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 Command — 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…'
'My money’s on the superbomb,' Elvis Haynes said as he leaned back in his chair.
Elvis, Schofield, Gant and Mother were sitting in one of the glass-walled offices by the main doors of the hangar.
With them were Colonels Grier and Dallas, all the other Marines stationed on board the Presidential helicopters, as well as the three remaining Secret Service agents.
In a not-so-subtle division of management and labor, all the White House people who had remained up in the hangar either sat in the other glass-walled office on the southern side of the hangar or worked inside their helicopters, which, they said, were more suited to their rank than the spartan Air Force offices.
They also — so Nicholas Tate had said to Gant when he had invited her to stay on Marine One with him — had better coffee, plunger stuff.
Gant went with Schofield and the others.
Ramrod Hagerty, on the other hand, sat over with the White House people.
'No way, man,' a small bespectacled corporal named Gus Gorman said. 'The superbomb doesn't exist.'
