Then, abruptly, the pool turned a sickening shade of red and Lucifer's legs went still. The Komodos just continued to eat his body.
Schofield winced at the sight, but then, if anyone deserved to die such a horrific painful death, Lucifer Leary did.
Then Schofield hit the button that closed the floor door, obliterating the foul sight, and hurried back to get Gant.
10:59.
Within a minute, Gant was unbound and standing next to Schofield as he freed the bleary eyed Hot Rod Hagerty.
Gant said, 'You know, this birthday really has sucked.' She nodded toward the decompression area. 'What happened in there? I thought Leary had…'
'He did,' Schofield said. 'Bastard dropped me in a pool filled with Komodo dragons.'
'So how'd you get out?'
Schofield pulled out his Maghook. 'Apparently reptiles are exceptionally sensitive to magnetic discharges. I only learned that little fact this morning, from a little boy named Kevin. So I just flicked on my Maghook and they didn't want to come near me. Then I opened the floor door up again from below and came back for you. Sadly, Lucifer didn't have a supercharged magnetic grappling hook on him when he fell in.'
'Nice,' Gant said. 'Very nice. So where's the President, and Kevin?'
'They're safe. They're outside the complex.'
'So why are you back in here?'
Schofield looked at his watch.
It was exactly 11:00 a.m.
'Two reasons. One, because in exactly five minutes this facility's self-destruct mechanism will be activated. Ten minutes after that, this whole place will be vaporized, and we can't allow that to happen while Caesar Russell is inside it. So we either stop it from going off, or, if we can't do that, we get Caesar Russell out of here before it does.'
'Wait a second,' Gant said, 'we have to save Caesar?'
'It seems our host decided to put a radio chip on his own heart as well as the President's. So if he dies, so does the country.'
'Son of a bitch,' Gant said. 'So what was the second reason?'
Schofield's face reddened slightly. 'I wanted to find you.'
Gant's face lit up, but she spoke matter-of-factly: 'You know, we can talk about this later.'
'I think that would be good,' Schofield said as Hagerty came free of his bonds, blinking out of his stupor. 'What do you say we do it on another date?'
Gant broke out in a grin. 'You bet.'
11:01.
Schofield and Gant rode the detachable mini-elevator swiftly up the main shaft, now armed only with Schofield's pistols…Gant with the M9, Schofield with the Desert Eagle.
Schofield had sent Hagerty down to Level 6, to escape via the Emergency Exit Vent. When he'd seen the hacked-up half-body of Colonel Harper, Hagerty hadn't argued. He was happy to get out of Area 7 as quickly as possible.
'I don't know if we'll be able to disarm the self-destruct system,' Gant said as Schofield gave her a shot of the Sinovirus vaccine to protect her against the contaminated hangar. 'You have to enter a lockdown code by 11:05 to call it off, and we don't know any of the codes.'
'I've been working on that,' Schofield said, pulling out his cell phone. He hit redial and Fairfax's voice came on the line straight away.
'Mr. Fairfax, how goes it?'
'The lockdown termination code is 10502,' Fairfax said. 'Hacked into the system from behind, from the source code. Got it that way. Turns out it's the operator number of the head dude there, an Air Force colonel named Harper.'
'I don't think he'll be needing it anymore,' Schofield said. 'Thank you, Mr. Fairfax. If I get out of this alive, I'll buy you a beer sometime.'
He hung up and turned to Gant.
'Okay. Time to turn off this nuclear time bomb. Then all we have to do is capture Caesar alive.'
They rose up the side of the darkened shaft.
Its great square-shaped opening up at ground level loomed above them, backlit by orange firelight.
It turned out that Lucifer Leary had indeed brought the main elevator platform down to Level 4. When they'd arrived at the elevator shaft from the Level 4 observation lab, Schofield and Gant had found the giant platform sitting right there in front of them, piled high with no less than fifteen bodies — prisoners, 7th Squadron commandos, Marines and White House staff — bodies which Leary no doubt planned to dismember in strange and unusual ways.
As such, the shaft now yawned wide above Schofield and Gant, open and airy.
As they traveled quickly up it, Gant reached underneath the moving platform. She emerged with her Maghook, which she'd left attached to the underside of the mini elevator earlier.
'Get ready,' Schofield said.
They had arrived at the main hangar.
The hangar looked like hell.
Literally.
Fires burned all over the place, bathing the enormous space in a haunting orange glow. Bodies lay everywhere.
Assorted debris littered the area — the remains of blown up helicopters, crumpled towing vehicles, the pieces of Bravo Unit's failed barricade over by the internal building.
Nothing, it seemed, lay unscarred.
The slanted windows of the control room overlooking the hangar were completely shattered.
Even one of the giant wooden crates hanging from the overhead crane system had a gnarled piece of Nighthawk 2's tail rotor embedded in its side.
Amazingly, however, one object remained untouched by the day's mayhem.
Marine One.
It still stood on the western side of the aircraft elevator shaft, miraculously intact.
As their elevator jolted to a halt inside the hangar, Schofield and Gant looked about themselves cautiously.
11:02.
'The self-destruct computer is in the control room,' Gant said.
'Then that's where we're going,' Schofield said, heading for the internal building.
'Wait a minute,' Gant said, stopping suddenly, her eyes scanning the debris-covered floor around them.
'We don't have a minute,' Schofield said.
'You go, then,' Gant said. 'Call me if you need any help. I'm gonna try something.'
'Okay,' Schofield said, charging off toward the internal building.
Gant, meanwhile, dropped to her knees and started searching through the bodies and debris around the mini elevator platform.
Schofield burst inside the lower floor of the internal building, leading with his Desert Eagle.
He hit the stairs on the fly, charged up them. For the first time that day, he actually felt in control. He had the lock down code — 10502 — and now all he had to do was punch it into the computer and disarm the nuke.
Then he would have plenty of time to find Caesar — whose men were now history — before he killed himself, and drag him out of Area 7 to face justice.
11:03.
Schofield came to the control room door, pushed it open, his gun leveled in front of him.
What he saw took him completely by surprise.
There, sitting in a swivel chair in the middle of the destroyed command room, waiting for Schofield and
