Matthew Reilly - Area 7

a few minutes head-start. It started ticking down from 85:00

minutes--85:00 ... 84:59 ... 84:58--when abruptly, he

heard a clattering noise from somewhere above him and he

snapped his head up--

Bullets sprayed everywhere.

Peppering the metal walls all around him and Mother.

Schofield saw a P-90 rifle sticking over the rim of the

ventilation shaft--held by someone out of sight--firing

wildly down into it.

"Scarecrow!" Gant called from ten feet below them.

She was crouched inside a small horizontal tunnel that

branched off the main vertical shaft. "Down here!"

"Go, Mother! Go!" Schofield yelled.

Both he and Mother released their footholds on the

shaft's walls and let themselves slide down the vertical vent.

Whooosh!

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Matthew Reilly

They shot down the narrow vertical tunnel, sizzling-hot

bullets impacting all around them, before--reeeech!--they

dug their heels into the shaft's walls just short of the horizontal

tunnel.

Mother came to a perfect halt right in front of it.

Schofield, however, overshot the cross-vent, but somehow

managed to throw his hands out and grip it with his fingertips,

a split second before he would have fallen several hundred feet to his death.

Mother stepped inside the cross-vent first, then hauled

Schofield into it after her, not a moment before a long abseiling

rope dropped down the vertical shaft above them.

The 7th Squadron was coming.

Up ahead, Gant ran in the lead, closely followed by

Brainiac. The silver-walled tunnel was about five feet

square, so they all had to crouch slightly to run through it.

Gant came around a slight bend on the tunnel and saw

light up ahead. She sped up--and then lurched to a sudden

halt, clutching desperately for a handhold.

She stopped so suddenly that Brainiac almost bowled

right into her. It was lucky he pulled up in time. A collision

would have sent both of them falling a hundred and eighty

feet straight down.

"Fuck me ..." Brainiac said.

"What's the holdup--?" Mother said as she and

Schofield arrived on the scene. "Oh ..."

Their tunnel ended at the main elevator shaft.

The giant concrete-walled chasm, two hundred feet

across, yawned before them.

On the other side of it, directly opposite them, they saw

an enormous heavy steel door with a black-painted "I" on it.

It looked like a hangar door of some sort.

And nearly two hundred feet below them--parked at

the fourth underground level--they saw the wide hydraulic

elevator platform.

"You know, it's at times like this I wish I had a

Maghook," Schofield said. A Maghook was a combined

Area 7 89

grappling hook and high-powered magnet--the signature

weapon of Marine Recon Units.

"There are a couple upstairs in Nighthawk Two,"

Mother said.

"Wouldn't do us any good," Gant said. "Distance is too

far. A Maghook has a maximum rope length of a hundred

and fifty feet. This is at least two hundred."

"Well, we better think of something," Brainiac said,

looking back down the cross-vent, listening to the whizzing

sounds of the 7th Squadron men abseiling down the main

vertical shaft beyond it.

Schofield looked at the wide concrete chasm in front of

them. It was clearly well used--covered in grime and

grease.

Indented at regular intervals on its walls, however, were

a series of thin rectangular conduits--small horizontal gutters

cut into the shaft's concrete walls. Each gutter was

about six inches deep and ran right around the enormous elevator

shaft, circling it. They were designed, it seemed, to

house wires and cabling without hindering the elevator platform's

upward and downward movement.

But right now, they afforded Schofield no escape.

Boom!

He spun. It was the sound of heavy boots clanging on

metal.

The 7th Squadron men had arrived at the other end of

the horizontal tunnel.

the air force men moved fast, racing half-crouched

down the cross-vent, guns up.

There were four of them--all wearing black combat

gear: helmets, gas masks, body armor. Unsure of which

cross-tunnel Schofield's group had taken, the others in their

unit had gone farther down the vertical vent to check the

other levels.

The two lead men rounded the bend in the tunnel--and

stopped.

Matthew Reilly

They had come to the end of the horizontal cross-vent,

to the point where it met the massive elevator shaft.

But there was no one there.

The end of the tunnel was empty.

when the president of the united states visits a certain

venue, the Secret Service has always plotted in advance at

least three alternate exit routes, in case of emergency.

In big-city hotels, this usually comprises a back entrance,

a service entrance--say, through the kitchen--and

the roof, for lift-out via helicopter.

At Area 7, the Secret Service had sent two advance

teams to secure and then guard the alternate exit points that

they had chosen.

Alternate Exit Point 1 was on the lowest level of Area 7--

Level 6. The exit itself was the eight-hundred-yard-long Emergency

Exit Vent that opened onto the desert floor about half a

mile from the low mountain that covered the base. The first Secret

Service advance team was stationed down on Level 6, the

second up at the Vent's exit on the desert floor itself.

The President and his five-man Detail charged down the

fire stairs, a hailstorm of bullets sizzling past their cheeks,

shooting right through their flailing coats. The 7th Squadron's

first unit--Alpha Unit, led by Major Kurt Logan--was close

behind them.

They came to a firedoor that read: level 4: laboratory

facilities. Dashed past it.

More stairs, another landing, another door. This one had

a larger sign on it:

LEVEL 5: ANIMAL CONTAINMENT AREA

NO ENTRY

THIS DOOR FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY

ENTER VIA ELEVATORS AT OTHER END OF FLOOR

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Matthew Reilly

The President ran right past it.

They arrived at the bottom of the stairwell--at a door

marked: level 6: x-rail station.

Frank Cutler was running in the lead. He came to the

door, yanked it open--

--and was immediately assaulted by a ferocious barrage

of automatic gunfire.

Cutler's face and chest became a ragged bloody mess

as a relentless wave of bullets rammed into it. The Chief of

the Detail went flying back into the stairwell, skidding

across the floor, the man immediately behind him also going

down.

Another agent--a young female named Juliet Janson-- dived forward and slammed the door shut again, but before

she did she got a fleeting, horrifying glimpse of the area beyond

it.

The sixth and lowest level of Area 7 looked like an underground

subway station--with a flat, raised platform sitting

in between two sets of extra-wide railway tracks. The

door to the Emergency Exit Vent--their goal--lay buried in

the concrete wall of the right-hand track.

Positioned on the train tracks in front of that door, however,

and covered by the station's chest-high platform, was a

whole other unit of 7th Squadron soldiers, all with their

P-90's trained on the fire escape.

In front of the 7th Squadron men, lying facedown in

their own blood, lay the bullet-riddled bodies of the nine

members of the Secret Service's Advance Team One.

The door slammed shut and Special Agent Juliet Janson

turned.

"Quickly!" she shouted. "Back up the stairs! Now!"