Area 7

by Matthew Reilly

  Trapped.

  "Fox..." he said into his mike.

  "...Whatever you're going to do…please do it soon."

  Gant was sweating, the world around her flashing red. Her ankle throbbed painfully, but she had to concentrate -

  "Warning. Four minutes to facility self-destruct..."

  She'd brought up the familiar spike pattern on the black box's small LCD screen. Now she turned to the I/T unit.

  The only question was which switch on the unit controlled the President's transmitter and which controlled Caesar's - 1 or 2?

  Gant had no doubt.

  Caesar would make himself Number 1.

  Then - in time with the spike screen on the black box, in between its recurring search and return signals - she flicked the switch marked "1" on the initiate/terminate unit, switching off Caesar's microwave signal.

  As soon as she did that, she switched on the black box's microwave signal - using it to impersonate Caesar's signal. If she'd done it right, the satellite in orbit above them wouldn't be able to tell that it was a new return signal coming back to it.

  A tiny green strobe light on top of the black box started blinking.

  Gant keyed her radio mike.

  "Scarecrow! I just took care of the radio signal! Nail the bastard!"

  As soon as Gant said it, Caesar came into Schofield's view.

  The Air Force general smiled at the sight of Schofield, slumped in the cockpit of the destroyed Super Stallion, defiantly raising his ornamental pistol in defense.

  Caesar wagged a finger at Schofield. "Oh, no, no, no, Captain, you're not allowed to do that. Remember, no shooting Uncle Caesar."

  "No?" Schofield said.

  "No."

  "Oh..." Schofield sighed.

  Then - blam! - quick as a flash, he snapped his gun up and shot Caesar square in the chest.

  A gout of blood erupted from Caesar's torso.

  Blam! Blam! Blam!

  Caesar reeled with each shot, staggering backwards, his eyes bulging in astonishment, his face completely aghast. He dropped his P-90 and fell unceremoniously to the floor, landing hard on his butt.

  Schofield rose to his feet, stepped out of the chopper and strode over to the fallen Caesar, kicking the general's P-90 away from his clawing fingers.

  Caesar was still alive, but only just.

  A trickle of blood gurgled out the side of his mouth. He looked pathetic, helpless, a shadow of his former self.

  Schofield stared down at him.

  "How...how...?" Caesar stammered through the blood. "You...you can't kill me!"

  "As a matter of fact, I could," Schofield said. "But I think I'll leave that to you."

  And then he hurried off to rejoin Gant and get the hell out of Area 7.

  "Warning. Three minutes to facility self-destruct..."

  Schofield carried Gant in his arms onto the detachable mini-elevator. Her right ankle had been completely shattered by Caesar's shot, and she couldn't walk on it at all.

  But that didn't stop her contributing.

  While Schofield carried her, she held the most important black box in the world in her lap.

  Their goal now - more than saving their own lives - was to get that flight data recorder out of Area 7 before it was destroyed in the coming nuclear blast. If its signal died now, everything they had fought for would be for nothing.

  "Okay, smart guy," Gant said, "how are we gonna get out of this seven-story nuclear grenade?"

  Schofield hit the floor panel of the mini-elevator and it began to whiz down the wall of the shaft. He looked at his watch.

  11:12:30.

  11:12:31.

  "Well, we can't get out through the top door," he said.

  "Caesar changed the code, and it took my DIA guy ten minutes to crack the lockdown codes. And I don't like our chances of getting out through the EEV in time. It took Book and me a good minute to come down through that vent before. I can't imagine the two of us getting up it in less than ten. And by then, that Escape Vent is gonna be vapor."

  "So what are we going to do?"

  "There's one way," Schofield said, "if we can get to it in time."

  11:12:49.

  11:12:50.

  Schofield stopped the mini-elevator at Level 2 hangar, and still carrying Gant, hustled down its length, making for the entry to the stairwell at the other end.

  "Warning. Two minutes to facility self-destruct..."

  They reached the stairwell.

  11:13:20.

  Schofield burst into it, leapt down it with Gant in his arms, taking the stairs three at a time.

  They passed Level 3, the living quarters.

  11:13:32.

  Level 4, the nightmare floor.

  11:13:41.

  Level 5, the flooded floor.

  11:13:50.

  Schofield kicked open the door to Level 6.

  "Warning. One minute to facility self-destruct..."

  He saw their escape vehicle right away.

  The small X-rail maintenance vehicle still sat right next to the stairwell door, on the track that led out to Lake Powell, in the spot where it had been sitting all day.

  Schofield remembered what Herbie Franklin had said about the maintenance car before. It was smaller than the other X-rail engines, and faster, too - just a round capsule and four long struts, with room for only two people in its podlike cabin.

  "Forty-five seconds to facility self-destruct..."

  Schofield yanked open the pod's door, heaved Gant into it, then he clambered up into the small round capsule after her.

  "Thirty seconds..."

  Schofield hit the black start button on the pod's console.

  The compact X-rail engine hummed to life.

  "Twenty seconds...nineteen...eighteen..."

  He looked at the tracks in front of him. They stretched away into flashing red darkness, four parallel tracks converging to a point in the far distance.

  "Hit it!" Gant said.

  Schofield jammed the throttle forward.

  "Fifteen..."

  The small X-rail pod leapt off the mark, thundered forward, shooting along the length of the underground subway station, crashing through the strobing red shadows.

  "Fourteen..."

  Schofield was thrust back into his seat by the speed.

  The pod hit 50 mph.

  "Thirteen..."

  The X-rail pod gained speed quickly. Schofield saw the quartet of tracks both beneath and above the windshield rushing past them.

  100 mph.

  "Twelve...eleven..."

  Then suddenly - shoom! - the X-shaped pod entered the tunnel leading out to Lake Powell, leaving Area 7 behind it.

  150 mph.

  "Ten..."

  250 mph.

  Two hundred and fifty miles per hour equalled about 110 yards per second. In ten seconds, they'd be nearly a mile away from Area 7.

  "Nine...eight..."

  Schofield hoped a mile would be enough.

  "Seven...six..."

  He urged the little pod onward.

  "Five...four..."

  Gant groaned with pain.

  "Three...two..."

  The little maintenance pod rocketed through the tunnel, shooting away from Area 7, banking with every bend, moving at phenomenal speed.

  "One..."

  "...facility self-destruct activated."

  Boom time.

  * * *

  It sounded like the end of the universe.

  The colossal roar of the nuclear explosion inside Area 7 was absolutely monstrous.

  For a structure that had been designed in the Cold War to withstand a direct nuclear strike, it did quite well containing its own supernuclear demise.

  The W-88 self-destruct warhead was situated inside the walls of Level 2, roughly in the center of the underground facility. When it went off, the whole underground complex lit up like a lightbulb, and a white-hot pulse of energy rocketed through its floors and walls - unstoppable, irresistible.


  Everything inside the complex was obliterated in a nanosecond...aeroplanes, test chambers, elevator shafts. Even the bloodied and broken Caesar Russell.

  From his position on the floor of the main hangar, the last thing he saw was a flash of blinding white light, followed by an instant's worth of the most intense heat he had ever felt in his life.

  And then nothing.

  But to a large extent, the complex's two-foot-thick titanium outer wall contained the blast.

  The concussion wave that the momentous explosion generated, however, shook the sandy earth well beyond the structure's titanium walls, making it shudder and shake for several miles around Area 7, the wave of expanding energy fanning outward in concentric circles, like ripples in a pond.

  The first thing to go was the Emergency Exit Vent.

  Its tight concrete walls were assaulted by the expanding wall of energy within a second of the blast. They were turned instantly to powder. Had Schofield and Gant been inside it, they would have been pulverized beyond recognition.

  It was then, however, that the most spectacular sight of all appeared.

  Since the entire complex had effectively become a hollowed-out shell, the superheavy layer of granite above the underground section caved in on it.

  From the sky above Area 7, it looked as if a perfectly circular earthquake had struck the facility.

  Without warning, an eight-hundred-yard-wide ring of earth around the complex just gave way, turned to rubble, and Area 7's buildings - the main hangar, the airfield tower, the other hangars - were just swallowed by the earth, dropping from sight, until all that remained in the place of Area 7 was a gigantic half-mile-wide crater in the desert floor.

  From his position on board a Marine Corps Super Stallion that had arrived at the complex only ten minutes earlier, the President of the United States just watched it all go down.

  Beside him, Book II, Juliet Janson and the boy named Kevin just stared in stunned awe at the spectacular end of Area 7.

  Down in the X-Rail tunnel, it wasn't over yet.

  When the nuke had gone off, Schofield and Gant's maintenance pod had been shooting through the tunnel like a speeding bullet.

  Then they'd heard the boom of the blast.

  Felt the shudder of the earth all around them.

  And then Schofield looked out through the rear window of the two-person pod.

  "Son of a..." he breathed.

  He saw an advancing wall of falling rock, rampaging through the tunnel behind them!

  The roof of the tunnel was caving in, shattering into pieces as the expanding pulse of the concussion wave rippled outward from Area 7. The problem was, it was catching up with them!

  The X-rail pod shot through the tunnel at two hundred and fifty miles per hour.

  The advancing wall of falling rock shot forward after it, doing at least two-sixty.

  Chunks of falling rock rained down on the tunnel. It was as if the passageway were now a living creature biting down at the heels of the speeding X-rail pod.

  Bang!

  A chunk of concrete the size of a baseball landed on the roof of the pod. Schofield snapped to look up at the sound. And then...

  Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!

  A deafening hailstorm of chunks rained down on top of the pod.

  No! Schofield's mind screamed. Not now! Not this close to the end!

  The advancing wall of collapsing rock had caught them.

  Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!

  Chunks assaulted the pod's windscreen, shattering it. Glass exploded everywhere.

  Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!

  Small chunks started entering the cockpit. The whole pod started to shudder violently, as if it were about to run off its...

  And then all of a sudden the concrete rain slowed and the pod blasted clear of the falling chunks.

  Schofield turned in his seat and saw the moving waterfall of concrete receding into the tunnel behind them, shrinking back behind a bend, falling back like a hungry monster that had given up on the chase. The ripplelike expansion of the concussion wave had run its course and petered out.

  They'd outrun it.

  Just.

  And as the X-rail pod continued on its way down the tunnel, Shane Schofield fell back into his seat and breathed a long and deep sigh of relief.

  By the time Schofield and Gant were airlifted from the canyonway outside the X-Rail loading dock adjoining Lake Powell by a Marine CH-53E, there was a veritable armada of Army and Marine Corps helicopters in the air above Area 7.

  They looked like a swarm of tiny insects, black dots hovering in the clear desert sky - all keeping at a safe distance to avoid any lingering radiation.

  The President was now safely ensconced in his Marine helicopter, which itself was surrounded by no less than five other Marine Super Stallions. Until the radio transmitter attached to his heart was removed, the Marines would stay by his side.

  And the moment he had been lifted off the tarmac at Area 7, he had issued a standing order that all Air Force aircraft in the continental United States be grounded pending further notice. Schofield and Gant - and their precious microwave-transmitting black box - were reunited with the President, Book II, Juliet and Kevin at Area 8, which had been secured twenty minutes before their arrival by two Marine Recon units.

  During their sweep of the base, the Marines had found no live personnel except one Nicholas Tate III, Domestic Policy Adviser to the President of the United States, rambling incoherently, saying something about calling his stockbroker.

  Gant was immediately placed on a stretcher and her ankle attended to by a corpsman.

  Schofield was given a temporary gauze dressing for his bullet wounds, a sling for his arm, and a dose of codeine for the pain.

  "Nice to see you made it out, Captain," the President said as he came over to where they sat.

  "Not so Caesar, I take it?"

  "I'm afraid he couldn't make it, sir," Schofield said. He held up the black box, its green transmission light blinking. "But he's with us in spirit."

  The President smiled. "The Marines who swept this base said they found something outside it that you might like to see."

  Schofield didn't understand. "Like what?"

  "Like me, you sexy thing," Mother roared as she stepped out from behind the President.

  Schofield grinned from ear to ear. "You made it!"

  The last he had seen, Mother had been flipping end over end inside a speeding cockroach.

  "Fucking indestructible is what I am," Mother said. She was limping slightly on her real leg.

  "When it got hit by that missile, I knew my cockroach was done for. And I didn't figure old Caesar and his buddies would take kindly to finding me in it. But when I ran off the runway, I kicked up a hell of a dust cloud. So I bailed out under the cover of the cloud. The cockroach flipped and smashed and I just dug a little hole for my head in the sand under its front bumper, ripped my fake leg off for added effect, and played dead until Caesar and his choppers flew off."

  "Ripped your fake leg off for added effect..." Schofield said. "Nice touch."

  "I thought so," she smiled. Then she jutted her chin at him. "What about you? Last I saw, you and the Prez were heading off into outer space. Did you save the fucking day again?"

  "I might have," Schofield said.

  "More to the point," Mother whispered conspiratorially, "did you do what I told you to do with You-Know-Who?" She nodded theatrically at Gant. "Did you kiss the friggin' girl, Scarecrow?"

  Schofield snuffed a laugh, cast a sideways look at Gant.

  "You know what, Mother? As a matter of fact, I think I did."

  A short while later, Schofield sat alone with the President.

  "So what's the word on the rest of the country?" he asked. "Have they been watching all this every hour on the Emergency Broadcast System?"

  The President smiled. "It's funny you should ask. While you were gone, we examined the com
plex's power history, and we found this."

  He pulled out a printout of Area 7's source power history, pointed to one entry.

  07:37:56

  WARNING: Auxiliary power malfunction

  System

  Malfunction located at terminal 1-A2

  Receiving no response from systems: TRACS; AUX SYS-1; RAD COMSPHERE; MBN; EXT FAN

  The President said, "Remember you said that you blew up a junction box on one of the underground hangar levels earlier this morning? Sometime around 7:37."

  "Yeah..."

  "Well, it seems that that junction box was kind of important. Among other things, it housed the controls for the base's auxiliary power system and its radiosphere. It also housed a system called the MBN. You know what 'MBN' stands for?"

  "No..."

  "Stands for the Military Broadcast Network, the previous name for the Emergency Broadcast System. Seems the MBN's outgoing transmission cable was destroyed in that blast. And because the LBJ Protocol was never initiated this morning, Caesar's transmissions over the Emergency Broadcast System were delayed by forty-five minutes."

  "But the system was destroyed at 7:37..." Schofield said.

  The President smiled.

  "Correct," he said, "which means that every time Caesar Russell spoke into his digital camera this morning, he wasn't transmitting at all. He was speaking to no one but the people at Area 7."

  Schofield blinked, trying to comprehend it all.

  Then he said: "So the country doesn't know this happened..."

  The President nodded ruefully.

  "It seems," he said, "that the people of America have been preoccupied all day with another drama, an accident involving Hollywood's highest paid actress and her actor fiance".

  "It appears that the unlucky couple have been trapped in the Swiss Alps all day, cut off by an avalanche while hiking illegally on Swiss military property. Sadly, their unscrupulous guide was killed, but I believe that just in the last hour our two superstars have been found safe and well."

  "As I understand it, CNN has been covering the whole drama all day, updating the public every hour, recycling some amateur footage of the area, giving updates. Biggest news event since Diana's car crash, they tell me."

  Schofield almost laughed. "So they really don't know," he said.

  "That's right," the President said. "And that, Captain, is the way it will stay."