Matthew Reilly - Area 7

Old married hags like me get off hearing about the sexual

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gymnastics of pretty young things like you. And I was just,

you know ... interested."

Gant smiled sadly. "It didn't go as well as I would have

liked."

"How do you mean?"

Gant shrugged, kept walking, gun in hand. "He didn't

kiss me. We had a great dinner at this quiet little restaurant,

then we walked along the banks of the Potomac, just talking.

God, we talked all evening. And then, when he dropped me

home, I was hoping that he'd kiss me. But he ... just ... didn't. And so we stood there awkwardly and said we'd see

each other later, and the date just ... ended."

Mother's eyes narrowed. "Oooh, Scarecrow. I'll kick your ass ..."

"Please don't," Gant said as they came to the door leading

to the stairwell. "And don't tell him I told you anything."

Mother ground her teeth. "Mmm, okay ..."

"In any case, I'd rather not think about it right now,"

Gant said. "We've got work to do."

She opened the firedoor a crack, peered through it, her

gun raised beside her face.

The stairwell was dark and silent.

Empty.

"Stairwell's clear," she whispered.

She opened the door fully, took a few steps up the stairs.

Mother moved into position behind her, both of their

eyes looking up the barrels of their guns.

They came to the Level 3 landing, saw the door leading

into the complex's living quarters.

There was no one here.

That's odd, Gant thought.

There were no soldiers stationed on the landing, not

even a sentry left there to block their movement up through

the complex.

Very odd, she thought. If she had been in charge of the

opposing forces, she would be flushing every floor for the

President, and ensuring that she blocked off the stairwell

while she did so.

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Obviously, the 7th Squadron operated differently.

With the stairwell unguarded, Gant and her team made

swift progress upwards, came to the Level 2 hangar bay.

The Level 2 hangar--untouched, so far, by the mayhem

of the day--was practically identical to the one above it, the

only difference being that the collection of planes inside it

was far less exotic. While the Level 1 hangar contained its

pair of Stealth bombers and the SR-71 Blackbird, this one

only held two AWACS surveillance airplanes.

Which was exactly what Gant wanted.

TWO MINUTES LATER, SHE WAS INSIDE THE LOWER CARGO HOLD

of one of the AWACS planes, unscrewing a heavy lead panel

in the floor.

The panel came free, revealing an electronics compartment

--and in the middle of that compartment, secured

firmly in place, was a very sturdy-looking fluorescent

orange unit, about the size of a small shoebox. The orange

box appeared to be made of some superstrong material.

"What's that?" Juliet Janson asked from behind Gant.

The President answered for her. "It's the plane's flight

data recorder. The black box."

"Doesn't look very black," Ramrod Hagerty said sourly.

"They never are," Gant said, extracting the small orange

unit from its nook. "It's just the name they're known by.

Black boxes are nearly always painted bright orange, for

better visibility in a wreck. That said, they're usually found

another way--"

"Oh, very good ..." the President said.

"What?" Hagerty asked. "What?"

"Ever wondered how they find the black box so fast after

an airplane crash?" Gant said. "When a plane goes down,

debris is spread all over the place, yet they always find the

flight data recorder very quickly, usually within a few

hours."

"Yes ..."

Gant said, "That's because all black boxes have a

battery-powered transponder inside them. That transponder

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emits a high-powered microwave signal, giving the box's location

to crash investigators."

"So what are you going to do with it?" Hagerty asked.

Gant called up through the hatch above her. "Mother!"

"Yeah?" Mother's voice floated back.

"You found that signal yet?"

"I'll have it in two seconds!"

Gant gave Hagerty a look. "I'm going to try to impersonate

the signal coming from the President's heart."

IN THE MAIN CABIN OF THE AWACS PLANE, MOTHER SAT AT A

computer console.

She pulled up the screen showing the microwave signal

coming into Area 7 from the low-orbit satellite. It was the

same screen Brainiac had found inside the other AWACS

plane earlier, depicting a twenty-five-second rebounding

signature.

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Gant came up from the cargo hold with the orange

colored black box. She plugged a cable into a socket on its

side, connecting it to Mother's terminal. Immediately, the

spike graph appeared on a small illuminated LCD screen on

the black box's top.

"Okay," Gant said to Mother, "see that search signal,

the upward spike? I want you to set it as the 'find' frequency

on the black box."

When crash investigators search for a black box, they

use a radio transmitter to emit a pre-set microwave signal

called the 'find' frequency. When the black box's transponder

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detects that signal, it sends out a return signal, revealing

its location.

"Okay ..." Mother said, typing. "Done."

"Good," Gant said. "Now set that rebounding frequency

--the downward spike--as the return signal."

"Okay, just a minute."

"Will the signal strength from the black box be powerful

enough to reach all the way up to the satellite?" the President

asked.

"I think it'll work. They used microwave signals to talk

to Armstrong on the moon, and SETI uses them to send

messages into outer space." Gant smiled. "It's not the size

that matters, it's the quality of the signal."

"All right, done," Mother said. She turned to Gant. "So,

Fearless Leader, what exactly have I just created?"

"Mother, if you've done it right, when we activate the

transmitter inside this black box, we'll be mimicking the

signal coming out of the President's heart."

"So what now?" the President asked.

"Yes," Hagerty said meanly. "Do we just switch it on?"

"Definitely not. If we turn it on, the satellite will pick up

two identical signals, and that might cause it to detonate the

bombs. We can't risk that. No, we've just laid the groundwork.

Now it's time for the hard part. Now we have to substitute the black box's signal for the President's."

"And how do we do that?" Hagerty asked. "Please don't

tell me that you're going to perform open-heart surgery on

the President of the United States with a pocket knife?"

"Do I look like MacGyver to you?" Gant asked. "No.

My theory is this: somehow Caesar Russell got that transmitter onto the President's heart ..."

"That's right. He did it during an operation I had a few

years ago," the President said.

"But I'm figuring he didn't turn it on until today," Gant

said. "The White House's scanners would have picked up an

unauthorized signal as soon as it was turned on."

"Yes, so ..." Hagerty said.

"So," Gant said, "somewhere in this complex, Caesar

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Russell has a unit that turns the President's transmitter on

and off. I'm guessing that that unit--probably just a handheld

initiate/terminate unit of some kind--is sitting in the

same room as Caesar himself."

"It is," the President said, recalling the small unit that

Caesar Russell had turned on at the very start of the challenge.