by Mike Mcquay
That damned stewardess. He knew he shouldn’t have trusted her. An anarchist, for god’s sake. Those people were insane. They’d do anything. Harker’s pulse was racing. They couldn’t do this to him. They couldn’t. He had to save himself.
The voice was still coming over the speakers as the secret service began throwing their weight against the door two at a time.
“All your guns and spying and computers can’t stop the people’s rightful vengeance. Can’t stop me!” Her voice was rising in intensity, peaked with hysteria. “Tell this to the workers when they ask where your leader went!”
There was a pause. Harker shoved the doctors away from him. They were too scared to be of any use anyway. The escape pod. That’s what he needed. He felt for the revolver in his jacket pocket. He was going to have the pod. He’d defend it if he had to.
The woman spoke again. Her words came more slowly; she was obviously reading. Her voice was vibrating, insane. Harker knew that she fully intended to take the plane down and die with it. “We the soldiers of the National Liberation Front of America, in the name of workers and all oppressed of this imperialist country, have struck a fatal blow to the racist police state.”
Two of the secret servicemen ran back to Harker while the other continued banging on the door.
One of them was talking. “Sir, we can’t get…”
“Jesus Christ, shoot the lock!” Harker screamed.
The man’s head was darting. “We can’t. She’s pressurized the cabin!”
“Rip out the hinges!”
One of the men began pulling him to his feet. “We’ve got to get you to the pod, sir.”
“Yes. Yes. By all means.”
His mind was whirling, out of control. He was trying to move, to walk, but they were handcuffing his wrist to that stupid briefcase. That was about the last thing he needed right then.
They had him walking. His free hand fingered the gun in his pocket, just in case. They moved to the rear of the cabin. One of the men was already turning the wheellock in the floor that led to the pod.
He turned once more to the front of the plane. The man up there was having some luck with the hinges.
“The door…” he started.
“No time.”
They were easing him down into the pod. It was small and cramped-claustrophobic. There was a tiny padded seat, the walls likewise padded. The only instrumentation was a readout screen that sat in front of the seat.
Hands were fastening his seatbelt. Someone clamped an aluminum bracelet onto his wrist, and the readout board immediately lit up, showing in moving blips his life functions: blood pressure, heartbeat and temperature. He thought about how silly it was to have a machine to tell him when he died.
He looked up just once to see faces staring down at him. Every one of them wanted to be in that pod. His fingers tightened on the pistol.
Then they closed the hatch, and Harker was alone in a dark void, his only companion a blipping readout board, a perverse sort of mirror. Then, movement…
Rehme was trembling, hands over his face. “Oh god,” he moaned. “Oh god, no.”
Hauk just ignored him, his gaze fixed on the radar screen, his mind whirling, looking for alternatives. On the screen, the red blip was moving into the flashing danger area-New York City.
He glanced over at the controller. The man was white as milk, lips moving soundlessly. No one talked; they just watched the blip.
Static over the speaker, then that voice again: “What better revolutionary example than to let their President perish in the inhuman dungeon of his own imperialist prison.”
Hauk moved away from the screen, away from the congestion of men standing around it. He stood, back to the commotion, staring at nothing. The crazy woman was still talking.
“The bosses of the racist, sexist, police state are shuddering under the collective might of the worker’s rightful vengeance!”
Hauk put a hand to his hair, smoothed it, composed himself.
“Workers of the world, look up into the skies! The people have won a glorious victory.”
A crashing sound came through the speaker. A cry from the woman, a strangled rasp of, “Bitch!”
There was loud popping, distorting off the audibility range, coming through as dead air at its peak.
Bullets, Hauk thought
He spun back to the screen, hope rising. A low moan was seeping through the speaker. Then a high pitched squeal, then… nothing. Soft, purring static.
There was a second of silence, then the controller said, “He’s down.”
Hauk was out of the traffic control door before he even thought about it. Central control was down the hall; they’d know exactly where the plane went down. He heard a noise behind him and turned. Rehme was right on his heels.
“I need you in one piece,” he told the man.
There was already activity in the bunker when they arrived. They had watched the thing go down, too. Blackbellies were running everywhere. Preparing advance deployment
“Commissioner,” someone called to him as he entered. He hurried over.
It was a beanpole of a man, all knees and elbows. He was excited, pointing to a medical scanner.
“What is it?” Hauk barked.
“Vital signs monitor,” the man choked out. “We use it for shore parties. It came on just before the plane crashed.”
Hauk looked at Rehme. The man had composed himself somewhat. “Escape pod,” he said. “They must have ejected him before…”
Hauk’s eyes flew back to the screen. All the blips were active, the pulse charging.
“He’s still alive!” Hauk said. “Where the hell is he?”
“Here,” Rehme said, excitement flavoring his words. “Over here,”
Hauk moved to the man. He was standing by a bank of green glowing machines. Rehme’s hand was shaking as he pointed to a schematic screen.
It showed a geometric, three-dimensional image of Air Force One. The computer was forming the image, inventing it from radar information. The plane tracked through the air. Then, a three-dimensional image of a skyscraper moved into the frame and silently, artistically, the plane collided with it, everything breaking apart in beautiful, mathematic symmetry. From the rear of the plane a blinking red dot arched slowly away from the hulk of the aircraft.
“The escape pod,” Hauk said, and his voice came out hoarse.
Rehme had a pocketcom in his hand, fingers flying across the keyboard. “Forty degrees,” he said.
The view from the invert screen pulled wider and the red dot fell away from the plane, making a parabolic arc down to street level.
“Fifty yards from crash site,” Rehme said,
Hauk started for the door. There were no decisions now, just action. “I’m going in,” he said. “Pinpoint the crash and get to me on the pads.”
He was out the door and moving. It was going to be a long night.
VI
RED ALERT
8:30 P.M.
The rain hadn’t started yet. The moisture was straining the dark clouds, stuffing them full like infection clogging a wound. Bob Hauk wasn’t thinking about the rain anymore, though. He was thinking about war.
The helicopters stretched out before him on the wide landing field, props beating the air, whipping it to frenzy. Their sound was grating and malevolent.
There were twenty copters; they were all painted flat black. They were screaming and angry, straining at the leash, ripping at the air with their whirring blades. They were all going crazy with the smell of blood.
Hauk was out of the air control bunker and moving toward the copters. He yelled at the first black suit that he saw. “Backpack!” he called.
The man stopped walking, his face filled with confusion. “BACKPACK!” Hauk screamed, trying to get above the horrible whines that filled the air. He pointed to his back.
The man nodded in understanding, gave him the thumbs-up sign and hurried off. Hauk started for the choppers again. He was t
hrough with war; he really was. And this was too much like it.
Leningrad had iced it for him. He took an early retirement after that one and, somehow, when he packed and came home, he had forgotten to pack his medals. It made him think of Snake Plissken for just a second. He had almost gotten to meet the man who had kept the USPF on the run for nearly five years. Now he didn’t know if he’d ever get to. Once you were dumped in the city-that was it. You were gone.
Bob Hauk knew that for a fact.
The blackbelly with the backpack ran up to him. Hauk took the black canvas sack from him with a silent nod. The man smiled broadly, his eyes glazed with the excitement. Hauk tightened his lips and moved on.
He was into the field of copters, caught in their vortex. The air swirled angrily around him. He wanted to remove himself mentally from the whole business, but he couldn’t. He’d spent too many years in the military, too many years giving and receiving orders. He would do what was expected of him. Always what was expected of him.
Black figures were blurring past, troopers in full battle dress: backpacks with survival gear, helmets, rifles, infrared goggles. Their mouths were open full, screaming, but Hauk couldn’t hear them above the helicopter noise.
He slipped off his jacket and threw it to the ground, then looped his arms through the straps of the pack and snugged it up against his back.
He kept as much distance from the whole thing as he could, tried to stay right on the edge of it. But he was a soldier, a professional soldier, and the call of battle was like sex to him. He was getting sucked in.
He kept walking until he caught sight of the command copter. It bore, in shining gold, the seal of the USPF. He looked at the icon of the eagle in the seal’s center. Its eye was staring and angry; its talons were wrapped around a length of barbed wire. The word COMMISSIONER was stenciled neatly just below the shield.
Opening the copter door, he hoisted himself into the big machine. He had a hard time getting himself situated in the seat with the bulky pack on his back. He wouldn’t be wearing it except that a regulation had come down saying that all personnel who entered the prison most wear survival gear. It was his own regulation.
When he got squared away, he shut the door. It cut down the outside noise considerably. The radio speaker blared static in front of him. He pointed to it.
“Traffic control?” he asked loudly.
The man grunted, yelling. “Yeah. Rehme’s on it.”
A headset with attached mike was lying on the console. Hauk picked it up and put it on his head, juicing the transmit switch. “Rehme.. this is Hauk. You there? Over.”
Rehme’s voice came back firm and in control. “I’m here.”
“You got the location? Over.”
“Yeah… we’re talking about the south. Somewhere around the corner of Beaver and… uh… Nassau.”
Hauk didn’t know the city that well. “Listen, Control. Where the hell is…”
“You know where Battery Park is?”
“Sure.”
“Just get to Battery Park and look for the smoke.”
“Gotcha.” Hauk started to toggle off, then, “Is he… how’s the monitor?”
“Vital signs are still positive,” Rehme’s distorted voice said. “He’s still alive. Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
Hauk nodded once to the pilot and stuck his thumb in the air. The man lifted them off at once, pointing them to the north and east. The other copters went up too, buzzing, crying. Hauk felt as if he were in the middle of a flock of carrion birds.
Bob Hauk had come back from the war feeling old, used up. He came back to find that he had lost his family. His wife was just gone, no trace or even conjecture as to what could have happened. Of his two grown sons, Walt died in the L.A. fire bombing; Jerry was caught looting a supermarket in Chicago. They said he was crazy. They sent him to prison. In New York.
Hauk was all empty inside. He felt like a Halloween jack-o-lantern that had had the guts removed and a lit candle stuck inside to make it look like the thing was alive.
He came to the prison to find Jerry, but they wouldn’t let him inside. So he hired on as a trooper, but when they found out who he was, they offered him the job of Commissioner. Nobody else would touch the job with a hundred-foot bayonet.
Hauk didn’t want it either, but it was the only way he could think of to find his son. For several years he went into the city every chance he got, but it was a useless exercise. The only records kept were of the prisoners going in. Once inside the city, they were on their own-for life.
Within the anarchy of the city itself, it was worse than useless trying to find anything out-it was madness. Hauk had beaten his head against the wall of silence so many times that he felt as if he were permanently bruised.
Then one day, he just quit looking. He had drained out what little bit of life force that had been left within him, finally and irrevocably, until only the burnt-out shell remained. That had been a year ago, and he hadn’t been anywhere near the city since.
The pilot was pointing down at the shoreline. “There’s the Park,” he said loudly.
Hauk followed his finger down to the dark open ground without buildings. Somehow, it looked better at night. He couldn’t see the barren ground and skeletons of trees that had once been fertile and alive.
He switched on the transmitter. “This is Hauk, over the Battery.. we’re moving down.”
He had the pilot take him down low, down to the rooftops. Straight ahead he could see a large cloud of rising smoke, lit from beneath. The pressure and humidity were pushing against the smoke, forcing it back down upon itself. It seemed to just hang there, suspended in space and time.
Hauk was back on the mike, “Crash site ahead, Rehme.”
“Roger,” came the reply. “I have you on the board.”
“We’re going down.”
They brought the copters down right on the streets. Deadly streets. Visions of perdition. They were in a valley, canyons of stone towering all around them. The streets were dark and desolate, the garbage of internal decay strewn everywhere. The burned-out and silent hulks of dead cars lined the roadway. They slept on rusted axles, tires long gone as good burning fuel for fires. The street was filled with smoke rolling back upon itself, a surreal landscape in the lower levels of hell. A fire burned in the midst of the smoke. A bright, sputtering fire that ignited the smoke and lit the street to a flickering nightmare.
“Don’t shut down the engines,” Hauk told the pilot, and opened the door to the racket. The dark mouths of the other choppers had opened already, vomiting blackbellies with long, shiny rifles and glowing red goggles for eyes.
Their flashlights came on, stabbing the darkness with small, symmetrical lines of brightness. The smoke came down on the beams, giving solid substance to them. Smoke danced in the light, made a game of it all.
The blackbellies formed tight defensive lines and began to advance, flashlight beams dancing and jiggling with the smoke as they moved. Hauk narrowed his eyes to a squint, trying to see through the congestion.
They moved slowly, carefully. Hauk was worried about the men. They were pumped up, ready to kill. If it came to that, he would have a difficult time controlling them.
“Commissioner!” someone yelled. “Sir!”
He moved out of the line, toward the voice. He waded through the curtain of smoke, unable to peg the sounds.
“Where are you?” he called.
“Here, sir. Over here!”
A flashlight beam was wiggling through the haze, coming back at him. He walked to the beam, tracing it back like a lifeline. A uniformed captain was attached to the other end.
“What have you got?” Hauk asked when he got up on the man.
“Here… something.”
He tilted the beam in the other direction. Something as bright and orange as a gasoline fire was billowing into the light
“The chute,” Hauk said.
They moved toward the thing, twenty ya
rds in the distance. It was trying to rise in the natural updraft between the buildings, but the low pressure kept pushing it back down. They followed the chute lines for another thirty feet and found the pod.
It was round, the size of a weather balloon and was solidly imbedded in the side of a building, only about half exposed. Hauk ran up to it. The hatch was already open.
“Damn.” He leaned over the opening and looked inside. The monitor board was blipping happily, but the pod was empty. The President’s vital signs were there; he was gone.
The captain was at his elbow. “Look.”
He looked. The man was pointing.
A figure was moving out of the smoke and the darkness toward them. It moved slowly, shuffling.
The captain brought a rifle up beside Hauk. The Commissioner pushed it aside. He could hear the sound of weapons being primed off in the smoke.
“Hold your fire!” he barked into the haze.
The figure, gauzy and ethereal, came closer. It was a man or least it had once been. Hauk started moving toward him. He was thin like ice on the Hudson, pale and wispy as the gray smoke that stirred around him, clinging to his ragged clothes. He was living death, a walking corpse. He stopped
“I’m Romero,” he rasped.
Hauk walked right up to him, smelling the rot that rolled out of his mouth and passed for breath. “I’m Hauk.”
“I know.”
Romero smiled broadly, a grinning deathshead smile. All of his teeth had been filed down to tiny, razor sharp points. He spoke slowly, dragging the words up painfully through the slime pit of his lungs. “If you touch me,” he said, “he dies. If you’re not in the air in thirty seconds, he dies. If you come back in, he dies.”
Hauk just stared at him, trying to read behind the lifeless, sunken eyes. Couldn’t.
“I have something for you,” Romero said, and held out his hand. Hauk reached out, never taking his eyes off Romero’s. The man, chuckling softly, dropped something lightly in his palm.
Hauk looked down to see a small, rolled up cloth.
Blood had soaked through it. He looked once at Romero’s grinning teeth and unwound the wrapping. It contained a finger, severed at the third joint. There was a ring on the finger. And on the ring-the Presidential seal.
