The rain had dissipated to a fine mist, the kind that you never really feel until you run your hands through your hair and come away wet. It was chill, autumn chill, and the misty rain seemed to act as a coating, sealing the chill right into the bones.
Plissken walked alone down the deserted airstrip toward the distant hangar, the hangar lights casting long, shimmering reflections on the lonely puddles beneath his feet.
There wasn’t a blackbelly in sight. Normally, that would have made him happy, but the fact that he was left unguarded made him feel that they accepted him as one of them. He couldn’t think of a single thing more disgusting to him in the whole world. It also tended to reinforce Hauk’s assertion that they actually had planted bombs within him.
There he was, Snake Plissken, going back off to war. Of course, he had never stopped going off to war. Every hour of every day of his life, Snake Plissken fought his battles. Sometimes they were internal, and sometimes they were wild and freewheeling like at the Federal Reserve. But the feelings were just the same.
None of it made any sense to him. What was one President more or less? What was one summit meeting? It was a President who decorated him after Leningrad, a President who thought he could buy his love and loyalty with a cheap slug of bronze and a bit of colored ribbon. It meant nothing to him. Less than nothing.
That was a different President, of course. How many had there been since-four, five? It didn’t matter; there were plenty more where those came from. When the medals didn’t buy him off, they offered him a high position in the fledgling USPF. When that didn’t work, they cut him loose, just gave him a discharge and sent him home.
Home.
Orange fire.
He felt the anger bolt through him and fought it back down. He needed his wits about him now. He came up to the hangar, pushed open the huge, sheet-metal door and went inside.
It sometimes occurred to him that maybe he was crazy like the rest of them. Although crazy people, it seemed, would not realize that they were crazy. Everything would seem perfectly logical and natural to them. That was the one feeling that made him think he was still shuffling the right deck. He could look around him and know, really know, how out of control the whole business was.
The inside of the hangar was lit with that creeping neon disease. The glider sat in the middle of the monstrous hangar, its only occupant. He crossed the cement floor, footsteps echoing loudly. Two cops were under the plane, taking the blocks out from in front of the wheels.
He got up to the machine and felt his insides surge. It had been a long time. The Gulffire was sleek and bullet-shaped. It was painted slick black and the neon script reflected in lazy, distorted patterns off its contours. The wings were stubby. The jet pack stuck a bit out of the tail like some kind of metal beehive. The canopy was black, flat black. It was all instruments, no eyeballing. He was surprised to find himself getting excited about flying again. He had thought he was through with it. But old soldiers never die…
“You Plissken?” came a voice from under the glider. The voice got caught in the echo and rebounded off the high walls until it sounded like a whole choir shouting down at him.
“What’s it to you?” Plissken returned, softly enough to avoid the echo.
The blackbelly was out from under the plane and standing beside him. Another head popped up on the other side of the fuselage. Plissken fixed the man with his good eye. All of the hatred came through, and probably more than a little of the pain.
The hard creases in the man’s face softened. Turning his head, he spoke to his partner. “Let’s get this thing outside,” he said.
They rolled it toward the big doors. Plissken walked with them, a hand on the sleek side, trying to get the feel back. He didn’t worry too much. He figured that it was like sex: once you got the rhythm, you never forgot it.
The blackbellies got the glider out of the hangar, and went to look for the truck and tow line. He waited until they were a distance away before jumping up on the wing and easing back the canopy.
He climbed in and immediately slid the covering closed. There was a second of total darkness, then the life- support and preflight lights came up. He could hear the air hiss as he looked over all the green and red lights that blinked the board before him, and after a few seconds the bottled air made it cold in there. Cold like the grave.
He sat, letting the sterile cold seep into his body, letting it become a part of him. It was like the grave, like the best part of the grave-the peace. He envied Bill Taylor just a little.
Reaching out, he began playing with toggles. Screens lit up in a panorama around him, filling the cabin with an eerie blue glow that was tinged with green around the soft edges. More toggles, and the geometric outline of the runway and surrounding area lined out on the screens.
He watched the outline of the tow truck pulling onto the runway, then saw the unreal stick figures of the blackbellies jumping out to hook on the tow line. He could feel the vibrations through the hull as they scraped the clamp against the glider to hook him up. Then they were waving their little stick arms obliquely at the canopy.
Okay, he thought. Fine and dandy.
He toggled the mike. “I’m ready,” he said.
Hauk’s voice came back to him immediately. “Twenty-one hours,” it chided.
“You don’t have to remind me,” he snapped back. Then, “Suppose he’s dead? If I come back without him do you burn these things out?”
There was a pause, a shot of static. When Hauk’s voice came back up, it sounded odd. “If you bring me the briefcase.”
The words hit him like a wrecking ball on a brick building. “The man means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”
“Get them both back, Plissken.”
“Yeah,” he answered. “I’m on my way.”
The truck’s radio was tuned to their communication. When Plissken got through, it started up immediately and began dragging the Gulffire down the runway.
He watched the speed build up on the dial, and his own spirit began to gear up with the acceleration. He took hold of the stick, felt the vibrations as the glider strained against the gravity that wanted to keep it chained to the ground. When he and the glider were ready, Plissken eased back on the stick and watched the outlines on the screens drop off the bottom and disappear as if they never existed at all.
He was up; he was free.
The urge was there to kick in the jet packs and put as much distance between himself and Hauk as he possibly could. It was almost as if getting away from the source of the madness would somehow kill the madness. It wouldn’t, though. He eased around forty degrees and headed for Manhattan Island.
Almost at once, the outline of the city appeared on the screens-distant, but not that distant. He found a thermal and bought himself some height. He was just seeing the tops of the buildings, and was closing in on them. A red blip appeared on the top of one of the outlines, flashing quickly, urgently.
Hauk’s voice on the radio, breaking the beautiful silence. “Are you picking up the target blip?”
“Right on course.”
He slid silently up on the cold empty towers, closed in on the City of Death. He lit a cigarette and dragged on it without pleasure. The buildings were right on him. He dipped down to their height and began aiming himself between them, testing his reflexes.
“How’s your altitude?” Hauk’s squeaky voice asked.
Plissken made a handsign at the radio.
“If you need to get higher,” Hauk said, “use your jet engine.”
Plissken sighed. The man wasn’t going to leave him alone. “Too much noise,” he replied.
His good eye drifted to the screen, went wide. It was filled with the outline of a huge building. It was there, right there.
“Damn!” He jerked the stick hard, tilting, nearly rolling. The building filled the screens, then listed crazily, finally sliding off the screen.
He moaned and sat back, removing the cigarette that he had bitten nearly in two. “Been a while,” he mumbled.
“What-what’s that?” came Hauk’s voice.
“Nothing,” Plissken returned.
He checked his instrument heading, made a small correction and once again, the target blip was on the screen. He evened the altitude and aimed for it.
