THE SENSORS WERE CONNECTED to the feeding and communications tubes at the top of the submerged chamber that housed Elizu Roote. The green light had been lit for so long that Corporal Elber didn't notice right away that it had gone to red. Bored, he had been staring at the blinking lights on a phone on the other side of the monitoring bank when he gazed back at his own station.

The solitary red light flashed like a warning beacon.

The color instantly drained from the Army corporal's face. Grabbing, fumbling, he dragged the nearby long-stemmed microphone to his mouth. His shouts echoed down the sealed hallways of the Special Projects Unit.

"We've got a red light on the board! Repeat! Red light on the board!"

Even as he screamed the words, his chair was toppling over backward. While he ran to the unmarked steel door near his station, he frantically yanked his semiautomatic pistol free from his hip holster. Before he'd even punched in the proper code, civilian men in white coats were swarming in behind him.

Questions were shouted and ignored as Elber's shaking hands entered the final digits into the touch pad. The red light above the door turned green, and the men piled into the inner room, careful to stay behind Elber and his pistol.

The dimly lit inner room was as big as a gymnasium. A huge water-filled tank-large enough for a school of dolphins-rested in a metal-and-concrete base in the center of the floor. Suspended in the tank was the black rubberized box connected umbilically to the surface via a few simple tubes that were lashed together with waterproof tape. Some of the lines from these tubes ran to computerized stations at the periphery of the room.

They hadn't been monitoring in earnest for quite some time. They saw now that they probably should have been.

The seam at the bottom of the box had been broken open.

The pale, naked body of Elizu Roote bobbed at the surface of the tank. From the angle of the men in the room, he was looking down at them. He made not a move as they cautiously approached the tank, bunched up behind the corporal and his gun.