Well, sort of stopped. Now it started raining down the sides of the shaft, covering the counterweight cables with a curtain of gushing water.
'What's happening?' Love Machine said.
And then Book II saw it.
Saw a shadow superimposed on the darkness above them — a box-shaped shadow, growing larger and larger as it came closer and closer.
'What is that?' Calvin Reeves said.
'Oh, damn…' Book II breathed. 'It's the elevator.'
The personnel elevator edged its way down the shaft, water pounding onto its roof and cascading off its sides.
High above it, in the open doorway up on ground level, two 7th Squadron snipers lay with night-scoped rifles at the ready, aimed down into the shaft.
Their guns were trained on the roof of the elevator, waiting for anyone to emerge from the gaps on either side of the lift, the only points where the enemy could climb out from underneath the downward-moving elevator.
'Not nice,' Book II said flatly. 'Not nice.'
Either they drowned as the elevator pushed them under the surface, or they climbed up the sides of the lift, where no doubt, the bad guys would be waiting…
He looked quickly at the pair of outer doors two feet above him. They had a large '5' painted on them.
Level 5.
He wondered what was on this level, then decided he didn't care. These doors were the only way out. Period.
He hauled himself out of the water, stood on his toes on the edge of the doorway. A curtain of water poured down onto his head.
Like all the other outer doors in this elevator shaft, he saw, these two were closed tight, air sealed.
The elevator above him continued its descent, moving slowly and steadily downward.
The rising water reached the base of the doorway, splashed against his boots, moving equally steadily upward.
Calvin Reeves appeared at his side. 'How the hell do we open these doors, Sergeant?'
Book guessed that the doors' release mechanism was contained somewhere within the wall.
'I can't see it!' he shouted back. 'It must be hidden inside the wall!'
The elevator was close now, looming one floor above them, grinding inexorably downward.
Water continued to pour.
And then Book II saw it — a thick insulated cable running out from the concrete wall to the right of the doors and down into the pool of water beneath him.
'Of course!' he yelled. An emergency release lever wouldn't be on this level. It would be situated either above or below the floor, so that the doors could be opened when the elevator was stopped here.
Without so much as a second thought, Book II took a deep breath and dropped into the pool of water beneath him.
Silence.
The eerie quiet of the underwater world.
Book II swam downwards, his fingers feeling their way along the thick black cable attached to the concrete wall.
After about nine feet, he came to a steel utility box sunk into the wall. He opened it, felt for a lever, found a row of six, and yanked the fifth one.
He immediately heard a sharp shoosh! from somewhere above him — the sound of a pressure door being released.
He swam upward, fast. Came to the surface, broke it…
'…Book! Quickly! Come on!' were the first words he heard.
He'd come up a few feet away from the now-opened doors and immediately saw Calvin Reeves and Elvis standing up on level ground. Love Machine clung to the edge of the doorway, reaching out for Book II with an outstretched hand.
Then Book II looked up.
The descending elevator was barely three feet above his head and coming down fast!
He threw out a hand and Love Machine grabbed it, and hauled him over to the doorway, pulling him through the water. Then Elvis and Calvin grabbed them both and yanked them out of the water, just as the elevator slid past the edge of the doorway and abruptly came to a halt — right in front of the doorway.
Everybody froze.
Water began to ooze up around the floor of the lift, rising up from beneath it, hungrily searching for an escape from the shaft. It immediately began to spread out across the concrete floor of Level 5.
Book II waited tensely for the elevator's doors to open — waited for a phalanx of 7th Squadron men to burst out from it with their guns blazing.
But none did.
The lift was empty.
They were safe, for the moment.
Book II turned to face the room around him. A layer of expanding water had already started filling it.
It was a wide anteroom of some sort. Some wooden desks, a Lexan glass cabinet full of shotguns and riot gear. Plus a couple of holding cells.
Book II frowned.
It was almost as if he were standing in the reception room of a jail.
'What in God's name is this place?' he said aloud.
At that very same moment, on the other side of level 5, Juliet Janson and the President of the United States found themselves standing in a whole new kind of hell.
Juliet had thought the animal cage room had been bad.
This was worse.
After bursting through the heavy-looking door on the western side of the animal cage room, she now found herself staring at a far more frightening part of Area 7.
A wide, dark, low-ceilinged room stretched away from her. It was sparsely lit, with only one in every three lights turned on, a policy which had the effect of leaving small patches of the vast room hidden in perfect blackness.
But the low light couldn't hide the true nature of this level.
It was filled with cells.
Old rusty concrete cages — thick-walled, with anodized black bars sunk deep into concrete dividers. The cells were quite obviously aged, and in the half-light of Level 5, they took on a positively Gothic appearance.
It was, however, the groans and hoarse whispers coming from the darkness behind the bars that betrayed the nature of their occupants.
These were not animal cells, Juliet realized in horror.
They were human cells.
The prisoners heard the heavy door burst open — heard Juliet and the President and the other two Secret Service agents charge through it — and they rushed as one to the doors of their cells to see what the commotion was.
'Oh, hey, baby!' one toothless individual cried as Juliet, striking and purposeful as she held her silver SIG Sauer pistol in her hand, charged past his cell, pulling the President behind her.
'Ramondo!' she yelled. 'Block that door behind us!'
A row of steel lockers lined the wall near the door leading back to the animal cage room.
Ramondo yanked the first three of them down from their upright positions, strewing the lockers in front of the door.
The prisoners began to shout and cry out.
