by Daniel Smith
“But how are the lights still on?” I asked.
“Emergency power, I guess. This is no ordinary plane. The hull is ten times stronger than a civilian passenger jet. It’s designed to withstand a nuclear blast on the ground — all the windows are armored, it has enemy radar jamming, flares to confuse enemy missiles, infrared to confuse enemy guidance systems —”
“So how did someone shoot it down?”
The president raised his eyebrows. “That’s a good question, Oskari, and there’s only one answer I can think of. Morris. He must have sabotaged the systems. There were twenty-six crew members on this plane. My security detail, staff members … more than forty people in total, and he just … threw them away like that. A man who I thought was my friend. Maybe he was right — maybe the president can’t have friends.”
“I’m your friend,” I said.
“Yes, you are. And you’ve proved it often enough. Come on, flight deck’s this way, maybe we’ll have better luck there.” He stepped past the debris and went through the door into the next room, saying, “crew lounge,” but I kept my eyes on his back, not wanting to see any more bodies as I followed him to the far end and entered the cockpit.
I thought it would need a massive flight deck to fly a beast like this, but it was actually quite cramped. There was enough room for a small table with a couple of chairs behind the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, but that was it.
The nose of the plane was raised slightly because it was resting on the shallows of the small island, so the curved window gave us a good view of the surface of the lake on either side. Over to our left I could just about make out the shore, but it didn’t look like much more than a dark strip from here.
“You think we could make it over there before they spot us?” I asked.
“Might be worth a try.”
The mist still hung over the water, but was a little thinner than before. There was a growing brightness that suggested the sun was trying to come out and burn it away, so maybe it would be gone by midday. I imagined the sky would be blue this afternoon, with just the slightest wisp of cloud. I wasn’t sure we’d live long enough to see it, though.
There was the same tangy, smoky stink of burned-out electronics in here as there had been in the communications center, and a variety of insistent pinging and beeping noises pulsed every few seconds. The alarms sounded in a chorus that fell in time with some of the lights flickering around the cockpit.
The president went straight to the front, standing between the pilot and copilot’s seats, leaning in to look at the array of equipment. There was a baffling assortment of switches and dials and screens and buttons. Some of them were dead, but others were alight, flashing as if they were expecting attention.
“Gotta be something here,” he said. “There has to be a radio or something.” He scanned the dials and buttons, touching this and that, shaking his head. “How the hell do they ever learn what all these are?”
He leaned closer, putting his hand on the throttle. Right away, the plane heaved and started to shake as if the engines were trying to start up. A warning siren began to scream, filling the flight deck, and a series of red lights erupted on the instrument panel.
The president jumped back in shock, releasing the lever. The lights stopped flashing, the siren stopped screaming, and the plane stopped shuddering.
He put one hand on the back of the pilot’s seat and the other on his chest. “Damn. Almost gave me a heart attack.” He turned to look at me. “Incredible. It’s like there’s still power to the engines. They always told me it’s designed to withstand impacts that would obliterate a normal plane.”
“I guess people aren’t designed to withstand the same impacts.” I pointed my chin toward the front of the seat, and he looked down to see the pilot lying in a heap on the floor.
The president took a jacket from beside the copilot’s chair and draped it over the dead man.
I turned away and looked out of the window, watching the lake rippling a few yards below the level of the glass to my left. There was something about it that bothered me.
“Did you find a radio?” I asked. “Is there anything we can use to call for help?”
The president looked at me for a long moment, then shook his head. “Truth is, I don’t know how any of this stuff works, Oskari.”
“What are we going to do, then? What do we do now?”
He sat on the edge of the pilot’s seat so our faces were level, and he put his hands on my shoulders. “Look at me,” he said, making me turn to meet his eyes. “We’re going to make it, Oskari.”
“How?”
“All we have to do is sit tight and wait for the military to arrive. They must have found us by now.”
“Using their satellites?”
He nodded.
“The same ones Morris is using?”
“Most probably.”
I turned and looked out of the window again, watching the water. Something wasn’t right. I leaned closer, peering down and frowning.
“What is it?” the president asked, getting to his feet. “You see something?”
“It’s getting higher,” I said. “The water.”
“No, it can’t —” He pressed in beside me and looked down.
“President, I think we’re sinking. I don’t think we can wait here much longer.”
But there was something else about the water, too. As we watched, the mist swirled around like a tornado and the movement on the surface grew larger and more troubled, buffeting more and more until a large ripple formed. The way it looked reminded me of the time a rock had bounced up and hit Dad’s windscreen. The glass had stayed in one piece, but had cracked in a circular pattern, with a hole in the middle and a thousand tiny fractures running away from it. That’s what the lake looked like now.
“Helicopter?” I whispered.
A vibration shook through the plane — not violent like it had been when the president touched the controls, but a gentle shaking.
“Yeah.” The president nodded. “But whose? The military’s, or Morris’s?”
The vibration continued to shake through the plane as other eerie sounds echoed in the cockpit, making us both look up at the ceiling. There was a rasping and shuffling of something being dragged across the top of the fuselage, then a strange metallic scraping noise followed by two heavy thuds.
“Someone’s on the roof.” My voice was barely audible, my throat tightening in fear. “You think it’s your soldiers?” The unmistakable noise of boots clomping just above us resonated through the flight deck. “Navy SEALs?”
The president didn’t answer. He just shook his head and continued to look at the ceiling, as if doing it for long enough might give him X-ray vision.
The footsteps moved right over our heads toward the front of the plane.
“I don’t like it …” the president said.
I didn’t like it, either, and I turned my head, following the noises until they stopped above the pilot’s seat. “Sounds like two sets of boots to me.”
“Just two?”
I nodded and glanced at the president. Just two sets. We both knew what that meant. And to confirm our worst fears, a face appeared at the top of the window, upside down, peering into the cockpit.
Morris.
There was a look of surprise when he first saw us, then he locked eyes with the president and grinned. In that moment, he looked like a devil, eyes glinting with victory. He tilted his head a touch and waggled his fingers before disappearing from view.
The next thing we saw was Morris’s hand, swinging down hard to stick a lump of what looked like putty to the window.
The president reacted right away, grabbing my arm and dragging me back toward the door. “Explosives!” he shouted. “Get out of here!”
The president shoved me out of the flight deck ahead of him, sending me barreling into the crew lounge, crashing into one of the beds on my right. I tripped, falling to one knee, but the president grabbed me
and pulled me to my feet.
“Keep going!” he shouted. “Get out! Get out!” He pushed me on, yanking the door shut behind him and yelling at me to move faster as we raced through the communications center and headed for the stairs.
We only made it down the first few steps before the explosion ripped through the upper deck of Air Force One.
For a heartbeat, all the air was sucked out of the world. My lungs deflated, a piercing jolt flashed through my head, and my eyes felt as if they were swelling in my skull. My ears deadened when the sound reached them, and every single one of my joints popped and screamed out in pain. Then the plane shuddered as pressure and heat raced after us like a demon.
A solid wall of force rushed through the cockpit, bringing a mess of shrapnel and debris with it, a raging cloud of destruction that smashed through the crew lounge, singeing everything it touched. The communications center door gave way under its power, blasting inward and allowing the energy to fill that room, too, collecting pieces of broken glass and plastic and burning paper as it went.
We were halfway down the stairs when the force of the explosion reached us. By then it had lost much of its intensity, but it still snatched us off our feet and threw us to the corridor below, where we landed on the damp beige carpet in a disorganized heap. Fragments from the crew lounge and the communications center bombarded us, hammering the ground like heavy rain on leaves.
Straight away, I tried to get up, but nothing seemed to work properly. My legs were like soft rubber and my arms were shaking. My vision was hazy and I could hardly think.
The plane filled with hot smoke, and there was an awful smell of burning and charred plastic that stung my eyes and caught in the back of my throat, making me cough. I put a hand over my mouth and made myself stop, afraid that it would give us away even though all I could hear was a high-pitched whining in my ears.
I turned my head in slow motion, the world swimming in front of me as I reeled from the effects of the shock wave. The president was lying beside me, trying to focus, but his eyes were streaming and rolling about. He reached out to reassure me and we stayed still, side by side, trying to recover.
“— after us,” the president said.
“What?” I tried to sit up and lean closer. I rubbed my face with both hands, then stuck my fingers in my ears and waggled them about, feeling some sense of normality return.
“I said, they’re coming after us.”
“Should we go back?” With some effort, I turned to glance at the security door, half-hidden by smoke, and shivered at the thought of trying to make it back through the plane, the way we had come.
“Too risky. We’re already sinking.” The president coughed. “We both saw that. Maybe the air pockets are gone.” He paused to wipe his irritated eyes. “We were lucky we found what we did when we came through. This whole plane’s going to be underwater soon. That explosion has only made it worse.”
“The side door, then. The one you wave from.”
The president got to his feet and put a hand on the wall to steady himself as he looked along the corridor. Tears streamed down his cheeks and he squeezed them shut over and over again, trying to wash away the effects of the acrid smoke. “They’ll just come after us. They’re never going to stop, Oskari. Never.” He shook his head. “They don’t want to kill me, though, not yet. Hazar said he wants to …”
I remembered what Hazar had said about stuffing the president and displaying him. It was too horrible to even think about.
He looked at me with a serious expression. “I think maybe it’s time to give myself up.”
He was a wreck. His shoulders were hunched and he could hardly stand up straight. His eyes were bloodshot and streaming with tears, and his body hitched as he coughed the smoky atmosphere out of his lungs. His skin was covered with cuts and bruises and scrapes; he looked like a beaten man. I would have bet anything that I looked beaten, too, and the obvious thing was to give up. We were outnumbered, outgunned, and backed into a corner with almost no way out.
But I had the blood of hunters in my veins.
I had one day and one night to find out what kind of a man I was. I had to know how to listen and fight tooth and nail for my prey. Nothing would be given to me for free.
Hamara’s words.
A boy set out into the wilderness, but a man would return.
I frowned at the president. “No.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘No.’ I have the blood of hunters in my veins.”
“It’s over, Oskari. We’re finished. We’ve had enough. You can escape when I’m gone — get out of the door I showed you.” The plane lurched beneath us as he spoke, throwing us against the wall. “I’ll tell them you’re dead.”
“No,” I said again, feeling the fear begin to slip away. I had had enough, but that didn’t mean I was going to run away. The time for running was gone. I was moving beyond fear now, and my instincts were changing.
“Mr. President!” Hazar’s voice echoed through the upper deck and floated down the hazy stairwell. “Where are you, Mr. President?”
We looked at each other, but the cold tightness that had gripped my insides was no longer as firm.
“Mr. President?” The singsong voice snaked through the smoke. “Don’t make me come looking for you.”
“I have to give myself up,” the president whispered. “I have to. It’s the only way to keep you safe.” He turned toward the stairs.
“Mr. President? Are you hiding from me?”
“No.” I grabbed his arm. “It isn’t the only way. I’ve already told you, I’m not giving you up. It’s time to fight.”
“Fight?” He looked back at me. “With what? Your bow and arrow?”
“Dad always told me I’m smart.” It felt good to know that I wasn’t going to run. It made me feel strong and confident. “You’re smart, too, President. Together we can beat them. I know we can. Once and for all.”
“How? You have an idea?”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “Follow me.”
Hazar didn’t call out again.
The plane settled into an eerie silence. Smoke and dust hung in the air, sparkling in the faint light that filtered around the edges of the closed blinds. Water dripped. The occasional groan of metal snaked through the cabin. From time to time something was displaced, skidding across the floor as water seeped into the plane and tipped it a little farther back into oblivion.
I crouched in the darkness, bow ready, squeezed against the far end of the presidential suite. It was a gamble, but my instincts told me it was a good place to make our final stand. This was how it had to be.
The space was a little smaller than our living room at home, and was triangular, coming to a flat point behind the nose of the plane. Two beds were angled in so the heads were close together, which was where I now waited, huddled low.
Dad had taught me to use my surroundings as camouflage, so that was what I had done. Sheets, pillows, cushions, and anything else I could find were strewn across the floor to create confusing shadows and shapes. A pile at the narrow end imitated not trees and bracken, but the jumbled heaps of debris that were scattered in every room of the plane. The perfect place to blend in. Nothing here would look unusual.
All I had to do now was wait.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I raised a hand and cupped it behind my ear, turning my head slightly.
Tap. Tap.
Someone coming down the steps from the communications center. Just one person. Heavy, but walking lightly, trying to be silent.
The sound stopped and I closed my eyes, listening.
I focused on my breathing, forcing myself to become calm.
A steady heart means a steady hand.
Whoever had come down the stairs was waiting by the door to the medical office. I pictured Morris peering into that room, knowing the layout, knowing where to look. He would scan to the most obvious hiding places first — behind desks and chairs, inside cabinets. He woul
d do the same in this room, overlooking what was hiding in plain sight.
A burst of static crackled into the silence. Short and loud.
Pssssssshhhhhht!
“You found him yet?”
Pssssssshhhhhht!
“What the hell you doing down there … ?”
“Shhh!” came the reply, and the radio went quiet.
The plane groaned and pitched to one side, sending a shudder through the cabin. Wreckage slid across surfaces and clattered into the walls.
“Damn it,” someone said, then everything fell silent once more.
Just dripping.
And the scuff of a shoe on the carpet.
Morris was coming.
He was not a hunter; that was for sure. I could have moved along the corridor and passed the president’s office without making a single sound. Not Morris, though. He probably thought he was doing well, but his shoes shuffled on the plush carpet, his clothes swished against the wall, and his breath sighed into the air. He might as well have whistled as he approached.
I knew when he was behind the door, and I raised my bow enough to pull the string back as far as I could manage in this position. I took shallow breaths and waited. Waited. Waited.
I had hunter’s blood in my veins.
The darkness sparkled in my eyes, and the smoke and dust glittered.
The door scraped the carpet as it opened, making a sound like gentle waves on the lakeshore. For a few seconds it was as if it had opened on its own. No one appeared. Then he was there, silhouetted in the doorway as he edged sideways, presenting as small a target as possible.
I knew, straight away, that it was not Morris. Morris was thicker-set and his hair was cropped short. He wore a suit, too. This man was wearing a tighter jacket and he was slimmer and shorter.
Hazar stood with his back to the wall as he slipped into the room, pistol raised in front of him.
“Now!” I hissed and stood up, drawing the bowstring.
As I rose, the president flicked a switch, turning on all the lights in the room, making Hazar squeeze his eyes shut in automatic response. He had seen me, though, caught a glimpse of me before he was blinded, and he swung his weapon around, squeezing the trigger.