"I know!" Mother shouted. "You go! Get up on the roof! I'll bring us under the ladder! And take the Prez here with you!"
"But what about you--?"
"Scarecrow! In about twelve seconds, that jumbo is going
to take off and if you aren't on it, we lose that kid! I have
to stay at the wheel of this thing, otherwise it'll spin out!"
"But those Penetrators will kill you once we're
gone ...!"
"That's why you have to take him with you!" Mother
said, nodding at the President. "Don't mind me, Scarecrow.
You know it'll take more than a bunch of Air Force cocksuckers to get rid of me"
Schofield wasn't so sure.
But he saw the look in her eye, and he knew that she
was prepared to keep driving the cockroach--to her almost
certain death--so long as he and the President got on board
that plane.
He turned to the President. "Come on. You're coming
with me."
THE COCKROACH RACED ALONGSIDE THE 747, ONCE AGAIN
shielded by its electronic countermeasures, swung in underneath
its forward left-hand entry door--the door from which
the rope ladder dangled.
The two tiny figures of Schofield and the President-- still dressed in their black combat uniforms--climbed up
onto the roof of the speeding towing vehicle. Conveniently,
their 7th Squadron uniforms came with protective goggles,
so they put them on to protect their eyes against the storm of
sand blowing all around them.
area 7 397
Down in the driver's compartment, Mother continued to
grapple with the steering wheel of the cockroach, trying
with all her might to keep the rampaging vehicle on a
straight course.
On the roof of the cockroach--in the face of the battering wind--Schofield reached for the flailing rope ladder. It
fluttered and swayed just out of his reach--
Then suddenly a deafening roar filled his ears.
The 747's four wing-mounted jet engines were coming
to life.
Schofield's blood ran cold.
The plane was powering up for take-off, starting its run
down the airstrip. Any second now, it would accelerate considerably
and pull away from the cockroach.
The rope ladder continued to flutter in the raging wind,
a few feet in front of the speeding cockroach. Billowing
clouds of sand flew everywhere.
Schofield turned to the President and yelled: "Okay! I grab the ladder! You grab me!"
"What!"
"You'll understand!"
And with that, Schofield charged across the flat roof of
the cockroach and leapt off its forward edge ...
... and flew through the air, reaching up with his outstretched
arms ...
... and caught the bottom rung of the dangling rope ladder.
He waved for the President to follow. "Now you grab me!"
With a doubtful shake of his head, the President said, "Okay ..."
And he ran forward and jumped--
--just as the silver 747 shot forward, its engines engaging.
The President flew through the short space of air in
front of the speeding cockroach before his body slammed into Schofield's, and he threw his arms around the young
captain's waist, clasping his hips tightly while Schofield
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himself held on grimly to the bottom rung of the rope ladder
with both of his hands!
Mother's cockroach instantly peeled away behind them,
unable to keep up. The two Penetrators also gave up the
chase, wheeling to a halt in midair above the runway.
Hanging from the rope ladder--and traveling at close to a hundred miles an hour, with the wind whipping all around him and the President of the United States hanging from his waist--Schofield watched in horror as one of the Penetrators loosed a missile at Mother's now-unprotected cockroach.
The missile hit the cockroach's tail and detonated hard,
lifting the rear end of the still-speeding towing vehicle a
clear five feet off the ground.
With the missile impact, the cockroach fishtailed
wildly--and shot off the runway, onto the sand, kicking up
an enormous billowing dust cloud--and then it flipped-- and tumbled--and rolled--once, twice, three times--before
it came to a thumping crashing crushing halt, right on its
cockpit, surrounded by falling sand.
And as he hung from the doorway of the accelerating
747, Schofield could only stare at the dust-covered wreck
and pray that Mother had died quickly.
BUT RIGHT NOW HE HAD OTHER THINGS TO DO.
The 747 continued to rush down the runway.
As it did so, the two tiny figures of Schofield and the
President could be seen dangling from its forward left-hand
doorway.
The 747 picked up speed. With the extra weight of the
X-38 on its back, it required an unusually long take-off run.
Wind whipped all around Schofield and the President as
they hung from the rope ladder.
"You go first!" Schofield yelled. "Climb up my body
and then go up the ladder!"
The President did as he was told.
With the runway rushing by beneath them, he first
climbed up Schofield's body, using his combat webbing for
hand- and footholds. Then he stepped off Schofield's shoulders
onto the rope ladder itself and began to climb it.
As soon as the President was on the ladder, Schofield
began to haul himself up, using only his arms.
The ground continued to whip by beneath them as they
ascended the rope ladder, the wind slamming into their
bodies.
And then, all of a sudden, as they reached the doorway
at the top of the ladder, the speeding runway beneath them
just dropped away—dropped dramatically away—and receded
rapidly into obscurity.
Schofield swallowed.
They were now in the air.
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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.
area 7 401
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
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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
area 7 403
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.
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Matthew Reilly
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
h
im and the President from being recognized. But still he
felt self-conscious, certain that he looked like an impostor
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
area 7 405
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!
Area 7 ss-2 Page 38
