Escape From New York

V

October 23

7:35 P.M.

Mousey, they used to call him when he was in Congress. Mousey or Straddler, as in fences. The Senator from the great State of Alabama used to call him worse. But it didn’t bother him. Now they all had to call him Mister President, and the first thing he did when he got elected was to cut off some very important water projects to the great State of Alabama. The Senator, oddly enough, disappeared on a fishing trip and was never seen again.

He stared out the window of the plane as they cut through the cloud bank, and he was glad that they were airtight. He watched the wings buffet in the turbulence, sometimes narrowing his gaze to take in his own reflection in the cabin window. Mousey.

“President Harker,” said a voice beside him.

He looked up. The stewardess was bending over him. Her dark blue uniform was pressed just so; her hair smelled slightly of jasmine.

“Yes, my dear?” he said in his soft, disarming voice.

“Can I get you a drink, sir?”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, thank you.”

There was something very strange about the woman’s eyes. Harker watched her very carefully, and didn’t like what he saw: LBJ had once said that if a politician couldn’t walk into a room and tell immediately who his friends and enemies were, then he was in the wrong business. This woman didn’t like him. He wondered what she was doing working for him.

The stewardess smiled the kind of smile you put on for the photographer and walked off toward the cockpit. Harker looked idly around the lush cabin. The secret servicemen sat at the big, round imitation wood table playing poker for bullets. They spoke in short, monotone sentences, their eyes, from habit, continually drifting. The two doctors from Walter Reed, whose names he didn’t know or care to know, were quietly getting soused at the small, padded bar. No one else seemed to notice anything odd about the stewardess, so he just let it go.

He stretched, feeling more bored than tired, and his hand hit the briefcase that was propped up on the seat beside him. He looked at it and smiled. It seemed silly to him to have such a large valise for the one small cassette that it held. But that was the government for you.

Bombs. He didn’t know a damn thing about bombs. But his people told him they had one. The Super Flash, they called it. Thermonuclear and clean as a whistle, they could zap out the Ruskies and the Chinks and not leave so much as one particle of radiation in the atmosphere.

He was on his way to the Summit Meeting at Hartford to play the information tape to the Russian and Chinese delegations. He’d give them twenty-four hours to surrender or he’d turn the entire eastern world into a giant firestorm.

Some would call it extortion, but Harker preferred to think of it as compromise. And compromise was something that John Harker knew a lot about.

It was what got him elected to the Presidency when no one thought he could do it. He was considered a New York liberal by his colleagues; he used the same soft-spoken, low key, egghead approach that characterized his boyhood hero, Adlai Stevenson. That sort of thing got good play in New York. Of course, he didn’t share Stevenson’s weakness, his passionate concern for ideals. Ideals just tended to get in the way of the real issues, like reelection.

So, he quietly put in his time in the Congress, mousing his way along. He saved his political chits and sharpened his arrows, and when the right time came along, he moved. The war had everything turned around and in chaos. The country, at least what was left of it, was looking for new leadership. Harker pulled in his lines, worked a few coup d’etats on his enemies, and when all the bloodletting was done, he stood at the top of the hill.

He was it-the Man.

And he liked it. Loved it. He had the power of a nation behind him. He was the power of the nation. He wasn’t Mousey anymore. And the great State of Alabama didn’t have its water projects.

Now he had a bomb that could make him President of the World. He’d go to Hartford, deliver his message, then retreat to the deep shelters at Camp David to await the response. Maybe he’d take that stewardess with him and fuck some sense into her, bang the hatred right out of her eyes. It was an intriguing thought.

The plane suddenly buffeted, nearly throwing Harker out of his seat. He jerked his head toward the cockpit to hear the sounds of a scuffle behind the door.

“What the hell?”

The movement had thrown everyone else to the floor. The secret servicemen were up first, moving to the cockpit. There was confusion as the plane rocked back and forth. Something was wrong, desperately wrong.

“Help me,” Harker called. “God help me!”

The doctors thought he was referring to them. They ran to him, as the agents tried to get through the cockpit door. It was apparently locked from the inside. The movements had steadied somewhat, but the plane was going down, steadily down.

The doctors were on him, checking his pulse, heads darting to the door. One of the secret servicemen was banging futilely against the terrorist-proof steel and wood with the butt of a rifle.

All at once, the cabin speakers came up. Something must have accidentally hit the button. All movement in the cabin stopped dead still, like a freeze frame.

“… and lies can’t stop him now. We’re going down. We’re going down hard.

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.