But this was asking a lot.

“I’ll see what she says,” Brierly warned, “but don’t expect much.”

MR. CHURCH SAT in his office and waited. He did nothing else. He didn’t even eat a cookie, though he eyed the plate of vanilla wafers with interest. The wall clock ticked and the boats in the harbor sloshed noisily through the choppy water.

“Mr. Church?” The First Lady’s voice was soft, but it was like silk wrapped around a knife blade.

“Good afternoon-”

“Is Joe Ledger in trouble?”

Right to the point. Church admired that. “Yes, ma’am.” In a few short sentences he explained what was going on. He even told her about Joe’s mission to Deep Iron. Church was a good judge of character who was seldom let down by his expectations.

The First Lady said, “And you want my husband, who has just come out of surgery, to not only take back the reins of office but take on the stress of a major political upheaval in his own administration?”

“Yes,” said Church. She would have fried him for an attempt to sugarcoat things.

“Will this help Joe?”

“Because of the NSA, Joe has had to go into an exceedingly dangerous situation without proper backup and no hope at all of rescue if things go wrong. That should never have happened.”

“Can you tell me what this mission is about? Not the incidentals but the big picture?”

“I could,” he said, “but you’re not cleared for it.”

“Mr. Church,” she said quietly, “I’m speaking to you on a secure line and I will have the final say as to whether my husband takes back his office. Not the Vice President, not the doctors here at Walter Reed, not the AG or the Speaker of the House. Believe me when I tell you that you need to convince me of the importance of this or this conversation is going to end right here and now.”

“You do that well,” he said.

“What?”

“Play the big cards.”

“My God… is that a compliment from Mr. Church?”

“It is. Call it respect from one pro to another.”

“So you’ll tell me?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think I’d damn well better.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

Deep Iron Storage Facility

Saturday, August 28, 3:21 P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 92 hours, 39 minutes E.S.T.

“Go! Go! Go!” I yelled, and laid down a stream of fire with my M4. Top dropped low and dove behind a parked golf cart, rolled, and came up into a shooter’s crouch. Bunny made a dive for cover behind a stack of boxes, but I saw his body pitch and twist in midair as he was hit by at least one round. He dropped out of sight.

I saw muzzle flashes from four points. A pair of shooters hidden behind the towers of boxes and two more on opposite sides of the row of golf carts. The stairwell was wider than the door, so I had a narrow concrete wall to stand behind, but every time I tried to lean out and fire, bullets slammed into the wall inches from my head. If it hadn’t been for the night-vision goggles the flying stone splinters would have blinded me and torn half my face off.

“Eyes!” Top yelled as he hurled a flash bang like a breaking ball. I closed my eyes and heard the dry bang! Then I dropped to one knee, leaned out, and looked for a target. I saw a dark figure staggering away from the point of explosion, and I gave him two three-round bursts. He spun away from me, hit a wall, and collapsed backward. To my left I saw Top edging along a wall of boxes toward the shooter on my far left. I laid down some cover fire and ducked back as the shooter returned fire, but then Top wheeled around the edge and put two in the guy’s throat.

I was running before the man had even dropped and I went fast and bent over along the row of carts knowing that the shooter on my right would be aiming in the direction of Top’s muzzle flashes. Suddenly there was movement in front of me and in a microsecond I realized that the shooter was running down the row of carts in my direction, but he had his head craned sideways as he tried to get an angle on Top.

The shooter never saw it coming. I closed to zero distance and put my barrel under his chin and blew his helmet off his head.

The last Russian must have seen me, because he opened up right away and I had to dive into a belly slide as bullets tore chunks out of the concrete floor behind me.

There was movement to my right and I saw Bunny, alive and crouched low, crabbing sideways toward me. When he caught my eye he pointed to a spot where a wall of stacked boxes stood between him and the remaining shooter. I nodded and he moved forward. The gunman kept me pinned down, but the carts were good cover. I had no idea where Top was, but I guessed he was closing on the shooter’s position from the far side.

When Bunny was in position I tapped the commlink and whispered, “Top, we got a runner on third. Wait for the pitch.”

There were two short bursts of static in my earbud as Top broke squelch twice for affirmative.

I said, “Throw him out at the plate. Let’s hear some chatter from the dugout.”

Top and I opened up and the cavern echoed with thunder as Bunny spun around the wall and ran across five yards of open space to come up at the shooter from behind. When he was ten feet out he put two bursts into the man, and the impact slammed him into the wall. He slid down onto his knees like a supplicant and then fell backward in a limp sprawl.

“Clear!” he yelled.

“Clear!” echoed Top.

“Hold there!” I yelled.

I didn’t trust the situation and I hugged the shadows as I skirted the open spaces to close on Bunny’s position. Top was there a step behind me and we secured the spot. Top took up a shooting position behind a short stack of boxes.

“You hit?” I asked Bunny. He grinned and folded back a torn flap of his camo shirt to show a long furrow that had been plowed along the side of his armor vest.

“Hooray for glancing blows,” he said.

“Hooah,” I agreed.

I bent and examined the dead man. No ID, no nothing, but his face was almost classical Slavic and weapons and gear were Russian. Same with the other three.

“When I woke up this morning,” Top said, “I didn’t expect to be at war with Mother Russia.”

“If the opportunity presents itself,” I said, “give me someone with a pulse so I can ask some questions.”

They nodded.

Before us was a sea of boxes. File boxes and crates of every description, stacked in neat rows that trailed away into the distance. Hundreds of thousands of boxes, millions of tons of paper records. There were hundreds of chambers in the natural limestone caverns, and thousands of rooms and vaults. Miles of cement walkways. I accessed the floor plan on my PDA and we studied it and made some decisions.

“Okay,” I said quietly. “We don’t know how many more of them there are, but we know these guys are smart and they’ve had time to get creative. We go slow and we look for booby traps. No assumptions, no undue risks.”

“Hooah,” they responded.

WE MOVED OUT, making no sound at all as we moved through an eternity of darkness. We found a few traps-mostly shape charges and rigged grenades-but they were crudely set. The way soldiers will do when they don’t have time to do it right. We disabled each trap and kept moving, the three of us spread out in case we missed one.

Then we almost walked into a cross fire they’d set up in a big vault stacked to the rafters with file boxes from Denver law firms. But Top stopped us before we stepped in it.

“What?” I whispered to him. “You see something?”

“No, Cap’n,” he murmured, “but if I was going to rig a shooting gallery it would be in there. How ’bout we get bright and noisy, see if we can flush some rabbits from the tall grass.”

I nodded and we tossed in a pair of our flash bangs. As soon as the starburst brightness faded, we rushed the room. There was a sniper on top of a stack of crates, but even as we rushed in he was rolling off onto the floor, hands clamped to his ears. He fell twenty feet and landed badly.