Big Game

by Daniel Smith

  When we were close to the bank, I glanced back to see the helicopter hovering over what was left of the plane. It was almost gone now — the door we had jumped from was beneath the water, and the nose of the jet was at a more severe angle, pointing to the tops of the stunted trees on the small lake island that had kept Air Force One afloat during the night.

  But something caught my attention.

  Some kind of movement.

  I blinked water from my eyes and looked again. Maybe it had been a curious bird, or debris swept up by the helicopter’s downdraught.

  There it was again, though. Movement in the plane’s cockpit window.

  “What’s that?” I said, wiping my face, trying to clear my vision.

  The president stopped beside me and turned to watch. “I don’t see any —”

  Something seemed to grow from the window. A dark shape that pushed upward like a moth emerging from a chrysalis.

  “Hazar,” I said. It had to be.

  “I tied him up.”

  “Not well enough.”

  As we watched, Hazar pulled himself through the broken cockpit window and crawled onto the nose of the jet. He paused, then got to his feet and looked out across the lake in our direction.

  “He can’t see us,” the president said.

  But Hazar lifted a hand and pointed right at us, then turned and signaled to the men in the helicopter.

  “Yes, he can,” I said.

  One of the soldiers leaned out and handed something down to Hazar. Part of a weapon I had seen before.

  “Start swimming,” I said. “Now.”

  We both turned and began swimming as fast as we could toward the shore. I knew what Hazar would do next. He would put that rifle together, fitting each part into place, and it wouldn’t take him long.

  “Faster!” I shouted at the president, who was starting to fall behind. We were both exhausted, but I had something to make me swim faster — I knew what a good shot Hazar was. I had seen Patu run for his life and fail.

  We made it to the shallows and put our feet down on the soft ground, wading quickly onto the shore. The muddy bank was open and clear for twenty yards or so before the tree line of the forest. Here and there, piles of driftwood lay like old bones, and craggy rocks and boulders littered the dirt as if they had been dropped from the sky. Those giant stones were the only cover available between the shore and the forest.

  “Keep going!” I shouted. “To the rocks!”

  We ran and stumbled to a collection of dark gray boulders, reaching them and diving for cover as Hazar’s first shot hit the ground halfway up the shore. It whizzed past us and smacked into the mud with a soft thump that sprayed a great gout of mud into the gray air. The sound of the gunshot reached us a fraction of a second later, a loud CRACK! that echoed around the lake, sending birds into the sky above the trees.

  If we had been any slower, the shot would have hit the president.

  “He got out?” he said. “How the hell did he get out?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s not important.”

  I crawled along the ground and risked a peek through the narrow gap between two rocks. The helicopter was still there, hovering, and Hazar was standing by the plane’s cockpit window, rifle to his shoulder.

  That was all I saw before I pulled away. And it was just as well, because Hazar had spotted me. As I moved back, a bullet struck the gap between the rocks, spraying sharp fragments and passing through to hit the mud behind me with a thump.

  Once again, the sound of the shot cracked in the air a moment later.

  “He has a good scope,” I said. “And he’s a good shot.”

  “Oh my God,” the president said. “Is this ever going to end?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  If we tried to make it to the tree line, Hazar would kill us. If we tried to make it to the water, Hazar would kill us. If we stayed where we were, Hazar would get into his helicopter and come over to kill us.

  The only thing left was for us to attack.

  I remembered what Dad had taught me, what he had reminded me about yesterday when we had driven up to the Place of Skulls. The two most important things. My knife and my fire kit.

  As long as you have those two things, you can survive anywhere and anything. Carry them on you at all times. Never put them in your pack, and don’t lose them. Out there, they can be the difference between life and death.

  My knife and my fire kit.

  And my bow.

  “I have an idea,” I said. “Get me a stick.”

  “What?”

  “A stick. Arrow-length.”

  While the president shuffled over to the pile of driftwood behind us, I slipped my knife from its sheath and put it on the ground in front of me. I then took the fire kit from my zipped pocket, relieved to see that the waterproof tub was still sealed tight.

  “Will this do?” the president said, holding up a slightly crooked stick.

  “It’ll have to.” I used my knife to shorten it and notch a groove into one end. I quickly sharpened the other end to a point with two or three rapid cuts. With that done, I cut a thin strip from the hem of my shirt and put it between my teeth while I twisted open the waterproof tub.

  “Knife and a fire kit,” the president said, starting to understand.

  I nodded without looking at him, and took out the storm-proof matches.

  “I guess this counts as an emergency, right?” he asked.

  “Right,” I said through clamped teeth.

  I cracked the seal on the yellow container and took out four of the matches.

  I put them around the sharpened end of the arrow and held them in place with my left hand, using my right to take the strip of shirt from my mouth. Wrapping the cotton around the matches, I tied them to the stick with a simple knot, then nocked the makeshift arrow to my bow.

  There were no feathered flights, and the stick was too crooked to fly straight, but I hoped it would be enough. It was all we had left.

  Shifting onto my knees, I drew the bow back, gritting my teeth and calling on all the strength I had left. My arms shook, but I put every bit of energy into it. I had to make this count. It was our last chance.

  When the string touched my cheek for the second time that day, I knew my plan would work.

  “Light it,” I said, leaning back, angling the arrow toward the sky.

  The president already had a match in his hand, and he struck it on the side of the container. When he touched it to the tip of the arrow, the other four matches flared with a whisper. I watched until I was certain they were alight, then I released the string.

  Without flights, the arrow spun and twisted as it flew, but it sailed high. Propelled by the full power of the bow, it went up and up, arcing over the rocks, over the mud and over the lake until it finally began to descend, falling out of view.

  Then, above the sound of the helicopter, we heard the distinctive WHUMP! of fuel catching fire, and large flames leaped into view over the top of the boulders.

  “It worked,” I whispered, and scrambled over to the gap in the rocks.

  What I saw through that gap was like Hell.

  “Look!” I grabbed the president’s arm, and together we stood to see the surface of the lake burning and dancing in a huge wall of flame. Everything in front of us was on fire, flickering in places, erupting into huge columns in others. The inferno was alive, racing from place to place on the lake, hungrily burning every drop of aviation fuel as it streaked toward the plane.

  We couldn’t see Hazar. The flames were too high. We could see the helicopter, though. We saw the way the rotor blades fanned the blaze as the aircraft tried to rise into the sky, but it was too late. The fire burned too fast and hot for anything to survive. It smothered the plane, engulfing its fuel-covered body, sucking into every air space, racing into the fuel tanks, and detonating in a massive eruption.

  The helicopter was engulfed by the ball of flame, wrapped in the orange-and
-black cloud that blew high into the sky. It spun and buffeted, then it added to the explosion, blowing outward into a thousand pieces.

  The heat and the blast flashed back across the surface of the lake, peppering the shore with debris. Pieces of metal and plastic shot in all directions like a thousand bullets. The rocks sheltered us from the worst of it, but they couldn’t protect us from the concussive wave that knocked us off our feet. Nor could they protect us from the rain of fragments that came pouring down from the hellish, burning sky, thumping into the mud and scattering into the trees beyond.

  Everything was overcome with heat and noise and smoke, and in the midst of the hurricane of fire, there was a sharp bump on my head and a moment of pain.

  There was no thought or feeling at all, just a slow falling through never-ending space. But soon the emptiness was filled with the smell of burning fuel. A grim, ugly smell that slipped its fingers down my throat and blackened my lungs. It scratched its nails along my throat, making me cough. With that came the dull throbbing at the back of my head, and I remembered that I had hit it when … when had it been? Yesterday? A year ago?

  No, not that long. In the president’s suite. I had jumped up to distract a man called Hazar and …

  “President?” I opened my eyes and sat up. “President?”

  He was lying beside me, pressed against the rocks and curled into a ball. His face was covered and his hands were wrapped over his head.

  “President?”

  Smoke drifted around us, thick and black, and the ground was littered with pieces of twisted metal and broken plastic. The sound of crackling flames made me look back to see a series of small fires burning at the tree line, reminding me of last night’s plane crash. Tangled piles of driftwood were on fire, too, as if the whole world was going up in a blaze.

  “President? You alive?”

  I couldn’t think straight. Dazed by the thunderous explosion, I felt as if my brain had been scrambled in my head and everything was fuzzy. There was something, though: a familiar sound that was growing louder by the second.

  Thucka-thucka-thucka.

  A helicopter.

  NO! The word screamed through my head. They couldn’t have survived. I saw them explode … I saw them burn up and burst into a thousand pieces. Not even Hazar could have survived that.

  The sound came closer, thumping across the lake toward us, and I leaned back to see two helicopters flying side by side.

  More hunters. More men coming to take my friend.

  I pushed to my feet, wobbling with dizziness and putting a hand on the rocks to support myself as I watched them reach the shore and hover like giant black insects.

  Smoke swirled in tornadoes beneath them as ropes dropped down from either side and men in black zipped down, armed with assault rifles and submachine guns.

  “No,” I said, moving away from the rocks and stumbling into the open to meet them. They weren’t going to have him. He was mine. “No.” I reached down to grasp the handle of my knife and pull it free of its sheath. “No.”

  “It’s all right,” said a voice behind me, and I turned to see the president standing there. His face was bloody and his clothes were tattered. He reached out and put a hand on mine, stopping me from drawing the blade. “These guys are with me.”

  I tried to pull the knife anyway, but he held my hand firm and shook his head. “They found us, Oskari. The rescue party. It’s time to go home.”

  Beyond the rocks, close to the waterline, three of the soldiers remained on the ground beneath the helicopter, facing in different directions, watching for threats. Another four hustled toward us with their weapons pointed at me. As they came closer, the president limped forward and held up a hand.

  “Am I glad to see you. Stand down, Captain,” he said, but his voice was quiet and they ignored the order. They moved between us, escorting the president away while others continued to point their guns at me, and I wondered if they had really come to rescue us. Maybe they were more of Hazar’s men.

  “I said, ‘Stand down, Captain’!” the president ordered, raising his voice and pulling himself away from them. “And take good care of this young man.” He came back to me and pushed the soldiers aside to put a hand on my shoulder. “If it wasn’t for him, you’d have a new president now.”

  The captain glanced down at me with a serious look. He had square features and cropped hair. His brow was furrowed into a frown, and he gave me a curt nod before looking back at the president. “Sir, please come with us. We have a jet at Rovaniemi Airport waiting to take you to Helsinki.”

  The president nodded and looked at me, reassuring me that it was all right, and the soldiers surrounded us while we waited for one of the helicopters to touch down. Once it was on the ground, the men escorted us back along the shore toward the waterline.

  “Wait!” I said, suddenly remembering something. “My bow!”

  One of the soldiers turned to grab me, but the president stopped him, saying, “Let him go.”

  I ran back to the rocks and searched through the sticks and other wreckage until I found the bow that Hamara had handed to me on the platform yesterday. I could hardly believe it had only been a day since I had left Dad behind and ventured into the forest alone.

  “Can’t forget that,” the president said, glancing down at the bow as we climbed aboard the helicopter.

  We sat opposite one another and the soldiers buckled us into our seats. I put the bow across my knees and looked at the battered and bruised president. Within seconds the helicopter lifted off the ground, rising high above the lake, then turned, put its nose down, and sped off across the trees.

  “I want you to contact the Pentagon and have the vice-president arrested,” the president said to the captain. “Do it now.” He didn’t sound so much like my president now; he sounded like a man who was used to giving orders rather than a man who needed to be led through the wilderness.

  “Sir.” The captain spoke into his communicator, passing on the message.

  “And we won’t be going to Rovaniemi.” The president kept his eyes on me as he shouted over the noise of the helicopter.

  “Sir, those are our orders,” said the captain. “From there you’ll be taken to —”

  “That’s not where we’re going.” Still he didn’t look at the soldiers. “We’re going to take Oskari home first.”

  “If you mean this boy, sir, then we can take him home after —”

  “I know you’re just doing your job, Captain.” The president shifted his eyes to look at the soldier sitting beside him. It was a look that dared the man to disobey him. “But remember who I am. You take your orders from me, and I am ordering you to take this young man home. It’s the least I can do for him.”

  The captain paused.

  “Do you understand?”

  “Sir, yes, sir. Um … you have a location on that? We need to know where ‘home’ is, sir.”

  The president looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “Where do you want to go, Oskari?”

  “The Place of Skulls.”

  “The what?” The president looked surprised and leaned closer as if he hadn’t heard me properly.

  “The Place of Skulls,” I repeated. “That’s where Dad will be waiting for me.”

  “I thought that’s what you said. Sounds like a serious place.”

  “It is.”

  The president nodded and turned to the captain. “You heard the man. Take us to the Place of Skulls.”

  “Um. You have coordinates on that?” asked the captain.

  “Southeast of the lake,” I said.

  The captain spoke the directions into his microphone, relaying them to the pilot. Immediately, the helicopter banked east.

  “No coordinates?” the captain asked. “Nothing else?”

  I shook my head, wondering how I could explain where to go. “Wait,” I said, unbuckling my seat belt and turning to look out of the window behind me.

  The wilderness was whipping away beneath
us at an incredible rate as we skimmed across the tops of the trees. Staring at the vast sea of trees and mountains around us, I searched for something familiar.

  “Come into the cockpit,” the president said, unbuckling himself and taking me forward.

  “Sir,” the captain warned. “I really must ask you to —” One look from the president was all it took. He stopped what he was saying, nodded, and saluted. “Sir.”

  We moved forward to the cockpit, looking over the pilot’s shoulder, seeing Lake Tuonela below. From this height it looked even bigger than I had imagined. Like the sea. The mist had cleared and the weak sunlight sparkled on the surface. Close to the shore, the water was still burning, and there was a dark shape drifting below the surface.

  I looked up at the president and knew he was thinking about all the people who had been on the aircraft. Hazar and Morris might have deserved to go down with it, but the others hadn’t.

  “Sir,” the captain said to him. “I’ve just had word from the Pentagon. The vice-president was found dead in the bathroom a few moments ago. Apparently he slipped on some soap and struck his head.”

  “Soap?”

  “That’s the information I have, sir.”

  “Have you ever slipped on soap in the bathroom, Captain?”

  “Can’t say I have, sir.”

  “Me neither. I think maybe someone helped him slip. The kind of person who helped him organize this setup, because God knows he couldn’t be this devious on his own. Someone silenced the vice-president, inside the Pentagon, and whoever it was, they’re probably still in there now.” The president thought for a moment. “Captain, have security lock the place down. Someone there knows who set me up.”

  “Lock it down, sir? The whole Pentagon?”

  “Those are my orders. Get it done.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  We flew past the waterfall and I pointed, showing the pilot which way to go: over the top of the mountain, down past the scars in the forest where the planes had crashed, and then on to where Dad would be waiting.

  When we came to the Place of Skulls, I couldn’t believe how small it looked.