Schofield didn't move a muscle. 'I wouldn't want to live in a country that leaves a little boy to die…'
Hagerty's eyes blazed. 'No. From now on, you will do as I say, how I say, and when I say…'
The President himself seemed about to interfere when Schofield stepped forward, right in front of Hagerty.
'No, sir' he said firmly, 'I will not follow you. Because if you'd waited for me to finish what I was going to say earlier, you would have heard me say: 'We go after the boy, and we take the President with us.' Because in case you haven't been paying attention, that Botha guy and whoever's with him opened up an exit to this place! They've given us a way out.' Hagerty fell silent, grinding his teeth.
'Now, if you don't mind,' Schofield said, 'and if nobody else has any better ideas, what do you say we all get the hell out of this place?'
Up in the control room overlooking the main hangar, Caesar Russell's four radio operators were working overtime.
'…Main power's down, no cameras operational at all. All systems running on auxiliary power supply…'
'…Sir, someone's initiated the lockdown release codes. The western X-rail door has been opened…'
'Who?' Caesar Russell asked pointedly.
The console operator frowned. 'It looks like it was Professor Botha, sir.'
'Botha,' Caesar said quietly. 'How predictable.'
'Sir,' another operator said, 'I have movement on the X-rail system. Someone heading westward toward the canyons…'
'Oh, Gunther. You couldn't help yourself, could you? You're trying to snatch the boy,' Caesar smiled sadly. 'What's the ETA on that X-rail train at the lake?'
'Forty miles of track at one hundred and seventy miles per hour. About fourteen minutes, sir.'
'Get Bravo down to Level 6 on the double, to pursue Botha on the X-rail. Then open the top door and send Charlie out in the AH-77's to cut him off at the lake — we'll get him from in front and behind. Now go. Go. Although Gunther could never know it, we need that boy. This will all be for nothing if we don't have that child.'
Schofield, Mother, Gant and Book II flew down the fire stairs at full speed.
Schofield ran with his Desert Eagle held out in front of him. The Football now dangled from his waist, its hand-grip attached to a clip on his 7th Squadron combat webbing.
Behind them came the President and Juliet, Herbie the scientist, Hot Rod Hagerty and Nicholas Tate. Bringing up the rear were Elvis and Brainiac, carrying Love Machine between them.
They came to the Level 6 doorway. Frank Cutler's bloodied and broken body still lay on the floor beside it.
'Be careful,' Juliet said to Schofield as he put his hand on the doorknob. 'This was where they got us before.'
Schofield nodded.
Then — quickly, silently — he whipped open the door, and took cover.
There was no sound.
No gunshots went off.
No bullets whistled into the stairwell.
'Holy Christ!' Mother said, as she looked beyond the doorway.
The massive aircraft elevator lumbered down the shaft.
On its back, amid the pieces of the destroyed AWACS plane, stood the ten men of Bravo Unit. They were moving down through the complex, heading for Level 6, in pursuit of Gunther Botha and the boy.
The gigantic elevator platform rumbled down the shaft, the dirty gray concrete walls sliding past the Bravo Unit men.
They swung by Level 3, moving downward… then Level 4… then the elevator platform plunged into water. As it came to Level 5, the cell block level, the elevator platform rushed down into a wide body of water that had formed at the bottom of the shaft. Several tons of water immediately gushed onto the platform, slithering in among the pieces of the crumpled AWACS plane.
'Goddamn!' the leader of Bravo Unit, Boa McConnell, exclaimed as the water rushed up to his waist.
He reached for his radio mike.
'…Bravo Unit reports substantial flooding on level 5. It's starting to fill the main elevator shaft. Only access to Level 6 is via the eastern fire stairs or the western ventilation shaft. Bravo is going for the ventilation shaft…'
'…Sir. That enhanced satellite image of the Emergency Escape Vent is coming through now.'
A sheet of high-gloss paper edged out of a nearby printer. A radio operator tore it clear, checked the time code at the top. 'This one's from ten minutes ago. Another one coming through — what the fuck…?'
'What is it?' Caesar Russell said, taking the printout from the operator. Russell recalled the subject of the satellite scans: the twenty-four rodlike objects that had been picked up on the infrared satellite earlier, the ones that had been fanned out in a wide circle around the EEV.
Caesar's eyes narrowed.
The enhanced satellite image showed a few of the 'rods' very clearly. They weren't rods at all.
They were combat boots — sticking out from underneath heat-deflecting covers.
The second satellite scan came through. Caesar grabbed it. It was more recent than the first.
Only a minute old.
It showed the same image as the first scan: the Emergency Exit Vent and the desert floor around it.
Only now the cluster of combat boots surrounding the Vent was nowhere in sight.
They were gone.
'Mmmm, very clever, Gunther,' Caesar said softly. 'You brought the Reccondos with you.'
There were bodies everywhere.
Christ, Schofield thought. It looks like a war has been fought down here.
He wasn't far wrong.
Level 6 resembled a subway station — with a central elevated concrete platform, flanked on either side by train tracks. Like a regular train station, at both ends of the extremely elongated space were a pair of train tunnels that disappeared into darkness. Unlike a regular train station, however, three of those four tunnels were sealed off by heavy gray-steel blast doors.
On the central platform lay nine corpses, all dressed in suits.
The nine members of the Secret Service's Primary Advance Team.
Their bodies lay at all angles, bathed in blood, their suits ripped to shreds by the penetration of countless bullets.
Beyond them, however, lay another set of bodies — ten of them — all dressed in black combat clothing.
7th Squadron men.
All dead.
Three of them lay spread-eagled on the platform, with enormous star-shaped holes in their chests. Exit wounds. It seemed that these men had been shot in their backs as they'd clambered up onto the platform from the right-hand railway track, their rib cages exploding outwards with the sudden gaseous expansion of the hollow- pointed bullets that had hit them.
More 7th Squadron men lay sprawled on the track itself, in various states of bloodiness. Three of them, Schofield saw, bore very precise bullet holes in their foreheads. Four of the 7th Squadron commandos, however, had not been shot.
They lay slumped next to a steel door sunk into the wall of the right-hand track — the entrance to the Emergency Exit Vent.
Their throats had been slit from ear to ear.
They had been the first to die, Schofield thought, when their assailants had emerged from the Vent behind them.
Schofield stepped out from the stairwell doorway, onto the platform.
