At the bottom of the pile, was Charlie, and he wasn’t being helped to his feet. Megan collapsed at that point, and the ambulance was brought up. The agent ran back over, and spoke to us from the track side of the fence. Marilyn and I rushed over.
“He’s alive, sir!” he exclaimed.
“How… what…”
“He’s alive! He’s all messed up, but he’s alive. I heard them say that he needed to be transported to Pittsburgh. They are going to try to send him out by air.”
I pointed back at the mess. “Go back and offer them Marine One! Go!”
He ran back, and I couldn’t wait any longer. I tried to climb over the fence, only to slip back. It was getting to be a real bitch, this getting old. A different agent stopped me and said, “No, sir, you can’t go!”
“Get out of my way!”
He grabbed me and kept me where I was. “No, sir! You’ll just be in the way! They know what they’re doing! You have to stay here!”
“SHIT!” I stepped back and put an arm around my wife. I knew he was right, but I simply hated it. I grabbed Doctor Tubb and pushed him towards the fence. “See what you can do!” He ran off and joined the agent. I could see that Charlie was on his side, and wasn’t moving, but they had his helmet off. He was being worked on by a couple of EMT types, and then they cleared the way and backed the ambulance up. They pulled a stretcher out, along with a back board. One of the ambulance personnel was talking on the radio.
The agent who had gone up to the wreck and the ambulance returned. He had Megan in tow, along with Tubb. “They have a Life Flight coming in to medevac him. They are prepping him for transport now. I am told the odds are good if they can get him to the hospital, but he’s in serious condition.”
I looked at the scene, and then at the agent. I nodded and said, “Yeah, okay, but we need to follow them. As soon as this Life Flight takes off, we are next.”
“I’ll set it up, sir.”
He began speaking into his sleeve mike. Marilyn was standing there crying, and she had Megan with her, wrapped up in each other’s arms, and Megan was practically hysterical. I gave them the latest news, and we simply waited, the seconds ticking by like hours. Charlie was loaded onto the stretcher and placed in the ambulance, which was driven into an empty section of the parking area. We heard the helicopter rotors, and watched as an air ambulance landed, and he was transferred. A minute after the Life Flight helicopter took off, Marine One landed, and we hustled over. Marilyn and Megan were still wrapped around each other, so we took Megan with us.
We had to wait for the Life Flight helicopter to lift back off the helipad at the hospital before we could land. There were a lot of people staring as we came in, but we were just directed towards the Emergency Room, and that was as far as we could go. Charlie was hustled straight into their trauma center, but just like anybody else, we had to hang around the waiting room.
My day job began to intrude at about this point. The Secret Service must have been in contact with the staff back at the White House, because almost immediately a cell phone rang and one of the agents handed it to me. It was Frank Stouffer, my Chief of Staff. “How’s he doing, Mister President?”
“Jesus! How did you…”
“Sir, please! This is the White House. We know everything, remember! I heard from the Secret Service.”
I snorted out a laugh at that. “Yeah. We don’t know yet. They airlifted him to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. We flew in after that. He’s in the emergency room now. We just don’t know.”
“Will and I will be there in a couple of hours. Under no circumstance are you to say a word to the press,” he told me.
“Frank, there’s no need…”
“Mister President, with all due respect, shut up! This is already on the news. If the press isn’t already in the parking lot, they will be within minutes. Will has promised to inflict bodily harm on everyone if you go on the news.”
I muttered something under my breath, but the rational part of me knew he was right. “Okay, Frank, see you in a few hours.”
My Chief of Staff and my Communications Director were prescient beyond belief. I handed the phone back to the Secret Service agent and said, “We need to get out of the lobby.”
“Working on it, sir. We should be able to move into a conference room in a bit. It’s Sunday, so a lot of the administrators aren’t here…”
He hadn’t even finished his sentence when the door to the parking lot swished open. Bright lights and a camera barged in, and a loud voice yelled out, “IS HE DEAD YET? CAN I GET A PHOTO OF THE BODY? WHERE’S THE BODY?!”
Marilyn shrieked and fainted dead away. I turned towards her and saw her slumping down, and an agent next to her grabbing her and picking her up. He looked a bit mystified, and the head agent swore, and he pointed at two agents and ordered, “Shut them down!” To the rest of us he said, “On my six!” and then he stormed through a door into the interior of the hospital, into an empty hallway and around a corner, leaving the yelling reporter behind us. Once out of the view of the lobby room, he turned to the agent I knew was his second in command. “I don’t care if it is Sunday, somebody must be running this place. I want them here, now, and their head of security. We need to get a handle on this immediately!”
Things weren’t quite as dire as they seemed. Marilyn came to and was set back on her feet. After about thirty seconds a secretary type appeared and led us all deeper into the hospital, and deposited us in a large conference room. A couple of minutes later an administrator showed up, and he and the Secret Service made the arrangements they needed. Meanwhile, I got a report that the rest of the motorcade was already well under way at top speed here to the hospital, and would probably arrive here in about a half hour. Also, Frank and Will had been driven over to the Naval Observatory and had been picked up by HMX-1 and were being flown up.
I pulled some chairs from around the conference table and pulled them to the side, and set Marilyn and Megan down, and then I sat between them. My wife was still a little out of it, and Megan was staring at everyone scurrying around. In front of us order began to arise from chaos. Doctor Tubb, and a nurse took one look at Marilyn and gave her a sedative. Within a couple of minutes she was lights out, and we loaded her on a gurney they hauled in and set in the corner, and covered her with a blanket. She didn’t need to be involved. We still didn’t know what was happening to Charlie. Half an hour later the motorcade arrived, and we got into high gear. More agents and staff came in.
It was kind of odd, just sitting there and watching what was going on. It was a Sunday afternoon, and America was relatively quiet that weekend. We weren’t invading anybody, we weren’t in the midst of a budget crisis, and we didn’t have any major scandals going on. It was just business as usual, and the First Lady and I had managed to take the afternoon off. Megan simply commented, “This is unbelievable!” as everybody scurried around.
After Doctor Tubb took care of Marilyn, I asked him, “Doc, can you find out what’s going on with Charlie? We haven’t seen anybody to tell us.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll look into it.”
“Find out where the best hospital is. I mean, if there’s a hospital or doctor or treatment, we’ll do it.”
He hesitated a second, and replied, “This is the place you want him to be at, sir. Pittsburgh is really good. If it had been you in an accident near here, this is where we would have taken you.”
“Okay, thank you. Now, please find out about Charlie.”
He nodded and took off out the door, leaving the nurse to check on Marilyn. Suddenly I felt underdressed. We were still wearing our shorts and flowered shirts, and Megan was in muddy jeans and a t-shirt. I caught somebody’s eye and he came over. “At some point I am going to be on television, and right now I look like a muddy tourist in Maui. Any chance we can scrounge up some decent clothing?”