Page 47 of Air Force One
“If it’s work, I won’t answer.” She pulled it out and looked at the screen. “It’s?—”
“What?”
Mei-Li tapped in. “It’s…airplane tickets. For both of us.”
Mui stopped moving with dinner half transferred into the serving bowl. “It’s what?”
“In six hours. To Washington, DC. Not China.” That had been a terrifying possibility. If forced back there, even their American citizenship might never again set them free.
“Scam or a prank,” Mui finished scraping the wok clean, tossed in a cup of water that flashed to steam as she gave it a quick scrub with a steel brush. Then she spilled that into the sink, ran a swirl of oil over the hot steel, and turned off the burner to let the metal season and cool.
“Our names and traveler information. Prepaid.”
Then she found the proof that it was real and turned it to Mui.
Mui read it twice, then turned very slowly to gather up the serving implements. “It seems,” she took a slow and careful breath that worried Mei-Li even more, “we’re going to DC tonight.”
38
“Let’s go somewhere new.”
Tech Sergeant Jeffrey Wilson didn’t want to go anywhere, except maybe to curl up and die. But he couldn’t show it, not here, not today. Especially not with Major Nelson asking. The man had taken him under his wing as their parents were friends. Not many folks left their small city of Liberal, Kansas. Most stayed for the meat packing plant or the oil field work. Those few who left inevitably went military.
“Sure, you name it.”
At Momma’s suggestion, he’d gone Air Force just as Nelson had. Over a decade younger, he’d had only fleeting memories of Nelson back home in Liberal. What he hadn’t expected was for Nelson to reach down through the ranks to give him a hand. A hand he now wished he could cut off.
“Been to Eddie’s Pizza? Heard good things about it.”
Jeffrey had always been good at writing code. And people in Liberal who were good at code didn’t turn into hackers, they turned into office workers.
“I could use a couple slices.”
Which was what he’d done. Except his office was in the secure hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. The one that had been purpose-built to contain the two 747s that served as Air Force One.
“Out the Virginia Gate, left on Old Alexandria Ferry Road, and it’s just before Woodyard Road on the left. See you in ten.”
No one had gotten any work done today. Everyone had been mesmerized by the unfolding disaster and recovery efforts on the screen. Thankfully he wasn’t the only one who’d had to go barf his guts out. Their job was making sure that Air Force One remained one hundred percent available at all times. And they’d just killed the President.
“Sure.”
Except he alone knew that he was the one who’d killed the President. He’d put the code in place. Not being part of the flight planning or preparation team, he hadn’t known about the changed assignment for President Roy Cole’s tour until they were rolling the plane out of the hangar. Nothing he could ever do would make it right again.
He managed to get into the old Dodge Ram 1500 pickup his parents had passed on to him when he graduated high school. It felt as if he was in an unreal video game, controlling his own body from some remote, faraway place.
Rolling down the window to let in the strange spring-warm air in the depths of winter, he headed south out the Virginia Gate. At the moment he couldn’t even recall why he’d done it. Everything was a blur. Alone for the first time today, the tears came. He kept blinking them away enough to see, but they wouldn’t stop.
Left on Old Alexandria.
The first drops of rain spattered the windshield. But he couldn’t roll up the window. Couldn’t turn on the windshield wipers. He had to tell someone. They’d lock him away forever. His parents would disown him. He couldn’t, but he must. Jeffrey knew he’d never be able to live with what he’d done.
Thankfully, he didn’t have to.
He wasn’t looking to his left where the Andrews Air Force Base East Golf Course ran through the maple and poplar trees just the other side of the security fence. So he never saw what hit him.
The golf ball was traveling at two hundred and seventeen miles per hour—just twenty-three miles per hour slower than the acknowledged world record fastest drive—when it struck Tech Sergeant Jeffrey Wilson in the side of the head. At that speed, it would have easily passed through the driver’s window and probably killed him. Because his window was down, the variable of the glass didn’t enter into what happened. The ball entered close above his left ear, smashed through the temporal bone and the midbrain—effectively cutting his spinal cord—and departed out his right. It had sufficient remaining momentum to punch out through the passenger window.
With his body cut off from his brain functions, his hands and feet went lax. He’d already been driving slowly. His foot slid off the gas pedal. With no additional fuel, the engine dropped to an idle and the truck slowed further. It stopped when it bumped into the end of a low guardrail. A road crew would later determine that there was insufficient damage to bother fixing the small dent.
