The man nodded, gulping.
Hauk let him go and climbed out of the copter, leaving his backpack behind him on the seat. He couldn’t feel his body as he ran. His concentration was all centered. He was moving eyes, moving toward the bunker.
Plissken stared at Slag’s motionless form on the canvas. He couldn’t tell whether the man was living or dead. He was just laying there, eyes staring abstractly at the high ceiling. The crowd was chanting again, but the words were different this time:
“Snake, Snake, Snake!”
He staggered over to the big man, and fell to his knees beside his prostrate form. The countdown watch was still hooked on his unmoving wrist.
“Excuse me,” Plissken said, and unstrapped the thing from Slag’s arm. He looked at it before he put it on, 3:39:22.
He put it on and slowly, painfully, creaked back up to stand on his feet. He raised his arms straight up, fists clenched in the victory salute. He looked defiantly up at the Duke’s box. The man wasn’t even watching him. He was listening intently to one of his men, and from the look on the Duke’s face, he wasn’t getting very good news.
Plissken kept his eye on them, even as he acknowledged the crowd. Something was up. Something big.
When the man finished talking, the Duke jumped up and ran from his box, all of his people hurrying behind. The man who had delivered the message stayed behind in the box. He began waving his arms for silence.
It took a while for everyone to see him, but they finally did. The noise in the room died down to nothing. Plissken couldn’t believe the change. Absolute silence ruled the mammoth room. The crowd got quietly to its feet, listening.
The man spoke loud enough so that his words were driven home on the crowd the way that Plissken had driven home the baseball bat. “The President’s gone!” he yelled. “Brain took him!”
It was like a fire in a madhouse. The whole place went immediately berserk; people were screaming, running in all directions, chairs overturned and flew through the air. These people had had one chance at freedom and it was suddenly snatched away from them.
They weren’t taking it well.
Plissken no longer mattered. Plissken was nothing. Brain was everything. Brain was all that mattered. They wanted Brain. Climbing through the ropes, the Snake limped away with the crowd. He wanted Brain, too. And he figured he knew where he could find him.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
The tracer let out a steady piercing whine. It was at once the most grating and beautiful sound that Hauk had ever heard in his lifetime. He watched, impatient, as Rehme tried to triangulate the signal on the radar screen in the control bunker. The man kept fiddling with the dials, muttering to himself.
“Hurry up,” Hauk said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
The Secretary had wandered in after them and stood off to the side, straightening his tie, waiting to see which way it was going to roll before he committed himself.
“There,” Rehme said, pointing. A faint dot had appeared on the radar scan. “Grand Central Station.”
Hauk banged a fist happily down on the table top. “I knew that son of a bitch was alive!”
All at once, the transmit signal started faltering, breaking up. Then it died, choked off.
“It’s gone,” the Secretary said, and he sounded almost happy.
“The signal only lasts fifteen minutes,” Hauk told him, then turned to stare at Rehme. “Down load the choppers. We’re in a stand-by situation.”
Rehme gave him the thumbs up, and slapped him on the back as he hurried out the door.
“Is that wise?” Prather asked, walking up close to Hauk. “Anybody could have pushed that button.”
Hauk found a chair and sat heavily. “Only Plissken knew there was a safety catch,” he returned, leaning his head back. He would have closed his eyes, but he was afraid that they’d stay closed. He sat up straight, shaking his head. “Well give him a little more time, just to make sure.”
Plissken found his leather jacket back in the dining room. He slipped it on, though the pain in his upper body made it a laborious process. Finding an exit, he limped out into the already darkening sky. He had missed the whole day.
The streets were crazy. People and cars, moving, hurrying; they were directionless, scattered, mindlessly charging around. It was a futile search, a doomed mission. Plissken smiled. He knew exactly how they felt.
He zipped his jacket halfway and turned up the collar. “You’re not going to do it to me again, Harold. No way.”
He moved casually along the sidewalk. He came upon a tiny car painted rust red. A Gypsy was just opening the door to get in. Plissken jumped at the man. Grabbing him by his long hair, he jerked him away from the car and flung him to the ground.
“There’ll be a bus along in a few minutes,” he told the man. Jumping into the car, he crossed the starter wires and roared away immediately. He had a date with a glider.
Hauk sat in his chair and watched the Secretary of State pace the room like he was on guard duty. The man was angry, finally cracking. Good.
“You blew it, Hauk,” Prather said. “We’ve got to go in. Now!”
Hauk smiled up at him. “A little late to be taking charge now, isn’t it, Mister Secretary?”
The man tried to stare him down, but Hauk was in a class by himself when it came to staring contests. “Go in now, Hauk!” the man screamed.
Hauk stood and stretched. “We hold,” he said.
The man got right up in his face. “You’re countermanding my orders!”
Hauk jabbed him with an index finger, pushing him back. “This is my prison,” he said calmly. “I give the orders.”
“I override all that.”
Hauk put his hands on his hips, his right, by design, resting on his gun butt. “Just try,” he said.
“You sent for me?” came a voice from the doorway. They both turned to watch Dr. Cronenberg come ambling into the bunker, hands stuffed down in the pockets of his lab coat.
Hauk pushed past Prather. “Where’s your machine?” he asked.
“At the airstrip,” the old man said, smiling just a touch at the confrontation he had just witnessed, but smart enough to keep his mouth shut about it
“How long would it take to get it back over here?”
Cronenberg moved all the way into the room, nodding hello at the Secretary. “Twenty minutes, give or take,” he said. “But he’ll use the glider, won’t he?”
“If he can,” Hauk answered.
Hauk walked over to the instrument panel and picked up a mobile two-way. He handed it to Cronenberg. “Stay on this radio,” he said. “Talk to me when you get there.”
The doctor stuck the black box into a coat pocket. He looked at Hauk and smiled curiously. “Somehow, I think you’ve grown fond of Mister Plissken.”
“I love him,” Hauk grimaced. “When I see him, I’m gonna give him a big, wet kiss on the lips.”
XXII
2:05:34, 33, 32…
The car died about a block from the World Trade Center. Plissken jumped out and hobbled the rest of the way on foot. He was in bad shape, but he kept moving, not dwelling on it, letting his simple momentum carry him forward.
He hurried across the broken streets and ran into the building without precautions. There was no time. He headed right for the stairs, but stopped long enough to take notice of a beat-up steam car that was sitting directly in the center of the lobby. It hadn’t been there the last time he had.
The climb was awful, never-ending. It turned his bad leg into a mirror reflection of his eye, pain coursing through the electrical connections of his body with every step.
He wound up the endless stairs in total darkness, gasping for breath, sucking in chunks of fetid air, tripping over the decomposing bodies, mindless of the pervasive stench. He was beyond all that. The horror had congealed itself in his mind and had become the norm.
He would get to the top-somehow. He was rapidly losing motor control of his body and his breath came up shallowly, in short gasps. The blow on the head kept him forever dizzy.