by Dave Barry
“How’s he going to assassinate the president?” said Victor. “I mean, he couldn’t bring a gun into the White House, could he?”
“No gun,” said Woltar. “Snake.”
“What?” said pretty much everybody at once.
“At end of press conference,” said Woltar, “assassin will give president a gift. Is ceremonial Gadakistan wooden box. Inside box is Gadakistan mountain snake, deadliest snake in world. Very mean snake. When president opens box, it will bite him, and he will die in seconds.” He looked at the TV screen. “Soon.”
Now the hole in my stomach was the size of the Grand Canyon.
“We have to do something,” said Suzana.
“We could call the police,” said Matt.
“There’s not enough time,” said Suzana. “And they wouldn’t believe us anyway.”
“Then what?”
Suzana pointed to the dragon. “What were you going to do with the kite?” she said.
“We fly kite with Lemi inside. When kite gets near fence, Lemi pulls lever, releases rope. Then he flies kite like glider. It has special controls. He flies over fence.”
“And he has the laser jammer to keep the missiles from shooting him down,” said Victor.
“Yes,” said Woltar. “He lands kite and stops assassin.”
“Stops him how?” said Suzana.
“With throwing fork.”
“With what?” said Suzana and I at the same time.
“Traditional Gadakistani hunting weapon,” said Woltar. He went over to Lemi, the little guy, who was sitting up now, but still obviously in pain. Woltar leaned over and gently pulled something out of Lemi’s waistband and brought it back to us. It was a heavy-looking fork with two prongs and a long handle.
“You hunt with that thing?” said Matt.
Woltar nodded. “Very deadly. Also efficient. Kill prey with it, then eat prey with it.”
“So your friend”—Suzana pointed at Lemi—“was going to throw the fork at the fake Brevalov before he could release the snake on the president.”
Woltar nodded. “Lemi is expert fork thrower. Was good plan.” He shook his head. “No good now.”
Everybody was quiet for a few seconds.
“No,” said Suzana. “It’s still a good plan. I’ll fly the dragon.”
Of course Suzana would volunteer to fly the dragon.
But Woltar was shaking his head again.
“No,” he said. “You are too heavy. Weight makes dragon unstable. Must be somebody same weight as Lemi. Like him.”
Woltar was pointing at me.
Suzana was looking at me.
They all were looking at me.
Here’s the thing. I don’t know how to fly a glider. I don’t even like heights. I’ve thrown up on several roller coasters. Also, in case you haven’t already figured it out, I am not the bravest person in the world. So I knew I was totally one hundred percent unqualified for this mission. It would be a disaster. The only intelligent thing for me to do was tell these people staring at me that I could not fly the dragon.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll fly the dragon.”
Everything happened really fast. Woltar picked up Lemi’s headset and put it on me. Then he lifted up the dragon and told me to get under it. It had an aluminum frame that formed a little cockpit. There were handles on the sides for holding on to the kite during the running takeoff, and a little seat to hop on when it (yikes!) left the ground. In front of me was a small windshield and the glider controls, which consisted of two levers and a red handle.
Woltar squatted on the ground and ducked his head (which is all of him that would fit) into the cockpit. He pointed to the red handle and said, “When I tell you, pull this to release rope.” Then he pointed to the levers and said, “Pull left one, turn left. Pull right one, turn right.”
Simple enough.
Then he pointed to something I hadn’t noticed: duct-taped to the frame was the laser jammer.
“If missiles come,” he said, “push button.”
Oh, right. Missiles.
“How will I know if missiles are coming?”
“You will see them. And I will shout.”
Okay, then.
“We must hurry. I will launch you now.” He started to duck out of the cockpit, then ducked back in. “One more thing.”
“What?” I said.
He reached in and tucked something heavy into my waistband.
The throwing fork.
“I don’t know how to throw that thing,” I said.
“You must try,” he said.
“But I—”
“No more talk!” said Woltar. “We must go!”
He ducked back out of the dragon.
“I’ve never shot a gun,” I said, to myself.
“Get ready!” I heard Suzana’s voice coming from my right, outside the dragon. I grabbed the side handles and lifted the dragon. My legs felt shaky from fear, not from weight; the kite was amazingly light. I looked through the little windshield and saw the back of Woltar, jogging forward with the rope over his shoulder, taking out the slack.
My headset crackled, and I heard Woltar’s voice: “Run!”
I started running, and just in time, because the rope slack was gone, and the dragon jerked forward. The cockpit was bouncing around and I couldn’t keep my face in front of the windshield, so I was basically running blind. I heard shouting all around me—Suzana, Matt, Cameron, Victor, and a bunch of other people.
The dragon was moving faster, and I was starting to have trouble keeping up. I stumbled, almost fell.
Then two things happened, one right after the other.
The first was that the kite took off. Not gradually. Suddenly. So suddenly that the handles yanked my arms up and the kite almost took off without me before I managed to jump and pull myself up and slide back onto the seat. I felt the kite drop a little under my weight, then start to rise again. Now I could see out the windshield. Woltar, his back to me, was at the end of the rope, still running hard. I could hear him breathing in my headset. The guy was a beast.
The second thing you will not believe. The dragon suddenly jerked downward, so for a second my feet hit the ground again. I looked down.
“Thief!”
Yes! The maniac taxi driver was still not giving up. He had grabbed hold of the frame, so the dragon was dragging him along the ground. I guess he thought he could pull it down. It looked like he might.
But he couldn’t. With Woltar the Beast pulling the rope, the kite started going back up. It was wobbling all over the place—Woltar was right about too much weight making it unstable. But it was still going up.
“Let go!” I yelled at the maniac.
“Thief!” he yelled. He was not letting go.
In a few more seconds he couldn’t let go, because the dragon, still wobbling like crazy, had started gaining altitude pretty fast. I looked down between my legs and saw people on the Ellipse pointing up at us and shouting. They looked like they were a long way down.
And we were still rising. The higher we got, the stronger the wind blew. The dragon started zigzagging back and forth across the sky, with the taxi driver dangling underneath. I would probably have puked except I was too scared. We were so high up that I didn’t want to look down. We were also so high up that the taxi driver had stopped calling me a thief and had switched to saying something in a foreign language. I think maybe he was praying.
And we were still going up.
And up.
And up.
The zigzagging was getting really bad. I grabbed the control levers and started pulling on them, trying to make it stop. I got it to be a little better, but we were still all over the place. The taxi driver was praying louder, and I didn’t blame him, because we were really high up now and the zigzags were swinging him back and forth. He couldn’t hold on forever.
Then I heard Woltar’s voice in the headset. He was hoarse, gasping for air.
“Pull red handle! Pull red
handle now!”
I looked at the handle, but I hesitated. I was scared to pull it.
“PULL RED HANDLE NOW!”
I reached down, grabbed the handle, and pulled. I think what I was thinking, if I was thinking anything, was: Whatever happens next can’t be as bad as this.
I was an idiot.
The first problem was, I couldn’t really see anything. I mean, I could see down, but (a) it was scary to look down, because it showed how high up I was, and (b) looking down didn’t tell me where I was going. But when I looked through the windshield, which was small, I mainly saw the sky, with occasionally a large object such as the Washington Monument whizzing past. I was holding tight to the levers, trying to control the zigzagging, but I was not having a huge amount of success.
“LEFT TURN!” Woltar shouted in my headset.
I pulled on the left lever.
“MORE LEFT!”
I pulled harder. The good news was, that stopped the zigzagging. The bad news was, the dragon started to go into a spiral, which was seriously scary. Judging by his scream, the taxi driver did not care for it either.
“RIGHT! RIGHT! RIGHT!”
I yanked on the right lever. The spiral stopped.
“NOW STRAIGHT! STRAIGHT!”
I worked the levers, trying to keep the dragon straight, but it was tricky. I looked down and saw a road. Then a high fence.
The White House fence.
We were over the White House grounds.
We were also heading down. I flew over some grass, then a fountain, then more grass. I looked through the windshield, and now I could see it, straight ahead. The White House.
“LEFT! JUST A LITTLE!”
I tugged the left lever. When the dragon turned I could see a bunch of people on the left side of the White House. At exactly that instant I saw a flash of light.
“MISSILE! MISSILE! MISSILE!”
With Woltar shouting in my ear, I let go of the right control lever and pushed the jammer button hard with my thumb.
Two things about the missile:
1. It didn’t come from the roof of the White House, which is where you would think an antiaircraft missile would come from. It came from under the ground. It, like, erupted out of the lawn. I don’t know what else they have under the White House lawn. I just know it’s not a normal lawn.
2. It was really, really, really fast. It was so fast that it got from the lawn to the dragon in almost exactly the same amount of time it took my hand to get from the lever to the button.
Almost exactly, but not exactly, or instead of a live human telling this story, I (and the taxi driver) would be several million human smithereens scattered around the general Washington, D.C., area. I must have pressed the button at the last possible instant, because the missile flew over the dragon, missing us by maybe five feet as it roared past at a bajillion miles per hour.
“MISSILE!” Woltar yelled again.
I still had my thumb on the button, so the second missile also missed, although it sounded even closer than the first one. The problem was, with my right hand on the jammer, I was not really in control of the dragon anymore, so we were zigzagging like mad, not to mention losing altitude. I grabbed the handle again, but I couldn’t regain control, and I couldn’t see where I was going anyway. I heard a lot of shouting, which I figured was the press conference people. I’ll be honest: At that point I wasn’t really thinking about saving the president. I was just hoping I would get back on the ground alive.
I didn’t see much of what happened next, because I was inside the dragon. But like just about everybody else in the world I’ve seen the video, since there were a bunch of television news cameras there. It’s pretty insane. The president is standing next to the guy pretending to be Brevalov, who’s holding a wooden box, which he is just about to give to the president, when a guy in the crowd notices the kite coming and shouts. Everybody looks, and they see this large flying dragon with a spooky head wobbling across the lawn toward the White House with a guy hanging out the bottom. There’s a lot of yelling and the Secret Service guys swing into action, with some of them forming a perimeter around the president and the fake Brevalov, and some of them running toward the dragon, pulling guns out of their jackets.
Then the first missile launches, and some people scream. Then the second missile goes off. More screams. Both missiles barely—I mean barely—miss the dragon and disappear into the distance. (It was later learned that one missile came down in the Potomac River; the other one demolished a fortunately unoccupied taco truck in Arlington, Virginia.)
By this point the scene is pretty much total chaos. The dragon is still coming, and people are running around shouting.
I need a bunch of words to describe what happens next, but in real time it takes a total of thirteen seconds.
First, a Secret Service guy, having seen the missiles miss, decides to shoot the dragon down. He’s standing right in front of it, and he’s in shooting position with both hands on the gun, which (I learned this later) is a Sig Sauer pistol that shoots .357 caliber bullets, which are big bullets.
Secret Service agents, especially the ones around the president, are excellent shots, and there is absolutely no doubt that this agent is going to blow a major hole in the dragon, and probably me. Except that just as he’s about to pull the trigger the taxi driver finally loses his grip and falls, and his momentum carries him forward enough that he lands right on the Secret Service agent.
So it’s a good thing he came along after all.
The sudden loss of weight causes the dragon to swoop violently up, which is fortunate because it causes two more Secret Service agents to miss me with their shots. Unfortunately the swoop also causes me to lose my grip on the control levers. Then the dragon suddenly dives almost straight down. The front end hits the grass first and the whole dragon does a somersault, with people scattering out of the way.
And then, as the dragon completes a three-hundred-sixty-degree flip, a shape comes blasting out if it.
This is me. The dragon frame has basically turned into a catapult, and it is flinging me out through the kite skin and a good fifteen feet into the air on an arc that takes me over the perimeter of Secret Service guys surrounding the president and the fake Brevalov. There’s a pretty famous picture of this, which you’ve probably seen. I’m frozen in midair, looking completely terrified, which I am; below me are four Secret Service guys, also frozen, looking up at me with these frowny, kind of puzzled expressions, like they’re thinking, They trained us for a lot of weird stuff in Secret Service school, but they did not prepare us for a kid to be vomited out of a flying dragon.
What I wish I could say happens next is that I slam into the fake Brevalov and knock him out. But this is not what happens.
What happens is, I slam into the president of the United States of America.
And knock him down.
And break his collarbone.
Which is probably not what Mr. Barto had in mind back in the Miami airport when he gave us the lecture about how we had to be on our very best behavior as ambassadors representing Culver Middle School.
Okay, that’s seven of the thirteen seconds. Here’s what happens in the last six:
The president of the United States and I roll over a couple of times on the ground. Meanwhile the Secret Service guys are spinning around, lunging toward us, ready to swing into action, to save the president.
But the fake Brevalov is closer. He’s lunging toward us, too. And he has the snake box in his hands. He’s opening the lid. He’s going to dump the snake—“Deadliest snake in world,” said Woltar; “Very mean”—on the president. Also pretty much on me. I doubt the snake cares who it bites.
So I see the fake Brevalov and his snake box coming toward us—you can see this all on YouTube, in slow motion—and somehow, I will never know how, I remember the throwing fork. I yank it out of my pants and heave it with kind of a sideways motion at the fake Brevalov.
The fork totally misses
the fake Brevalov.
It also, fortunately, totally misses the lunging Secret Service agents, who are right behind the fake Brevalov.
What the throwing fork hits, somehow, is: the snake.
You can also see this in slow motion on the video. It was later called, by Gadakistani experts, the greatest Gadakistani throwing fork throw ever thrown, although it was one hundred percent pure luck. In the video, you can see the deadly Gadakistan mountain snake coming out of the box with its mouth wide open, ready to strike me or the president with these long, sharp, mean-looking fangs. Then you see the fork coming from the other direction, spinning in the air but miraculously getting into exactly the right position so that one of the prongs goes right into the snake’s open mouth, then comes out the back of the snake’s head, and just like that the deadliest snake in the world got turned into a harmless snake kebab.
I didn’t see any of that happen in real time. By the time that fork hit the snake I had two Secret Service agents who could probably be NFL linebackers landing on top of me and—I don’t blame them a bit; they were trained to do this, and it was the absolute correct thing to do, considering what the situation looked like—knocking me unconscious with some kind of martial-arts blow to my head.
And that’s the last thing I remember.
I woke up in a bed in some kind of military hospital. I still don’t know exactly where it was. I do know there were guards at the door and a lot of people in uniforms around.
After I woke up two doctors came in and spent a long time checking me out and giving me tests to see if I had a concussion. I felt okay and kept trying to ask them questions, like could I talk to my parents, and was I in really bad trouble, and what was going to happen to me, stuff like that. But they wouldn’t tell me anything.
After they left a soldier brought me breakfast, which I figured meant I had been there overnight. I was starving and ate the whole breakfast in maybe thirty seconds. After that two people, a man and a woman, both wearing business clothes, came in and told me they were with the FBI, and they wanted to ask me “some questions.”