by Mike Mcquay
The voice came back excited. “Nice work, Gotham 4. Is that you, Charly? Over.”
“Yeah, it’s me,” the pilot answered. “And I’ve bagged seventeen. Another month and I’ll have a gold badge.”
“I believe it’s eighteen, Charly,” the static-filled voice returned. “I think you’ve got eighteen.”
“I think you’re right. I think it is eighteen.”
“Well, congratulations. And keep up the good work. Over. Out.”
They were coming up on the Statue of Liberty, command post for the USPF control of the Manhattan prison. The whole island was heavily fortified with artillery and great stone bunkers topped by rolls of barbed wire.
They came in close, right past the great lady’s face. The interior of the crown was brightly lit, and Hauk could see movement within. People manning machines, gazing out the windows with huge binoculars up to their faces. Machinery. Lots of machinery. They flew under the beam of the power searchlights that were set atop the torch. The beam was wide angle, and raked the waters below in long, sweeping patterns.
The landing pad was on the Jersey side of the Statue, right beside the huge wall that they had erected connecting liberty Island with the New Jersey shore.
The wall loomed large beside them as they floated down to the big yellow “X” of a landing zone. It rose far into the sky, its top filled with a long row of red lights that continually flashed a pulsebeat rhythm on and off, on and off.
Troop bunkers were built into the base of the wall and when they got close, Hauk could see black-suited cops drifting in and out of the stone canyons.
Hauk hated the prison, and he hated the killers who called themselves cops. He never came down here unless there was a damn good reason. Tonight he had a reason. Tonight he had come down to meet someone special. Tonight he had come down to meet Snake Plissken.
IV
LIBERTY ISLAND
IN-PROCESSING
October 23
7:45 P.M.
The inside of the van was dark like a cave. It was all steel inside, cold and slick. It was going to rain; Plissken could feel it in his eye. But he couldn’t tell otherwise, for he was completely closed in-no light, no warmth and only the air that had been locked in there with him.
They had been riding for a long time, and the suspension on the truck was so bad that Plissken was bruised all over from the jolts. He would have slept since he needed the rest, but the continual bouncing plus the heavy chains they had manacled him down with made it impossible.
They had taken him out of the San Francisco Station, just leaving Taylor’s body there for whatever the Fates had in store for it. They never talked to him, except for the occasional exclamation of a rifle butt across his back or head. But it didn’t matter. He knew what was in store for him.
They put him on a hummer and he traveled, coach this time, all the way back to New Jersey. Then they put him in the back of the truck and started driving. Nobody wanted him any longer than they had to have him, for Snake Plissken had a reputation of being slippery. It would have been a lot easier to amply kill him the way they did Taylor, but catching the most wanted criminal in the country alive was a miracle to everyone concerned. They were extremely happy to have Snake, but only for a little while.
There was no trial, of course. Trials had gone out with the USPF. With so much crime and so little money, the country simply didn’t have the machinery or inclination to deal with a legal system. The blackbellies were the legal system-judge, jury and in more cases than not, executioner.
They were sending him to New York. He knew it as soon as they punched up the coordinates to New Jersey way out in San Francisco.
The van stopped moving. He got slowly to his feet, having to work around the chains that ran from his wrists down to his ankles. The ceiling of the truck was lower than his height, so he was forced to stoop. He moved close to the door, ready to kick out and make a bid for freedom if the opportunity arose.
He heard voices outside, but the walls of the van made it impossible to tell what they were saying. Then the door came open.
There were guards, and they all had rifles. All of the rifles were pointing at him.
“Have you heard the one about the traveling salesman?” he asked, and then they were grabbing, pulling him through the opening to fall on the hard ground.
He went down, the fall knocking the wind out of him. Rolling onto his back, he was staring up at black night clouds. A helicopter was passing by just overhead. It feathered down on a landing pad not a hundred feet from him.
The blackbellies pulled him to his feet and led him toward the bunkers set into the great wall. Behind him stood the Statue, grim and massive, pulling silent sentry duty over the fortress of New York, her search-beams stinging the night in long, melancholy streamers.
The bunkers were blank and unimaginative, and stretched out the entire length of the wall. Radar scanners revolved slowly on their roofs. Plissken was taken toward a door. Above it, a sign read:
LIBERTY ISLAND SECURITY CONTROL.
They shoved him through the door to stand in a long hallway. There were more signs on the walls, huge signs.
PRISONERS: NO TALKING
NO SMOKING
FOLLOW THE RED LINE
The red line was painted, none too neatly, right onto the floor.
“Go on,” a voice behind him barked, then he was shoved from the back.
He followed the red line, hoping that it would take him to the pot of gold. He ended up at a guard station. A duty Sergeant with a flabby face and two fleshy cracks for eyes looked up at him.
“Hold up,” the Sergeant said, his eyes drifting down to the clutter on his desk.
Plissken stopped walking, a look of disgust on his face. He was in the midst of blackbelly heaven and it made him feel dirty.
The duty Sergeant was idly flipping through a stack of manila folders, his mouth moving wordlessly. Then he found what he wanted and stopped.
“Mister Snake Plissken,” he said without inflection.
The other guards suddenly came awake, eyes wide, staring at Plissken. They took the safety catches off their rifles and held them a little tighter, a little steadier. Snake shook his head. He wasn’t going anywhere. At least not right away.
“How are you tonight, Plissken?” the man with the folder asked.
“Fabulous,” Plissken responded, and his words were as dead as Bill Taylor.
The man smiled, showing rotted teeth. “Not for long,” he purred.
A gun was jammed into Plissken’s back, pushing him on down the hall. He shuffled on, his chains chinking along the stone floor as he moved.
He was heading toward a doorway. It was the kind of doorway that could lead straight to hell. There was a sign above the doorway, neatly stenciled in blood red letters. It read:
GOODBYE, CHARLIE DON’T THINK IT HASN’T BEEN FUN
He hesitated for only a second before they shoved him into the blackness within.
Hauk had never met Snake Plissken, but he knew about him. He had been Lieutenant Plissken then. Names change to fit circumstances. Hauk had been Big Bob then, and sometimes, Colonel Hauk.
He shared a heritage with Plissken. It was a heritage called Leningrad. When Plissken’s men were storming the city that cold, ugly sunrise, Hauk had been leading a squadron of slant wings on the eastern, industrial section of town. They were drawing fire. And they drew one hell of a lot. They drew enough fire to burn up the world.
Hauk wore a tiny gold earring in his right ear. In another century, sailors used to set earrings like his to show that they had survived a shipwreck. That’s what Colonel Big Bob Hauk thought about Leningrad. And he wanted to meet Plissken, just once. Wanted to tell him that he understood.
The copter touched down, and he watched some guards leading a chained man past him to the holding area. He started to follow the figure with his eyes, but something else caught his attention.
Someone was running toward him. It was the Section Commander, Reh
me.
He climbed out of the chopper without a word to the pilot. He was wearing his dark suit and tie, which fit his mood. His nickel-plated. 38 with the pearl handle rode snugly on his hip. He never came to New York without a gun. Never.
He bent down under the bite of the props, the machine-generated wind whipping his face and hair. Rehme stoop-ran right up to him and began talking. He couldn’t hear a word the man was saying above the roar of the fake wind. He waved his hand and pointed to his ear. Rehme nodded, and they trotted away from the copter which took off again as soon as they were clear. Charly was anxious to get back up there. He had a gold badge to earn.
“What is it?” Hauk asked as soon as the noise died down.
Rehme was panting, out of breath. His blue serge suit fit him like it was a hand-me-down from a gorilla. “We have a small jet in trouble, sir,” he said between gulps of air. “Over restricted airspace.”
Hauk looked hard at him. “Did you say a jet?”
The man nodded.
“Where is he?”
Rehme’s eyes drifted skyward, as if he was looking for the plane. “About seven miles and closing.”
They had reached the air traffic control bunker. Rehme hurried inside. Hauk started to follow, then stopped for a second. He looked up the way Rehme had done, then followed the man through the doorway.
The doorway opened to stairs. The steps down were steep and poorly lit.
Rehme was in the lead, “We can’t reach him,” he said over his shoulder. “There was one transmission about ten minutes ago. He identified as ‘David Fourteen’ and then all of a sudden he was cut off.”
“You can’t raise him?” Hauk asked.
“Not a word.”
The stairs terminated in the air traffic bunker. The room was softly lit, mostly from the bluish green glow of all the instruments that filled the four walls, floor to ceiling.
Hauk didn’t need to ask to know where the commotion was. A group of controllers was huddled around a single radar screen. He moved up on them and looked over some shoulders.
A small blip was moving across the gridded field. One man sat at the console. He was speaking into a microphone,
“David Fourteen, do you copy? Over.”
Rehme walked up next to Hauk, his face grim. Hauk knew that he was wondering why this had to happen on his shift. There was an answering voice on the small speaker, but it was so distorted that it was incomprehensible.
The man with the mike spoke again. “David Fourteen, I’m calling air rescue. Please turn to band 749 and stand by.”
He turned, weary eyed, to Hauk and Rehme. “Still no reply,” he said, shaking his head.
Rehme nodded and pointed to a switch on the console. The man turned and flipped it. “Bayonne, I have a mayday in restricted space.”
The radio crackled back immediately. “New York, I have him,” the tinny voice replied. “Thirteen east. He’s losing altitude fast.”
Hauk turned and stared at Rehme. “Who is he?”
“I don’t know,” Rehme answered in clipped tones.
That wasn’t good enough. “You have the code.”
The man pursed his lips and took a breath. Everyone had turned to stare at him. “There’s no David Fourteen on the computer,” he said softly.
“Unlisted?”
Rehme was nervous now, visibly shaken. He ran a hand across his leathery face. “It’s an unregistered code. We had to call Washington.”
Hauk just stared at the man. That plane could be anything, and it was coming down right in their laps. He didn’t want to make decisions like this, didn’t ever want to make them.
There were several beats of silence, then the radio crackled, making them all jump. A voice was coming up, a voice jumbled with static.
The controller adjusted his tuner. “I think I got ’em, sir,” he said.
Then the voice was there, and Hauk wished that it wasn’t.
“… it’s too late, assholes! All your imperialist weapons and lies can’t save him now. We’re going down. We’re…”
The voice drowned in static again. Hauk felt his insides tightening, stomach churning. The controller was back on the mike, frantic.
“David Fourteen, do you copy? Do you copy, David Fourteen?”
A man called from across the room, from the computer bank. “Code’s coming in, sir,” he called, and his voice had the same knife edge to it as the controller’s.
Hauk and Rehme moved quickly to the computer, the controller’s voice still jangling their ears. They got down close to the screen and watched the typer print it out:
AIRCRAFT IDENT
CODE: DAVID 14
DECODE: AIR FORCE ONE
At that exact instant, Bob Hauk wished that he had died in Leningrad.
V
AIR FORCE ONE
October 23
7:35 P.M.
Mousey, they used to call him when he was in Congress. Mousey or Straddler, as in fences. The Senator from the great State of Alabama used to call him worse. But it didn’t bother him. Now they all had to call him Mister President, and the first thing he did when he got elected was to cut off some very important water projects to the great State of Alabama. The Senator, oddly enough, disappeared on a fishing trip and was never seen again.
He stared out the window of the plane as they cut through the cloud bank, and he was glad that they were airtight. He watched the wings buffet in the turbulence, sometimes narrowing his gaze to take in his own reflection in the cabin window. Mousey.
“President Harker,” said a voice beside him.
He looked up. The stewardess was bending over him. Her dark blue uniform was pressed just so; her hair smelled slightly of jasmine.
“Yes, my dear?” he said in his soft, disarming voice.
“Can I get you a drink, sir?”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, thank you.”
There was something very strange about the woman’s eyes. Harker watched her very carefully, and didn’t like what he saw: LBJ had once said that if a politician couldn’t walk into a room and tell immediately who his friends and enemies were, then he was in the wrong business. This woman didn’t like him. He wondered what she was doing working for him.
The stewardess smiled the kind of smile you put on for the photographer and walked off toward the cockpit. Harker looked idly around the lush cabin. The secret servicemen sat at the big, round imitation wood table playing poker for bullets. They spoke in short, monotone sentences, their eyes, from habit, continually drifting. The two doctors from Walter Reed, whose names he didn’t know or care to know, were quietly getting soused at the small, padded bar. No one else seemed to notice anything odd about the stewardess, so he just let it go.
He stretched, feeling more bored than tired, and his hand hit the briefcase that was propped up on the seat beside him. He looked at it and smiled. It seemed silly to him to have such a large valise for the one small cassette that it held. But that was the government for you.
Bombs. He didn’t know a damn thing about bombs. But his people told him they had one. The Super Flash, they called it. Thermonuclear and clean as a whistle, they could zap out the Ruskies and the Chinks and not leave so much as one particle of radiation in the atmosphere.
He was on his way to the Summit Meeting at Hartford to play the information tape to the Russian and Chinese delegations. He’d give them twenty-four hours to surrender or he’d turn the entire eastern world into a giant firestorm.
Some would call it extortion, but Harker preferred to think of it as compromise. And compromise was something that John Harker knew a lot about.
It was what got him elected to the Presidency when no one thought he could do it. He was considered a New York liberal by his colleagues; he used the same soft-spoken, low key, egghead approach that characterized his boyhood hero, Adlai Stevenson. That sort of thing got good play in New York. Of course, he didn’t share Stevenson’s weakness, his passionate concern for ideals. Ideals jus
t tended to get in the way of the real issues, like reelection.
So, he quietly put in his time in the Congress, mousing his way along. He saved his political chits and sharpened his arrows, and when the right time came along, he moved. The war had everything turned around and in chaos. The country, at least what was left of it, was looking for new leadership. Harker pulled in his lines, worked a few coup d’etats on his enemies, and when all the bloodletting was done, he stood at the top of the hill.
He was it-the Man.
And he liked it. Loved it. He had the power of a nation behind him. He was the power of the nation. He wasn’t Mousey anymore. And the great State of Alabama didn’t have its water projects.
Now he had a bomb that could make him President of the World. He’d go to Hartford, deliver his message, then retreat to the deep shelters at Camp David to await the response. Maybe he’d take that stewardess with him and fuck some sense into her, bang the hatred right out of her eyes. It was an intriguing thought.
The plane suddenly buffeted, nearly throwing Harker out of his seat. He jerked his head toward the cockpit to hear the sounds of a scuffle behind the door.
“What the hell?”
The movement had thrown everyone else to the floor. The secret servicemen were up first, moving to the cockpit. There was confusion as the plane rocked back and forth. Something was wrong, desperately wrong.
“Help me,” Harker called. “God help me!”
The doctors thought he was referring to them. They ran to him, as the agents tried to get through the cockpit door. It was apparently locked from the inside. The movements had steadied somewhat, but the plane was going down, steadily down.
The doctors were on him, checking his pulse, heads darting to the door. One of the secret servicemen was banging futilely against the terrorist-proof steel and wood with the butt of a rifle.
All at once, the cabin speakers came up. Something must have accidentally hit the button. All movement in the cabin stopped dead still, like a freeze frame.
“… and lies can’t stop him now. We’re going down. We’re going down hard.