The big wall was in touching distance of the one they stood on. A line was slithering down for them, a winch line, creaking on wheeled pullies.
Reaching out, they grabbed the line. Plissken turned his back to the big wall, waiting for the Duke as the President wrapped his hand around the thing.
“Hang on!” Plissken yelled and, with a jerk, the line started creaking back up the surface of the wall, taking the President with it.
Plissken looked down at his lifeclock. 0:01:33, 32, 31. He looked straight up. The line had made the top of the wall. Hands were helping Harker over the top. The line started back down again.
Suddenly a flash. It was the Duke, midway through the car forest. His rifle came up, firing. Bullets began exploding all around Plissken; he dove, rolling on the bridge, getting behind a dead car.
The aim went up, up for the guards. The President hit the ground, flattening himself on the wall top. One of the guards moved to shield him with his body and was picked off, his lifeless form falling the fifty feet to the bridge below. The other went spinning away, disappearing off the other side.
The Duke saw the dangling wire, went running for it. Plissken got back on his feet, waiting until the Duke got to his vantage point, then he jumped up on the hood of the Ford that was hiding him and dove onto the Duke from behind.
They went down hard, the rifle skittering away across the concrete. He was atop the Duke, the man stunned by the fall. Grabbing the back of the man’s head, he slammed his forehead into the hard ground, a muffled cry issuing from the Duke’s mouth.
There was no time.
Plissken climbed off the man and jumped back up on the retaining wall. He dove for the line on the big wall, catching it part of the way up.
He could hear the President calling from the top of the wall. “Pull it up,” he was yelling. “Hurry.”
With a jerk, he felt the line moving upward. He looked back down to the ground. The Duke was up on hands and knees, blood streaming from his forehead into his face and eyes. He was crawling toward the rifle.
Plissken looked up. There was a long way to go. He looked back down. The Duke had picked up the rifle and was wiping the blood out of his eyes so he could see. He was taking aim at a sitting duck.
His eyes traveled up again. The President, face set in a grimace, was leaning over the edge of the wall. He had one of the guard’s rifles in his hands. He fired, pulling the automatic’s trigger and not letting go.
The ground kicked up all around the Duke, and he exploded blood from twenty places on his immense frame. He danced with the bullets, as they kicked him, already dead, through a lifeless mazurka.
Finally he reeled on one foot, falling in a heap to the bloody pavement, and lay still.
The line got Plissken to the top. The President helped him over. “Thanks,” he rasped, then, still holding the rope, went over the other side, motioning for the winch operators to bring him down.
As he descended, he saw Hauk looking up at him, then he saw a jeep carrying the old doctor and that damnable machine screech to a halt next to him.
Cronenberg jumped out of the jeep and hurried around to the machine, bringing out those long rubber hoses that had planted the bombs in him to begin with.
Ten feet from the ground, Plissken let go of the rope and dropped the remaining distance. He came down hard on his bad leg, buckling to the ground with the pain. He looked at his watch. 0:0:14, 13, 12…
Struggling to his feet, he moved toward the machine, limping, falling, pulling himself along the ground with the power left in his arms. He got up, leaning on the jeep for support. Hauk rushed over to help him. He pushed him away.
Cronenberg had flipped on switches and was holding out the tubes. “Turn on the power.” he told one of the blackbellies.
He was fading in and out, threatening to faint. The sound of a generator. The machine whirred to blathering life. He made it to Cronenberg. The man was smiling at him, preparing to place the tubes on his neck. Then, a hand pushing them away.
Hauk’s voice. “The tape, Plissken.”
Plissken put his hands in his pockets, digging, grasping. They wouldn’t work right. He couldn’t feel anything.
“Jesus!” Cronenberg said. “Five seconds, four, three…”
He pulled his hand out and it was there, lying in his feeble grasp. Hauk grabbed it and moved aside. Cronenberg’s tubes on his neck, the man’s weathered face showing concern.
The machine buzzed loudly, then was silent. It clicked off. Plissken’s eyes drifted down to the watch. It read zeroes all the way across the dial.
Everything stopped. They all stared at one another-waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
“That’s it,” Cronenberg said at last.
XXIV
LATE EVENING
So, they took him back to the bunkers and cleaned and bandaged his wounds. They gave him a cup of coffee, his amnesty papers and a pack of cigarettes; then acted like he should slither back under whatever rock he crawled out of.
But it wasn’t that simple with Snake Plissken. He had looked for Hauk, but the man had disappeared right after the rescue and hadn’t reappeared since. He smiled to think that maybe the man was afraid of him, afraid of his death threat. Somehow, though, he didn’t think that was the case.
It didn’t matter anyway. A good bit of the anger had been whipped out of him.
He walked around in the chill night air, smoking one cigarette after another, figuring where he’d go now that he had survived hell. The President was huddled under a blanket by a mobile radio truck. A doctor stood beside him, just in case he wanted one. Hauk’s man, Rehme, was working on a tape recorder that was hooked up outside the truck.
The Snake wandered over to listen. Rehme was talking to a half-listening John Harker.
“We radioed ahead, sir,” he said in a patronizing tone. “They know the situation and they’re waiting for your broadcast.”
Plissken got up close. The secret servicemen that came from God knows where stiffened, hands reaching inside of sports jackets.
“It’s all right,” the President said, his eyes traveling up to meet Snake’s.
Plissken needed attention, and he needed sleep. But right then he needed to suck on that cigarette and play the game all the way out to the end.
“I want to thank you,” the President said. “Anything you want, just name it.”
“A moment of your time,” the Snake replied.
The President moved his head very slowly to glance at Rehme.
“Thirty seconds, sir,” the man said.
Harker shrugged. “Yes?”
Plissken took a drag, let it out. He wasn’t much with words. “We lost some people back on the bridge,” he said, and he couldn’t separate New York from Leningrad. They both formed some horrible amorphous lump in his mind. “They died getting you here. I… I just wondered how you felt about it.”
The man answered perfunctorily, immediately. “I’m very grateful,” he said.
Plissken didn’t know what he wanted to hear, but that wasn’t really it. There was a void, a vacuum that he desperately needed to fill if he was to survive as anything even resembling a human being. “Yeah?” he said.
The President spoke again, mechanical, like a speech. “The nation appreciates their sacrifice.”
Plissken just stared at him. The man had already forgotten about it, had already shuffled it into the back dusty corners of his brain where he’d never have to take it out and look at it again.
“I’m really sorry,” he said, looking at the tape recorder. “But I have to go.”
The Snake knew that he was out of his element with the man. He simply nodded and limped away. Then he saw Hauk, standing by the bunker. They locked eyes and Plissken made his way over to the man.
“Gonna kill me now. Snake?” he asked.