Book II swallowed. He would have preferred to keep that door open.
He flicked on a heavy police flashlight he had taken from the Level 5 anteroom. Holding it under the barrel of his shotgun, he played its beam over the room around them.
Calvin Reeves assumed command of strategy.
'You two,' he whispered to Curtis and Ramondo, 'check behind those telephone booths, then take the stairwell door. Haynes, Lewicky, Riley' — he said, using Elvis's, Love Machine's and Book II's surnames — 'the area behind this decompression chamber, then secure that other door,' he pointed toward the dividing wall. 'Janson. You and I stay with the Boss.'
Curtis and Ramondo disappeared in among the test chambers, then, moments later, reappeared at the stairwell end.
'No one back there,' Ramondo said.
Book II, Elvis and Love Machine entered the darkness behind the decompression chamber. A narrow, empty section of floor greeted them. Nothing.
'Clear back here,' Book II said, as the three Marines emerged from behind the long hexagonal chamber. They headed for the door in the dividing wall.
Reeves was following standard tactics in close-quarter, indoor engagements — where there is no sign of the enemy, secure all exits, then consolidate your position.
It was his biggest mistake.
Not only because it limited his options for retreat, but because it was exactly what Kurt Logan — already inside the room — was expecting him to do.
While Elvis and Love Machine headed for the dividing wall, Book II played his flashlight over the thirty-foot- long decompression chamber. It was absolutely huge.
At the end of the elongated chamber, he found a small glass porthole, and shone his light in through it.
What he saw made him jump.
An Asian face stared back at him, a man's face, pressed up against the glass.
The Asian man was smiling cheerfully.
And then he pointed up — toward the roof of the decompression chamber.
Book II followed the man's finger with his flashlight and peered up at the top of the decompression chamber — and found himself staring into the mantislike face of a 7th Squadron commando wearing night-vision goggles and a gas mask!
The flashlight was the only thing that saved Book II's life.
Primarily because it blinded the man hiding on top of the decompression chamber, if only for a moment. The man shied away from the light as his night-vision goggles magnified its beam by a factor of 150.
That was all the time Book II needed.
His shotgun boomed, blasting the commando's goggles to pieces, sending him flying off the top of the chamber.
It was a small victory, for at that exact moment, gunfire erupted around the darkened room as a legion of dark figures emerged from their positions on top of the decompression chamber and inside the telephone-booth-like test chambers and rained hell on Book's hapless group in the center of the floor.
Over by the stairwell door, Curtis and Ramondo were assaulted by a barrage of P-90 gunfire from both flanks. They were cut down where they stood, their bodies riddled with bloody wounds.
Juliet Janson crash-tackled the President, hurling him to the floor at the base of the decompression chamber, just as a volley of rounds whistled past their heads.
Calvin Reeves wasn't so lucky.
The crossfire of bullets ripped into the back of his head, and he jolted suddenly upright, then dropped to his knees, a look of stunned dismay on his face — as though he had done everything right, and still lost. Then his face smacked down hard against the floor, right next to the spot where Herbert Franklin lay with his head in his hands.
Bullets sizzled through the air.
Juliet yanked the President to his feet, firing with her free hand, dragging him toward the cover of the lab benches over by the dividing wall, when suddenly she saw a 7th Squadron commando rise up from the roof of the decompression chamber and take aim at the President's head.
She brought her gun around. Not fast enough…
Blam!
The 7th Squadron man's head exploded, his neck snapping backwards. His body tumbled off the decompression chamber.
Juliet spun to see who had fired the killing shot, but strangely she saw no one.
Book II, elvis and love machine all dived together behind a lab bench just as the benchtop was raked with gunfire. They returned fire, aiming at three Air Force commandos taking cover among the test booths.
But it quickly became clear that the Marines' makeshift assortment of shotguns and pistols was going to be no match for the rapid-fire P-90 machine guns of the 7th Squadron troops. The shelves around them shattered and splintered under the phenomenal weight of enemy fire.
Elvis ducked for cover. 'Goddamn!' he yelled. 'This is seriously fucked up!'
'No kidding,' Book II shouted. He shucked his pump action and snapped up to fire, but when he appeared above the benchtop and loosed a couple of shots, he saw a very strange thing happen: he saw all three of the shadowy 7th Squadron shooters get yanked clean off their feet from behind.
Their guns went silent, and Book II found himself staring at an empty area of the battlefield.
'What the…?'
From his own position near the stairwell door, Alpha Unit's leader, Kurt Logan, saw what was happening.
'Fuck! There's someone else in here!' he yelled angrily into his microphone. 'Somebody's picking us off!'
Suddenly the trooper beside Logan took a hit to the side of the head and half his skull exploded, spraying blood and brains everywhere.
'Fuck!' Logan had expected to lose maybe two of his men in the Shootout — but now he had lost six. 'Alpha Unit, pull out! Everybody back to the stairwell now! Take emergency evac measures!'
He threw open the stairwell door, just as a line of bullets punctured the wall all around it, almost taking his head off. His remaining men dashed past him, out through the door, into the shelter of the eastern stairwell — but not before they had brutally fired down at their fallen comrades' bodies, peppering the corpses and the floor all around them with bullets.
Logan himself mercilessly strafed the body of a dead 7th Squadron man on the ground beside him. Then, when he was done, he disappeared through the doorway after the others and abruptly there was silence.
Book II was still crouched behind his lab bench with Elvis and Love Machine, acrid gunsmoke rising into the air all around them.
Silence.
Deafening silence.
Juliet Janson and the President lay on the floor five feet away from Book and the others, shielded by another bench, covered in dust and broken bits of plastic. Juliet still had her gun raised…
Whump!
A pair of boots landed with a loud thud on the benchtop above them.
They all snapped to look up — and found themselves staring at Captain Shane M. Schofield, USMC, dressed in full dress uniform, with two nickel-plated Berettas gripped in his hands.
He smiled at them. 'Hey there.'
Meanwhile, in bars and offices and homes around America and the world, people sat glued to their television sets.
Because there was so little footage, CNN and the overseas news networks just kept broadcasting the existing few minutes' worth of tape over and over again. Experts were brought in to give their opinions.
Government people sprang into action, although no one could really do anything substantive, since the exact location of the nightmarish affair was known only to a select few.
In any case, in a few minutes it would be eight o'clock Mountain Daylight Time and the people of the world
