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
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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.
area 7 377
"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 bicep.
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
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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.
area 7 375
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 back 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
area 7 381
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. ]
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
area 7 383
shuttles: mainly white, with the American flag and "united
states" 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 th
e 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
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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
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