'Fucking indestructible is what I am,' Mother said. She was limping slightly on her real leg.
'When it got hit by that missile, I knew my cockroach was done for. And I didn't figure old Caesar and his buddies would take kindly to finding me in it. But when I ran off the runway, I kicked up a hell of a dust cloud. So I bailed out under the cover of the cloud. The cockroach flipped and smashed and I just dug a little hole for my head in the sand under its front bumper, ripped my fake leg off for added effect, and played dead until Caesar and his choppers flew off.'
'Ripped your fake leg off for added effect…' Schofield said. 'Nice touch.'
'I thought so,' she smiled. Then she jutted her chin at him. 'What about you? Last I saw, you and the Prez were heading off into outer space. Did you save the fucking day again?'
'I might have,' Schofield said.
'More to the point,' Mother whispered conspiratorially, 'did you do what I told you to do with You-Know-Who?' She nodded theatrically at Gant. 'Did you kiss the friggin' girl, Scarecrow?'
Schofield snuffed a laugh, cast a sideways look at Gant.
'You know what, Mother? As a matter of fact, I think I did.'
A short while later, Schofield sat alone with the President.
'So what's the word on the rest of the country?' he asked. 'Have they been watching all this every hour on the Emergency Broadcast System?'
The President smiled. 'It's funny you should ask. While you were gone, we examined the complex's power history, and we found this.'
He pulled out a printout of Area 7's source power history, pointed to one entry.
07:37:56
WARNING: Auxiliary power malfunction
System
Malfunction located at terminal 1-A2
Receiving no response from systems: TRACS; AUX SYS-1; RAD COMSPHERE; MBN; EXT FAN
The President said, 'Remember you said that you blew up a junction box on one of the underground hangar levels earlier this morning? Sometime around 7:37.'
'Yeah…'
'Well, it seems that that junction box was kind of important. Among other things, it housed the controls for the base's auxiliary power system and its radiosphere. It also housed a system called the MBN. You know what 'MBN' stands for?'
'No…'
'Stands for the Military Broadcast Network, the previous name for the Emergency Broadcast System. Seems the MBN's outgoing transmission cable was destroyed in that blast. And because the LBJ Protocol was never initiated this morning, Caesar's transmissions over the Emergency Broadcast System were delayed by forty-five minutes.'
'But the system was destroyed at 7:37…' Schofield said.
The President smiled.
'Correct,' he said, 'which means that every time Caesar Russell spoke into his digital camera this morning, he wasn't transmitting at all. He was speaking to no one but the people at Area 7.'
Schofield blinked, trying to comprehend it all.
Then he said: 'So the country doesn't know this happened…'
The President nodded ruefully.
'It seems,' he said, 'that the people of America have been preoccupied all day with another drama, an accident involving Hollywood's highest paid actress and her actor fiance'.
'It appears that the unlucky couple have been trapped in the Swiss Alps all day, cut off by an avalanche while hiking illegally on Swiss military property. Sadly, their unscrupulous guide was killed, but I believe that just in the last hour our two superstars have been found safe and well.'
'As I understand it, CNN has been covering the whole drama all day, updating the public every hour, recycling some amateur footage of the area, giving updates. Biggest news event since Diana's car crash, they tell me.'
Schofield almost laughed. 'So they really don't know,' he said.
'That's right,' the President said. 'And that, Captain, is the way it will stay.'
Exactly six hours later, the second X-38 space shuttle from Area 8 was launched off the back of a high-flying 747.
Its mission: the destruction of a rogue Air Force reconnaissance satellite hovering in a geosynchronous orbit above southern Utah.
So far as the shuttle's pilots could tell, it appeared that the satellite in question had been sending and receiving a peculiar microwave signal down into the Utah desert.
In the end, the pilots didn't care what it was doing. They had orders, which they followed to the letter.
And so they blasted the satellite out of the sky.
With the controlling satellite destroyed, the Type 240 plasma explosives in the airports were rendered useless, apart from their proximity sensors, which would take a little more time to disable.
Over the next few hours, all fourteen bombs would be disarmed and dismantled, and then taken away for analysis.
In addition to the disarming of the plasma bombs, the destruction of the satellite also allowed for the removal of the radio transmitter attached to the President's heart.
The procedure was conducted by a renowned civilian heart surgeon from Johns Hopkins University Hospital under the watchful eye of three other cardiac surgeons and armed supervision by the United States Secret Service and the United States Marine Corps.
Never was a surgeon more careful — or more nervous — during an operation.
Limited anaesthesia was used. Although the public was never notified of it, for twenty-eight minutes, the Vice President was in charge of the United States of America.
An investigatory committee would later be formed to conduct an inquiry into the Air Force's role in the Area 7 incident.
As a result of that inquiry, no less than eighteen high ranking Air Force officers in charge of a dozen bases across the southwestern United States and ninety-nine junior officers and enlisted men stationed at those bases were tried for treason in closed session.
It appeared that all of the men linked to the day's events were either currently serving, or had once served, at either the Air Force Special Operations Command, based at Hurlbut Field, Florida, or with the 14th and 20th Air Forces at Warren and Falcon Air Force Bases in Wyoming and Colorado. All, at one time or another, had been under the direct command of Charles 'Caesar' Russell.
Overall, in a service of nearly 400,000 men and women, one hundred and seventeen traitors was not a very large group, barely a dozen to each tainted base. But considering the aircraft and ordnance at those bases, it was more than enough to carry out Caesar's plan.
It further emerged at the trials that five of the USAF personnel involved in the plot were Air Force surgeons who at various times had performed procedures on congressional members, including the United States senator and onetime presidential hopeful, Jeremiah K. Woolf.
Circumstantial evidence presented at all the trials also suggested that every Air Force man involved in the incident was a member of an informal racist society within the United States Air Force known as the Brotherhood.
All were sentenced to life imprisonment at an undisclosed military prison, with no hope of parole. Unfortunately, the plane delivering them to the secret prison inexplicably crashed during flight. There were no survivors.
In the investigatory committee's final report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the subject of 'informal antisocial interest groups' within the armed forces was raised. While it was acknowledged in the report that most such societies had been removed from the military during a purge in the 1980's, the report recommended that a new
