Mother stood up to go.
'Just promise me this,' she said kindly. 'When you see Fox next, kiss the fucking girl, will you!'
While Schofield, mother and the president were shooting through the X-rail tunnel under the desert floor toward Area 8, Caesar Russell and his four remaining 7th Squadron men were zooming through the air above the desert in their two Penetrator attack choppers, heading in the same direction, a few minutes ahead of the X-rail train.
The small cluster of buildings that was Area 8 rose up out of the sandy landscape in front of the two helicopters.
Area 8 was essentially a smaller version of Area 7: two box-shaped hangars and a three-story airfield control tower sat alongside the facility's black bitumen runway, complete with its sand-covered extensions that Schofield had observed earlier that day.
As the two Penetrators approached it, Caesar saw the gigantic doors to one of the complex's hangars suddenly part in the middle, and open.
It took the doors a long while to open fully, but once they had, Caesar's jaw dropped.
One of the most amazing-looking flying objects known to man rolled slowly out of the hangar.
Truth be told, what Caesar saw was actually two flying objects. The first was a massive Boeing 747 jumbo jet, painted in glistening silver. The jumbo, with its imperious nose and outstretched swanlike wings, edged out from the shadows of the hangar.
It was, however, the smaller aircraft mounted on the back of the 747 that seized Caesar's attention.
It looked incredible.
Its paint scheme was like that of NASA's regular space shuttles: mainly white, with the American flag and 'United sstates' written in bold lettering on its side, and with the distinctive black-painted nose and underbelly.
But this was no ordinary space shuttle.
It was the X-38.
One of two sleek mini-shuttles purpose-built by the United States Air Force for the tasks of satellite killing and, where necessary, the boarding, takeover or destruction of foreign space stations.
In shape, it was similar to the standard shuttles — delta platform, with flat triangular wings, a high aerodynamic tail, and three conical thrusters on its rear end — but it was smaller, much more compact. For where Atlantis and her sister shuttles were heavy long-haul vehicles designed for ferrying bulky satellites into space, this was the sports version, designed for blasting them out of existence.
Four specially designed zero-gravity AMRAAM missiles hung from its wings, on the outside of two enormous Pegasus II booster rockets — massive cylindrical thrusters filled to the brim with liquid oxygen — that were attached to the underbelly of the bird.
What a lot of people don't realize is that many of today's space flights are conducted with what is essentially late 1960's technology. Saturn V and Titan II boosters were used in the original U.S.-Soviet space race in the sixties.
The X-38, however, with its 747 launch platform and its stunning Pegasus II boosters, is the first orbiter to truly bring space flight into the twenty-first century.
Its specially configured 747 launcher — fitted with new extra-powerful Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines, enhanced pressurization systems and extra radiation protection for the pilots — can carry the X-38 to a release height of around 67,000 feet, 24,000 feet higher than a commercial jumbo can fly. Air launch saves the shuttle one- third of its first stage power/lift ratio.
Then the Pegasus II boosters kick in.
More powerful than Titan III by a whole order of magnitude, the boosters provide enough lift after the high altitude launch to carry the shuttle into a low-earth orbit. Once expended, they are jettisoned from the shuttle. The X-38 — now in a stationary orbit about two hundred and ten miles above the earth — can then maneuver freely in space, killing enemy satellites at will, and coordinate its landing, all under its own power.
Caesar Russell gazed at the mini-shuttle.
It was absolutely magnificent.
He turned to Kurt Logan. 'That shuttle cannot be allowed to get off the…'
He didn't get to finish the sentence, for at that moment — completely without warning — five Stinger missiles came rocketing out from the darkened hangar behind the silver 747, swooping in a wide arc around its wings before rising sharply into the air, heading straight for Caesar's two Penetrators.
Echo Unit had seen them.
The underground X-Rail station of Area 8 was identical to the one at Area 7: two tracks on either side of an elongated central platform, with an elevator sunk into the northern track's wall.
After about' seven minutes of superfast travel, Schofield's X-rail car zoomed into the station, bursting into the white fluorescent light of Area 8. The bullet-shaped engine decelerated quickly, stopped on a dime.
Its doors hissed open and Schofield, Mother and the President of the United States came charging out of it, heading straight for the elevator set into the northern wall. Trailing behind them — looking completely lost and now holding his cell phone to his ear — was Nicholas Tate in.
Schofield hit the elevator's call button.
As he waited for the lift to arrive, he noticed Tate for the first time. The White House suit was clearly rattled, freaked out by the morning's events. But it was only then that Schofield realized that Tate was speaking into his cell phone.
'No,' Tate said irritably into the phone, 'I want to know who you are! You have interrupted my phone call to my stockbroker. Identify yourself.'
'What on earth are you doing?' Schofield asked.
Tate frowned, spoke very seriously — in doing so, indicating that he had gone completely bonkers. 'Well, I was calling my broker. I figured by the way things are going today, I'd sell off my U.S. dollars. So, after we got out of that train tunnel, I called him up, but no sooner do I get him on the line than this asshole cuts across the connection.'
Schofield snatched the phone from Tate's hand.
'Hey!'
Schofield spoke into it. 'This is Captain Shane M. Schofield, United States Marine Corps, Presidential Detachment, serial number 358-6279. ho is this?'
A voice came through the phone: 'This is David Fairfax of the Defense Intelligence Agency. I'm speaking from a monitoring station in D.C. We have been scanning all transmissions emanating from two Air Force bases in the Utah desert. We believe that there may be a rogue Air Force unit at one of those bases and that the President's life may be in danger. I just enacted an emergency breakthrough on your friend's telephone call.'
'Believe me, you don't know the half of it, Mr. Fairfax,' Schofield said.
'Is the President safe?'
'He's right here.' Schofield held the phone out for the President.
The President spoke into it: 'This is the President of the United States. Captain Schofield is with me.'
Schofield added, 'And we are currently in pursuit of that rogue Air Force unit you just mentioned. Tell me everything you know about it…'
Just then, the elevator pinged.
'Hold on.' Schofield raised his P-90 toward the elevator.
The doors opened… revealing horribly blood-splattered walls and a particularly grisly sight.
The gunned-down bodies of three dead Air Force men lay strewn about the elevator — no doubt members of the skeleton crew stationed at Area 8.
'I think we got a fresh trail,' Mother said.
They hurried into the lift.
Tate stayed behind, determined not to go near any more danger. The President, however, insisted on going with Schofield and Mother.
'But, sir…' Schofield began.
'Captain. If I'm going to die today as the representative of this country, I'm not going to do it cowering in some corner, waiting to be found. It's time to stand up and be counted. And besides, it looks like you could do with
