Mike McQuay: Escape From New York

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.

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 just 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.