To the left, around a bend, the regular elevator shaft, and… something else.
Caesar froze. He saw a combat boot protruding around the corner that led to the regular elevator shaft.
The black combat boot of a dead commando.
Caesar stepped closer.
And saw that the boot belonged to the horribly bloodied body of Python Willis — the commanding officer of Charlie Unit, the 7th Squadron unit that had been bringing Kevin back to Area 7.
Caesar's face darkened.
Charlie Unit lay dead before him. And Kevin was nowhere to be seen.
Then Caesar saw the mark on the wall next to Python Willis's dead fingers, a symbol scrawled in blood, a final gesture from Charlie Unit's commander before he'd died.
A single capital 'E'.
Caesar just stared at it, pursing his lips.
Logan came up beside him. 'What is it?'
'Let's get to the secondary command post,' Caesar said flatly. 'And when we get there, I want you to find out what's happened to Echo Unit.'
Shane Schofield emerged from the air vent hatch underneath Marine One, flanked by the four heavily armed prisoners. He no longer carried the Football. One of his captors now held it like a new toy.
As he slid out from underneath the Presidential helicopter, he thought he heard clapping and shouting… and then suddenly — boom! — a gunshot made him start. The shot was quickly followed by a loud roar of approval.
Then another booming gunshot — and more cheers and applause.
Schofield felt his blood run cold.
What the hell was he walking into?
He emerged from beneath Marine One and immediately saw about thirty prisoners, their backs to him, gathered around the central aircraft elevator platform.
In the time since his capture in the air vent down below, the massive platform — with the tangled remains of the destroyed AWACS plane still on it — had been lowered about ten feet below the floor-line of the hangar and halted, so that now it formed a gigantic square-shaped pit in the center of the hangar.
The mob of inmates was crowded around the makeshift pit, looking intently down into it like gamblers at a cockfight, shaking their fists, shouting and cat-calling. One shaggy-looking individual was screaming, 'Run, little man! Run! Run! Ha-haaaaa.'
They were the most motley crew Schofield had ever seen.
Their angry faces were covered in scars and tattoos. Each prisoner's uniform had been tailored to his own personal tastes — some had ripped off their shirtsleeves and turned them into headbands, others wore their shirts open, others still, wore no shirts at all.
Schofield was marched over to the edge of the pit. He looked down into it.
Amid the maze of AWACS plane pieces that littered the square concrete hole, he saw two blue-uniformed Air Force men — young men and, judging by their perfectly pressed uniforms, office bunnies, radio operators probably — running like frightened animals.
In the pit with them were five burly inmates — all armed with shotguns — prowling through the maze, hunting the two hapless radio operators.
Schofield saw the bodies of two more radiomen lying in pools of blood in separate corners of the pit: the cause of the cheers he had heard moments before.
It was then, however, that to Schofield's horror, a small band of prisoners emerged from the other side of the hangar.
In the midst of this new group of inmates, Schofield saw Gant, Mother, Juliet… and the President of the United States.
'Tell me this isn't happening,' he breathed to himself.
Down in the darkness of the Level 1 hangar, Nicholas Tate III, Domestic Policy Adviser to the President of the United States, gazed nervously up into the elevator shaft.
The President and his three female protectors hadn't returned from their trip up the shaft on the detachable minielevator, and now Tate was worried.
'Do you think the inmates got them?' he asked Hot Rod Hagerty.
They could hear the shouts and gunshots from up in the main hangar. It was like standing outside a stadium during a football match.
'I hope not,' Hagerty whispered.
Tate continued to stare up into the shaft, a thousand thoughts flickering through his mind, most of them relating to his own self-preservation. A minute passed.
'So what do you think we should do?' he said at last, without turning around.
There was no reply.
Tate frowned, spun around. 'I said…' He froze.
Hagerty was nowhere to be seen.
The Level 1 hangar stretched away from him, shrouded in darkness, the only presence, the shadows of the gigantic planes inside it.
Tate's face went blank.
Hagerty was gone.
Vanished… silently, instantly… in the space of a single minute.
It was as if he'd just been erased from existence.
A lightning bolt of fear shot through Nicholas Tate.
Now he was alone, down here, in a locked-down facility filled with treacherous Air Force commandos and the nastiest collection of murderers known to man.
And then he saw it.
Saw a glint of light on the floor a few yards away from him, at the spot where he had last seen Hagerty standing. He went over to it, picked it up.
It was a ring.
A gold officer's ring.
Hagerty's graduation ring from Annapolis.
The last two radio operators didn't last long.
As the final shots rang out from within the pit, Schofield and Gant were shoved together, the others beside them.
'Hey there,' Gant said.
'Hi,' Schofield said.
After Schofield and the President's daring trapeze act, Gant and her team hadn't fared any better than Schofield had.
No sooner had the President swung back onto the mini elevator than the little platform had jolted suddenly and whizzed up the shaft — called by someone up in the main hangar.
They had risen up into the hangar and found themselves in the middle of a whole new nightmare.
The prisoners — the former test subjects for Gunther Botha's vaccine — were now in charge of Area 7.
Although there was no way she could have hidden their meager supply of guns, Gant did manage to hide her Maghook on their short ride up the shaft. It now lay clinging magnetically to the underside of the detachable mini elevator.
Unfortunately, when the little platform had arrived up in the ground-level hangar — rising up through the matching square hole in the corner of the main platform — Gant had still had the black box from the AWACS plane in her possession.
But she hadn't wanted to alert any of the prisoners to its significance, so she'd placed it on the floor of the mini elevator, and as soon as the platform had come flush against the floor of the main hangar, she'd 'accidentally' kicked it clear, sending it tumbling out onto the hangar floor, a short way from the elevator shaft.
