A welcoming party stood on the runway in front of the hangar, standing silently in the cool morning air, silhouetted by the hangar light behind them.]
Two Air Force officers - one colonel and one major - stood at the head of the welcoming unit.
Behind the two officers stood four rows of fully armed commandos, ten men to a row. All of them were dressed in full combat gear - black battle-dress uniforms, black body armor, black helmets - and they all held high-tech Belgian made P-90 assault rifles rigidly across their chests.
Looking out through Marine One's cockpit windshield, Schofield recognized their insignia patches at once. They were members of a unit rarely seen at U.S. military exercises, a unit which was shrouded in secrecy, a unit which many believed was used only in the most critical of missions.
It was the elite ground unit in the United States Air Force, the famous 7th Special Operations Squadron.
Based in West Germany for much of the Cold War, its official task during that time was the defense of U.S. airfields against the elite Soviet Spetsnaz units. Its unofficial achievements, though, were far more spectacular.
Masterminding the defection of five senior Soviet nuclear missile specialists from a secret base in the Ukraine mountains. The assassination of KGB operations chief Vladimir Nakov in Moscow in 1990, before Nakov could himself assassinate Mikhail Gorbachev. And, finally, in 1997, the daring rescue of the CIA's captured Far Eastern Bureau Chief, Fred Conway, from the dreaded Xiangi Prison - the all but impregnable maze of grim cells and torture chambers belonging to the notorious Chinese External Intelligence Service.
Each man in the formation wore a special combat mask around his throat - an ERG-6 gas mask. Black and hard, it looked like the lower half of a hockey mask, and it covered its wearer's mouth and nose in much the same way Jesse James's mask had covered his face in the old days.
Three other men stood out in front of the detachment of 7th Squadron members on the deserted runway. All three wore starched white lab coats. Scientists.
Once the Marine and Secret Service people from Nighthawk Two were in place, a set of Airstairs folded down from the forward left-hand side of Marine One.
Two Marines emerged from the helicopter first and took up their positions at the base of the stairs, backs straight, eyes forward.
A moment later, Special Agent Frank Cutler stepped out of the chopper, hand on his holster, eyes watchful. The Secret Service trusts nobody. Not even the United States Air Force. Even it could have a disgruntled soldier who might take a shot at the President.
The President came out next, followed by his staff.
Schofield and a young Marine corporal emerged last of all.
As usual, Marine One's two pilots, Gunman and Dallas, stayed on board just in case a rapid departure was called for.
The two parties faced each other on the runway in the early morning light - the Air Force detachment stationed at the complex; the President and his entourage.
Twisting coils of windswept sand swirled around their bodies. A sandstorm was due later in the day.
A young Air Force captain guided the President over to the colonel at the head of the Air Force formation - a severe looking man with gray hair and eyebrows. As the President came closer, the colonel stepped forward and crisply saluted his Commander-in-Chief.
"Good morning, Mr. President," he said. "My name is Colonel Jerome T. Harper, United States Air Force Medical and Surgical Command, and commanding officer of United States Air Force Special Area (Restricted) 7. This is Major Kurt Logan, commander of the 7th Squadron forces here at the base. Your two Secret Service advance teams are waiting for you inside. We're honored to have you, sir. Welcome to Area 7."
"Thank you, Colonel," the President replied. "It's a pleasure to be here. Lead the way."
As soon as the President was taken away, disappearing inside the enormous main hangar with his highest-level entourage in tow, the major in charge of the 7th Squadron detachment came up to Schofield.
Major Kurt Logan was about six-one, with closely shaved hair and heavily pockmarked skin. Schofield had actually met him before, although he doubted Logan would remember him.
It had been at a special command and leadership course run by the Navy at their SEAL compound in Fort Lauderdale in 1997. Through a combination of smart tactics and ruthless follow-through, the softly spoken Logan had come first in the class by a clear forty points. He could assess any battlefield situation in an instant, and when it came to engaging the enemy, he was uncompromising. Schofield, then just a budding Recon Unit commander, had come tenth in a class of sixteen.
From the looks of things, Logan hadn't changed much. His whole bearing - hands clasped firmly behind his back, steely level gaze - indicated a powerful, confident inner strength. Battle-hardened strength.
"Excuse me, Captain," Logan said in a soft Southern drawl. He offered Schofield a sheet of paper. "Our personnel list for your records."
Schofield took the list, then gave one of his own to Logan in return.
It was common practice at presidential inspections for both sides to swap personnel lists, since the President's people wanted to know who was at the base they were inspecting, and the base people wanted to know exactly who was in the presidential convoy.
Schofield glanced at the Area 7 list. Columns of meaningless names ran down it.
UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
SPECIAL AREA (RESTRICTED) 07
ON-SITE PERSONNEL
CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET
NAME UNIT
COMMAND UNIT
Harper, JT (CO)
7TH SQUADRON
Alvarez, MJ A - Frommer, SN E - Arthurs, RT C - Gale, A D - Atlock, FD B - Giggs, RE B - Baines, AW A - Golding, DK D - Bennett, B E - Goldman, WE A - Biggs, NM C - Grayson, SR E - Boland, CS B - Hughes, R A - Boyce, LW D - Ingliss, WA B - Calvert, ET E - Johnson, SW D - Carney, LE E - Jones, M D - Christian, FC A - Kincaid, R B - Coleman, GK E - Littleton, SO E - Coles, M B - Logan, (MAJ) KW A - Crick, DT D - McConnell, BA B - Criece, TW A - Messick, K E - Davis, AM E - Milbourn, SK D - Dayton, AM E - Morton, IN C - Dillan, ST D - Nance, GF D - Doheny, FG A - Nystrom,JJ D - Egan, RR B - Oliver, PK E - Fraser, MS C - Price, AL C - Fredericks, GH A - Rawson, MJ C - Sayles, MT B - Stone, JK C - Willis, IS C - Sommers, SR C - Taylor, AS B - Wolfson, HT A
CIVILIAN STAFF
Botha, GW MED - Franklin, HS MED - Shaw, DE MED
He did notice something, though.
There were more names here than there were 7th Squadron men on the tarmac. While there had been forty commandos out on the tarmac, there were fifty 7th Squadron members on the list. He figured there must be another ten man unit inside the base somewhere.
As Schofield looked at the list, Logan said, "Captain, if you wouldn't mind, we'd like you to move your…"
"What appears to be the problem, Major?" a voice said from behind Schofield. "Don't bother with Captain Schofield. I am in command here."
It was Ramrod Hagerty, the White House Liaison Officer. With his Englishman's mustache and distinctly battle-hardened posture, Hagerty was everything Kurt Logan was not.
Before he answered him, Logan looked Hagerty up and down. What he saw obviously didn't impress him.
"I was led to believe that Colonel Grier was in ultimate command of Marine One," Logan said coolly - and correctly.
"Well, ah, yes...yes, technically, he is," Hagerty said. "But, as White House Liaison, anything to do with the movement of these helicopters must go through me first."
Logan looked at Hagerty in stony silence.
Then he said, "I was about to ask the captain here if he wouldn't mind rolling your helicopters into the main hangar while the President is at the base. We wouldn't want enemy satellites knowing that we had the Boss visiting, now would we?"
"No, no, of course not. Of course not," Ramrod said. "Schofield. Make it happen."
"Yes, sir," Schofield said dryly.
* * *
The giant double doors of the hanga
r closed with a resounding boom.
The two lead helicopters of Marine Helicopter Squadron-1 were now parked inside the main hangar of Area 7, their rotors and tail booms folded into their stowed positions. Despite their own considerable size, the two Presidential helicopters were dwarfed by the cavernous hangar.
Having supervised the roll-in of the choppers, Schofield now stood in the middle of the massive interior space, alone, scanning it silently.
The rest of the Marine, White House and Secret Service contingent - those who hadn't been senior enough to go with the President, about twenty people - variously milled about the helicopters or drank coffee in the two glass-walled offices that flanked the main doors.
The size of the hangar stunned Schofield.
It was gigantic.
Completely illuminated by brilliant white halogen lights, it must have stretched at least a hundred yards into the mountain. A ceiling-mounted rail system ran for its entire length. At the moment, two large wooden crates hung from the rails at either end of the hangar.
At the far end of the vast space - facing the doors that led out to the runway - stood a twostory, completely internal building that ran for the full width of the hangar. This building's upper floor had angled glass windows that looked out over the hangar floor.
A small unobtrusive personnel elevator sat quietly underneath the overhang created by the building's upper level, sunk in the hangar's northern wall.
Apart from the Presidential helicopters, there were no other aircraft in the hangar at present. Some large white painted towing vehicles not unlike those seen at airports lay scattered around the hangar floor - indeed, Schofield had used two of them to bring in the choppers.
By far the most striking feature of the immense hangar, however, was the massive aircraft elevator platform that lay in its center.
It was huge, unbelievably huge, like the enormous hydraulic elevators that hang off the sides of aircraft carriers - a giant square-shaped platform in the very center of the hangar.
At 200 feet by 200 feet, the platform was large enough to hold an entire AWACS Boeing 707 - the Air- Force's famous radar-detecting airplanes, known for the thirty-foot flying-saucerlike rotodomes mounted on their backs.
Supported by an unseen hydraulic lift system, the giant platform took up nearly the whole of the central Area of the hangar. As with similar aircraft elevators, to maximize efficiency, on the northeastern corner of the platform was a small detachable section which was itself a working elevator, capable of operating independently of the larger platform. To do this it ran on rails attached to the wall of the elevator shaft rather than on the main platform's telescoping hydraulic strut - a kind of "platform within a platform," so to speak.
Today, however, the Air Force personnel at Area 7 were putting on the whole show.
As he stood at the edge of the enormous elevator shaft, Schofield could see the President - with his nine-man Secret Service Detail and his high-ranking Air Force tour guides - standing on the full-sized platform, getting smaller and smaller as they descended the wide concrete shaft on it.
* * *
At that very same moment, as Shane Schofield stood in the center of the vast hangar bay, looking down into the wide elevator shaft, someone else was watching him.
The watcher stood in Area 7's darkened control room, on the upper floor of the internal building that formed the eastern wall of the hangar. Around him, four uniformed radio operators spoke softly into headset microphones:
"…Alpha Unit, cover the Level 3 common room…"
"…Echo Unit advises that the Marine investigatory team from Nighthawk Three had to be neutralized out at the EEV. They found the secondary advance team. Echo is parking their chopper in one of the outside hangars now. Returning to the main hangar when they're done -"
"...Bravo and Charlie Units are to remain in main hangar..."
"...Delta Unit reports that it is now in position..."
"...The Secret Service are trying to contact their primary advance team on Level 6. The simulated All-Clear signal, however, appears to be working..."
Major Kurt Logan arrived at the side of the shadowy figure. "Sir. The President and his Detail just arrived on Level 4. All units are in position."
"Good."
"Shall we move now?"
"No. Let him take the tour," the faceless man said. "There is still one more thing that has to be taken care of before we can begin."
* * *
"Good morning."
Schofield turned, and saw the smiling faces of Libby Gant and Mother Newman.
"Hey there," he said.
"Ralph's still pissed at you," Mother said. "He wants a rematch." Ralph was Mother's husband. A short nugget of a man with a moon-shaped smiling face and a limitless ability to put up with Mother's eccentricities, he was a trucker, owning his own Mack eighteen-wheeler. It had a painting of an arrow-struck heart on its side with the word "Mother" flowing over it. With his short stature and ready smile, Ralph was widely regarded in the Marine community as a bona fide legend.
He was also the proud owner of a new barbecue, and at the obligatory Sunday afternoon lunch at Mother's place a few weeks ago, he'd challenged Schofield to a shoot-off on the garage basketball hoop. Schofield had let him win and Ralph knew it.
"Maybe next weekend?" Schofield said. "How about you? How'd that checkup on the leg go yesterday?"
"In a word, Scarecrow, sen-sational," Mother said. "I got full movement and I can run just as fast as I used to. That seemed to satisfy the docs. Hell, I told 'em that just last week I bowled 275, but that didn't seem to mean much. Either way, since I'm now part machine, I want a new nickname: Darth Fucking Vader."
Schofield laughed. "Okay, Darth."
"You having trouble with Ramrod again?" Gant asked seriously.
"The usual," Schofield said. "Hey, happy birthday."
Gant smiled. "Thanks."
"I got you something." Schofield reached into his dress coat pocket. "It's not huge or anything, but..." he frowned, patted his other pockets. "Damn, it's here somewhere. Maybe it's back on the chopper..."
"Don't worry about it."
"Can I give it to you later?"
"Sure."
Mother gazed at the enormous hangar around them. "What the fuck is this place? Looks like Fort Knox."
"More than that," Schofield said.
"What do you mean?"
"Look at the floor just inside the hangar doors."
Mother and Gant did. A series of box-shaped indentations ran in a line across the concrete floor in front of the doors. Each indentation was at least a yard square and deep.
"Now look up."
They did, and saw a series of thick, toothlike metal protrusions - protrusions which, when lowered, would fit perfectly into the box-shaped indentations on the floor.
"Piston-driven armored door," Schofield said, "like the ones they have on Nimitz-class carriers. They're used to divide the ship's hangar bays into self-contained zones in case of fire or explosion. But, you'll notice that there aren't any other armored doors in this hangar. That's the only one, which means it's the only exit."
"So what are you saying?" Mother asked.
"I'm saying," Schofield said, "that whatever they're doing in this complex is more important than you or I could possibly imagine."
* * *
The wide elevator platform holding the President of the United States jolted to a halt in front of a giant steel door marked with an enormous black-painted "4."
The wide concrete elevator shaft stretched up into the air above the President and his Secret Service Detail like an oversized vertical tunnel. The bright artificial light of the ground-level hangar was but a small square of white now - three hundred feet straight up. No sooner had the elevator stopped than the massive steel door in front of it rumbled upward. Colonel Jerome Harper led the way, walking and talking quickly:
"This facility was once the headquarters for the North American Air Defense Comman
d - NORAD – before NORAD was moved to a more modern facility built underneath Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado in 1975. The complex is surrounded by a two-foot-thick titanium outer wall, which is itself buried beneath one hundred feet of solid granite. Like the Cheyenne Mountain complex, it is designed to withstand a direct hit from a thermonuclear missile."
Harper handed the President a sheet of paper, on which was a schematic diagram of the subterranean structure.
The hangar appeared at the top of the diagram – at ground level, capped by the low mountain - then the wide aircraft elevator shaft led downwards, until it met a multileveled structure built deep within the earth.
Harper said, "The underground complex contains six levels, the first two of which - Levels 1 and 2 - are storage hangars for high-risk aircraft, much like the ones you saw at Area 8 earlier this morning. Level 3 houses communications and staff living quarters. Level 5 is confinement. And Level 6 is the X-Rail system."
"Each level is completely scalable to both radiation and airborne contagions, and the whole facility, if locked down, is capable of living off a self-contained supply of oxygen for thirty days. Food supplies are kept in a storage Area on Level 3. Water supply is kept in a 100million-gallon tank in the Level 1 hangar."
Their group came to a short upwardly sloping corridor, at the end of which sat a squat solid looking door that looked like a gigantic safe. An Air Force man hurriedly began opening it.
"Project Fortune was stationed here four years ago, after the first viable embryo reached maturity," Harper said. "Now, at last, it has reached a stage where it can be put to use."
The President waited patiently while the three-foot thick door was pulled open.
Frank Cutler and the eight other members of the President's personal Detail stood behind him - silent, impassive, invisible. At three-minute intervals, Cutler would silently check his earpiece for the All-Clear beacons from both of his advance teams. The beacons came in loud and clear.
Then, finally, the door swung open, and the President looked casually beyond it.
And his jaw dropped.
"Oh...my...God..."