Tap-tap.
"Are you okay?"
Tap.
"Where are you? Tap out the floor number."
Tap-tap-tap-tap.
10:53.
Schofield burst through the Level 4 firedoor, scanning the decompression area down the barrel of his gun.
It was dark.
Very dark.
This end of the floor was completely deserted - the decompression chamber was empty, as were the test chambers opposite it, and the catwalks above. The sliding horizontal doorway in the floor - the one that led down to the Level 5 cell bay - however, was still open.
The water level down on Level 5 had risen considerably over the last few hours. It had leveled off flush against the floor of Level 4. Inky black wavelets lapped up against the edges of the horizontal opening so that it now looked like a little rectangular pool.
Level 5, it seemed, was completely underwater now.
Schofield stepped past the pool - just as something slashed quickly through its waves. He spun, whipped his gun around, but whatever it had been was long gone.
This was not what he needed.
Dark complex. Bears moving around the stairwells. Caesar and Logan in here somewhere.
Water everywhere. Not to mention the possible presence of more prisoners.
He came to the wall that divided Level 4 in two, flung its door open and snapped his gun up... and immediately saw Gant on the far side, beyond the shattered remains of Kevin's cube, lying spread-eagled up against a bizarre steel cross.
Schofield ran across the observation area, slid to his knees in front of Gant.
As he arrived before her, he dropped his P-90, clasped her head gently in his hands and, without even thinking, kissed her on the lips.
At first, Gant was a little stunned, then she realized what was happening and she kissed him back.
When he pulled away, Schofield saw the two men on either side of her.
First he saw Hagerty, out cold, similarly crucified.
Then he saw the dead Colonel Harper - saw the raw pink flesh of his hacked-off lower body, saw his exposed tailbone.
"Holy Christ..." he breathed.
"Quickly," Gant said. "We don't have much time, he'll be back soon."
"Who?" Schofield started unraveling her duct-taped throat.
"Lucifer Leary."
"Oh, shit..." Schofield started working faster. The tape around Gant's neck came free. He started on her wrists...
There came a loud resonating boom from within the walls.
Schofield and Gant both looked up, eyes wide.
"The aircraft elevator..." Schofield said.
"He must have gone upstairs," Gant breathed, "and now he's back. Hurry..."
Faster now, Schofield continued untying the tape around Gant's left wrist, but it was done too tightly. His fingers fumbled with the tape. This was taking too long...
He spun, saw some glass shards lying over by Kevin's stagelike living area - shards that he could use to cut the duct tape. He slid over toward them and sifted through them, trying to find one that was sharp enough. He found one, just as Gant called, "Scarecrow!" and he stood and turned - and found himself confronted by an extremely tall broad-shouldered figure.
Schofield froze.
The figure just stood there before him - perhaps a yard away, his face shrouded in shadow - absolutely motionless.
He towered over Schofield, gazing at him silently. Schofield hadn't even heard him approach.
"Do you know why the weasel never steals from the alligator's nest?" the shadowy figure asked. Schofield couldn't even see the man's mouth move.
Schofield swallowed.
"Because," the figure said, "it never knows when the alligator will return."
And then the giant man stepped into the firelight - and Schofield saw the most fearsome, evil looking face he'd ever seen in his life. The face was big - like its owner - and it had a hideous black tattoo covering its entire left side, a tattoo depicting five ragged claw marks scratched down the length of the man's face.
Lucifer Leary.
He was absolutely enormous, too, at least six-foot eight, with massive muscular shoulders and gigantic tree trunk legs; almost a full foot taller than Schofield. He wore prison-issue jeans and a sky-blue shirt with the sleeves ripped off. His black eyes revealed not a trace of humanity – they just stared at Schofield like empty black orbs.
Then Leary opened his mouth, smiling menacingly, revealing foul yellow teeth.
The effect was mesmerizing, almost hypnotic.
Schofield shot a glance back over at Gant, at his P-90 lying on the floor in front of her. Then, in what he thought was a quick draw, he whipped his two pistols from his thigh holsters.
The guns barely got out of their sheaths. Leary had anticipated the move.
Quick as a rattlesnake, he lunged forward and clamped his fists around Schofield's gun hands, seizing them by the wrists.
And then the bigger man started to squeeze.
Schofield had never felt such intense pain in his life. He dropped to his knees, teeth clenched - his wrists held in Leary's giant paws. Blood flow to his hands ceased. It felt as if his fingers - bulging with redness - were going to burst.
He released his pistols. They clattered to the floor. Leary kicked them away.
Then, with the guns gone, he seized Schofield by the throat, lifted him clear off the ground and hurled him across Kevin's living area.
Schofield went crashing across the stage, sliding through some toys, before he exploded through a still upright section of glass and went tumbling off the far edge of the stage.
Lucifer stalked around the elevated platform after him, his every step crunching on broken glass.
Schofield groaned, tried to stand.
He needn't have bothered.
Within seconds, Leary was there.
The massive killer lifted Schofield off the floor by his combat webbing and punched him hard in the face, sending his head snapping backwards.
Gant could only watch helplessly from her cross – her hands still tightly bound, Schofield's P-90 lying on the floor only inches away from her - as Lucifer pounded Schofield.
The fight was all one-way traffic.
Lucifer hit, Schofield recoiled, collapsed in a heap to the floor.
Lucifer strode forward, Schofield struggled to stand up.
And then Lucifer hurled Schofield through the doorway that divided Level 4, sending him sliding into the decompression area.
Lucifer followed him in.
Another kick and Schofield rolled - bleeding and gasping - up against the rim of the horizontal doorway in the floor, filled as it was with lapping water.
And then from out of nowhere, a giant reptilian head came bursting up out of the water and lunged at Schofield's head.
Schofield rolled quickly, avoiding the fast-moving jaws as they snapped down an inch away from his face.
Jesus!
It was a Komodo dragon. The largest lizard in the world, a known man-eater. The President had said they kept some of them here - along with the Kodiak bears, in cages down on Level 5 - for use on the Sinovirus project.
The electric locks on their cages, it seemed, hadn't survived the power shutdown either.
At the sight of the Komodo dragon in the pool, a thin smile cracked Lucifer's hideous face.
He lifted Schofield off the ground and held him out over the reptile-infested pool.
As he hung above it, legs kicking, hands grappling at Lucifer's enormous fists, Schofield saw the dark alligator like bodies of at least two dragons in the water beneath him.
Then without so much as a pause, Lucifer dropped Schofield into the pool.
Schofield splashed down into the water in an explosion of foam, a moment before Lucifer pressed a button in the floor beside the doorway, causing the hole's sliding garage style door to close quickly over the ripples that marked the spot where Schofield had plunged into it.
Within seconds, t
he leading edge of the door met the opposite rim.
Ka-chunk.
Sealed.
Shut.
Lucifer grunted a laugh as he heard Schofield's fists banging on the underside of the sliding door, heard the sloshing of water underneath the closed door - the sound of the dragons mauling the foolish Marine.
Lucifer smiled.
Then he headed back toward the other side of Level 4, where the pleasure of carving up the pretty female soldier awaited him.
Libby Gant gasped in horror as lucifer leary returned alone to the observation area of Level 4.
No.
Lucifer couldn't have...
No...
The giant serial killer strode confidently across the wide hall-like room, his head lowered, his eyes locked on Gant's.
He dropped to his knees in front of her, pushed his face close to hers. His breath was foul - it reeked of eaten human flesh.
He stroked her hair.
"Such a shame, such a shame," he trilled, "that your knight in shining armor was not the brave warrior he thought himself to be. Which only leaves us, now, to get... better acquainted."
"Not likely," said a voice from behind Lucifer.
The giant spun.
And there, in the doorway that led to the decompression area, his whole body dripping with water, stood Shane Schofield.
"You'll have to get rid of me," he said grimly, "before you lay a finger on her."
Lucifer roared, snatched up Schofield's P-90 and let rip with an extended burst.
Schofield just stepped behind the doorway, out of sight, as the dividing wall all around the door was shredded by the hailstorm of gunfire.
Within seconds, however, the gun ran dry and Lucifer discarded it and stormed across the observation area, into the decompression area.
The horizontal door in its floor now lay open, wavelets still lapping against its rims. The large outlines of the Komodo dragons were still visible beneath the pool's rippling surface.
But, somehow, they hadn't killed Schofield.
And then Lucifer saw him, standing over by the decompression chamber, to the right of the pool.
He charged at Schofield, lashed out with a ferocious right.
Schofield ducked, walked under the punch. He was calmer now, collected. Not so caught-by surprise. He had Lucifer's measure.
Lucifer spun, swung again. Another miss. Schofield punished the error with a crisp hit to Lucifer's face.
Crack.
Instantly broken nose.
Lucifer seemed more stunned than injured. He touched the blood that ran down from his nose as if it were an alien substance, as if no one had ever hurt him before.
And then Schofield hit him again, a great powerful blow, and for the first time, the big man staggered slightly.
Again, harder this time, and Lucifer took an unsteady step backwards. Again, another step backwards.
Again - the most violent punch Schofield had ever thrown - and Lucifer's back foot touched the rim of the pool. He turned slightly - just as Schofield nailed him in the nose, causing the big man to lose his footing completely and fall backwards... into the Komodo-infested pool.
There was a great splash as Lucifer entered the water, and as the foam subsided, the Komodos rushed him, swarming all over his body, turning it into a writhing mass of black reptilian skin, claws and tails, and in the middle of it all, Lucifer's kicking feet and agonized screams.
Then, abruptly, the pool turned a sickening shade of red and Lucifer's legs went still. The Komodos just continued to eat his body.
Schofield winced at the sight, but then, if anyone deserved to die such a horrific painful death, Lucifer Leary did.
Then Schofield hit the button that closed the floor door, obliterating the foul sight, and hurried back to get Gant.
10:59.
Within a minute, Gant was unbound and standing next to Schofield as he freed the bleary eyed Hot Rod Hagerty.
Gant said, "You know, this birthday really has sucked." She nodded toward the decompression area. "What happened in there? I thought Leary had..."
"He did," Schofield said. "Bastard dropped me in a pool filled with Komodo dragons."
"So how'd you get out?"
Schofield pulled out his Maghook. "Apparently reptiles are exceptionally sensitive to magnetic discharges. I only learned that little fact this morning, from a little boy named Kevin. So I just flicked on my Maghook and they didn't want to come near me. Then I opened the floor door up again from below and came back for you. Sadly, Lucifer didn't have a supercharged magnetic grappling hook on him when he fell in."
"Nice," Gant said. "Very nice. So where's the President, and Kevin?"
"They're safe. They're outside the complex."
"So why are you back in here?"
Schofield looked at his watch.
It was exactly 11:00 a.m.
"Two reasons. One, because in exactly five minutes this facility's self-destruct mechanism will be activated. Ten minutes after that, this whole place will be vaporized, and we can't allow that to happen while Caesar Russell is inside it. So we either stop it from going off, or, if we can't do that, we get Caesar Russell out of here before it does."
"Wait a second," Gant said, "we have to save Caesar?"
"It seems our host decided to put a radio chip on his own heart as well as the President's. So if he dies, so does the country."
"Son of a bitch," Gant said. "So what was the second reason?"
Schofield's face reddened slightly. "I wanted to find you."
Gant's face lit up, but she spoke matter-of-factly: "You know, we can talk about this later."
"I think that would be good," Schofield said as Hagerty came free of his bonds, blinking out of his stupor. "What do you say we do it on another date?"
Gant broke out in a grin. "You bet."
11:01.
Schofield and Gant rode the detachable mini-elevator swiftly up the main shaft, now armed only with Schofield's pistols...Gant with the M9, Schofield with the Desert Eagle.
Schofield had sent Hagerty down to Level 6, to escape via the Emergency Exit Vent. When he'd seen the hacked-up half-body of Colonel Harper, Hagerty hadn't argued. He was happy to get out of Area 7 as quickly as possible.
"I don't know if we'll be able to disarm the self-destruct system," Gant said as Schofield gave her a shot of the Sinovirus vaccine to protect her against the contaminated hangar. "You have to enter a lockdown code by 11:05 to call it off, and we don't know any of the codes."
"I've been working on that," Schofield said, pulling out his cell phone. He hit redial and Fairfax's voice came on the line straight away.
"Mr. Fairfax, how goes it?"
"The lockdown termination code is 10502," Fairfax said. "Hacked into the system from behind, from the source code. Got it that way. Turns out it's the operator number of the head dude there, an Air Force colonel named Harper."
"I don't think he'll be needing it anymore," Schofield said. "Thank you, Mr. Fairfax. If I get out of this alive, I'll buy you a beer sometime."
He hung up and turned to Gant.
"Okay. Time to turn off this nuclear time bomb. Then all we have to do is capture Caesar alive."
They rose up the side of the darkened shaft.
Its great square-shaped opening up at ground level loomed above them, backlit by orange firelight.
It turned out that Lucifer Leary had indeed brought the main elevator platform down to Level 4. When they'd arrived at the elevator shaft from the Level 4 observation lab, Schofield and Gant had found the giant platform sitting right there in front of them, piled high with no less than fifteen bodies - prisoners, 7th Squadron commandos, Marines and White House staff - bodies which Leary no doubt planned to dismember in strange and unusual ways.
As such, the shaft now yawned wide above Schofield and Gant, open and airy.
As they traveled quickly up it, Gant reached underneath the moving platform. She emerged with her Maghook, which she'd l
eft attached to the underside of the mini elevator earlier.
"Get ready," Schofield said.
They had arrived at the main hangar.
The hangar looked like hell.
Literally.
Fires burned all over the place, bathing the enormous space in a haunting orange glow. Bodies lay everywhere.
Assorted debris littered the area - the remains of blown up helicopters, crumpled towing vehicles, the pieces of Bravo Unit's failed barricade over by the internal building.
Nothing, it seemed, lay unscarred.
The slanted windows of the control room overlooking the hangar were completely shattered.
Even one of the giant wooden crates hanging from the overhead crane system had a gnarled piece of Nighthawk 2's tail rotor embedded in its side.
Amazingly, however, one object remained untouched by the day's mayhem.
Marine One.
It still stood on the western side of the aircraft elevator shaft, miraculously intact.
As their elevator jolted to a halt inside the hangar, Schofield and Gant looked about themselves cautiously.
11:02.
"The self-destruct computer is in the control room," Gant said.
"Then that's where we're going," Schofield said, heading for the internal building.
"Wait a minute," Gant said, stopping suddenly, her eyes scanning the debris-covered floor around them.
"We don't have a minute," Schofield said.
"You go, then," Gant said. "Call me if you need any help. I'm gonna try something."
"Okay," Schofield said, charging off toward the internal building.
Gant, meanwhile, dropped to her knees and started searching through the bodies and debris around the mini elevator platform.
Schofield burst inside the lower floor of the internal building, leading with his Desert Eagle.
He hit the stairs on the fly, charged up them. For the first time that day, he actually felt in control. He had the lock down code - 10502 - and now all he had to do was punch it into the computer and disarm the nuke.
Then he would have plenty of time to find Caesar - whose men were now history - before he killed himself, and drag him out of Area 7 to face justice.
11:03.
Schofield came to the control room door, pushed it open, his gun leveled in front of him.
What he saw took him completely by surprise.
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