Area 7 ss-2
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wails of the dying prisoners--as they fell, they dropped
their torches, plunging the pit into even thicker darkness--
he had lost sight of Jerome Harper.
After the blast, Harper had dashed off into the darkened
forest of the AWACS wreckage, disappearing. Schofield
didn't like the idea of him lurking somewhere in the area.
But right now, he had other things to worry about.
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The mist was now inside the pit--nine feet off the
floor--and still falling.
He looked over at the President and Juliet.
Like him, they were still wearing their stolen 7th
Squadron uniforms--complete with ERG-6 half-face gas masks wrapped around their necks.
"Captain! Your gas mask! Put it on!" the President
yelled, pulling on his own mask. "If you breathe the virus
into your lungs directly, it'll kill you in seconds! With the
mask on, it's a lot slower!"
Schofield lifted his mask over his face.
Juliet, however, yanked her mask up and over her head
and threw it over to Mother, just back from her fight with
Webster. Unlike the other three, Mother was still dressed in
her maskless full dress uniform.
"But what about you--?" she said.
Juliet indicated her Eurasian features. "Asian blood, remember.
It won't hurt me. But it'll kill you if you don't put
that on!"
"Thanks!" Mother said as she clamped the mask over
her nose and mouth.
"Quickly!" Schofield said. "This way!"
Gas mask on, he charged into the darkened maze of
wreckage, heading for the northeastern corner, for the mini
elevator parked there.
The others took off after him, racing into the darkness.
After several seconds of running, Schofield came to the
mini-elevator, lying flush against the floor in the corner of
the pit.
A flaming torch lay on it. One of the dying prisoners up
on the rim must have dropped it into the pit when the virus
had struck him down.
Schofield snatched it up and turned to see the President
and Mother arrive at his side.
It was only then that any of them noticed.
No Juliet.
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juliet janson lay sprawled on the ground back near
the AWACS's fuselage.
Just as she had been about to charge into the maze after
Schofield and the others, a strong hand had appeared from
completely out of nowhere and grabbed her ankle, causing
her to trip and fall.
The hand belonged to Boa McConnell, lying spread
eagled on the floor, still dazed from Mother's tackle earlier,
but alert enough to recognize one of his enemies.
Now, he held on to Juliet's ankle, refusing to let go.
Juliet struggled.
Boa extracted a long K-Bar knife from his boot, raised
it. Juliet's eyes went wide as he made to plunge the knife
into her ankle ...
Blam! McConnell's head exploded like a burst balloon,
shot from somewhere above them. He flopped to the floor,
dead.
Juliet scrambled away from the body. She looked upward,
searching the darkness for the source of the gunshot.
She found it in the shape of a flaming torch over on the
southern side of the pit, being waved from side to side, accompanied by a voice that called: "Janson! Agent Janson!"
Juliet squinted to see the owner of the torch.
In the flickering glow of the torch's flames, she could
just make out the man holding it--a man in 7th Squadron
clothing brandishing a nickel-plated pistol in his spare hand.
Book II.
"janson! where are you?" schofield said into his radio mike, as he waited impatiently on the detachable mini elevator.
Book II's voice answered him. "Scarecrow, it's Book.
I've got Janson. You get out of here."
"Thanks, Book. Fox, you still alive?"
No reply.
Schofield's whole body froze.
And then: "I'm here, Scarecrow."
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He started breathing again. "Where are you?"
"I'm inside the building at the eastern end of the hangar.
Get the President out of here. Don't worry about me."
"All right ..." Schofield said. "Listen, I have to get to
Area 8. The bad guys have taken Kevin there. I'm going to
take the President with me. Rendezvous with us there when
you--oh, shit!"
"What is it?"
"The Football. It's still up in the hangar somewhere.
Grimshaw had it."
"Leave that to me," Gant said. "You just get the President
out of here. I'll meet you at Area 8 as soon as I can."
"Thanks," Schofield said. "And Fox ..."
"Yeah?"
"You be careful."
There was a pause at the other end. "You too, Scarecrow"
And with that, Schofield pressed a button and the mini
elevator whizzed him, Mother and the President swiftly
down the shaft.
AS THEY DESCENDED QUICKLY, MOTHER TOUCHED SCHOFIELD
on the shoulder, spoke through her gas mask.
"Area 8?"
Schofield turned to face her. "That's right."
No matter how he looked at it, his mind kept coming
back to the same image: the image of the 7th Squadron unit
down on the Level 6 platform taking Kevin into the X-rail
tunnel, heading for Area 8.
Kevin ...
The little boy was at the center of all of this.
Schofield said, "I want to find out what this whole thing
has been about. But to do that, I need two things."
"What?"
He indicated the President. "First: him."
"And second?"
"Kevin," Schofield said firmly. "Which is why we have
to get to Area 8 fast."
caesar russell, kurt logan and the three surviving
commandos from Logan's Alpha Unit charged across the
runway of Area 7 in the glare of the blazing desert sun, raced
into the four-story airfield control tower that stood about a
hundred yards from the main complex.
Having emerged from the top door exit inside a small
side hangar, they'd made their way to the tower, which doubled
as the base's secondary control room.
They hurried into the tower's command center--it was
a replica of the one inside Area 7--and started flicking
switches. Television monitors came to life. Console lights
flicked on.
Caesar said, "Get me a fix on Echo Unit's personnel locators."
It didn't take long for Logan to find Echo. Every 7th
Squadron member had an electronic locator surgically implanted
beneath the skin on his wrist.
"They're on the X-rail. Arriving at Area 8 right now."
"Fire up the Penetrators," Caesar said. "We're going to
Area 8."
down on level 1 of the underground complex,
Nicholas Tate was wandering around in a terrified daze.
After the sudden and mysterious disappearance of Hot Rod Hagerty, he didn't know what to do.
Flashlight in hand, he walked absently to the far end of
the darkened hangar, searching for Hagerty. But he stopped
twenty yards short of the ramp there when he saw s
omething
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emerging from it. Already somewhat muddled, now his
mind reeled at the sight that met him.
It was almost surreal.
A family of bears--yes, bears--stepped out from the
ramp and onto the floor of Level 1.
One gigantic male, a smaller female, and three
awkward-looking little cubs ambled out onto the hangar
floor. They were all hunched forward, padding along on all
fours, sniffing the petrol-soaked air all around them.
Tate wobbled unsteadily.
Then he turned and ran back toward the main elevator
shaft.
THE DETACHED MINI-ELEVATOR WHIPPED DOWN THE AIRCRAFT
elevator shaft in near total darkness, with Schofield, Mother
and the President on its back, the orange glow from
Schofield's torch the only light .
As they descended, Schofield yanked a couple of Gunther Botha's glass ampules from his thigh pocket--the small glass bulbs containing the antidote to the Sinovirus.
He turned to the President, spoke through his gas mask:
"How long do we have?"
"Half an hour till the first symptoms set in," the President
said, "when it invades the body through the skin. Dermal
infection is slower than direct inhalation. That antidote,
however, will neutralize the virus in its tracks."
Schofield handed a glass bulb to both Mother and the
President, then pulled out another one for himself. "We need
to find some hypodermic needles before we head to Area 8,"
he said.
They rode the mini-elevator down to Level 1.
When they arrived there, however, they were met by
Nicholas Tate, bursting forth from the darkness wide-eyed
and alarmed. He stepped straight onto the mini-elevator.
"I ... er ... don't think you want to go that way," he
said.
"Why not?" Schofield asked.
"Bears," Tate said dramatically.
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Schofield frowned, looked to the President. Clearly,
Tate had lost it.
"Where's Ramrod?" Mother asked.
"Gone," Tate said. "Just--poof---disappeared. One minute he was standing here behind me, the next he was just missing. All he left was this."
Tate held up Hagerty's Annapolis graduation ring.
Schofield didn't get it.
The President did.
"Oh, Jesus," he said. "He's out."
"Who's out?" Mother asked.
"There's only one person in this complex who is known to leave a person's jewelry at the site of an abduction," the
President said. "The serial killer, Lucifer Leary."
"The Surgeon of Phoenix ..." Schofield whispered, recalling
the name and the horror that went along with it.
"Oh, super," Mother spat. "Just what we need. Another fucking wacko running around this place."
The President turned to Schofield. "Captain, we don't
have time for this. If Caesar Russell's got that boy ..."
Schofield bit his lip. He didn't like leaving anybody behind,
even Ramrod Hagerty.
"Captain," the President said, his face hard, "as I said
earlier this morning, sometimes in this job I have to make
difficult decisions--and I'm going to make one now. If he's
still alive, Colonel Hagerty is going to have to look after
himself. We can't spend the next hour searching this facility
for him. There's something bigger at stake here. Much bigger.
We have to get that boy back."
they took the mini-elevator to the second underground
hangar, Level 2, and--now accompanied by the confused
Nicholas Tate--dashed down its length.
Thankfully, there were no bears in this hangar.
They hit the fire stairwell at a run and rushed down it,
guided by the light of Schofield's flaming torch. Since they
had come direct from their fight in the pit, they had no
weapons, no flashlights, no nothing.
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Matthew Reilly
They came to the bottom of the stairwell, and the door
to Level 6.
Cautiously, Schofield opened it.
The Level 6 X-rail platform was completely dark.
No sound. No sign of life.
Schofield edged out onto the platform. Dark shapes littered
the area--bodies from the three separate gunfights that
had taken place down there over the course of the morning, the charred remains of Elvis's RDX explosion.
Schofield and Mother ran straight over to the bodies of
some Bravo Unit men. They grabbed a P-90 assault rifle
each, plus SIG-Sauer pistols. Schofield even found a first
aid field kit on one of the men which contained four plastic wrapped hypodermic needles.
Perfect.
He tossed a SIG to the President, but didn't offer a gun
to the unstable Tate.
"This way," he said.
He hurried along the platform, heading for the X-rail
engine that sat on the northern tracks of the underground
railway station, pointing toward the open tunnel that led to
Area 8.
UP IN THE MAIN HANGAR, BOOK II WAS PULLING JULIET Janson out of the ten-foot-deep pit that was the aircraft elevator
platform. He was wearing his uniform's ERG-6 gas mask.
A thin residual mist hung over the area, the lingering
cloud of the Sinovirus.
Juliet came out of the pit, and with a shout, she saw
them: Seth Grimshaw and the giant Goliath disappearing inside the personnel elevator. And Grimshaw was still holding
the Football.
"Over there!" she pointed. "They're going for the exit in
the elevator shaft. That Air Force guy Harper gave Grimshaw the exit code."
"Do you know the code?" Book II asked.
"Do I ever," Juliet leapt to her feet. "I was there when
Harper said it. Come on."
libby gant was on her own.
She was standing in a dark hallway inside the command
building at the eastern end of the hangar, at the base of a set
of stairs--unarmed but alert as hell.
In the hangar outside, the Sinovirus was loose, and she
didn't have a gas mask.
Okay, she thought, surely in a facility like this, there
would have to be some--
She found them in a cupboard underneath the stairs:
biohazard suits. Great big yellow Chemturions--with large,
baggy plastic helmets, balloonlike yellow coveralls, and
self-contained air packs.
Matthew Reilly
In the same cupboard, Gant also found a chunky
Maglite flashlight. Very handy.
She slipped into one of the Chemturion suits as fast as
she could, pulling its Ziploc zipper shut, turning on its self
contained air supply. The suit immediately inflated and she
started hearing her own breathing as a Darth Vader-like
wheeze.
Now safe from the Sinovirus, she had something else
she wanted to do.
She recalled her previous plan: find Caesar Russell's
command center--get the initiate/terminate unit that he'd
used to start the transmitter on the President's heart--then
use the black box that she'd taken from the AWACS plane
earlier to impersonate the President's radio signal.
The black box.
So far as she knew, it was still on the floor of the main<
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hangar, in the spot where she had kicked it away from the
mini elevator.
She decided to search the command center for the I/T
unit first. Then she'd go back for the black box.
Guided by the light of her newfound flashlight, she
climbed the stairs, came to the command room's doorway.
The door was ajar.
Slowly, Gant pushed it open, to reveal a very battered
looking room.
It looked like a war had been fought in there.
The room's plasterboard walls were shredded with bullet
holes. The slanted windows overlooking the main hangar
were cracked or completely shattered. Several computer
consoles bore fat round holes in their monitors. Others just
sat there blank, lacking a power source.
Dressed in her yellow biohazard suit, Gant entered the
room, stepping over a pair of dead 7th Squadron men lying
all shot up on the floor. Their weapons were gone, presumably
taken by the inmates who had stormed through here.
Through the faceplate of her airtight suit, Gant's eyes
swept the control room, searching for the
Yes.
area 7
It was sitting on top of one of the computer monitors
and it was just as the President had described it: a small red hand held unit, with a black stub antenna sticking out of its top.
The initiate/terminate unit.
Gant picked it up, examined it. It looked like a miniature mobile phone.
She saw two switches on its face. Beneath each switch
was a crude length of tape marked with a handwritten T
and "2."
Gant frowned. Why would Caesar need ... ?
She shook the thought away, stuffed the IT unit into the
chest pocket of her biohazard suit.
As she did so, she peered out over the darkened hangar
to see if she could spot the black box down by the pit.
The vast hangar floor stretched away from her, veiled
by the unearthly mist of the Sinovirus.
Except for the flickering flames of the prisoners' discarded
torches, nothing moved.
The area was awash with irregularly shaped objects:
slumped bodies, Marine One, a crashed cockroach, one battered
helicopter, even Bravo Unit's busted-open barricade of
crates and boxes.