Fairfax swallowed.
Audrey gasped.
Hogg just went bug-eyed. 'What in cotton-pickin' hell is going on here?'
The Marine named Trent stepped forward. He was a big guy, all muscle, and in his full battle dress uniform, a seriously imposing figure.
'You must be Hogg,' Trent said. 'Mr Hogg, my orders come direct from the President of the United States. There is a serious international incident afoot and at this critical time, Mr Fairfax is perhaps the fourth most important person in the country. My orders state that I am to escort him on a mission of the highest importance and guard him with my life. So if you don't mind, Mr Hogg, get out of the man's way.'
Hogg just stood there, stunned.
Audrey just gazed at Fairfax, amazed.
Fairfax himself hesitated. After this morning's events, he didn't know who to trust.
'Mr Fairfax,' Trent said. 'I've been sent by Shane Schofield. He says he needs your help again. If you still don't believe me, here . . .'
Trent held out his radio. Fairfax took it.
At the other end was Book II.
Within twenty-two minutes, Dave Fairfax was sitting on board a chartered Concorde jet, heading west across the country at supersonic speed, his destination: San Francisco.
On the way to the airport, Book had briefed him on what Schofield needed him to do. Book had also asked him a maths question: what was the sixth Mersenne prime number.
'The sixth Mersenne?' Fairfax had said. 'I'm going to need a pen, some paper and a scientific calculator.'
And so now he sat in the passenger cabin of the Concorde—head bent over a pad, writing furiously, concentrating intensely—shooting across the country all alone.
Alone, that is, except for the team of twelve United States Marines protecting him.
AXON CORPORATION SHIPBUILDING AND MISSILE ATTACHMENT PLANT, NORFOLK, VIRGINIA, USA 26 OCTOBER, 0935 HOURS LOCAL TIME (1535 HOURS IN FRANCE)
Surrounded by two teams of United States Marines, the Department of Defense inspection team in charge of the Kormoran-Chameleon Joint Project approached the missile installation facility in Norfolk, Virginia.
The Axon plant loomed above them—a giant industrial landscape comprising a dozen interconnected buildings, eight enormous dry-docks and innumerable cranes lancing into the sky.
This was where Axon Corp installed its cutting-edge missile systems onto US naval vessels. Sometimes Axon even built the vessels here as well.
At the moment, a lone mammoth supertanker sat in one of the plant's dry-docks, covered by gantry cranes, towering above the industrial shoreline.
But strangely, at 9.30 in the morning, there was not a sign of life anywhere.
The Marines stormed the plant. There was no firefight. No battle. Within minutes, the area was declared secure, the Marine
commander declaring over the radio:
''You can let those D.O.D. boys in now. But let me warn you, it ain't pretty in here.'
The smell was overwhelming.
The stench of rotting human flesh.
The main office area was bathed in blood. It was smeared on the walls, caked on benchtops, some of it had even dried as it had dripped down steel staircases, forming gruesome maroon stalactites.
Fortunately for Axon's legions of construction workers, the plant had been in security lockdown for the week preceding the official inspection, so they had been spared.
The company's senior engineers and department heads, however, hadn't been so lucky. They lay slumped in a neat row in the main lab side-by-side, having been executed on their knees, one after the other. Foul starbursts of blood stained the wall behind their fallen bodies.
Over the past week, rats had feasted on their remains.
Five bodies, however, stood out amid the carnage—they had quite obviously not been Axon employees.
The men of Axon, it seemed, had not gone down without a fight. Their small security force had nailed some of the intruders.
The five suspicious bodies lay at several locations around the plant, variously shot in the head or in the body, AK-47 machine-guns lying on the ground beside their corpses.
All were dressed in black military gear, but all also wore black Arab howlis, or headcloths, to cover their faces.
And despite the sorry state of their vermin-ravaged bodies, one other thing about them was clear: they all bore on their shoulders the distinctive double-scimitar tattoo of the terrorist organisation, Global Jihad.
The Department of Defense inspection team assessed the damage quickly, aided by agents from the ISS and FBI.
They also took a call from a secondary team checking out Axon's Pacific plant in Guam. A similar massacre, it seemed, had happened there as well.
When this news came in, one of the D.O.D. men got on the phone, dialling a secure line at the White House.
'It's bad,' he said. 'In Norfolk: we have fifteen dead—nine engineers, six security staff. Enemy casualties: five terrorists, all dead. Forensics indicate that the bodies have been decomposing for about eight days. Actual time of death is impossible to tell. Same story in Guam, except only one terrorist was killed there.
'All the terrorists here have been identified by the FBI as known members of Global Jihad—including one pretty big fish, a guy named Shoab Riis. But sir, the worst thing is this: there must have been more terrorists involved. Three of the Kormoran supertankers are missing from the Norfolk plant, and two more from the Guam facility . . . and all of them are armed with Chameleon missiles.'
AIRSPACE ABOVE THE FRENCH COAST 26 OCTOBER, 1540 HOURS LOCAL TIME (0940 HOURS E.S.T USA)
The Black Raven rocketed down the French coastline heading toward the Forteresse de Valois.
'So, Rufus,' Mother said, 'there's something I've got to know. What's the story with your boss? I mean, what's an honest grunt like you doing with a murderous bastard like this Knight guy?'
In the front seat of the Sukhoi, Rufus tilted his head.
'Captain Knight ain't a bad man,' he said in his drawling Southern accent. 'And definitely not as bad as everyone says he is. Sure, he can kill a man cold—and believe me, I seen him do it— but he weren't born that way. He was made that way. He ain't no saint, for sure, but he isn't an evil man. And he's always looked after me.'
'Right. . .' Mother said. She was worried about this bounty hunter who was supposedly protecting Schofield.
'So what about all that stuff in his file then? How he betrayed his Delta unit in the Sudan, warned Al-Qaeda of the attack and let his own guys walk into a trap. Thirteen men, wasn't it? All killed because of him.'
Rufus nodded sadly.
'Yeah, I seen that file, too,' he said, 'and let me tell you, all that stuff about Sudan, it's horseshit. I know because I was there. Captain Knight never betrayed no-one. And he sure as hell never left thirteen men to die.'
'He never left them there?' Mother asked.
'No ma'am,' Rufus said, 'Knight killed those cocksuckers himself.'
'I was a chopper pilot back then,' Rufus said, 'with the NightStalkers, flying D-boys like Knight in on black ops. We were doing night raids into Sudan, taking out terrorist training camps after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in '98. We were flying out of Yemen, skimming into Sudan from across the Red Sea.
'I got to know Knight at the base in Aden. He was kinda quiet, kept to himself most of the time. He read books, you know, thick ones, with no pictures. And he was always writing letters to his young wife back home.
'He was different to most of the guys in my unit, the chopper pilots. They weren't so nice to me. See, I'm kinda smart, but in my own way—I can do maths and physics easy as pie, and because of that I can fly a plane or a helicopter better than any man alive. Thing is, I ain't so good in social environments. Sometimes I just don't get the humour in jokes, especially dirty ones. That kinda thing.