by Daniel Smith
“Is the camera ready?” Hazar’s accented voice was deep and he spoke slowly.
“Almost, sir,” replied the man who was preparing the camera, pointing it at the escape pod.
“What the hell is the camera for?” This voice made me jump. It was close, no more than five yards away from where we were lying, and whoever had spoken was in the forest; they hadn’t come down from the helicopter.
Obviously Hazar wasn’t expecting the voice, either, because his men whipped around and aimed their weapons toward the place where it had come from.
I pressed myself closer to the ground, making myself as invisible as possible, and nudged the president again, but he had already done the same thing.
“Who’s that?” Hazar spoke quietly.
“Who do you think?” A figure came toward the other men, but was obscured from our view by the trunk of a large pine. It was impossible to get any idea of what he looked like, but he spoke with an American accent, like the president.
“Oh, it’s you,” Hazar said. “You don’t look ready for your close-up; you’re a mess. Have trouble getting here?”
“I did what I had to.”
“When you didn’t show up, I thought maybe your parachute didn’t open.”
“It did,” the man said. “The others weren’t so lucky. What’s the camera for?”
“We’re going to record this moment for posterity,” Hazar said. “Big game hunting never got any bigger.”
“I’m camera shy,” the man replied.
Beside me, the president pushed himself up a little, as if listening intently while trying to see around the tree trunk.
I put out a hand to stop him but he ignored me and started to shuffle to one side, so I grabbed his arm and held him tight. The president stared at me with a grim expression. His eyes narrowed and his jaw bulged, but he nodded and eased back into the undergrowth.
“Are you ready?” Hazar asked.
“Yes, sir,” said the cameraman.
Hazar walked across the clearing to stand beside the pod. He reached out and touched it. The man with the umbrella followed him, keeping Hazar out of the drizzle.
“This is a wonderful moment.” Hazar closed his eyes. “Something to savor.”
When his eyes flicked open again, they reflected the lights, making him look like some kind of forest demon. For a moment, I was reminded of Mom’s stories.
“Tell me the code,” he said.
The man hidden by the tree cleared his throat. “Fourteen-ninety-two.”
The president tensed beside me. His hands drew into fists and his whole body was shaking.
Hazar smiled. “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Fourteen-ninety-two. Nice touch.” He turned and punched three numbers into the keypad.
“Gentlemen.” He looked back at his men. “Prepare to meet the president of the United States of America.”
With a final flourish he keyed in the fourth number and a familiar grinding noise filled the night. It was followed by a long hiss of hydraulics, and as the door popped open and slid to one side, Hazar straightened up and looked into the pod.
“What the hell … ?”
Silhouetted in the light, he stepped forward and paused with one hand on the edge of the door. “What —?” He leaned inside. “Where —?” He backed away in confusion, then whipped around to face the figure behind the tree. “What the hell is this?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s not there,” Hazar growled.
“What do you mean ‘he’s not there’? Where else would he be?”
“See for yourself.” There was menace in Hazar’s voice as he moved to one side and pointed into the empty pod.
The figure hesitated, then came out from behind the tree and strode over to investigate. We could see him more clearly now — the dirty suit, a lot like the president’s, and the muddy shoes that had once been shiny — but his back was to us, hiding his face.
“Turn around,” the president whispered beside me.
The man in the suit looked inside the pod. “It doesn’t make any sense. How the hell did he get out? I removed the handle inside. He couldn’t open the door unless someone —”
Hazar pointed to one of his men, who came forward and drove the butt of his weapon into the suited man’s back, just below his right shoulder. It came down with a hard crunch, and I heard the air go right out of him as he crumpled in a heap. He lay facedown, then groaned and rolled over.
Two more of Hazar’s soldiers came forward and stood over the man, casting shadows across his face as they aimed their weapons down at him.
“We had a deal.” Hazar ran a hand over his beard and spoke through his teeth. “You promised to deliver the president.” He moved to stand over the suited man and exploded as if he couldn’t contain his anger anymore. “NOW DO IT!”
“He’s supposed to be in there,” said the man in the suit. “I did everything exactly as I said I would.”
“Then how do you explain his absence?”
“Someone must have opened the door for him. It’s the only explanation.”
“Out here?” Hazar looked about and spread his arms wide. “In the middle of nowhere?”
“How about you let me get up and try to figure it out?”
Hazar considered the man’s suggestion, then stepped back and ordered his soldiers to stand down. They lowered their weapons and the suited man got to his feet and began moving around the clearing, studying the ground. Hazar’s men stuck close to him, blocking us from getting a good look at him.
“What are you doing?” Hazar asked.
“Looking for something. Anything.” He stopped and crouched, putting his fingers to the damp soil.
“What is it? What have you found?”
“A footprint.” The man stood up again. “Someone did help him get out. Someone with a small shoe size.”
“Small shoe size? What does that mean?”
“Usually it means small feet.”
“Don’t try to be clever with me.” Hazar snapped his fingers and one of his men sprang into action, raising his weapon. Before he could put it to his shoulder, though, the man in the suit whipped out a pistol as if from nowhere and fired two shots into the soldier’s chest.
Gunfire echoed in the wilderness and the soldier collapsed, but hadn’t even hit the mud before the suited man was moving. He crossed the short distance to Hazar in an instant and grabbed hold of him, twisting his body so he was shielding himself from the other soldiers. He pressed the barrel of his pistol under Hazar’s chin and spoke clearly.
“I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to organize this hunt for you, you overprivileged psychopath. Not because I wanted to, but because I need the very generous amount of money you’re offering. I do not intend to lose that money because you can’t control your temper or because my plans are ruined by someone with small feet. Do you understand?”
Hazar only nodded. His expression was surprisingly calm.
“If I’m going to collect that money, though, I need to deliver you the president — which I intend to do. Until then, you need to keep me alive, because without me, you will never have access to this” — with his left hand, he dug a phone from his pocket and held it up for Hazar to see — “or to the information it can give us. And before you get any ideas, Hazar, this can’t be accessed without my password. Now, do we have an understanding, or should I just kill you now?”
Hazar seemed impressed rather than angry at the suited man’s outburst. He smiled and held out his hands. “Fair enough. You argue a good point. So what does your useful telephone tell you? How long before the Americans figure out their mistakes?”
The man in the suit removed his pistol from under Hazar’s chin and stepped away, keeping the weapon pointed at Hazar’s head.
“There really is no need for that,” Hazar said. “You have my word.”
“For what that’s worth.” The man slowly lowered his pistol, holding it by his sid
e.
Hazar shrugged. “How much time do we have?”
“Well, I disposed of the transponder, as I said I would, so right now they’ll be looking for it somewhere over the Norwegian Sea. We have a good head start, and they won’t think of looking anywhere near here until at least dawn tomorrow. No one is coming until then, so for now I suggest you call your helicopter back, because we’re going to need the rest of your gear.” The man put away his weapon. “Let’s do what you came here for. We’ll have a hunt.”
“Follow the small shoe prints?” Hazar asked.
The suited man nodded. “Follow the small shoe prints.”
After seeing the man shoot one of Hazar’s soldiers, and hearing what they were going to do, the president and I both knew we had to get out of there. Fast.
Staying on our stomachs, we slithered quickly and quietly through the undergrowth. Hazar was ordering his men to pack up the camera and lights, so their noise covered any sounds we made, and by the time Hazar took out his radio and called for the helicopter to return, we were on our feet and had begun our escape.
We hurried through the trees, putting as much distance between them and us as we could. Behind me, the president was breathing heavily and making enough noise to wake every animal in the forest. If he kept that up, those men wouldn’t have any trouble finding us. They’d just have to follow the noise of his puffing and panting, and then we’d both be dead.
I didn’t want to end up like Patu or the man in the clearing just now, and tears welled in my eyes as I ran. A desperation was building up in me: the sense that everything was lost, that I was going to die out here. I had come into the forest to find my trophy and I was going to die instead. I should have gone back when I saw Hazar shoot Patu. I should have returned to the Place of Skulls, but I had made the wrong decision and tomorrow Dad would come looking for me and he’d find nothing. No trace. Or maybe he’d find my body, lying dead among the fallen branches. Either way, he would be alone. He would have lost both Mom and me.
No. I stopped and looked back, waiting for the president to catch up. No. I am not going to die.
This wasn’t about hunting anymore. It wasn’t about making Dad proud. It was about survival. It was about staying alive and not leaving Dad alone.
I am not going to fail.
“Stop,” I said, holding up a hand.
“What? No. We need to —”
“We’re making too much noise,” I said. “Leaving too many tracks.”
The president came to a halt and put his hands on his hips, looking back into the darkness. We had almost reached the place where the scar cut across what had once been the path.
“I don’t see anything.” He was panting hard. “We need to keep moving.”
“They will have lights,” I said. “The helicopter has lights.”
“So what do you suggest? We can’t stay here; you saw what they just did.”
I scanned the area, seeing the small fires still burning in places along the scar ahead. My mind was working clearly now that I had something to focus on. No more thinking about dying or hunting. All I had to concentrate on now was escape. That was all.
“We follow the scar,” I said. “Everything’s a mess already; they won’t see our tracks.”
The president looked at me, a glint of fire sparkling in his eyes. He thought for a moment, then nodded. “All right, kid. That sounds like a good idea.” He started to move, but I put a hand out.
“I’ll go first,” I said. “Put your feet where I put mine, and don’t step in any mud.”
“That’s going to be hard in this rain.”
“The rain is our friend now. It will help to cover our tracks.” I started to move but stopped again, the president bumping into me. “Avoid the ash, too, and don’t walk in the ferns. The leaves will drop and wilt, and if those men know how to track, they’ll see it. Step on the fallen needles — the brown ones. And step lightly.”
“Anything else?” He put his foot down and there was an explosion of movement and sound from the undergrowth beside him. He jumped back in fear as a partridge burst out from the ferns and flew up with a clatter of wings.
I turned to stare at him. “Yes. Keep quiet.”
I gripped the bow tight and moved carefully through the forest toward the scar. We crept through the last of the trees, keeping to the animal tracks and natural paths among the ferns, avoiding the puddles and soft mud. Coming to the scar, I climbed up onto the trunk of a fallen spruce and turned to see if the president needed help. He didn’t seem like much of a woodsman to me, but I guessed he was more used to sitting in a warm office, getting people to do everything for him.
“Keep going,” he said. “I’ll be fine.” As he tried to pull himself up, though, his shoe slipped on the tree bark, and he only just managed to reach out and grab a branch in time to stop himself from falling.
“Come on,” I said. “We haven’t got time for this.”
The president said nothing. He just glared at me, then tried again, hauling himself up onto the tree trunk. Standing tall, he looked down at me as if to say, See, I can do it, and in that moment, I understood that we had something in common. Both of us had something to prove.
“All right, but we can’t leave any trace, remember.” I crouched and reached down to wipe away the muddy smear where his foot had slipped.
“What the hell is going on?” the president said, gasping for breath as he looked along the scar, shaking his head at the splintered trees and patchy fires. “What happened? One minute I’m in my plane on the way to —”
“I think those men shot you down. I tried to tell you that before.”
“But how? It doesn’t make sense. Air Force One is virtually indestructible.”
“Air Force One? That’s the president’s plane, right? Your plane?”
He nodded.
As we moved on, I told him everything I could: about the moment I first heard the helicopter, about Patu, about the rocket launchers and the streaks shooting up into the sky.
“Some kind of shoulder-mounted missile?” he said. “They’d have to be powerful, though. Something high-tech and … wait a minute, we’re on a mountain. They must have fired them from here so they’d be high enough to shoot Air Force One out of the sky. It’s the only thing that makes sense. From down on the ground, they’d never have reached. But why didn’t the countermeasures work? Why didn’t the plane protect itself? Only way that would happen is if …” He went quiet.
“Do you know who they are?” I asked, remembering how the president had seemed interested in the suited man.
“Terrorists?”
“What about the one who came out of the forest? The man in the suit? He said he did something to the pod so you couldn’t get out. How did he even know you’d be in the pod? How did he know you wouldn’t just die in the plane? You sure you don’t know him?”
The president stopped, but when I did the same and turned to look at him, he didn’t seem to see me. He just stood there, lost in thought for a moment before he blinked and looked back into the forest.
I had a strong feeling there was something he wasn’t telling me.
“I can’t believe this is happening to me,” he said. “Shot down, hunted, and climbing halfway up a damn mountain. And to make matters worse, I’ve only got one shoe and my foot is wet and it’s killing me.”
I glanced down at his feet, seeing one black shoe that was now mostly brown, and one wet sock. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a plastic bag, then crouched at the president’s feet and opened the bag. “Put your foot in here.”
“What?”
“Put your foot in the bag.”
He wiped the rainwater from his face and sighed. “I can’t believe this is happening to me,” he said again as he stuck his foot in the bag.
I twisted it tight, wrapped the handles around his ankle, and tied them together. “There. Now you have a shoe.”
“Yeah. Kind of.” His face softened. “Thanks, kid
.”
“Oskari.”
“What?”
“My name is Oskari.”
“Oh, right. Oskari. Well, you can call me William. Or Bill.”
“Bill? Why not Alan?”
“I guess my mother preferred ‘Bill.’ ”
“Bill.” I said the name again, testing the sound of it, but somehow it didn’t feel right. “No. I’ll call you President. It’s more interesting.”
“Yeah, I guess it is.” He put out his hand. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Oskari. Thanks for coming to my rescue.”
I nodded and shook his hand. “Welcome to Finland.”
His grip was firm, but not crushing, and when he let go, we stood facing each other while the drizzle fell on and around us.
“Come on,” I said. “We need to keep going.”
“You’re right. You first.”
I hurried along the tree trunk, arms out for balance, until I came close enough to jump across to a different tree. Moving like that, from tree to tree, we followed the scar for half a mile, passing small fires and steaming chunks of hot metal.
The drizzle was still coming down, but the clouds had parted in the distance, and the moon was shimmering over the mountain. On the scar, with no tree cover, there was just enough light to see. In the distance, though, the forest was black. That was where we had to go. Once we were in there, they would never find us.
“This must be where it came down,” the president said as we scurried along the fallen trees. His breathing was still heavy, as if he was having trouble sucking air into his lungs. “My plane. Or one of the planes, anyway.”
“How many planes do you have?”
“A few.”
“Not anymore,” I said.
The president made a sound that was something like a laugh, and I stopped once more to look back at him.
He stopped, too, and bent over, with his hands on his hips. “What the hell is wrong with me?” he asked. “I mean, I know I’m not the fittest guy in the White House but, y’know, I thought I was fitter than this. When I get back I’m going to have to spend more time in the gym.”