it came to engaging the enemy, he was uncompromising. Schofield, then just a budding Recon Unit commander, had come tenth in a class of sixteen.
From the looks of things, Logan hadn't changed much. His whole bearing — hands clasped firmly behind his back, steely level gaze — indicated a powerful, confident inner strength. Battle-hardened strength.
'Excuse me, Captain,' Logan said in a soft Southern drawl. He offered Schofield a sheet of paper. 'Our personnel list for your records.'
Schofield took the list, then gave one of his own to Logan in return.
It was common practice at presidential inspections for both sides to swap personnel lists, since the President's people wanted to know who was at the base they were inspecting, and the base people wanted to know exactly who was in the presidential convoy.
Schofield glanced at the Area 7 list. Columns of meaningless names ran down it.
UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
SPECIAL AREA (RESTRICTED) 07
ON-SITE PERSONNEL
CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET
NAME UNIT
COMMAND UNIT
Harper, JT (CO)
7TH SQUADRON
Alvarez, MJ A — Frommer, SN E — Arthurs, RT C — Gale, A D — Atlock, FD B — Giggs, RE B — Baines, AW A — Golding, DK D — Bennett, B E — Goldman, WE A — Biggs, NM C — Grayson, SR E — Boland, CS B — Hughes, R A — Boyce, LW D — Ingliss, WA B — Calvert, ET E — Johnson, SW D — Carney, LE E — Jones, M D — Christian, FC A — Kincaid, R B — Coleman, GK E — Littleton, SO E — Coles, M B — Logan, (MAJ) KW A — Crick, DT D — McConnell, BA B — Criece, TW A — Messick, K E — Davis, AM E — Milbourn, SK D — Dayton, AM E — Morton, IN C — Dillan, ST D — Nance, GF D — Doheny, FG A — Nystrom,JJ D — Egan, RR B — Oliver, PK E — Fraser, MS C — Price, AL C — Fredericks, GH A — Rawson, MJ C — Sayles, MT B — Stone, JK C — Willis, IS C — Sommers, SR C — Taylor, AS B — Wolfson, HT A
CIVILIAN STAFF
Botha, GW MED — Franklin, HS MED — Shaw, DE MED
He did notice something, though.
There were more names here than there were 7th Squadron men on the tarmac. While there had been forty commandos out on the tarmac, there were fifty 7th Squadron members on the list. He figured there must be another ten man unit inside the base somewhere.
As Schofield looked at the list, Logan said, 'Captain, if you wouldn't mind, we'd like you to move your…'
'What appears to be the problem, Major?' a voice said from behind Schofield. 'Don't bother with Captain Schofield. I am in command here.'
It was Ramrod Hagerty, the White House Liaison Officer. With his Englishman's mustache and distinctly battle-hardened posture, Hagerty was everything Kurt Logan was not.
Before he answered him, Logan looked Hagerty up and down. What he saw obviously didn't impress him.
'I was led to believe that Colonel Grier was in ultimate command of Marine One,' Logan said coolly — and correctly.
'Well, ah, yes…yes, technically, he is,' Hagerty said. 'But, as White House Liaison, anything to do with the movement of these helicopters must go through me first.'
Logan looked at Hagerty in stony silence.
Then he said, 'I was about to ask the captain here if he wouldn't mind rolling your helicopters into the main hangar while the President is at the base. We wouldn't want enemy satellites knowing that we had the Boss visiting, now would we?'
'No, no, of course not. Of course not,' Ramrod said. 'Schofield. Make it happen.'
'Yes, sir,' Schofield said dryly.
The giant double doors of the hangar closed with a resounding boom.
The two lead helicopters of Marine Helicopter Squadron-1 were now parked inside the main hangar of Area 7, their rotors and tail booms folded into their stowed positions. Despite their own considerable size, the two Presidential helicopters were dwarfed by the cavernous hangar.
Having supervised the roll-in of the choppers, Schofield now stood in the middle of the massive interior space, alone, scanning it silently.
The rest of the Marine, White House and Secret Service contingent — those who hadn't been senior enough to go with the President, about twenty people — variously milled about the helicopters or drank coffee in the two glass-walled offices that flanked the main doors.
The size of the hangar stunned Schofield.
It was gigantic.
Completely illuminated by brilliant white halogen lights, it must have stretched at least a hundred yards into the mountain. A ceiling-mounted rail system ran for its entire length. At the moment, two large wooden crates hung from the rails at either end of the hangar.
At the far end of the vast space — facing the doors that led out to the runway — stood a twostory, completely internal building that ran for the full width of the hangar. This building's upper floor had angled glass windows that looked out over the hangar floor.
A small unobtrusive personnel elevator sat quietly underneath the overhang created by the building's upper level, sunk in the hangar's northern wall.
Apart from the Presidential helicopters, there were no other aircraft in the hangar at present. Some large white painted towing vehicles not unlike those seen at airports lay scattered around the hangar floor — indeed, Schofield had used two of them to bring in the choppers.
By far the most striking feature of the immense hangar, however, was the massive aircraft elevator platform that lay in its center.
It was huge, unbelievably huge, like the enormous hydraulic elevators that hang off the sides of aircraft carriers — a giant square-shaped platform in the very center of the hangar.
At 200 feet by 200 feet, the platform was large enough to hold an entire AWACS Boeing 707 — the Air- Force's famous radar-detecting airplanes, known for the thirty-foot flying-saucerlike rotodomes mounted on their backs.
Supported by an unseen hydraulic lift system, the giant platform took up nearly the whole of the central Area of the hangar. As with similar aircraft elevators, to maximize efficiency, on the northeastern corner of the platform was a small detachable section which was itself a working elevator, capable of operating independently of the larger platform. To do this it ran on rails attached to the wall of the elevator shaft rather than on the main platform's telescoping hydraulic strut — a kind of 'platform within a platform,' so to speak.
Today, however, the Air Force personnel at Area 7 were putting on the whole show.
As he stood at the edge of the enormous elevator shaft, Schofield could see the President — with his nine- man Secret Service Detail and his high-ranking Air Force tour guides — standing on the full-sized platform, getting smaller and smaller as they descended the wide concrete shaft on it.
At that very same moment, as Shane Schofield stood in the center of the vast hangar bay, looking down into the wide elevator shaft, someone else was watching him.
The watcher stood in Area 7's darkened control room, on the upper floor of the internal building that formed the eastern wall of the hangar. Around him, four uniformed radio operators spoke softly into headset microphones:
'…Alpha Unit, cover the Level 3 common room…'
'…Echo Unit advises that the Marine investigatory team from Nighthawk Three had to be neutralized out at
