"RAMP DOOR IS OPENING ..." ONE OF THE TENTH SQUADRON
commandos inside the Level 4 decompression area whispered
into his radio mike.
The other nine members of Alpha Unit were arrayed
around the eastern section of the floor in various hiding
places--their guns focused on the ramp in the center of the
room. With their half gas masks and night-vision goggles
they looked like a gang of insects waiting for the kill.
The horizontal door slid slowly open, casting a wide
beam of light up into the darkened room. The only other
light in the area came through the section of glass at the top
of the wall which divided this level in two.
"Stay out of sight until they're all up on level ground,"
Kurt Logan said from his position. "No one gets out alive."
the two secret service agents Curtis and Ramondo
stepped up into the semi-darkness first, armed with their
Uzis. They were followed by Calvin Reeves and Elvis.
The President came next, with Juliet Janson by his side.
He held a small SIG-Sauer P-228 pistol awkwardly in his
hand. Juliet had given it to him, just in case.
Behind them came the scientist, Herbert Franklin, and
bringing up the rear, Book II and Love Machine, both armed
with pump-action shotguns.
As soon as he stepped up into the semidarkness, Book
II didn't like it.
Various structures loomed around them. To his immediate
right, on the southern side of the enormous room, was a
long hexagonal chamber. To his left, shrouded in deep
shadow, he saw eight telephone-booth-sized chambers. In
the hazy light filtering through from the other side of the floor, he could just make out a series of catwalks high up
near the ceiling, twenty feet above the floor.
As soon as Book II stepped clear of the floor-level doorway,
its horizontal door slid smoothly back into place near
his feet, sealing the exit.
Calvin had hit a switch in the floor nearby, closing it.
area 7 137
Book II swallowed. He would have preferred to keep
that door open.
He flicked on a heavy police flashlight he had taken
from the Level 5 anteroom. Holding it under the barrel of his
shotgun, he played its beam over the room around them.
Calvin Reeves assumed command of strategy.
"You two," he whispered to Curtis and Ramondo,
"check behind those telephone booths, then take the stairwell
door. Haynes, Lewicky, Riley"--he said, using Elvis's,
Love Machine's and Book II's surnames--"the area behind
this decompression chamber, then secure that other door," he
pointed toward the dividing wall. "Janson. You and I stay
with the Boss."
Curtis and Ramondo disappeared in among the test
chambers, then, moments later, reappeared at the stairwell end.
"No one back there," Ramondo said.
Book II, Elvis and Love Machine entered the darkness
behind the decompression chamber. A narrow, empty section
of floor greeted them. Nothing.
"Clear back here," Book II said, as the three Marines
emerged from behind the long hexagonal chamber. They
headed for the door in the dividing wall.
Reeves was following standard tactics in close-quarter,
indoor engagements--where there is no sign of the enemy,
secure all exits, then consolidate your position.
It was his biggest mistake.
Not only because it limited his options for retreat, but
because it was exactly what Kurt Logan--already inside the
room--was expecting him to do.
while elvis and love machine headed for the dividing
wall, Book II played his flashlight over the thirty-foot-long
decompression chamber. It was absolutely huge.
At the end of the elongated chamber, he found a small
glass porthole, and shone his light in through it.
What he saw made him jump.
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An Asian face stared back at him, a man's face, pressed
up against the glass.
The Asian man was smiling cheerfully.
And then he pointed up--toward the roof of the decompression
chamber.
and peered up at the top of the decompression chamber--
--and found himself staring into the mantislike face of
a 7th Squadron commando wearing night-vision goggles
and a gas mask!
THE FLASHLIGHT WAS THE ONLY THING THAT SAVED BOOK II'S life.
Primarily because it blinded the man hiding on top of
the decompression chamber, if only for a moment. The man
shied away from the light as his night-vision goggles magnified
its beam by a factor of 150.
That was all the time Book II needed.
His shotgun boomed, blasting the commando's goggles
to pieces, sending him flying off the top of the chamber.
It was a small victory, for at that exact moment, gunfire
erupted around the darkened room as a legion of dark figures
emerged from their positions on top of the decompression
chamber and inside the telephone-booth-like test chambers
and rained hell on Book's hapless group in the center of the
floor.
OVER BY THE STAIRWELL DOOR, CURTIS AND RAMONDO WERE
assaulted by a barrage of P-90 gunfire from both flanks.
They were cut down where they stood, their bodies riddled
with bloody wounds.
Juliet Janson crash-tackled the President, hurling him to
the floor at the base of the decompression chamber, just as a
volley of rounds whistled past their heads.
Calvin Reeves wasn't so lucky.
The crossfire of bullets ripped into the back of his head,
and he jolted suddenly upright, then dropped to his knees, a
look of stunned dismay on his face--as though he had done
area 7 139
everything right, and still lost. Then his face smacked down
hard against the floor, right next to the spot where Herbert
Franklin lay with his head in his hands.
bullets sizzled through the air.
Juliet yanked the President to his feet, firing with her
free hand, dragging him toward the cover of the lab benches
over by the dividing wall, when suddenly she saw a 7th
Squadron commando rise up from the roof of the decompression
chamber and take aim at the President's head.
She brought her gun around. Not fast enough--
Blam!
The 7th Squadron man's head exploded, his neck snapping
backwards. His body tumbled off the decompression
chamber.
Juliet spun to see who had fired the killing shot, but
strangely she saw no one.
book II, elvis and love machine all dived together behind
a lab bench just as the benchtop was raked with gunfire.
They returned fire, aiming at three Air Force commandos
taking cover among the test booths.
But it quickly became clear that the Marines' makeshift
assortment of shotguns and pistols was going to be no match
for the rapid-fire P-90 machine guns of the 7th Squadron troops. The shelves around them shattered and splintered under the phenom
enal weight of enemy fire.
Elvis ducked for cover. "Goddamn!" he yelled. "This is
seriously fucked up!"
"No kidding," Book II shouted. He shucked his pump
action and snapped up to fire, but when he appeared above
the benchtop and loosed a couple of shots, he saw a very
strange thing happen: he saw all three of the shadowy 7th
Squadron shooters get yanked clean off their feet from behind.
Their guns went silent, and Book II found himself staring
at an empty area of the battlefield.
"What the ...?"
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Matthew Reilly
from his own position near the stairwell door, alpha
Unit's leader, Kurt Logan, saw what was happening.
"Fuck! There's someone else in here!" he yelled angrily
into his microphone. "Somebody's picking us off!"
Suddenly the trooper beside Logan took a hit to the side
of the head and half his skull exploded, spraying blood and
brains everywhere.
"Fuck!" Logan had expected to lose maybe two of his
men in the Shootout--but now he had lost six. "Alpha Unit,
pull out! Everybody back to the stairwell now! Take emergency
evac measures!"
He threw open the stairwell door, just as a line of bullets
punctured the wall all around it, almost taking his head off.
His remaining men dashed past him, out through the door,
into the shelter of the eastern stairwell--but not before they
had brutally fired down at their fallen comrades' bodies,
peppering the corpses and the floor all around them with
bullets.
Logan himself mercilessly strafed the body of a dead
7th Squadron man on the ground beside him. Then, when he
was done, he disappeared through the doorway after the others
and abruptly there was silence.
BOOK II WAS STILL CROUCHED BEHIND HIS LAB BENCH WITH
Elvis and Love Machine, acrid gunsmoke rising into the air
all around them.
Silence.
Deafening silence.
Juliet Janson and the President lay on the floor five feet
away from Book and the others, shielded by another bench,
covered in dust and broken bits of plastic. Juliet still had her
gun raised--
Whump!
A pair of boots landed with a loud thud on the benchtop
above them.
They all snapped to look up--and found themselves
area 7 141
staring at Captain Shane M. Schofield, USMC, dressed in
full dress uniform, with two nickel-plated Berettas gripped
in his hands.
He smiled at them. "Hey there."
meanwhile, in bars and offices and homes around
America and the world, people sat glued to their television
sets.
Because there was so little footage, CNN and the overseas
news networks just kept broadcasting the existing few
minutes' worth of tape over and over again. Experts were
brought in to give their opinions.
Government people sprang into action, although no one
could really do anything substantive, since the exact location
of the nightmarish affair was known only to a select few.
In any case, in a few minutes it would be eight o'clock
Mountain Daylight Time and the people of the world tensely
awaited the next hourly update.
THIRD CONFRONTATION
3 July/ 0800 Hours
UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
SPECIAL AREA (RESTRICTED) NO.7
0800 HOURS
GROUND LEVEL: Main Hangar
LEVEL 1: Hangar Bay
LEVEL 2: Hangar Bay
LEVEL 3: Living Quarters
LEVEL 4: Laboratories
Level 5: Animal Confinement Quarters
LEVEL 6: X-rail platform
space division, that part of the defense intelligence
Agency which deals with foreign powers' space capabilities,
is located on the second-to-bottom floor of the Pentagon,
three stories directly below the famous Pentagon Situation
Room.
And although its title may sound exotic and exciting, as
David Fairfax knew, such a perception couldn't have been
further from the truth.
In short, you got sent to Space Division as punishment,
because nothing ever happened in Space Division.
It was nearly 10.00 a.m. on the East Coast as Fairfax ... oblivious to any commotion going on in the outside world ... tapped away on his computer keyboard, trying to decipher a collection of phone taps that the DIA had picked up over the past few months. Whoever had been using the phones in question had fitted them with sophisticated encoders, masking their content. It was up to Fairfax to crack that code.
It's funny how times change, he thought.
David Theodore Fairfax was a cryptanalyst, a code
breaker. Of medium height, lean, with floppy brown hair and
thin wire-frame glasses, he didn't look like a genius. In fact,
in his Mooks T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, he looked more
like a gawky university student than a government analyst.
It was, however, his brilliant undergraduate thesis on
theoretical nonlinear computing that had brought him to the
attention of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department
of Defense's chief intelligence-gathering organization.
The DIA worked in close consultation with the NSA, America's
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Matthew Reilly
chief signals gatherer and code breaker. But that didn't
prevent it from running its own team of code crackers--who
often spied on the US A--of which Dave Fairfax was a part.
Fairfax had taken to cryptanalysis immediately. He
loved the challenge of it, the battle between two minds: one
which hopes to conceal, the other which hopes to reveal. He
lived by the maxim: No code is unbreakable.
It didn't take him long to get noticed.
In the early 1990's, U.S. authorities were confounded by
a man named Phil Zimmerman and his unbreakable encryption
software, "PGP." In 1991, Zimmerman had posted
PGP on the Internet, to the great consternation of the U.S.
government--principally because the government couldn't
crack it.
PGP employed a cryptographic system known as the
"public key system," which involved the multiplication of
very large prime numbers to obtain the code's all-important
"key." In this case "very large prime numbers" meant numbers
with over 130 digits.
It was unbreakable.
It was claimed that it would take all the supercomputers
in the world twelve times the age of the universe to check all
the possible values for a single message.
The government was annoyed. It became known that
certain terrorist groups and foreign governments had started
using PGP to encrypt their messages. In 1993, a grand jury
investigation into Zimmerman was initiated on the basis that
by uploading PGP onto the Internet, he had exported a weapon out of the United States, since encryption software
came under the government's definition of a "munition."
And then strangely, in 1996, after hounding Zimmerman
for three years, the U.S. Attorney General's office
dropped the case.
Just like that.
They claimed th
at the horse had bolted and the case was
no longer worth pursuing, so they closed the file.
What the Attorney General never mentioned was the
area 7 147
call she had received from the Director of the DIA on the
morning she dropped the case, saying that PGP had been
cracked.
And as anyone in cryptography knows, once you crack
your enemy's code, you don't let them know you've
cracked it.
And the man who cracked PGP: an unknown twenty-five-year-old DIA mathematician by the name of David
Fairfax.
It turned out that Fairfax's theoretical nonlinear computer
was no longer theoretical. A prototype version of it
was built for the express purpose of breaking PGP, and as it
turned out, the computer, with its unimaginable calculative
abilities, could factor extremely large numbers with considerable
ease.
No code is unbreakable.
History, however, is tough on cryptanalysts--for the
simple fact that they cannot talk about their greatest victories.
And so it was with Dave Fairfax. He might have
cracked PGP, but he could never talk about it, and in the
great maze of government work, he had simply been given a
small pay raise and then moved on to the next job.
AND SO HERE HE WAS IN SPACE DIVISION, ANALYZING A SERIES
of unauthorized phone transmissions coming into and out of
some remote Air Force base in Utah.
In a similarly isolated room across the hall from him,
however, was where all the good stuff was happening today.
A joint taskforce of DIA and NSA cryptanalysts were tracking
the encrypted signals coming out of the Chinese space
shuttle that had launched from Xichang a few days earlier.
Now that was interesting, Fairfax thought. Better than
decrypting some phone calls from a stupid Air Force base in
the desert.
The recorded phone calls appeared on Fairfax's computer
screen as a waterfall of cascading numbers--the
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mathematical representation of a series of telephone conversations
that had taken place in Utah over the last couple of
months.
A huge pair of headphones covered Fairfax's ears, emitting