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,' Schofield 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.'
'How do we know it isn't just a beacon or something?' Schofield said.
'The irregularity of it,' Brainiac said. 'See how it isn't quite a perfectly replicating sequence? See how, every now and then, there's a medium-sized spike in between the search and the return signals?' Brainiac tapped the midsized spikes inside two of the circles.
'So what does that mean?'
'It's an interference signature. It means that the source of the return signal is moving.'
'Jesus,' Schofield said. 'It's real.'
'And it just got worse,' Gant said from the window set into the escape door on the left-hand side of the cabin. 'Have a look at this.'
Schofield came over to the small window, looked out through it.
And his blood went cold.
There must have been at least twenty of them.
Twenty 7th Squadron soldiers running quickly across the hangar outside — P-90 assault rifles in their hands, ERG-6 masks covering their faces — forming a wide circle around the AWACS plane, surrounding it.
It was the smell that hit them first.
It smelled like a zoo — that peculiar mix of animal excrement and sawdust in a confined space.
Juliet Janson led the way into Level 5, pulling the President along behind her. The other two Secret Service
