Ahead of her, Omari still muttered in Arabic.
Then he unbuckled and stood up. In his hand, he held what looked like a cell phone, powered on. He said, much louder now, “La ilaha illa Allah.” Then again. The other man chanted along with him.
Suddenly it hit her: Mohammed had not sought out Omari for help. Mohammed had been a courier to Omari, bringing him a weapon. Brett had been right: they had planned the terrorist attack at the event, but the chaos had destroyed their timeline. Oh, Brett, she thought. Oh, Brett.
The plane circled lower as it approached the center of Manhattan. Ellen realized then what she had to do. Why, perhaps, God had given her no children to leave behind. Why she had been fated to marry a patriot and a military lifer. She was one, too: a soldier in a war. And she had to act now, before they hit downtown.
The other passengers looked around uncomfortably, paralyzed by a peculiar inability to overcome their political correctness. She unbuckled her seat belt and edged to the aisle. Then, she got up calmly and walked toward Omari. Before she could speak, Mahmoud cut her off, grabbed her hand, twisted it behind her back, then threw her to the ground. “He has a bomb!” she shouted.
Secret Service agents appeared behind Omari almost instantaneously; two agents pulled guns in the press cabin itself. Omari held up his phone. “All I want is to negotiate,” he said. “President Prescott will speak to me. I know he will.”
The agents froze. Omari had been invited by the president. This had to be an enormous mistake, something that could be worked out.
From the floor of the airplane, Ellen looked up at Omari. He was lying. She could see it. He was stalling for time. No more time, Ellen thought to herself. No more talk, negotiations, games. A line from her past crept into her head for some reason: No loitering, cadet. She almost smiled as she remembered.
“Take a bullet for you, babe,” she whispered to herself. Then she pushed herself to her feet, launched herself past a startled Mahmoud, and grabbed Omari’s phone.
Air Force One exploded at approximately two thousand feet. The daylight went bright, then brighter, a blinding green flash in the sky forcing people miles from the detonation to look away. The blast wave hit almost simultaneously with the light—those nearest the blast would never register it. The blast blew through skyscrapers, tearing them down sideways, their glass facades disintegrating almost instantaneously. It tore through Washington Heights, obliterated full blocks. It set the trees on fire through Fort Washington Park. Tenements blew apart like a house of cards. The shock wave exploded through the streets, disintegrating peoples’ clothes, ripping the flesh from their muscles, tearing their faces open, turning them to ash nearest the bomb site; further away, debris from the buildings killed hundreds more.
Tens of thousands of military men and women still in the midst of cleanup at the George Washington Bridge were killed almost instantaneously; thousands more of them were wounded, doomed to radiation poisoning, burned beyond recognition by the nuclear wind in the aftermath.
General Brett Hawthorne saw none of it. He was staring at the wall of his cell near Battery Park when the bomb went off; he merely saw the sky grow light.
He turned to stare into the distance. He saw the mushroom cloud rise above the profile of the new Freedom Tower. “Oh, no,” he whispered. “Oh, God, please, no.”
Then he fell to his knees and buried his head in his hands, screaming silently.
Epilogue
“GOOD EVENING, MY FELLOW AMERICANS.”
The former governor of Michigan looked directly into the camera. She spoke from the East Room of the White House. The tears in her eyes were genuine; she forced them down.
“I know many of you may not know me; few Americans bother to learn the name of the vice president of the United States. But my name is Allison Martin. A few hours ago, I was sworn into office as the president of the United States.
“By now, I’m sure you have heard the news from New York City, where our nation’s greatest city has once again been struck by the scourge of terrorism. I am also sure that you have heard that the president of the United States, Mark Prescott, was the target of that attack, along with hundreds of thousands of the citizens he loved so much.”
Her green eyes, hardened by years in the political limelight, glinted. She had earned the lines around those eyes, the worry lines around her mouth. Allison Martin had fought her way to the top of American politics. She had done so not as a token woman on a vaguely inspirational ticket, but as her party’s chosen ideological warrior. Allison Martin, they said, backed down from no one. She would keep Mark Prescott honest.
Her enemies had questioned her qualifications, her achievements. They had implied that her sex had elevated her to the second highest office in the land; they ignored her degree from Harvard, her law degree from Columbia. They had overlooked her.
Her speaking style was mechanical. She was unlikable. She did not have the charm of Mark Prescott; she did not inspire. She was, as she liked to think of herself, a grinder. She did not, she reminded her subordinates, tolerate losing.
“I would give my own life to have preserved Mark Prescott’s. Mark Prescott was a visionary leader, a public servant for his entire life. He died serving the public, standing for you. He lived for unity, not divisiveness. He lived to bring people together.
“We will live for him, and for his memory. We will keep our commitments, and the commitments of President Prescott. The commitment to build. The commitment to love one another. Mark Prescott’s visionary sense of Americanism will live on in our hearts, and in our policy. What Mark Prescott brought out in us, we will magnify; what Mark Prescott uncovered in us, we will allow to shine forth.”
Her voice rose a pitch in urgency and tenor. “Mark Prescott was always honest with you. And I will be no less honest. Here is what we know tonight. We know that there was an assassination attempt on President Prescott today at New York Harbor; it was thwarted through the diligent work of our security on the ground. We do have a man in custody.
“Shortly after the attempted attack on the president, the president’s security team moved him aboard Air Force One, where he was accompanied aboard by media and political figures. We have released a full list of those aboard the plane, all of whom lost their lives in today’s tragic terrorist attack.
“The White House has been in negotiations with the State of Texas over Texas’s refusal to abide by federal immigration law, and Governor Bubba Davis’s unconstitutional use of state troops to attack a sovereign nation outside the borders of the United States. President Prescott had invited a representative of Governor Davis to New York City to discuss possible solutions. That representative, Ellen Hawthorne, is suspected of having smuggled and detonated a small-yield nuclear weapon aboard Air Force One.
“This aggression will be answered. As President Abraham Lincoln once did, I now appeal to all loyal citizens to aid the effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our national union.
“Now, life will undoubtedly change in the short term. Our intelligence shows that the highest levels of our government have been penetrated by those who sympathize with the extremism of Ellen Hawthorne and the State of Texas. This is a time for unity, not disunity, and we must steel ourselves for the battle ahead.