“Phones?”

He pulled one off the wall, shook his head.

“We’re going to be out of communication real fast,” said Bunny. “Without a hard line we’d be better off shouting.”

I tapped my commlink for a patch to Brick, filled him in, and told him to establish a command link with Major Courtland.

“If the elevator’s working I can come in-,” he started to say, but I cut him off.

“Truly appreciated, Gunny, but we need to move fast. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“And make sure no one else comes in here who doesn’t belong to the club.”

“I guarantee it.”

We took one elevator, but we sent all six of them down at the same time. We stopped two of them-ours and one other-at the next to last level, and as soon as the doors opened and we cleared the area around us we bent low and listened to the sounds coming up from the elevator shafts. We heard the other cars stop, heard the doors open.

The limestone caverns were huge and dark and smelled of mold and bad dreams. There were long rows of fluorescent fixtures overhead, but the power to the lights was off. The elevators must have been on a different circuit or had their own power supply. It made sense that the intruders would leave the elevators on-it was a mile-long climb back into the sunlight if they had to take the stairs.

We crouched and waited, using night vision to look for movement, but there was nothing. No ambush gunfire. No explosives.

It didn’t mean that there weren’t Russian shooters lying in wait-it just meant that they weren’t shooting randomly at anything that moved. That could be good or bad. I pointed to the stairwell door, and after checking it for trip wires we entered the stairwell and looked down.

All of the battery-operated emergency lights had been smashed, and the stairwell was a bottomless black hole.

The night-vision devices used by the DMS are about six cuts above anything on the commerical market and a generation newer than most special ops teams had. A lot of the standard NVDs used passive systems that amplified existing environmental ambient lighting; ours had an option for an active system that emmitted an infrared light source to provide sufficient illumination in situations of zero ambient light. The downside was that the infrared from an active system could be spotted by someone else wearing night vision. It’s a risk that also had rewards if the other guys weren’t using something as sophisticated, and that wasn’t likely. The only other option was flashlights, and that screwed with your natural night vision and was a sniper’s paradise. The other useful feature of our NVDs was the new panoramic lens that gave us a ninety-five-degree field of clear vision and a thermal-imaging component. If there was something alive down here, we’d see it in total darkness and we’d see it better than a hunting owl. With night vision everything is a ghostly green, but we were all comfortable with it and we all automatically made the mental shifts necessary to function with top-level efficiency.

Even so, when I looked down the stairwell all I saw were flights of stairs at right angles that descended beyond the effective range of the NVP optics.

We went down slow and careful, expecting traps.

We found the first trip wire thirty-seven steps down. In my goggles it was a slender spider’s web of glowing green. Whoever placed it was smart, setting it close into the back of the riser so that it wouldn’t trigger as someone stepped down on the ball of his foot but would catch the fall or rise of the heel. Smart.

I showed it to Bunny, who nodded his appreciation, but Top shook his head dismissively. He was more seasoned than Bunny. The trap was smart, but it was too soon to be smart. The best way would have been to rig an obvious trip wire and then the more subtle one. Set and then exploit the expectations of the person you’re trying to trap.

We moved forward slowly and found one more trip wire. Same as before. Like the first, it was attached to a Claymore and set back near the riser. Bunny disabled them both. If backup came, we’d like them to arrive in one piece.

A few times we encountered something smeared on the banister, but with the night vision it looked like oil. It smelled of copper, though. Blood.

“Maybe a guard clipped one of those Russian boys,” Top suggested in a whisper, but I didn’t think so. The smears were on the outside of the railings that surrounded a central drop all the way to the floor. You might get smears like that if something was thrown down the shaft and hit rails on the way down.

At the bottom of the stairwell we solved that mystery. A man in unmarked black BDUs lay twisted into a rag-doll heap at the bottom of the stairwell. It was clear he had been thrown over the rails and had struck several times on the way down to the concrete floor. His body was torn to pieces. I looked up through the vacant hole around which the stairwell curled for over a mile. It was a long, long fall. I wondered if the man had been alive during any of that horrible plummet.

Top knelt by the man. He checked first for booby traps, and when he found none he went through the man’s pockets. No ID, no personal effects. All he had on him were gun belts and equipment bags. Some hand grenades and lots of spare magazines. The ammunition was 7.62x39mm FMJ. Russian.

Top weighed a magazine thoughtfully in one hand and looked up at me. “Jigsaw?” he suggested.

“I don’t know,” I said, but in truth I didn’t like the feel of this.

Bunny was by the door to J-level, checking it for traps. “We’re clear here,” he reported.

I pulled up the floor plan on my PDA and we studied it. Right outside the stairwell door was a wide corridor with elevators on one side and the first of the storage units on the other. The schematic couldn’t show us anything more than a blueprint, so we had no way of knowing what kind of actual cover might be out there.

“Scope,” I said, and Bunny fished a fiber-optic scope from his pack and fed it under the door. The scope fed images to a palm-sized screen that folded down from his chest pack. He had it set for night vision, but that couldn’t show thermals. Bunny turned the scope in all directions. We saw a row of electric golf carts and stacks of file cartons. Thousands of them standing in rows that trailed off far beyond the visible range of the optics. Nothing moved.

Using hand signals, I indicated that we would open the door and give cross-fire cover as we exited. I’d use the shelter of the stairwell landing to provide cover while they ran out and went left and right. They nodded and Bunny stuffed the scope back into his pack. I finger counted down to zero, and then we went through into the cavern.

Gunfire shattered the silence around us and suddenly we were in one hell-storm of an ambush.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The Warehouse, Baltimore, Maryland

Saturday, August 28, 3:13 P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 92 hours, 47 minutes

“How is the President?” asked Mr. Church.

“Unhappy, unwell, and unwilling to deal with this crap,” barked Linden Brierly.

“Tell him that he has my sympathies, but I need to speak with him.”

“I can probably set up a call later this-”

“Linden… I need to speak with him now.”

Silence washed like a cold tide back and forth between their phones.

“You’re killing me, Church,” said Brierly. “The doctors here already want me lynched, and if I ask the First Lady to let him take a call she will have my nuts for lunch.”

“Tell her that this concerns Joe Ledger,” said Church.

Brierly was quiet. Two months ago Joe Ledger and Echo Team had saved the First Lady and half of Congress from terrorists who wanted to release a deadly plague. The First Lady had seen Ledger in action, had seen his heroism and his absolute viciousness. It had changed her as a person, and Brierly had not yet put his finger on whether that change was good or bad. He’d been part of that fight, and it had been a step up for him.