Page 30 of Air Force One
“Where have you been, Sergeant?”
“We were on a training run when we were told to redirect to make an emergency civilian pickup at the South Lawn.”
“Oh. The President, Roy that is, is dead. Sarah’s just fine. The Bear is fifteen kilometers off the Delaware coast. We need to go there. Would you like the coordinates?”
She didn’t need her reference chart to understand his expression; Miranda had seen it too many times over the years.
“I’m not crazy. I’m autistic.”
The phrase was her only defense, though it rarely seemed to help. It was like…like being autistic was the same as being infected with a highly communicable plague. Pointing out she wasn’t infectious never helped either.
He leaned back in his seat and swung his microphone into place. After a short back-and-forth, his mouth shifted—it became tight and formed a straight line. For that she had to check her emoji page and was pretty sure it matched grim. It might also be angry, but she couldn’t tolerate looking at his eyes to see if they’d narrowed.
Whatever his expression meant, the White Hawk tilted strongly nose down and they raced eastward.
25
“We’re not authorized to land on a US Coast Guard ship.”
“But you know how?”
“We’re Marines, ma’am.”
Holly took that as an affirmative. “So how about if I open the door and throw your Marine ass down onto that boat? Then they’ll have to come and get you, right? Of course, you might get a little broken along the way, as we’re still thirty feet up, so I’ll apologize for that up front because that’s the kind of considerate gal I am.”
He grabbed her wrist and applied pressure that would make any civilian collapse. She knife-handed him in the solar plexus, not very hard, just enough to get his attention.
In answer, he reached for his sidearm. Unbelievable.
Holly didn’t break his wrist—quite. She did take his Sig Sauer M18 and jam the nose of it up under his chin. “Please tell me you aren’t this stupid in your personal life.” She turned to Andi. “Hit the intercom, Army, do your thing.”
Andi didn’t hesitate in picking the handset from beside the President’s chair that connected her to the cockpit. “Marine, proceed with landing on that ship. Your authorization is that there’s a dead President here and the new President has sent our team in to find out why. Once there, you will remain on deck until we give you permission to depart. Are we clear, Marine?”
She listened for a few seconds, nodded to herself, and hung up.
Holly gave her a thumbs up and Andi stuck out her tongue.
The Marine crew chief gurgled something.
“Whups! Sorry.” She safetied his weapon and slammed it back into his holster. His glare as he rubbed at his chin made her mutter to Andi, though loudly enough for him to overhear. “No pleasing a Marine.”
“Never was.” Andi smiled this time.
The helo did the strange hover and side-slip that was indicative of a helo landing on a moving ship. Holly tipped her head at Jeremy and Miranda, then shared a nod with Andi. In a lively sea, it was an incredibly dangerous and precise helo technique that made landing a jet on an aircraft carrier not look so tricky. Andi would have flown this trick probably hundreds of times during her service, and Holly had certainly ridden through it often enough during her years in Aussie Special Operations Forces. The two civilians, not so much.
She glanced over at the helo’s crew chief, but he still looked some kinda pissed. Not really in a sharing-the-joke mood. Then she remembered why they were here and decided that she wasn’t in much of one either.
There was no way to brace for the landing; all she could do was stay loose and let it happen. Miranda and Jeremy were catching up on married life or some such shit. She, Andi, and the crew chief all waited for the landing.
It would come abruptly once the ship’s landing officer had guided the helo as low as he dared above the rising and falling stern of the ship. Then, as a wave lifted it toward its highest point, he’d signal the helo down hard. If all went well, the descent would close the last few feet of gap before whapping down on the deck at the top of its arc; then ship and helo would descend together. Then the deck crew would scramble into place to chain down the helo by the wheels, hopefully before the ship rolled unexpectedly or a rogue wave lifted the cutter abruptly. If it did, the stern of the eighteen-hundred-ton ship would swat the ten-ton helo like an annoying fly.
Holly heard the landing happen by the sudden load change on the rotors from hover to hard descent. But she never felt the contact.
Her stomach said they were riding down. Were they about to join the passengers of Air Force One? Escaping from a flooding helo in a winter ocean was not a high-probability-of-success sort of challenge.
They finally bottomed out and rode back up—in a gentle rising-ship way, not in an oh-God-we’re-all-gonna-die way. The landing had been dead smooth.
“Well, shit,” she turned to the crew chief, “At least your pilots are real Marines.”
