He’d simply dumped his bags in the first row of seats. The FAA wouldn’t approve, he knew, but the FAA didn’t look in his plane.
Jordan slid the door open, stepped into the main cabin, and froze at the sight of a man pointing a pistol at him. He recognized the face and he staggered back a step.
“Subsonic dum-dum bullets,” Boomer said, waggling the pistol slightly.
“It’ll make a big hole in you but won’t go through the skin of the plane and depressurize us.”
“What are you doing here?” Jordan demanded.
“I was in the cargo compartment. You really ought to stow your gear,” Boomer said.
“What do you want?”
“Did you know Earl Skibicki? I think you knew his mother, Maggie.
Pearl Harbor? 1941?”
Jordan didn’t say anything.
“You knew her, right?” Boomer insisted. He cocked the pistol.
“Yes.” Jordan swallowed.
“What do you want?”
“Did you know about her daughter getting killed?”
“What do you want?” Jordan repeated, his eyes casting about, searching for anything he could use as a weapon.
“Did you know about her daughter. Earl Skibicki’s sister, being strafed by Japanese planes and killed on the morning of December seventh, 1945?” Boomer asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you know about Skibicki’s half-brother — your son — being killed in Vietnam in the la Drang Valley?”
“What?” Jordan said, his eyes stopping their search and fixing on Boomer.
“What did you say?”
“You didn’t even keep track of your own son, did you?” Boomer said.
“Maggie told me you didn’t, but I couldn’t believe that. That a man wouldn’t even give a shit about his own flesh and blood. You just don’t give a shit about anyone, do you?”
Boomer shook his head.
“All the things you’ve done over the years. All the bodies. All the pain and suffering.
You are a sorry sack of shit, Mr. Senator.”
“What do you want?” Jordan said.
“The diary,” Boomer snapped. He smiled as Jordan’s eyes flickered toward his snakeskin briefcase.
“You’re stupider than I thought. You should have destroyed it, but I knew you’d still have it. You wanted to keep it because you never know, right? Might need it some day?”
Boomer grabbed the briefcase with his free hand and set it down on a seat next to him. He pulled out a knife and cut through the locked flap, pulling out Hooker’s diary. He stuffed it inside his parka.
“But that’s not really why I came here,” he said.
“I really wanted you.”
“We can work this out,” Jordan said.
“The Line is finished.
I did the right thing. I helped the President and General Maxwell too—”
“Spare me the bullshit. You don’t have much time left.
Better use it to pray. You tried to kill me once. Now I’m returning the favor.”
“I beg of you — I can make it right — I can—”
“You can’t make the dead come back to life,” Boomer said. He tucked the gun into his belt, and Jordan breathed a sigh of relief.
Boomer took one step closer to the senator, then spun, his right leg lashing out and the boot slamming into Jordan’s chest, forcefully expelling the air Jordan had just so gratefully inhaled.
Jordan crumpled down the floor, gasping in pain as the jagged edges of his broken ribs cut into his lungs.
“Please,” he gasped.
“Please.”
“Shut up,” Boomer snapped. He pulled a parachute out of the cargo bay and buckled it on over his parka, making sure all the straps were tight. Then he turned back to Jordan lying on the floor.
“Come on, senator. You’ve got a plane to fly,” Boomer said, grabbing the other man by the lapels and pulling him into the cockpit.
Jordan tried to scream as Boomer threw him into the pilot’s seat, but the act of screaming hurt as much as the movement. Boomer carefully buckled up the senator’s shoulder straps, making sure he was securely fastened to the seat.
“What are — you — doing?” Jordan managed to say, his hands gripping the armrests of his seat so hard the whites of his knuckles showed.
In response. Boomer knifed down with the outer edge of his right hand onto the senator’s left wrist. Bones cracked with an audible snap.
Before Jordan fully realized what had happened. Boomer did the same to the senator’s right wrist.
“Oh God!” Jordan screamed, his hands dangling helplessly.
“Please, please, don’t do this!”
“Have a good flight,” Boomer said. He reached over and flipped off the autopilot. Then he jammed the yoke all the way forward and the plane nosed over. Grabbing a hold of the doorjamb. Boomer pulled himself into the main cabin, where he hit the emergency opening on the crew door. It swung open and slammed tight against the outside of the plane. He could hear the senator screaming in the cockpit, and as he pulled himself out of the plane. Boomer idly wondered if the man had the guts to try and use his broken limbs to regain control.
Boomer was out into the wind stream and he spread his arms and legs until he stopped tumbling and was stable. He pulled his ripcord and gained positive control of his canopy.
He looked about and spotted the Learjet 2,000 feet below him, still in a steep dive. It hit into the snow-covered slopes of the Green Mountains and exploded.
“No fucking guts,” Boomer said as he turned his chute away from the mountains toward his landing zone and waiting jeep.
EPILOGUE
Eisenhower Hall is the West Point equivalent of a student center. It houses several restaurants and meeting areas and it is there dances for underclass cadets are held on weekends.
It also houses a 4,500-seat auditorium and for the past twenty minutes the Corps of Cadets all 4,200 strong — had been filing in with military efficiency, filling the seats from front to rear., General Maxwell, the recently confirmed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff settled into a back row seat and watched the process. By protocol he shouldn’t be in the auditorium. He should wait until all others were seated, then make an entrance, requiring all inside to pop to their feet at attention and hold it until he gave them at ease. But he wasn’t the reason the cadets were here this evening. He was neglecting protocol, because he wanted the young men and women in front of him to realize the seriousness of this evening.
Down the back aisle from him were several members of the press corps from New York City. They were a bit confused by the lack of protocol also, but for a different reason.
They were here because Maxwell was here. A short press release issued by the public affairs officer at West Point earlier in the day had simply stated that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be giving a lecture to the Corps of Cadets. With the MRA still a hot issue, even in modified form, in the Senate, the reporters were hoping for a good quote or two from Maxwell.
The previous superintendent had surprisingly resigned for “health” reasons just after the new year. The new superintendent was a hard-charging young two-star direct from command of the 101st Airborne Division — General Turnbull. And it was Turnbull who took the stage as the last of the cadets took his or her place exactly on time.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the Superintendent of the United States Military Academy,” the cadet adjutant announced.
A sea of gray dutifully rose in front of Maxwell and remained at rigid attention.
“At ease,” Turnbull boomed out, disdaining the microphone.
He looked toward the rear, where he knew Maxwell was in the shadows.