Page 77 of Air Force One
Miranda shrugged. “I can only confirm what and how. You know I can never answer Why or Who kinds of questions.”
“Your death, Madam President.” Clarissa and the Russian said in unison. With Elizabeth close behind. Andi was nodding as well.
“But Roy was the one on the plane.” Miranda protested.
It was Andi who explained. “First, there was the election. Then the plane was sabotaged. It was after that when Roy planned his final trip.”
“But,” Felicia spoke, “President Cole would have used the plane for his final trip home.”
“The failure parameters…” Jeremy spoke from the phone.
Finally, everyone’s attention shifted there. Andi was right, as usual; she just had to give it enough time.
“…the ones set in the software to disable the engines, required both an unrecoverably dangerous distance from shore and that the plane was flying using the Air Force One ID over the radio. Without that, say once he retired, President Cole could have flown anywhere.”
“But that means…” Sarah’s skin had turned a surprisingly pale shade.
“Oh, yes,” Mirand understood now. “That means that you were the target. If Roy hadn’t spontaneously added that trip, you would have been the first to fly internationally aboard the plane using the Air Force One call sign.”
Sarah’s skin didn’t return to her normal coloring. Miranda had no references in her notebooks about the meaning of skin tone changes.
“Is that a Why?” Miranda asked Andi. “Did I actually figure out a Why?”
Andi wiggled her head in neither a shake or a nod that Miranda could interpret. “Why they sabotaged the plane, yes. Why they wanted to kill President Feldman, no.”
Miranda looked at Sarah. “All that leaves is who wants you dead badly enough to kill a whole airplane.”
Sarah spoke very softly, as if talking to herself. “Well, isn’t that just too perfect?”
75
Icing your bruises was supposed to make them feel better. Holly had been icing her ass with an entire glacier for three days and it didn’t feel one bit better.
She hadn’t come prepared to sit high on Mt. Elbrus through a big storm. Yet more of her training that had slipped away unnoticed. When selecting her gear at The Bunker, she’d opted for fast-and-light mission profile, with no secondary prep if it ended up being a stay-low-and-slow. Worse, she’d apportioned the bulk of what she did bring into Mike’s gear, expecting him and Inessa to be the ones to get into trouble if anyone did.
For three days the storm raged outside the slit of her snow cave. When it covered over, she let it. She started her snow vigil with a dead battery in her radio. By Day Two, her phone followed in its discharged footsteps. Now she no longer knew the time because who wore a watch in the age of smartphones besides the fashion conscious like Mike? Not her.
So she tracked time by whether she could see the walls of her dim Holly-sized hole-in-the-snow: daylight, or could not see the walls of her ice-bound Hobbit hole: night. A bare nine hours of daylight in mid-January meant she spent a whole lot of time in a world darker than a dingo’s butthole.
Day Two saw the end of her energy bars, even rationed into single bites. She didn’t mind being hungry, but running out of chocolate on Day Three had seriously hurt. Mostly she dozed to conserve energy and stayed hydrated with melted snow.
Day Four, it was the quiet that woke her. Either she was finally buried deep enough to no longer hear the storm’s howl or the damn storm had finally abated. She could almost make out the vague outline of her gloved hand, so she waited.
The cave’s brightness eventually rose to normalish levels, which meant that if she was buried, it wasn’t avalanche deep.
Then she heard it: the heavy thud of helicopter rotors, muffled by the snow. She could feel the pulse of the deep bass notes. The weather had cleared, but the skies hadn’t. Until now, it had only been nature trying to kill her. Now it would be the Russians.
If the crash had gone according to plan, the plane should have impacted on the northwestern face of the peak at five thousand meters. Her best estimate placed her on the south side at four thousand. Even though she’d retained her white coverall from the jump, the passage of the helicopter overhead told quite how big the rescue operation must be. Probably not the best time to go out for a stroll, even wearing white on a snowfield.
Three more helo passes confirmed the wisdom of her decision. But, dozing in and out, she couldn’t tell when they stopped until the cave darkened. All of the overflights had been in the morning. At least half a day since the last one.
She punched a hole—or rather tried to. The snow cover extended beyond the length of her arm. Hard decision: wait through another long night or start to burrow? The first would leave her that much weaker and perhaps trap her for another day if they resumed patrols this far afield in the morning. The latter had only one problem, her snow cave had no spare room. If she started to burrow out, much of the extra snow would have to be backfilled into the cave. That meant no retreat once she’d started.
Well, it wasn’t the biggest risk she’d taken on this mountain. And she actually wanted to see Mike—the bastard. One lousy I love you had changed nothing and everything. But she wasn’t going to see him anytime soon if she stayed perched up here all winter. Burrow out it was.
After three meters, she stopped to check the feel of downness to make sure that she was still moving horizontally. At five meters, she wondered if she was digging in circles; she’d set out moving directly away from her protecting rock. It was now dark enough outside that any attempt to look behind her didn’t reveal a thing. Besides, the tunnel was exactly the size of her body.
At eight meters, by which time her entire body was encased in impacted snow, the powder working its way in through every crevice in her gear, her fist broke through into free air. Was it mountain free air or had she circled back into her snow cave, in which case she just might cry some icicle tears. The shivers were setting in from all the snow melting inside her clothes. A very bad sign.
