Adams nodded. ‘Let’s go then,’ he said, stepping into the tunnel, Lynn next to him.
He turned back round when he realized the two scientists were not following them.
And then Lynn gave a startled yell and Adams’ eyes went wide as they saw Professor Travers standing there with a pistol aimed directly at Steinberg’s head.
22
‘Did you really think I was just going to let you walk out of here?’ Travers asked. ‘Did you think I was unaware of the plans?’ He laughed at them. ‘I was a guest at the Bilderberg Group meeting of two thousand and two, picked for the Hundred immediately.’ He gestured back down the corridor. ‘You hear that sound?’
Adams could hear it, and cursed himself for not picking up on it sooner. It was the sound of boots, lots of them, running towards them. He had allowed Travers to distract him with his stories. From the sound of the echoes, Adams estimated they would be upon them within the next sixty seconds.
‘Twenty members of security,’ Travers said, a wicked smile painted across his features. ‘And they are not known for their tolerance of escapees.’
Adams saw the look of indignant rage on the face of Steinberg long before Travers did, and was gripping Lynn’s hand and moving for the tunnel even as Steinberg let out an angry yell and launched himself at his colleague.
Steinberg clasped both hands round Travers’ pistol and yanked the arm upwards. A loud blast rang out, and a single supersonic round ricocheted down the corridor as both men struggled for control of the weapon.
Adams could hear the footsteps just about to turn the final corner, and pushed Lynn into the metal cart, looking in vain for the controls.
Steinberg saw what they were trying to do and yelled to them, ‘The left-hand side! The red button!’
Adams turned and saw the armed guards storming into the corridor, submachine guns raised at shoulder level.
He flinched as they pulled their triggers, heard Lynn cry an exultant, ‘Yes!’ saw Steinberg ripped to bloody pieces by hundreds of nine-millimetre hollow-point rounds, and then felt his own body surge back into the metal cart with tremendous force as it tore free from its moorings and accelerated at terrifying speed up the tunnel, leaving Travers and the twenty guards as tiny, insignificant specks in the far, far distance.
Steinberg hadn’t been joking about the G-forces, Lynn realized.
At first, the shock of the cart’s speed made her brain all but malfunction, the incredible force pinning her against the back of the cart, her face rippling under the intense pressure. But her faculties started to return, and she estimated the G-force to be in the range of 4 or 5.
During her time with NASA, she had experienced forces of up to 12 G in inverted dives when she had been invited to observe pilot training, but that had been wearing a special G-suit which mitigated much of the shock. And although 4 to 5 G was about the same as a high-G rollercoaster ride, those figures only applied to short spells on the fastest parts of the ride. Here, there were no protective suits, and the acceleration was constant, for a prolonged period of time.
She soon started to feel the effects. The first thing she noticed, after only thirty seconds of hard acceleration, was a progressive blurring and greying of her vision, the long tunnel ahead of her losing all colour and clarity. She closed her eyes to try and gather herself, but soon started to feel nauseated.
Opening her eyes once more, she experienced an intense tunnel vision. The fact that she was in a tunnel anyway didn’t help, but her range of vision was becoming progressively — and rapidly — diminished. She had no idea how fast they were going but she knew that the tunnel was five miles long. Even at two hundred miles per hour, the journey would take longer than one and a half minutes, and she was unsure how much time had already elapsed. How much longer could she hold out? She felt her vision start to fail completely, blackout coming on fast now, and knew that unconsciousness would follow soon after, with death being a significant possibility.
Blackness started to creep into the corners of her vision, and she knew all would soon be lost, but then she felt the cart slowing; it was gradual but she could sense the deceleration, and as the cart slowed, her senses started to come back to her. First the blackness ebbed away, then the tunnel widened out ahead of her, and then finally colours returned and her perception cleared totally as the cart continued to slow until it came to a complete stop.
Her hand went to the side of the cart for support as she was hit by another wave of nausea, her head swimming, but then she felt a hand on her arm, and turned to see Adams looking at her through bleary eyes.
‘Come on,’ he said weakly, pulling her by the arm. ‘Let’s go.’
Colonel Briscoe Caines stood at the main bank of monitors in the Main Security Building, a large brick structure located next to the new base headquarters, in the dead centre of the plethora of other buildings that littered Area 51.
Caines was in overall command of physical security at the base, a task he carried out with ruthless dedication. He had been a major in the US Special Forces before transferring to the Defence Intelligence Agency, where he had risen to the rank of full colonel before moving to Area 51.
Although his appointment had been made by the US military, in cooperation with the CIA, he had really been co-opted by his old friend Stephen Jacobs and was under no illusions about who really led security at the base: Commander Eldridge and the men of Alpha Brigade. Eldridge and his cronies had, however, recently decamped to Geneva, leaving Caines alone to clean up this mess.
He had been woken up when the emergency call had come through ten minutes before, the watch officer in something of a blind panic. He swung his feet out of the bed in his private room in the dormitories to the rear of the MSB and started to get dressed even as he listened to the report.
An emergency distress signal had been sent to the guard room on Level 34 from Laboratory 8 two levels below, from Professor Travers. It seemed that the two captives who had recently been brought to the base had overpowered the two guards assigned to them, along with two of the interrogators, and had managed to convince Dr Steinberg to try and get them out. Caines had scoffed when he heard that — what possible chance did they have?
But then it became apparent that they were headed to the Roosevelt Exit, and all of a sudden the possiblity became somewhat more real. Ordering a section of men to hunt the escapees down through the vast corridors of Level 36, and all other base security personnel to be on immediate standby, he left the officers’ dormitory at a full run, getting to the MSB in record time.
By the time he got there, however, things had gone even more wrong. Although Steinberg had been killed, Adams and Edwards had made it into the escape tunnel and had vanished towards the exit in the magneto-electric cart.
‘Converge on Groom Lake Road!’ he yelled into his radio mouthpiece, panic creeping now into his own voice. ‘All units!’
23
Adams hoisted Lynn out of the cart and pointed upwards. The rail track stopped several feet from the end of the tunnel, which turned sharply upwards into a short vertical shaft. A ladder was bolted to the wall, which snaked its way up through the dark cylinder to what looked like some sort of submarine hatch.
Adams started climbing the ladder and Lynn followed him immediately, turning to look back down the long tunnel for only a second to make sure that they were still alone.
Her head had recovered from the shock of the cart’s acceleration, and the nausea had now left her completely, although her stomach still felt more than a little nervous, given that they still had to make good their escape from the most secure military base in the world; and not only was there a team of trained killers hot on their heels behind them, they had no idea whatsoever what would be on the other side of the hatch above them. Still, she stayed close behind Adams, watching as he reached the top and entwined his feet in the rungs so that he could brace himself to open the metal hatch.