The President exchanged a look with Frank Cutler.
Caesar said, 'Oh, and just in case you're harboring ambitions of escaping this facility…' He lifted an object into view.
It was a stainless steel briefcase.
Warrant Officer Carl Webster's steel briefcase.
The case's handle still had the pair of handcuffs attached to it — only now the open-ended cuff was no longer attached to anything. It was splattered all over with blood.
It was the Football.
And it was open.
The President saw the briefcase's flat-glass palm-print analyzer and keypad. The palm-print analyzer was an identification feature programmed to recognize the President's palm print, so that only he could activate — and deactivate — America's thermonuclear arsenal.
Somehow, though, Russell had managed to falsify the President's palm print and enter the arming codes. But how could he have gotten a copy of the President's hand print?
'In addition to the transmitter on your heart, Mr. President,' Russell said, 'all the devices in the airports have been networked to a recycling timer of exactly ninety minutes, as is shown on the Football's display screen. Only the application of your palm print to the analyzer — once every ninety minutes — will reset that timer and stop the plasma warheads from going off, so don't think of leaving. The Football, for your information, will be kept up here in the main hangar.'
'This is a great day in the history of the nation, Mr. President, a day of reckoning. Come the dawn of tomorrow, the glorious Fourth of July, we shall see if we all awake in a new, reborn America. Good luck, Mr. President, and may God have mercy on your soul.'
At that moment, as if right on cue, the main doors to the common room burst open and a team of 7th Squadron commandos — led by Major Kurt Logan and wearing their fearsome ERG-6 gas masks — rushed into the room, their devastating P-90 machine guns blazing.
The challenge had begun.
SECOND CONFRONTATION
The main hangar had become a battlefield.
Bullet holes raked the floor at Shane Schofield's feet as he raced for the doorway to the northern glass-walled office.
He poked his head around the doorway: 'Marines! Scatter!'
But that was all he could say before the window next to him shattered into a thousand fragments and he dived away, crawling for the cover of the two Presidential helicopters and their towing vehicles.
He looked back just in time to see a couple of full dress-uniformed Marines burst out through the windows of the office a moment before the small structure was hit by a Predator shoulderlaunched missile and its walls blasted outwards in a shower of glass and billowing fire.
Schofield slid under Marine One, and found himself lying next to Libby Gant and Brainiac.
Gunfire echoed out all around them. And then bizarrely, above the gunshots, Schofield heard a voice booming out from the hangar's loudspeaker system: 'Good luck, Mr. President, and may God have mercy on your soul.'
'Holy shit!' Brainiac yelled.
'This way!' Schofield said, crawling on his stomach underneath the big helicopter.
He arrived at a wide grille in the floor. It came away easily. An air vent opened up beneath it.
The steel-walled vent plunged down into the earth, disappearing into darkness.
'Let's go!' Schofield yelled above the gunfire.
Abruptly, a metal panel in the bottom of Marine One burst open — almost decapitating Schofield — and a figure with an M-16 dropped down behind him, the gun leveled at his forehead.
'Fuck! It's you,' Mother said as she lowered herself out of the helicopter's emergency escape hatch onto the ground.
'Here, happy birthday,' she said, tossing an MP-10 machine pistol to Gant. 'Sorry, Scarecrow, nothing for you. That was all I could find in the basic arms cabinet on board. There's more in the forward armory, but Gunman's got the key to that.'
'Never mind,' Schofield said, 'the first thing we've got to do is get out of here and regroup. Then we have to figure out a way of taking these bastards down. This way.'
'Did you catch any of that shit on the television?' Mother said as she crawled over to the vent.
Gant and Brainiac climbed down into the vent first, bracing their legs against its walls, shimmying themselves down into it.
'No,' Schofield said, 'I was too busy dodging bullets.'
'Then I've got a lot to tell you,' Mother said as they lowered themselves into the shaft.
The President of the United States was moving faster than he had ever moved before. In fact, his feet barely even touched the ground.
At the first sight of the 7th Squadron commandos storming the common room, his nine-man Protective Detail had thrown itself into action.
Four men immediately took up defensive positions in between the President and the oncoming assault troops, throwing their coats open to reveal Uzi submachine guns. The Uzi's buzzed as they unleashed a brutal wave of gunfire at a crushing 600 rounds per minute.
The other five members of the Detail crash-tackled the President out into the nearby fire escape, practically lifting him off his feet as they gang-rushed him out of the room, covering his body with their own.
The door to the fire stairs slammed shut behind them, but not before they saw the 7th Squadron troops clinically take up covering positions behind couches, doors and cupboards and leap-frog each other and tear to shreds the four Secret Service men who had remained behind — drowning out the buzz of their Uzi's with the whirring drone of their P-90 assault rifles.
The Uzi's might have fired at 600 rounds per minute. But the P-90, made by the FN Herstal company in Belgium, fired at an astonishing 900 rounds per minute. Indeed, with its rounded hand guard, internal blowback system, and incredible hundred-round magazine mounted above the barrel, it looked like something out of a science fiction movie.
'Down the stairs! Now!' Frank Cutler yelled as bullets slammed into the other side of the firedoor. 'Head for the alternate exit!'
The President and what was left of his Detail flew down the stairs, taking them four at a time, hurling themselves around every turn. Every one of them had a weapon in his or her hand now — Uzi's, SIG-Sauers, anything…
The President himself could do nothing but run with them, so tightly was he flanked by his bodyguards.
'Advance Team One! Come in!' Cutler yelled into his wrist microphone as he ran.
No reply.
'Advance Team One! Come in! We are approaching Exit Point One with Patriot and we need to know if it is open!' He received no reply.
Up in the main hangar, Book II was in hell.
Bullets strafed the floor all around him, glass rained down on his head.
He was tucked up against the outside of the northern office with Elvis — in the tiny gap between it and the hangar's armored door — the two of them having dived out through the office's bullet-shattered windows a moment before it had been blasted to smithereens by the Predator missile.
The three ten-man teams of 7th Squadron men were everywhere, moving with precision and speed, racing around the helicopters, leaping over dead men, their guns pressed against their shoulders, eyes looking straight
