The President's Plane Is Missing

by Robert J Serling

  Pitcher and Harmon hurried to their staked-out phone. En route, Chris asked what prompted the question on the Condor’s stability.

  “Just something I heard from a couple of airline pilots,” Pitcher explained. “They told me they wouldn’t fly that plane from Newark to Kennedy in a bad thunderstorm.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Early Tuesday morning, Frederick Madigan was riding to his office in the Executive Office Building adjoining the White House, that ancient architectural monstrosity which had once housed the State Department within its walls of gingerbread stone.

  As the Vice President, he always was accompanied by a Secret Service agent but now he was enormously self-conscious at the presence of no less than three in the limousine. Two sat on either side of him and the third was in front with the chauffeur.

  Madigan thought he saw the outline of a gun under the suit jacket of the agent on his left and he actually thrilled to the import of these silent men, their lives pledged to his safety and protection. He also was enormously flattered and not a little excited, emotions which prompted renewed twinges of guilt but which were still not quite strong enough to quell the excitement.

  He hoped the agents did not notice this inner tug of war between conscience and the delicious anticipation of a politician about to take stage center. For the time being, anyway, Hester had effectively eliminated his doubts and fears. Right now, he wanted to be President of the United States.

  For a moment he considered asking the agents if they minded his stopping off at a church so he could say a prayer for the President’s safety. That also should impress the reporters who had interviewed him briefly at his apartment and were now following him to his office in taxis. There were a couple of photographers in that group, too. . .

  No, Madigan decided. It was bad enough to feel no real sorrow for what had happened, to put on an act of phony concern, without adding sacrilege on top of those sins. But he was not about to abandon the phony act, either, so he dropped a mask of unadulterated sorrow over his face for the benefit of the agent to his right and murmured, “I cannot believe it. I just cannot believe it.”

  “No, sir, neither can I,” the agent said, accomplishing a masterpiece of double-entendre that fortunately went over the Vice President’s head.

  Madigan’s first deed on arriving at his office was in the category of political diplomacy. He called Bertrand Haines’s office to express his concern, grief and unyielding confidence that the senator’s brother was safe. Only Bert Haines was not in.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Vice President,” the senator’s secretary informed him, “but Senator Haines left on a plane last night for a fishing trip in Maine. We’re trying to locate him now but you know the senator and his fishing—as usual, he wouldn’t tell anybody exactly where he could be reached.”

  “I just wanted to pay my respects and tell him I’m praying for the President’s well-being,” Madigan said. “If Mrs. Haines calls, please tell her my thoughts are with the family.”

  He hung up. Nothing more to do except wait. He would have to preside over the Senate at noon—a chore he detested and dreaded—but that was several hours away. Oscar Bartrum, the administrative assistant, popped his head in to announce that the outer office was filled with reporters.

  “Tell ’em I’ll be out as soon as I finish talking to the White House,” Madigan said, wishing at the same time that the White House would call him. Well, it wouldn’t hurt to ask Newt Spellman if there was any news of the plane. He dialed the Executive Mansion himself and was told Mr. Spellman’s line was busy, with four other calls on hold.

  “This is the Vice President,” he said in a tone he hoped was authoritative without being too demanding. “Tell Mr. Spellman I’d appreciate his phoning me as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, sir, I’ll put your message ahead of the other calls.”

  “Thank you.” He had time only to light a cigarette when the harassed Spellman returned his call.

  “Just wanted to know if you’ve heard anything yet,” Madigan said. “Nothing new? Well, this is a terrible blow to all of us. You know how I must feel, my boy—it’s like sitting on a keg of dynamite. Thank you, Newt. I appreciate those words more than I can say. And I would be grateful if you’d keep me advised. Good-by.”

  The suspense, thought Madigan, was torture. No sir, nothing to do but wait and—he figured he’d tell the reporters—pray. Wait and pray, that should be a good line. He had enough objectivity left in him to wonder wryly if any of them would remember that story about the ailing President Woodrow Wilson and the Senate delegation that came to visit him, headed by Wilson’s mortal enemy, Henry Cabot Lodge.

  “Mr. President, the Senate is praying for you,” Lodge was supposed to have said.

  “Which way?” Wilson asked.

  Which way was he praying for Jeremy Haines? Madigan asked himself. Again, a few dregs of decency still were in his coffee grounds of conscience that stubbornly refused to be rinsed out of the cup. What kind of a monster was he, wishing for the death of a nation’s leader? A man the people had chosen for the presidency. What demon of desire could turn a well-meaning, God-fearing Christian like Fred Madigan into a putrid glob of uncontrollable ambition? Did he really hate Haines that much? Or was it simply the lure of power and prestige and a place in history that only death could bequeath him? A prize that had to be inherited because Frederick James Madigan knew he never could earn it on his own. Yes, he hated himself for his dirty dreams, but he could not prevent the dreaming. And there was Hester. She would be so proud. . .

  So what if he wasn’t an intellectual giant? Neither was Harry Truman, and he turned out to be one hell of a President. That’s whom he would model himself after. The Average American thrust suddenly into Greatness. Rising above his limited capabilities by the very challenge of the nation’s needs in a time of crisis. Humble as Truman had been, yet strong and assertive. Truman had said something about feeling that the whole world, the sun, the moon and the stars had fallen on him when Roosevelt died. Yet he had shown guts from the moment he took office. The Hiroshima decision. The way he stood up to Stalin and wouldn’t back down in Korea. The typical Little Man transformed into a giant by Fate.

  President Madigan. “Mr. President.” Hell, it didn’t sound so unreal, so impossible, so ridiculous, after all.

  Fred Madigan mentally began to compose what he would say to the press when the word came from somewhere in Arizona.

  Only there was no word from Arizona.

  The ubiquitous helicopters growled their noisy treks across the baked and barren desert, rotor blades lifting sand and dust and tumbleweed into tiny whirlpools. The choppers poked inquisitively and hopefully into gulches and canyons. They hovered expectantly over mountaintops and their crews peered into dingy scrub foliage and thick forests alike until eyeballs ached.

  Overhead, the armada of higher-flying search planes criss-crossed the skies in a prearranged grid pattern, looking mostly for the telltale glint of sunlight on metal. The helicopters and the small Civil Air Patrol planes, more efficient in a “low and slow” mission of search, had the best chance of finding Air Force One. That they were having difficulties was not surprising. Aircraft have remained missing for so long that, when wreckage finally was found, the occupants were skeletons. And the Arizona landscape includes virtually every variation of terrain capable of swallowing up the evidence of an accident.

  Tuesday, the first day of search, produced nothing. Madigan stayed in his old office after a brief session at the Senate, torn between flashes of anxiety that the worst had happened and a private admission that the worst was what he secretly wanted. By the end of the day he was willing to settle for an end to the suspense no matter what the end involved. His phone rang incessantly, the calls ranging from expressions of sympathy to inquiries on what the Vice President really knew about the missing plane. The latter pleased him because it was nice to think that some people assumed he was on the inside of all developments, but they also
bothered him because he realized he didn’t know any more than his callers. It renewed his old feeling of inferiority.

  An army of reporters descended on search headquarters in Winslow, clamoring for news that was pitifully unavailable. One fact they were not given was a classified order by the Joint Chiefs of Staff placing the Strategic Air Command on a war alert. At a score of hidden underground installations, grim-faced technicians stood by their deadly ICBMs and prepared to push their buttons of death. They could take no chances, nervously aware that the President’s plane might have been shot down or sabotaged as an opening salvo for World War III.

  Editorials and official reactions from around the world took on the semblance of a mass prayer for Jeremy Haines’s safety. Only Peking and Moscow remained silent and this fed the rumors, nourished the jitters and ballooned the fears of the stunned nation.

  For the news of Air Force One had flared against a backdrop of blackening world tensions. If the average American felt like invoking God’s help for his President, he also was inclined to beseech deliverance from whatever evil force might have forged his President’s peril. The world held its collective breath, but the United States had its collective fingers crossed. The possibility of catastrophic tragedy was shocking by itself, but adding suspicion and fear to sorrow was enough to fray the nerves of a panic-susceptible public.

  The stock market, so sensitive to anything as minor as a presidential head cold, skidded in the worst downward spiral since 1929.

  A reporter at search headquarters heard from what he later termed “responsible sources” that the Air Force had found the wreckage but was sitting on any announcement because mysterious, unexplainable marks were on the metal. He had picked this up from an off-duty airman in a Winslow bar and, frustrated by the lack of hard news and fortified by a couple of drinks himself, he filed a story. The result was a wave of flying saucer reports and a demand by the American Committee for Truth about UFOs that the government admit Air Force One had collided with a spacecraft from another planet.

  There still was optimism as the first day of search ended, although the optimism was of the whistling-by-the-grave-yard variety. But on the morning of the second day the headlines began to sag into such banners as hope fades for president. The stock market continued its nose dive and Frederick James Madigan mentally continued to rehearse what he would say to the press after he was sworn in.

  The search itself gave Stan DeVarian and Gunther Damon a chance to regroup their bleary-eyed forces. The White House now had to be staffed twenty-four hours a day and Damon, over DeVarian’s mild objection, had insisted on assigning a man to stay outside Vice President Madigan’s office or apartment at all times.

  “We can get somebody there in a hurry when the plane’s found,” DeVarian pointed out. “My God, Gunther, by the time this is finished our overtime will look like the national debt.”

  “In a hurry won’t be fast enough, Stan. Every additional minute that plane’s missing adds up to a new President. He’d be sworn in immediately—and it could be at four o’clock in the morning. The story’s in Arizona right now, but the second they find that plane it’ll move right back here. Which reminds me, let’s get Jonesy back to the White House. We’ve got plenty of manpower covering the search. Half the LA bureau and the whole Phoenix bureau.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” DeVarian agreed. “But Jonesy might balk. I talked to him last night—he called me from Winslow.”

  “Balk? For Christ’s sake, why?”

  “It was his idea to go from Palm Springs to search headquarters. When I asked him if he didn’t think he should come home, he said he wanted to stay there until they found the plane. Then he started to cry, Gunther. So help me, he was crying like a baby.”

  “It figures. He went to pieces right after Kennedy’s funeral—remember? And he thinks a helluva lot of Haines. Or should I say thought? But, dammit, a White House reporter stays with the President. And that very shortly will be, God help us all, Frederick J. Madigan. Not Jeremy Franklin Haines. So our Mr. Jones belongs right here, not out in the middle of a desert looking for his hero.”

  “I agree with your king-is-dead, long-live-the-king concept,” DeVarian said softly. “But Jonesy’s a very sensitive, emotional guy. Let him stay in Winslow, Gunther.”

  Damon spat out a four-letter expletive and then relented. “Okay, I’ll let sentiment conquer my better judgment. He won’t be in Winslow very long anyway. They oughta find that plane any time now. It has to be somewhere.”

  The Vice President was thinking that, too, as the hours of futile search stretched into the second day. And so were the three men sitting in his pine-paneled inner office, richly furnished with huge leather easy chairs and a small but thoroughly equipped bar. This private sanctum and the use of a limousine were the two items Madigan liked most about being Vice President.

  His just-arrived, early morning visitors were Wayne Verdi, the House Speaker; Matt Parrish, the Senate majority leader, and the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, the Honorable Harrington Van Dyke. It was 7:30 A.M., an hour which underlined the urgency of their meeting.

  Parrish got right to the point. He was a man with a pipe-cleaner frame, a cadaverous face and an enormous shock of untamed sandy hair that gave him the general appearance of an animated floor mop. The press gallery considered him the greatest compromiser since Henry Clay, a genius at legislative wheeling and dealing. He did the Administration’s dirty work on the Senate side, scrounging votes with techniques that ranged from blackjack viciousness to powder-puff flattery. Ironically, he had never felt real warmth toward a President who was his intellectual and political equal, but he had always been fond of Fred Madigan, who was neither. He had asked Madigan for this meeting because he was convinced Haines must be dead, and he was anxious to have the Vice President fully prepared for what was to come. Wisely, he suspected that the thrill of assuming the presidency had blocked any comprehension of its consequences.

  “Fred, we’ve got to face some unpleasant facts,” Parrish said in his rather unpleasant, rasping voice. “The President must be dead. At any second, you could be sworn in. That’s why we’ve got to do some advance planning.”

  “We may be burying him a bit prematurely,” Madigan said. “There’s always a chance, Matt. . . ”

  “Baloney. That plane couldn’t have been lost this long without the worst happening. Wayne agrees with me and so does the. Chief Justice. We’ve got to get moving.”

  The Chief Justice nodded ponderously. Harrington Van Dyke was the kind of man who must have carried himself with dignity at the age of five. As John Foster Dulles years ago had prepared himself for the day he would become Secretary of State, so had Van Dyke consciously and deliberately prepared himself for the nation’s highest judicial post. The Supreme Court had been his goal the day he decided to become a lawyer.

  “Matt’s right, my friend,” Van Dyke said in a deep, resonant voice that could have emerged from an organ. “The next time that telephone on your desk rings, it might be my duty to administer the oath.”

  Madigan said nothing. His brown eyes blinked, with just a trace of moisture.

  “And those are my sentiments, Fred,” said the Speaker, a small man whose Cyrano nose dominated a face that would have been totally homely except for Verdi’s eyes— deep-set and doelike. “I just hope you’re emotionally and psychologically prepared to take over. There will be a joint session of Congress within twenty-four hours. You’ll have to hold a press conference immediately. You should be at the Pentagon or the State Department right now getting briefed; I doubt if Haines has ever taken you into his complete confidence, has he?”

  Madigan shook his head.

  “Well, that’s the more reason why you should start preparing yourself.”

  The Vice President finally propelled some words out of his mouth. “I still think we’re being premature. I just finished talking to Newt Spellman and—”

  “He’s heard something?” Parrish
asked quickly.

  “No. About forty or fifty false alarms. I guess some of the search planes are seeing wreckage when they spot a jack rabbit.”

  “Then we—”

  “Wait a minute,” Madigan interrupted the majority leader. “Spellman told me something I never knew before. Something we’ve got to consider even if they find that plane with no survivors.”

  “Like what?” said Verdi.

  “It carried one parachute—for the President to use if jumping was the only way to save his life.”

  The three men stared at the Vice President as their minds digested this revelation.

  “My God,” Parrish said. “Haines may be wandering around somewhere in the middle of Arizona, miles from civilization. He could be lost for days or even weeks.”

  “You gentlemen are forgetting one thing,” Van Dyke interjected. “When they find the plane, all they have to do is count the bodies and identify them. It will be easy to ascertain if the President used the parachute.”

  “Provided,” Verdi said, “that the bodies aren’t burned beyond recognition. Nevertheless, Fred, the finding of the plane should remove most of the uncertainty. Your course, barring unforeseen developments, still is plain.”

  “Still except for that one little unforeseen possibility,” Madigan said.

  “And that is?”

  “Suppose he did use the parachute.”

  Captain Kelly Ormsbee of Midwest Airlines always bid the Los Angeles-Washington run for an entirely non-aeronautical reason.

  He was an avid student of history, and he never could get enough of the nation’s capital and its sightseeing bargain basements. The flight he usually commanded left Los Angeles at 9 A.M. California time, arrived in Washington at 4:30 P.M., and the return trip didn’t leave Dulles until five the next afternoon.

  This always gave Ormsbee almost an entire day to prowl around the city. He had visited the Smithsonian no less than eighteen times and Mount Vernon twelve. He had seen Congress in session, attended committee hearings, watched the Supreme Court at work, and thanks to a newspaperman whom he had known in college, he even got in to see a presidential news conference.