Air Force One, Conclusion (1) Flight Crew He has seen four million sunsets. Or rather, he has lived through them, for he has certainly not seen more than a few. In all those years, he wonders, how many times has he actually watched the daylight fade from the sky as the arc of heaven opens to sight and fills itself with stars? He supposes that he must have watched, sometimes, as a boy — idling in a kingdom of high meadows filled with flowers and harbors filled with tall ships. But he cannot be sure. He long ago accepted that he cannot know how true are his memories of that time. That land, long since destroyed, is now nearly lost even to memory. More nearly so, since the five agents whom his men have killed were certainly from that same long-ago land. He did not know them then, but it must have been there, during the last centuries of that great nation’s existence, that his life diverged from theirs. It was there, in his service as a sailor charting the wide savage lands far down the curve of the world, that he discovered the new Powers that had secretly entered the world. It was then that They spoke to him, and to his desire, and it was then that he pledged himself to Their service and thus began a career that has endured while years have fallen around him like leaves and the toy kingdoms of subjugated savages have come and gone like momentary flowers: to be enjoyed for a time and then plucked or uprooted and cast into the furnace. Now he knows that all those many evenings have come down to focus upon this one. His struggle of ten thousand years will be decided tonight, and the prize that he has sought for so long will be his. He thought it was within his grasp when Page and his men were slain, and eagerness made him careless of the small one’s desperate machinations. That lapse, so close to the goal, was nearly catastrophic. He knows now that it was the approach of this event that caused his earlier misgivings, but he was barely able to understand in time to stave off disaster. Yet he has, if barely, passed that final test. He knows that he will not falter again. The moon is high enough now to light the faces of his men as they stand in their ranks near the aircraft’s wall, awaiting his orders. It almost makes him smile to see how carefully they keep their faces impassive, not knowing that he can nevertheless read their hopes and fears as easily as a grown man detects the secret thoughts of a child. How they long for their reward if he is victorious, and dread his displeasure should they fail! Yet, however simple they may seem to him now, their hopes are not unfounded. With his success tonight, the Order that he has served for so long will reestablish its rule for another age of the Earth. The victory, coming so close to absolute defeat, will be his alone. With so many of the others now slain or scattered, these men before him will indeed become the new lords of the earth. And as for him — He looks up to the night sky, filled now with the eternal stars. By the end of this night, he will no longer belong to the Earth at all. While these men who have feared him as a kind of god for so long become as he is now — he will become a god indeed. By the end of this night, he will walk among the stars. He feels the arrival of the moment which he has awaited, and turns to the soldier who stands ready at the communicator, its wiring torn out and patched to allow them unfettered access. The man sees his movement and braces eagerly, eyes glinting in the silver moonlight, awaiting Tennen’s command. "Now," he says. "Skip control surface checks!" the pilot yelled. "Go to emergency start on all engines." The co-pilot glanced left, surprised, but only after hitting the touch-screen icons for rapid start-up of all six engines on each wing. The big engines were not built for speed, or thrust-to-weight ratio — they were only built to last. They would take over two minutes to spool up to liftoff thrust, but the pilot was apparently hoping that, by using three times as many of them as necessary, he could get going a full minute sooner. The copilot knew very well that, on this night, sixty seconds might very well make all the difference in the world. "Roger!" he shouted back, louder than necessary with the engines just beginning to spin, "emergency start all engines!" Three years he had been training for this duty, and finally got the call only a week and a half before. There had been some political shake-up in the ranks, the Generals making sure that no essential personnel had any FC connections, however remote. The result was his phone call. Finally he was out of the sims, and sitting in the enormous cockpit of an actual C-9 Manta — one of no more than twenty in the world. And not just any one of those, either. In fact, this airplane ceased to be a C-9 Manta when it took on its current duty, in very much the same way that he stopped being a normal pilot ten days ago. You needed to get here, but you also needed to be a lot more than that. You need to be hyper-politically correct, with all of the right friends and acquaintances and none of the wrong ones. The men in his old squadron said that you needed to be a pretty serious spook, and maybe that’s what he had become over the years. But the result is that he was here, now. In the flight crew’s case, there’s no special name when you finally get this duty. You just drop off the map — or anyway off all of the normal ones. In fact, you simultaneously become both famous and unmentionable. It’s only the airplane that gets that magic name, and you’ll never again hear anyone, from maintenance crew chief to flight controllers call you a Manta, or a C-9, or "Hang-45" or "Heavy" or anything else like that. From now on they will, always and only, call you Air Force One. He snapped his belts together just in time to hear the pilot shout "Belts and hoses!" although in fact neither of them had actually bothered to wear their helmets, preferring instead the lightweight cordless headsets that will let them move around in the huge cockpit if necessary, without losing touch. "Roger belts and hoses!" "Advise passengers we are rolling! Brake release!" He clapped a hand to the headset’s left earphone, not to let himself hear better but to stop the microphone that it’s attached to from shaking so much. He wanted it to sound good when he made his announcement that would echo to everyone on board, including the honest-to-God-no-bullshit President of the United States. Drop what you’re doin’ folks and put up those tray tables because we are leaving. Takeoff procedures? We don’t need no stinkin’ takeoff procedures! Kick the tires, light the fires, taxi on the yellow, take off on the white — first man up is lead! He dropped his hand to the yoke again just as the brakes actually let go, and felt the takeoff roll begin — at just about the speed that a man could walk. "Come on, baby," the pilot said. The engines were at just over fifteen percent, spooling up at the rate of perhaps a percent every second or two. They could hear radio chatter all over their channel, nobody respecting their air-traffic control channel. They hadn’t even talked to the tower anyway. Everybody on the field knew perfectly well what was going up. You don’t actually need much in the way of air traffic control when you have the airfield ringed with SS men carrying Stinger missiles on their shoulders, ready to give the finger to anybody stupid or unlucky enough to come within five miles. In fact there are probably SS guys in the tower too. Standing between the controllers and their microphones, just to be sure. Five seconds later, they were rolling at something like the speed of a man running. The engines spooling up sounded like nothing else in the world. They sounded — and felt — like they could find the resonant frequency of every bone in your body, every rock on the ground, and every cloud in the sky. "Go baby," the co-pilot echoed, unconsciously. "Go go go!" People from somewhere were yelling about the White House. Jesus, he realized, they’re inside the White House. Walker’s men. Probably Walker himself, stepping over the bodies into a big white beautifully appointed hallway. This wing formerly decorated in Mid Eighteenth Century Neo-Colonial, has now been converted to Early Twenty-First Century Apocalyptic. And if that bastard Walker is there himself, the co-pilot thought, how long will it take him to figure out what’s going on? That man has no fucking soul. The pilot rapped one fist against the yoke, like a man giving the spur to his horse. " Go, baby!" He told himself to keep his eyes on the runway, visible only in their night-vision heads-up display since, on SS orders, all the lights have been turned off. Keep your eyes on the converging lines of that big, four-mile runway, and don’t look at the speed until you take one whole breath and let it out. But then he lost his resolve halfway through exhaling, and looked down at the screen. Forty knots per hour. Twenty-six to twenty-seven percent across the board. They need seventy-two knots to fly. Over the radio from the White House, he hears machine gun fire. "OK," the pilot said. "Get the gear up the second we get off the ground. It’ll give us a little extra." "Damn right," he said. Shit. You’re supposed to say ‘Roger that!’ Sound cool, even while you’re waiting to get toasted. Of course you’re also not supposed to start putting the gear up a foot off the deck. Fifty-five knots. He looked over at the pilot across the huge separation between them. Ten feet that felt like a mile. This isn’t a cockpit, it’s a damned greenhouse. The pilot nodded at him, "We’re gonna make it!" He nodded back, then looked out the big forward window again. He could just see, with his naked eyes through the window up above the HUD, the white lines of the runway centerline, ghost gray in the starlight. They’re starting to tick by at a pretty good rate. Sixty-three knots. "We can rotate at seventy," the pilot says. "We’re light!" Light. Yeah, we only weigh five or six hundred tons. But he’s right: this isn’t the kind of mission AF1 is supposed to fly. There’s supposed to be an international political crisis, mounting tension, days in which to prepare, a couple hundred personnel loaded on board, together with everything they need to stay up for at least a month. Twenty carry-ons apiece folks, bring anything you want! Scores of Command Control and Communications people sitting at their screens, talking to every submarine, missile silo, and mountain redoubt in the country. It shouldn’t be like this — putting off too fast for the goddamn engines to keep up, with nothing but the Boss and a few of the Cabinet aboard. Betrayed in their own capitol by people who were supposed to be Americans. Who were supposed to be helping them put the world back together. Bastards. On the other hand, it does make them a teensy bit lighter. He can’t help wondering if, even now, the lights of vehicles will suddenly appear at the end of the runway. Vehicles, and, no doubt, machine gun fire. But can that really happen? Things don’t just appear. The Secret Service guys, at least, would see them coming a mile away. And, from what he’s seen already — and heard — he’s starting to think those guys can handle just about any damn thing that can possibly happen. In any case, in just a few more seconds, the FC fuckers can show up in busloads, for all he cares. They can show up to crane their necks and wave goodbye, boys, because we are at — sixty-nine knots! "Rotate!" the pilot yells, and they both pull back their yokes together, perfectly coordinated. The engine roar is like a force of nature, as unstoppable now as the wind. Ponderously, the nose begins to lift — and eight breathless seconds later the co-pilot feels the giant rear wheel assemblies leave the ground as well. Even as the pilot shouts "Gear clear!" he’s already hitting the icon to bring them up. He starts to turn toward the pilot, to say something — to yell something — celebratory. Air Force One has gained the freedom of the skies and he knows as certainly as he has ever known anything, that once this great craft has gained the air nothing can bring it back to Earth. But, just as he turns his head, a streak of light catches his eye: a razor-thin line of fire, arcing upward from a point straight ahead of their course. Sam, he thinks immediately. But it’s impossible. Nobody could have gotten a surface-to-air missile battery into the District this soon after the coup. Not even the FC. The streak of light goes straight overhead and he leans back to follow it, watching through the high curved windows. In the last moment, he realizes that his great aircraft was not its target at all: the missile was aimed for Andrews itself. The whole base. One second later the sky in front of them lights up ten times brighter than daylight — each shred of cloud as incandescent as the sun. Mick stands inside the control room, looking at the two corpses still strapped into their chairs. The pilot still has both hands on the yoke, his grip apparently having frozen on it in the moment of death. The yoke moves slightly, echoing the control inputs of the flight computers, and the corpse’s hands and arms move with it. The copilot is slumped backward, his arms hanging down at his sides, staring forever into the sky. Mick reaches up to key his new headset. "Johnny," he says into it quietly, "are you there?" "Johnny?" he asks again. An answer comes back on the second try, but it consists of barely modulated static. Somehow, they’ve already gotten into position to do jamming. That could mean they got lucky, or that their helicopters are faster than Johnny thought. It could also mean that they know exactly where the tank is. That would be — bad. Lowering his hand from the headset’s earphone, Mick looks up. They’ve completed the eastward turn, so at least they’re headed back toward the Wolverine. But if Johnny is already out of the picture — The moon has risen high enough now to provide some light, but the mummified faces of the flight crew are still lit in odd and occasionally changing colors by displays on the long touch-screen control panel. As Mick looks at the panel a red light begins to blink on an area close to him: the copilot’s screen. He takes a cautious step forward and sees that the blinking area contains a word. It says "intercom". He advances further, leaning close to the copilot’s body to touch the screen. Proximity to the corpse doesn’t bother him any more — if he can use a headset that the copilot’s been wearing for the last ten years the least he can do is relax about standing next to the guy. Anyway the dead have hardly any smell — maybe the faintest trace of leather and pepper. And seeing the copilot out of the corner of his eye illuminated by the moonlight, it easy to imagine that he’s leaning past a man who has simply dozed off on his watch. He’s just helping his buddy out by taking care of a little problem here on the panel without waking the poor guy up. It’s easy to imagine himself in one of their green-bag flight suits. "Hello?" he says to the panel. "Hello, Mick," Tennen’s voice replies. The innkeeper straightens up slowly looking at the screen as though if he were to wait long enough, it might eventually show him a picture. If Johnny were still in control, it probably would. "Hello, Colonel" he says again. "Are you enjoying the flight?" "Less than I had expected to," the voice replies, and Mick smiles. "If I may," Tennen continues, "I’d like a chance to explain." "Oh, you want to talk?" Mick feigns surprise. "Why’s that? Are you low on ammunition? Force field batteries getting low?" "I would point out," the old man says coldly, "that I have not harmed you, your family, or your friends. You, however, have killed at least fifteen of my men. Many of them in a particularly gruesome fashion, I might add — unless you prefer to believe that they for some reason lost consciousness in the very moment they began to fall. I believe that they had at least a minute and a half of inconceivable terror before their deaths. "Of course I am aware," he continues, anger barely in check, "that you must have been frightened by the gunplay. I am aware that you probably believe that I have lied to you by concealing my identity. You certainly deserve an explanation, which, in hindsight, I should have given to you much earlier. I accept that it was my mistake, not your fear and ignorance, which cost my men their lives. "In any case — I am asking for the chance to explain now. And I do think that my men’s lives should be worth at least that much. Do you?" "I didn’t have much of a choice, did I!" Mick says. "Neither did my men," Tennen’s voice replies instantly. "Neither did I. None of us have ever had much of a choice, have we? Then perhaps we should all be a little slower to make judgments — judgments that result in irreversible consequences!" Mick turns away from the console to look aside, out the broad windows at the towering cloudscapes, moonlit heights fading down into darkness. An unexpected hand, thrust against the middle of his back. Falling through the sky. "The aircraft," he says, "has been programmed to overfly the Wolverine. When we get there, I want to see that my wife and guests are all OK, and free to leave. It’ll take us just under two hours to get there. Until then you will follow my orders absolutely—" "Lieutenant—" "I am not a Lieutenant, Sir!" the innkeeper interrupts. "Do you hear this?" He taps the President’s credit-card-shaped plastic key against the console. "That is the key to the crypto-safe that you need to get into to gain control of every weapons systems that this aircraft knows about. And do you hear this?" With his left hand he slams the butt of the M-16 against the console’s edge. "That is an automatic weapon that I took from one of your men. You might say that my friend and I disarmed him. We killed him pretty dead in the process, but that’s OK because we had no choice, just as you had no choice in the matter of impersonating an Air Force Officer or murdering a few Federal agents. "And by the way," he continues, voice rising angrily, "I think it’s just great that we can all feel so good about what we do! Since we apparently can’t control ourselves and none of it has any moral consequences!" "But it does have some practical consequences, Sir. Namely, that there is no fucking way that you can get what you want without my permission. If you or your remaining men feel that you have no choice but to try something other bizarre shit — and if your uncontrollable actions so much as upset me, then I will feel that I have no choice but to put a bullet through my Armageddon ATM card here. "I will then have no choice but to expend the rest of my ammunition on the navigational decision-making computers, which my friend has informed me are here in the control room, after which point I will assume manual control of the aircraft, open the reactor to full power, and fly as directly as possible into the earth. And let me tell you, if you liked my little spin-recovery, you are just fuckin’ gonna love this. "You know," he says, suddenly thoughtful, "I think I might actually be able to get her up to four hundred knots before we hit, as long as I don’t worry about sustaining a little structural damage along the way. Which, under the circumstances, seems reasonable. I’m pretty sure the crypto safe won’t survive the crash, but I’m damned sure that no people on board will survive it. "I’m also pretty sure that when the reactor comes apart it’ll make the wreckage glow like a watch-dial for just about the next thousand fucking years." "So, basically," he continues more calmly, "I’m more or less planning that our crash will kill everything down to bacteria for a few miles around, including your poor soldiers, and you, and me. And I really don’t care, Mr. Tennen. So please don’t call me ‘Lieutenant’, and absolutely do not forget who’s in charge." Mick stops to take a long breath. "I really hope that’s perfectly clear." "Yes, it is," Tennen’s voice comes back after a moment. "Good," Mick says, letting his breath out. "That’s good." "OK," he continues after a pause. "First, stop the jamming. Second, land your remaining helicopters on the aircraft and tie them down. Then you march all your men into the main entry hall where my friend with the ceiling-mounted machine guns can watch everybody. Including yourself.
Copyright © 2000 Michael Goulish |