The door slammed shut and Special Agent Juliet Janson turned.
"Quickly!" she shouted. "Back up the stairs! Now!"
"…All units, be aware, Delta unit has engaged the enemy..." One of the radio men in the control room said. "Repeat, Delta Unit has engaged the enemy..."
* * *
Shane Schofield tried not to breathe, tried not to make a sound.
All they had to do was look over the edge.
He was hanging by his fingertips from one of the horizontal cabling gutters carved into the concrete wall of the elevator shaft, a bare three feet below the mouth of the cross-vent he had been standing in only moments before.
Standing in that cross-vent right now were the four heavily armed 7th Squadron men who had stormed it only seconds earlier.
Beside him, Mother, Gant and Brainiac were also clinging to the cabling gutter with their fingers.
Above them, they could hear one of the 7th Squadron men speaking into his helmet mike.
"Charlie Six, this is Charlie One, they're not in the Level 1 cross-vent. Copy that, we're on our way."
Heavy footsteps, then nothing.
Schofield sighed with relief.
"Where to now?" Brainiac asked.
"There," Schofield said, jerking his chin at the giant steel hangar door on the opposite side of the wide elevator shaft.
* * *
"You ready?" Book II yelled to Elvis.
"Ready!" Elvis shouted back.
Book II looked out at the big white-painted Volvo towing vehicle attached to the tail boom of Nighthawk Two ten yards away. With its oversized tires, low-slung body and small two-man driver's cabin, it looked like either a brick on wheels or a giant cockroach. Indeed, it was this resemblance that had earned the towing vehicle the nickname "cockroach" among airport workers around the world.
At the moment, Nighthawk Two's cockroach was facing outwards, pointed at the armor-plated titanium door that had thundered down into place only minutes earlier, sealing the hangar.
Book II was now holding two nickel-plated Berettas in his hands, one his own, the other pilfered from a dead Marine nearby. He shouted to Elvis, "You take the wheel! I'll go for the other side!"
"You got it!"
"Okay! Now."
The two of them leapt to their feet and dashed out into the open together, their legs moving in time.
Almost instantly, a line of bullets raced across the ground behind them, nipping at their heels.
Elvis flung himself into the driver's seat, slammed the door shut behind him. Book II made for the passenger side, but he was met with a brutal volley of gunfire, so instead he just dived onto the towing vehicle's flat steel roof and yelled, "Elvis! Punch it!"
Elvis keyed the ignition. The Volvo's big 600 horsepower engine roared to life. Then Elvis jammed it into gear and floored it.
The towing vehicle's tires squealed as they shot off the mark, heading straight for the armored door that cut the hangar off from the outside world, taking Nighthawk Two, a full-sized CH53E Super Stallion transport helicopter, with it!
The two remaining units of 7th Squadron men in the hangar - twenty men in total - swept across the hangar on foot, pursuing the speeding cockroach with their guns. A wave of supercharged bullets pummeled the big Volvo's sides.
Elvis yanked on the steering wheel and the big cockroach swung around, rocketing toward the southern glass walled office.
On its roof, Book II raised himself on one knee and fired both his pistols at the oncoming 7th Squadron commandos.
It didn't do much good - the Air Force assassins had him outgunned. It was like attacking a battery of Patriot missiles with a peashooter. He ducked back behind the cockroach's cabin amid a flurry of return fire.
"Oh, crap!" Elvis shouted from the driver's cabin.
Book II looked up.
A lone 7th Squadron commando stood about thirty yards in front of them - right in their path - on the southern side of the central elevator shaft, with a Predator antitank rocket launcher hefted onto his shoulder!
The commando pulled the trigger. There was a puff of smoke before a small cylindrical object came blasting out of the launcher, shooting toward the speeding cockroach at phenomenal speed, leaving a dead-straight vapor trail in the air behind it.
Elvis reacted quickly, did the only thing he could think to do.
He yanked his steering wheel hard to the left.
The massive Volvo towing vehicle rose onto two wheels as it swung violently left - and for a moment it looked like it was going to drive straight into the yawning chasm that was the elevator shaft.
But it just kept turning... turning... wheels screeching... until suddenly it was heading north, along the narrow section of floor in between Marine One and the elevator shaft.
Nighthawk Two wasn't so lucky.
Since it was bouncing along - in reverse - behind the runaway cockroach, Elvis's sudden turn had brought it directly into the missile's line of fire.
The Predator hit it, slamming into Nighthawk Two's reinforced glass cockpit at tremendous speed.
The result was nothing short of spectacular.
The whole front section of the CH-53E Super Stallion exploded magnificently - blasting out in an instant, showering the area behind the quickly moving helicopter with glass and twisted metal, leaving the chopper with a jagged metal hole where the glass bubble of its cockpit was supposed to be!
The impact of the missile had also destroyed the landing wheels under the nose of the chopper. So now the giant helicopter was being hauled behind Elvis's towing vehicle with its nose - or what was left of it - dragging wildly on the floor, kicking up sparks.
"Elvis!" Book II yelled. "Go for the elevator! The regular elevator!"
The 7th Squadron soldiers dived out of the way as the speeding cockroach thundered in among them, wildly out of control.
Elvis saw the elevator doors off to his right, and yanked the steering wheel hard over. The cockroach responded, swinging right, cutting the corner of the aircraft elevator shaft - so that for the briefest of moments, Book II, partially hanging off the roof of the vehicle, saw nothing but a wide chasm of emptiness falling away beneath him.
Three seconds later, the cockroach - with the semidestroyed helicopter behind it - skidded to a squealing halt right in front of the elevator doors on the northern side of the hangar.
Book II leapt off the top of the big Volvo and hit the call button, Elvis joining him, when suddenly two armed men leapt over the big towing vehicle behind them.
Book II spun, snapping his guns up, triggers half-pulled.
"Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!" one of the armed men said, holding his pistol up.
"Easy, Sergeant," the other one said calmly. "We're with you."
Book II eased back on his triggers.
They were Marines.
The first was Sergeant Ashley Lewicky, an extraordinarily ugly career sergeant with a thick monobrow, battered pug nose, and mile-wide grin. Short and stout, his call-sign was a slam dunk: "Love Machine." Of roughly equal age and rank, he and Elvis had been buddies for years.
The second Marine, however, couldn't have been more different from Love Machine. Tall and handsome in a clean cut kind of way, he was a twenty-nine-year-old captain named Tom Reeves. A promising young officer, he'd been tagged for rapid promotion. Indeed, he'd already been promoted over several more-experienced lieutenants. Despite his obvious skills, the men called him "Calvin," because he looked like a Calvin Klein underwear model.
"Jesus H. Christ, Elvis," Love Machine said, "where the hell did you learn to drive! A demolition derby?"
"Why? Where have you two been?" Elvis asked.
"Where do you think, knucklehead? Inside Nighthawk Two. We both dived in there when the shit hit the fan. And we were kinda happy there until you guys drove us into the sights of that rocket laun..."
Just then, a volley of bullets smacked into the wall above their heads.
Ten 7th Squadron men - Bravo Unit - wer
e charging across the wide hangar after them.
"I presume you had a plan when you drove over here, Sergeant," Calvin Reeves said to Book II.
At that moment, the elevator pinged and its metal doors slid open. Thankfully, it was empty.
"This was it, sir," Book II said.
"I approve," Calvin said and they all rushed inside. Book II went straight to the control panel and hit "door close."
The doors began to close. A bullet sizzled inside, smacked against the back wall of the lift.
"Hurry up..." Elvis urged.
The doors kept closing. They heard boots thud onto the roof of the cockroach outside, heard machine-gun bolts cock...
The doors came together... a bare second before they erupted with domelike welts from the barrage of bullets outside.
* * *
It had taken them a while, but moving hand over hand, hanging by their fingertips from the cabling gutter that ran all the way around the elevator shaft, they had eventually made it to the wide hangar door on the other side.
Hanging one-handed from the horizontal gutter, Schofield hit a button on a control panel beside the hangar door. Instantly, the massive steel door began to rumble upward.
Schofield climbed up onto level ground first, made sure there were no enemy troops around, then turned to help the others up behind him.
When they were all up, they gazed at the area before them.
"Whoa, mama..." Mother breathed.
A cavernous - completely underground - aircraft hangar stretched away from them.
* * *
In the control room overlooking the main grund level hangar, the wall of black-and-white television monitors flashed an array of images from the underground complex:
Juliet Janson and the President running up the stairwell.
Book II, Calvin Reeves, Elvis and Love Machine inside the regular elevator, punching out the ceiling hatch and climbing up through it.
Schofield and the others stepping up into the doorway of the underground hangar.
"...Okay, Charlie Unit, I have them. The ones who were in the ventilation shaft. Level 1 hangar bay. Four Marines: two male, two female. They're all yours..."
"...Bravo Unit, your targets have just exited the personnel elevator through the ceiling hatch. About to lose visual contact. But they're in the shaft. Sealing all elevator shaft doors except yours. Okay, they're shut in. Take them out..."
"...Sir, Echo Unit has cleaned out the rest of the main hangar. Awaiting further instructions..."
"Send them to help Charlie," Caesar Russell said, eyeing the monitor with Shane Schofield on it.
"...Echo, this is Control, proceed to Level 1 hangar bay for rendezvous with Charlie Unit..."
"...Alpha Unit, Presidential Detail is climbing the stairs. Coming right for you. Delta Unit, the Level 6 fire door is unguarded. You are free to enter the stairwell and engage..."
* * *
It was absolutely gigantic.
An enormous subterranean hangar, roughly the same size as the one up at ground level, perhaps even larger.
It had several aircraft in it, too.
One converted Boeing 707 AWACS plane, with the characteristic flying-saucer-like rotodome mounted on its back. Two sinister-looking B-2 stealth bombers, with their black radar absorbent paint, futuristic flying-wing design, and angry furrowed-brow cockpit windows. And parked directly in front of the stealth bombers, one Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the world's fastest operational aircraft, with its sleek super-elongated fuselage and twin rear thrusters.
The massive airplanes towered above Schofield and his team, dominating the cavernous space.
"What do we do now?" Mother asked.
Schofield was momentarily silent.
He was staring intently at the AWACS plane. It just stood there silently, pointing toward the wide aircraft elevator shaft.
Then he said, "We find out if what they're saying about the President's heart is true."
* * *
The air in the fire stairs was filles with flying bullets.
The Presidential Detail, down to three now, guided their charge up the stairs, leading with their guns, a makeshift array of Uzis, SIG-Sauers and spare ankle revolvers.
A young male agent named Julio Ramondo led the way, spraying the stairs above them with his Uzi, despite a bullet wound to his shoulder.
Special Agent Juliet Janson came after him, having assumed command of the Detail more by action than protocol. She guided the President along behind her.
The third and last surviving agent of the Detail – his name was Curtis - covered their rear, firing down the stairs behind them as they moved.
At twenty-eight, Juliet Janson was the most junior member of the President's Detail, but that didn't seem to matter now.
She had degrees in criminology and psychology, could run a hundred meters in 13.8 seconds and was an excellent marksman. The daughter of an American businessman father and a Taiwanese university lecturer mother, she had a flawless Eurasian complexion - smooth olive skin, a sharply defined jawline, beautiful almond-brown eyes and shoulder length jet-black hair.
"Ramondo! Can you see it!" she shouted above the gunfire.
After the horror of their attempt to get to Level 6 and the bloody death of Frank Cutler, the President and his Detail had been left in the middle of a 7th Squadron sandwich.
The unit down on Level 6 was coming up after them, while the unit that had chased them out of the common room on Level 3 was closing in on them from above.
What that had left them with was a race - a race to get to one of the floors in between Level 6 and Level 3 before they faced fire from both above and below.
"Yes! I see it!" Ramondo yelled back. "Come on!"
Juliet Janson arrived on the landing next to Ramondo, with the President beside her.
Thumping footfalls echoed down the stairwell above them, bullets ripped apart the walls all around them.
Janson saw the nearest door, saw the sign on it:
LEVEL 5: ANIMAL CONTAINMENT AREA
NO ENTRY
THIS DOOR FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY.
ENTER VIA ELEVATORS AT OTHER END OF FLOOR.
"I think this qualifies as an emergency," she said, before blasting the door's locks with three shots from her SIG-Sauer.
Then she kicked open the door and hauled the President into Level 5.
* * *
Book II looked up into the darkness of the regular elevator shaft, saw the outer doors that led to the ground-level hangar about fifty feet above him.
He was standing on top of the personnel elevator – now stopped midway down the shaft - with Calvin, Elvis and Love Machine. A few widely spaced fluorescent lights illuminated the enclosed concrete elevator well.
"Why did we have to get out of the elevator?" Elvis asked.
"Cameras," Book II said. "We couldn't stay..."
"We'd have been sitting ducks if we'd stayed inside it," Calvin Reeves said, cutting in.
"Gentlemen, as the ranking officer here, I am taking command."
"So what's the plan then, Captain America?" Love Machine asked.
"We keep moving..." Calvin began, but that was all he got out, because at that moment, the outer doors above them burst open and almost immediately three P-90 gunbarrels appeared, bright yellow flashes bursting forth from their muzzles.
A flurry of ricochets impacted all around the elevator.
Book II ducked and spun - and saw a series of vertical counterweight cables running down the wall of the shaft, disappearing down the side of the stationary elevator.
"The cables!" he yelled, scampering over to the wall, not caring for the chain of command.
"Everybody down! Now!"
* * *
Shane Schofield burst into the forward cabin of the AWACS plane in the hangar on Level 1.
"Brainiac"
"Already on it," Brainiac headed aft, disappearing inside the main cabin of the aircraft.
"Close the door," S
chofield said to Mother, who had come in last.
Schofield charged aft. The interior of the AWACS was very similar to that of a commercial airliner - albeit a commercial airliner that had had all its seats ripped out and replaced by large flat-topped surveillance consoles.
Brainiac was already at one of the consoles. It was whirring to life as Schofield took a seat beside him. Mother and Gant went straight for the plane's two door-windows, peered out through them.
Brainiac started typing at the console.
"Mother said it was a microwave signal," Schofield said. "The satellite beams it down and then the radio chip on the President's heart bounces the signal back up."
Brainiac typed some more. "Makes sense. Only a microwave signal could penetrate the radiosphere over this base... and then only if it knew the trapdoor frequency."
"Trapdoor frequency?"
Brainiac kept typing. "The radiosphere over this base is like an umbrella, a giant hemispherical dome of scrambled electromagnetic energy. Basically, this umbrella of garbled energy stops all unauthorized signals from either entering or escaping the base. But, like all good jamming systems, it has a designated frequency for use by authorized transmissions. This is the trapdoor frequency - a microwave bandwidth that wends its way through the radiosphere, avoiding the jamming signatures. Kind of like a secret path through a minefield."
"So this satellite signal is coming in on the trapdoor frequency?" Schofield said.
"That's my guess," Brainiac said. "What I'm doing now is using the AWACS's rotodome to search all the microwave frequencies inside this base. These birds have the best bandwidth detection systems around, so it shouldn't take - bingo. Got it."
He slammed his finger down on the enter key and a new screen came up.
"Okay, you looking at this?" Brainiac printed out the screen. "It's a standard rebounding signature. The satellite sends down a search signal - they're the tall spikes on the positive side, about 10 gigahertz - and then, soon after, the receiver on the ground, the President, bounces that signal back. Those are the deep spikes on the negative side."
Brainiac circled the spikes on the printout.
"Search and return," he said. "Interference aside, the rebounding signature seems to repeat itself once every twenty-five seconds. Captain, that Air Force general ain't lying. There's something down here bouncing back a secure satellite microwave signal."