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, Rehme.
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.”