observed how the Echo men had attached themselves to the shuttle's centralized life-support system and strapped themselves into their seats.

  He arrived at his seat, and plugged a secondary hose from his life-support briefcase into a socket in the seat's arm. Then he sat down and started securing his seat harness.

  The President, watching him, did the same, strapping himself into a seat on the other side of the central aisle.

  Once he was safely secured, Schofield turned to look about himself.

  Across the aisle from him, in the seat directly behind the President, he saw the lopsided figure of Kevin, looking very awkward in his oversized space suit.

  It was then that a strange thing happened.

  Kevin waved at him.

  Waved at him.

  It was a rapid side-to-side wave which made the little boy's overlong sleeve flap stupidly in the air.

  Schofield frowned, did a double take.

  He was wearing his opaque gold-tinted space helmet. There was no way Kevin could see his face.

  Did Kevin know who he was?

  How could Kevin know who he was?

  Schofield dismissed the thought as stupid. Kevin must have just been waving at all of the astronauts.

  He turned to check on the President - saw him draw his seat belts tightly across his chest. The President seemed to take a long, deep breath. Schofield knew how he felt.

  Suddenly, voices came in over their helmet intercoms.

  "Booster ignition standing by..."

  "Approaching launch height..."

  "Umbilical release in three... two... one... mark."

  There came a loud clunking noise from beneath the shuttle, and abruptly, the whole spacecraft rose slightly in the air, felt lighter.

  "Umbilical has separated… we are clear of the launch vehicle..."

  There came a soft chuckle. Then Cobra Carney's voice: "Burn it."

  "Certainly, sir. Prepare to engage Pegasus boosters... Ignition in three..."

  The shuttle beneath Schofield began to rumble ominously.

  Two...

  He waited in tense anticipation.

  "...One...Mark."

  It looked like someone had ignited a flame thrower.

  When the X-38's Pegasus boosters fired, the space shuttle was positioned slightly above its abandoned 747 launch vehicle - its gigantic boosters pointed directly at the silver jumbo beneath it.

  The boosters ignited, bright as magnesium flares. Two incredibly long tongues of white-hot fire blasted out from the twin cylindrical boosters on the underside of the X-38.

  The two lances of fire shot like lightning bolts straight into the 747, severing it in the middle, cutting through it like a pair of blow torches.

  The 747 just snapped in half under the weight of the fiery blast, its back broken in an instant. The fuel inside its wings ignited immediately, and a split second later, the whole gigantic plane just exploded, showering the sky with a thousand pieces of smoke-trailing debris.

  Schofield never saw the 747 get destroyed. He was in a whole new world now.

  The blast of the boosters igniting was like nothing he had ever heard.

  It was loud. Booming. All-consuming.

  It had been like the sound of a jet engine thundering to life - only multiplied by a thousand.

  Now the shuttle tilted sharply upwards and rocketed forward.

  Schofield was thrust back into his seat by the G-force. The whole cabin began to shake and shudder. He felt his cheeks flatten, press back against his face. He clenched his teeth.

  Apart from the closed cockpit door, the only visible link between the flight deck and the rear cargo compartment was a five-inch-thick window set into the cockpit's back wall.

  Through this window, Schofield could see right through to the forward windshield of the shuttle - through which he could actually see the sky turning purple as they rose higher.

  For a few minutes the shuttle soared upward, its massive boosters lifting it high into the sky.

  Then, abruptly, over the roar of the rockets, the flight team's voices returned: "Prepare to jettison boosters and switch over to self contained power..."

  "Copy that."

  "Stand by for booster release. In three... two... one... mark."

  Kerchunk!

  Schofield felt the weight of the enormous booster rockets drop away from the rising shuttle.

  He looked over at the President - the Chief Executive was gripping his armrests tightly. As far as Schofield was concerned, that was actually a good sign. It meant that the President hadn't passed out.

  The X-38 rose into the sky. The shuddering and shaking had stopped now and the ride became smoother, quieter, almost as if the X-38 were floating on air.

  The respite gave Schofield a chance to take in his surroundings more closely.

  The first thing he saw was a keypad next to the cockpit door - a locking mechanism, presumably for use in emergencies, like when cabin pressure was lost.

  Schofield also examined his space suit. There was a small unit sewn into the sleeve of his left forearm which appeared to control his helmet intercom. At the moment, the unit's display screen indicated that he was currently on channel 05.

  He looked over at the President, surreptitiously tapped his wrist unit, then held up three fingers: Switch to channel three.

  The President nodded.
A few seconds later, Schofield said, "Can you hear me?"

  "Yes. What's the plan?"

  "We sit tight. And we wait for a chance to take over this bird."

  The Shuttle flew higher.

  As it did so, the view outside its forward windshield gradually changed. The sky transformed from cloudy purple to ominous black.

  And then abruptly, as though a veil had been lifted, Schofield found himself looking at a glorious galaxy of stars, and beneath the starfield - glowing like an opal against the jet-black sky - the wide elliptical expanse of the Earth, curving downward at both extremities, stretching away into the distance like some unbelievably gigantic luminescent orb, so absolutely immense in its size that it was almost too large to comprehend.

  It was breathtaking.

  They weren't far up, almost exactly at the dividing line between space and the outer atmosphere, about two hundred miles.

  The Earth itself - curved and massive and dazzling - filled almost three-quarters of Schofield's field of vision.

  He stared at the sight, at the glowing turquoise planet hovering in front of the universe. Then he turned his gaze to the starfield above the planet. It was so clear up here, the starry sky so endless.

  And then, one of the stars began to move.

  Schofield blinked, looked again.

  One of the stars was definitely moving.

  "Holy Christ..." he breathed.

  It wasn't a star at all.

  It was a shuttle, a space shuttle, all but identical in shape and size to the regular American models.

  It soared effortlessly in the weightlessness of space, cutting a dead-straight line toward them. The red and yellow flag on its tail was unmistakable. It was the Chinese space shuttle.

  Schofield flicked back to channel 05 in time to hear Cobra's voice say: "Yellow Star, this is Fleeing Eagle, I have visual on you now. We are reducing thrust to begin parking orbit. You may commence your approach in thirty seconds."

  Just then, the cockpit door slid open and two of the X-38's pilots emerged.

  Schofield snapped to look up.

  Now that they were in low orbit, they could move around the cabin. It was zero gravity, so they stepped lightly, using handgrips attached to the ceiling to move around.

  Both pilots still wore their gold-tinted helmets, still carried their briefcase-like life-support units at their sides. They strode past Schofield and the President, heading aft to prepare for the docking with the Chinese shuttle.