“Readback correct. Cessna Five One Six One Yankee, go ahead with your request.”
One last scan with the binoculars. He let them dangle around his neck. From the trunk he pulled out a roll of carpet. He put it on the ground and unrolled it. He took a second roll out and did the same.
Charon put one of the four-foot-long tubes carefully on the ground right by the gravel pile after he had inspected it for damage. The second he inspected and kept in his hands.
He arranged himself against the gravel so he had some support for his lower back, yet the exhaust from the missile would pass safely above the gravel. They would find this spot, of course, and the carbon from the missile exhaust would prove that it was fired here. He just didn’t want the hot exhaust deflected onto his back. He put the missile launcher across his lap.
He sat there and waited, counting the minutes. If the chopper was cruising at a hundred and twenty knots, it was making two nautical miles a minute over the ground. He had figured the distance at twenty-four miles. Twelve minutes. With a tail wind or more speed, the time would be less. He would wait for eighteen minutes and if the chopper had not appeared it would have used a different route. And the wind was out of the northwest, so the chopper would have a tail wind today. Eighteen minutes, then he would leave and try something else.
The helicopter might not use this route. There was no way of knowing of course. He would soon see.
And the pilot of the helicopter didn’t make the call to Dulles Approach from Camp David. He had lifted off a minute or two earlier and was climbing out on course when he called Approach. So less than twelve minutes.
The minutes passed as he scanned the sky. Six, seven, eight …
He heard the distinctive noise of a helicopter. He looked. The trees behind him would block his view until it was almost overhead.
He turned on the batteries in both launchers and grasped the binoculars.
There it was! High, to his left. Perhaps a mile east of his position.
He checked with the binoculars, thumbing the focus wheel expertly. Yes. A Marine VIP chopper, like the one he had seen on the White House lawn.
He lowered the binoculars and raised the missile launcher to his shoulder. Power on. Aim. Lock on. He squeezed the trigger.
The missile left with a roar.
Charon dropped the empty launcher and picked up the second one. Power on. Aim. Lock on. Shoot!
With the second missile on its way he tossed both launchers, the rugs, and the binoculars in the trunk of the car.
He looked up. The first missile had already detonated, leaving a puff of dirty smoke against the light gray overcast above. The chopper was falling off to the right, the nose swinging.
Whap! The warhead of the second missile exploded right against the chopper.
The helicopter’s forward progress ceased and it began to rotate and fall, a corkscrewing motion.
Henry Charon picked up the remaining radio.
“Mayday, Mayday! Marine One has had a total hydraulic failure and has lost an engine! We’re going down!”
“Marine One, Dulles, say again.”
The pitch of the voice was higher, but the pilot was still thinking, still in control. The words poured out. “Dulles, we’ve lost an engine and hydraulics. The copilot’s dead. Two explosions, like missiles. We’re going down and … uh … roll the ambulances and emergency vehicles. We’re going down!”
Charon snapped off the radio and carefully placed it in the trunk of the car on top of one of the rugs. He closed the trunk lid firmly.
He scanned the area. Nothing left lying about.
The assassin paused by the driver’s door and looked again for the stricken helicopter. Much lower, falling several miles to the southeast with the nose very low … rotating quickly, like once a second. The crash was going to be real bad.
Henry Charon seated himself in the car, started it, and drove away.
CHAPTER TWENTY
HENRY Charon dialed the radio to a Washington news-talk station and pointed the car north, toward Frederick. A woman was debating with various callers the appropriateness of the federal response to the AIDS crisis. At Frederick he turned east on I-70. When he saw a rest stop, he pulled off.
He parked the car on the edge of the lot and removed the galoshes. These he put in the trunk. He carefully wrapped the spent missile launching tubes in the rugs and wound the rugs with gray duct tape. After closing the trunk and ensuring the car was locked, he walked fifty yards to the rest rooms and relieved himself.
Rolling again, he was listening to the radio when the announcer broke in with a bulletin:
“A United States Marine Corps helicopter carrying the President of the United States and several other high-ranking officials has crashed in northern Virginia north of Dulles Airport. Emergency crews from Dulles International are responding. We have no word yet on the condition of the President. No further information is available at this time. Stay tuned for further news as we receive it.”
The radio station stopped taking calls. In short order the woman guest was off the air and two newsmen began discussing and speculating about the bulletin. They mentioned the fact that President Bush had spent the weekend at Camp David and was presumably on his way back to Washington when the accident occurred. They called it an accident. They read the list of the officials that had spent the weekend with the President and speculated about the reasons the helicopter might have crashed. The reasons they advanced all concerned mechanical failure or a midair collision. It was obvious to Charon that neither man knew much about helicopters.
He turned the radio off.
So it had started. The hunt was on and he was the quarry.
He turned off the interstate and followed the twists and turns of a county road for several miles until he reached a landfill. He pulled up to the booth.
The woman inside had the radio on.
“Five dollars,” she said distractedly.
He took out his wallet and gave her the money. She pushed a small clipboard at him. On it was a form, a certification that he was not disposing of hazardous materials. False swearing, the form said, was perjury in the second degree.
“What’s happened?” Charon asked as he scrawled something illegible by the printed X.
“President Bush’s helicopter has crashed.”
“You’re kidding? Is he dead?”
“They don’t know yet.”
Charon handed the clipboard back and was waved on through.
More luck. His was the only vehicle there to dump trash. A snorting bulldozer was attacking a small mountain of the stuff while a huge flock of seagulls darted and swooped.
Henry Charon opened the trunk and got rid of the galoshes and the two missile launchers wrapped in carpet. He threw the cylinders down toward the base of a garbage pile that looked as if it would be next. Then he got the sandwich wrapper, bag, and coffee cup from the floor of the rear seat and added them to the garbage wasteland spread out at his feet.
He pulled the car out of the dozer’s way, carefully avoiding the soft ground off the vehicle ruts. A pickup truck loaded with construction debris parked a little further down the cut and the driver began throwing off trash. He was still at it when the big dozer shoved a hill-sized pile of garbage and dirt over the rug-wrapped missile launchers.
Special Agent Thomas Hooper got the news at the FBI facility in Quantico. Hooper, Freddy Murray, and an assistant federal prosecutor were interrogating Harrison Ronald when the call came.
Prior to his assignment three years ago to the drug crimes division, Hooper had served for five years as special agent in charge of the FBI SWAT team. He was still on call. Use of the FBI for paramilitary operations was rare, but occasionally a situation arose. When the situation required more men than the SWAT team had available, the watch officer went down the standby list of qualified agents. He wanted Hooper to go to the crash site. He passed the news, the order, and the location in as few words as possible.
&nbs
p; Hooper hung up the phone and found the other men were staring at him, no doubt in reaction to the look on his face. “The President’s helicopter just crashed,” he told them, “with him in it. I gotta go.”
“Is he dead?”
“Don’t know,” Hooper muttered to his stunned audience on his way out of the room.
Jake, Callie, and Amy Grafton were returning to their apartment from a shopping mall when they heard the news on the radio. The family carried the packages upstairs and Amy ran for the television. Regular programming had been interrupted and the networks were using their weekend news teams.
Like tens of millions of viewers all over America, the Graftons got the news as the networks acquired it. Four people were dead in the wreckage and four were injured, three critically. Both the pilots were dead, as was the secretary of state and the national security adviser. One of those critically injured was the President, who had been flown to Bethesda Naval Hospital by another helicopter. Mrs. Bush, on vacation in Kennebunkport, was flying back to Washington.
Footage of the wreckage was shown, shot from about a hundred yards away.
Later in the evening witnesses to the crash were interviewed. One elderly woman working in her flowerbed had seen the craft fall. She searched for words as the camera rolled: “I knew they were going to die. It was falling so fast, twirling around, I closed my eyes and prayed.”
What did you pray for?
“For God to take to Himself the souls of those about to die.”
Amy decided she wanted to sit beside her father on the couch. He wrapped his arms around her.
In the newsroom of The Washington Post Jack Yocke was assigned to assist a team of reporters in writing a story assessing the presidency of George Bush, a story that would not run unless he died. Two weeks ago Yocke would have chafed at not being sent off willy-nilly to the crash site. Not this evening. As he called up the major stories of the Bush presidency on his computer screen and perused them, he found himself trying to get a sense of this man chosen by his fellow citizens to lead them.
World War II naval aviator, Texas oil entrepreneur, self-made millionaire, politician, public servant—why did George Bush want the toughest job in the world? What had he said? How did he approach the job? Why did he avoid the spotlight’s glare? Did he have a sense of where America should go, and if so, what was it? These questions Yocke wrestled with, though he occasionally took a moment to read the wire service ticker and listen to the television.
He also took a moment to call Tish Samuels.
“Heard the news?”
“Isn’t it terrible?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I feel for his wife,” Tish said. “I admire her so. This must be extraordinarily tough on her, to be so frightened with the whole world watching.”
The helicopter had crashed in a pasture just a hundred yards west of the Potomac, which flowed south at this point. In the glare of portable floodlights Special Agent Tom Hooper caught a glimpse of at least three dead cows. One of them was ripped almost in half. He asked the Virginia state trooper escorting him toward the helicopter.
“Shrapnel from the rotor blades,” the trooper said. “The forward blades were still turning when it hit the ground.”
The wreckage looked grotesque in the glare of the floodlights. The chopper had impacted nose low, so the cockpit was badly squashed. The crew hadn’t had a chance. A team was cutting through the wreckage to get the last body out of the cockpit. Another team wearing army fatigue uniforms was examining the engines. The rest of the machine was almost as badly mangled as the cockpit, but not quite. Hooper marveled that four fragile human beings had survived the helicopter’s encounter with the earth. Maybe.
The senior Secret Service agent was holding an impromptu meeting beside the machine. Hooper joined the group.
“The army experts are ninety-nine percent certain that this machine was struck by missiles. At least two. Probably heat seekers. We’ll know for sure tomorrow when we analyze the warhead fragments.”
“You’re saying that this was an assassination attempt?” someone asked, the disbelief evident in his voice.
“Yes.”
Hooper was stunned. He turned slightly to look at the wreckage, and now the evidence leaped at him—a hole and jagged tears in the right engine compartment, and another spray of small holes near the exhaust.
“When are you going to announce this?”
“That’s up to the White House. None of you are going to say it to anybody. Now there’s a ton of things that have to be done as soon as possible, so let’s get at it.”
The Secret Service assigned the FBI the job of locating the place from where the missiles had been fired. Hooper walked back toward his car and its radio with his mind racing. He would draw a circle with a ten-mile radius around this spot and seal it. Then he would search every foot of ground within the circle and interview every human being he could find. For that he would need people, as many as he could get. The local sheriffs and state police could help with roadblocks. But the searching, for that he would need a lot of people. Perhaps the Marines at Quantico could lend him some.
An assassin. He was out there somewhere. No doubt the Secret Service would redouble its efforts to guard the Vice-President and Mrs. Bush, but he would check to see if they needed more people.
So he got on the radio and began. He knew he would be at it all night and into tomorrow, and he was. Understandably, Hooper completely forgot about the grand jury and Freeman McNally. They would have to wait.
Henry Charon settled into the Hampshire Avenue apartment to watch television. He was munching a bag of chips and sipping a beer when someone knocked on the door.
He scanned the apartment. Nothing lying around that would incriminate him. Leaving the television on, he opened the door.
“Hello, Mr. Tackett,” Grisella Clifton said. “Remember me? The building manager?” She was wearing a frumpy housedress and a bulky sweater.
“Oh, sure. Grisella, right?”
She nodded. “My television is on the fritz. May I watch with you?”
“Sure. Come in.”
She settled in on the couch. He offered her some potato chips and beer. “I just couldn’t. I’m not the least bit hungry. Isn’t this whole thing so tragic?”
Henry Charon agreed that it was and plopped into the stuffed lounge chair.
“You’re watching NBC? I’ve been watching CNN. They’ve been talking to some witnesses who saw the crash. What could have gone wrong with that helicopter?”
Charon shrugged. “We can change the channel if you like.”
“If you don’t mind. I think CNN is so … so newsy.” Obligingly, he rose and turned the dial. “I just can’t believe what happened to my set. The picture suddenly got all fuzzy. Just when there is something important on, it quits. Isn’t that so typical?”
“Ummm.”
“I do hope you don’t mind this intrusion. But I just needed to be around someone. In the midst of life … It really bothers me, y’know?”
He nodded and glanced at her. She prattled on. He found he could hear anything important said on TV and still catch enough of her remarks to make appropriate responses.
She ceased talking when a doctor at Bethesda Naval Hospital came on the show. He explained the extent of the President’s injuries in detail to the dozens of reporters and used a pointer and a mannequin to answer questions.
What if he survives? Charon asked himself. He had been paid to kill Bush, not put him in the hospital.
Not a word had yet been said on TV about an assassination attempt, but no doubt the Secret Service and FBI knew. The physical evidence of the helicopter would shriek murder to the first professional aircraft accident investigator who looked. Getting to Bush for a second attempt would be a real neat trick.
Listening to Grisella Clifton’s nervous chatter—why was she nervous, anyway?—watching the images on the screen, he began to examine the problem. The armor might have a crack somewh
ere. He would have to think about it.
All over America, in hamlets and cities and on farms, people gathered around televisions or sat in automobiles with the radios on. The President of the United States lay in a hospital close to death, and two hundred and fifty million Americans held their breath.
It didn’t matter if you had voted for George Bush or against him, whether you liked his politics, whether you even knew what his politics were. You sat and listened and were deeply moved as the condition of the President became known. He was seriously injured, with a concussion, broken ribs, a damaged spleen and a seriously fractured leg.
The surgeon at Bethesda reappeared on the television and ignored all the shouted questions. “We don’t know. We don’t know. We’re running tests and we’ll see.” He paused, listened to the cacophony a moment, then said, “He’s unconscious. His vital signs are erratic. We don’t know.”
He was not a king, not a dictator, but a fellow American who had been chosen to lead the nation for a period of four years. Four years—long enough for a skillful politician who understood the mood and spirit of the people to accomplish something worthwhile, yet not enough time for a fool or incompetent to do irreparable damage.
The nation had had all kinds of presidents in the 201 years since George Washington had taken the oath of office. Yet each of them had understood that they spoke for their fellow citizens, and by doing so they created in the American people a deep, abiding respect for the office of the presidency and the men who held it that seemed, in a curious way, to have little to do with the individual merit or personal failings of each temporary occupant. Americans expected the president to weigh the interests of everyone when he made a decision, to speak for all of them. From their congressmen and senators they expected partisanship; from their president they expected leadership. This working politician, this common citizen they raised to the high place, he became the embodiment of their unspoken hopes and dreams. In some vague, slightly mystical way, he became the personification of America. And of all it stood for.
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