that had planted the bombs in him to begin with.
Ten feet from the ground, Plissken let go of the rope and dropped the remaining distance. He came down hard on his bad leg, buckling to the ground with the pain. He looked at his watch. 0:0:14, 13, 12…
Struggling to his feet, he moved toward the machine, limping, falling, pulling himself along the ground with the power left in his arms. He got up, leaning on the jeep for support. Hauk rushed over to help him. He pushed him away.
Cronenberg had flipped on switches and was holding out the tubes. “Turn on the power.” he told one of the blackbellies.
He was fading in and out, threatening to faint. The sound of a generator. The machine whirred to blathering life. He made it to Cronenberg. The man was smiling at him, preparing to place the tubes on his neck. Then, a hand pushing them away.
Hauk’s voice. “The tape, Plissken.”
Plissken put his hands in his pockets, digging, grasping. They wouldn’t work right. He couldn’t feel anything.
“Jesus!” Cronenberg said. “Five seconds, four, three…”
He pulled his hand out and it was there, lying in his feeble grasp. Hauk grabbed it and moved aside. Cronenberg’s tubes on his neck, the man’s weathered face showing concern.
The machine buzzed loudly, then was silent. It clicked off. Plissken’s eyes drifted down to the watch. It read zeroes all the way across the dial.
Everything stopped. They all stared at one another-waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
“That’s it,” Cronenberg said at last.
XXIV
LATE EVENING
So, they took him back to the bunkers and cleaned and bandaged his wounds. They gave him a cup of coffee, his amnesty papers and a pack of cigarettes; then acted like he should slither back under whatever rock he crawled out of.
But it wasn’t that simple with Snake Plissken. He had looked for Hauk, but the man had disappeared right after the rescue and hadn’t reappeared since. He smiled to think that maybe the man was afraid of him, afraid of his death threat. Somehow, though, he didn’t think that was the case.
It didn’t matter anyway. A good bit of the anger had been whipped out of him.
He walked around in the chill night air, smoking one cigarette after another, figuring where he’d go now that he had survived hell. The President was huddled under a blanket by a mobile radio truck. A doctor stood beside him, just in case he wanted one. Hauk’s man, Rehme, was working on a tape recorder that was hooked up outside the truck.
The Snake wandered over to listen. Rehme was talking to a half-listening John Harker.
“We radioed ahead, sir,” he said in a patronizing tone. “They know the situation and they’re waiting for your broadcast.”
Plissken got up close. The secret servicemen that came from God knows where stiffened, hands reaching inside of sports jackets.
“It’s all right,” the President said, his eyes traveling up to meet Snake’s.
Plissken needed attention, and he needed sleep. But right then he needed to suck on that cigarette and play the game all the way out to the end.
“I want to thank you,” the President said. “Anything you want, just name it.”
“A moment of your time,” the Snake replied.
The President moved his head very slowly to glance at Rehme.
“Thirty seconds, sir,” the man said.
Harker shrugged. “Yes?”
Plissken took a drag, let it out. He wasn’t much with words. “We lost some people back on the bridge,” he said, and he couldn’t separate New York from Leningrad. They both formed some horrible amorphous lump in his mind. “They died getting you here. I… I just wondered how you felt about it.”
The man answered perfunctorily, immediately. “I’m very grateful,” he said.
Plissken didn’t know what he wanted to hear, but that wasn’t really it. There was a void, a vacuum that he desperately needed to fill if he was to survive as anything even resembling a human being. “Yeah?” he said.
The President spoke again, mechanical, like a speech. “The nation appreciates their sacrifice.”
Plissken just stared at him. The man had already forgotten about it, had already shuffled it into the back dusty corners of his brain where he’d never have to take it out and look at it again.
“I’m really sorry,” he said, looking at the tape recorder. “But I have to go.”
The Snake knew that he was out of his element with the man. He simply nodded and limped away. Then he saw Hauk, standing by the bunker. They locked eyes and Plissken made his way over to the man.
“Gonna kill me now. Snake?” he asked.
“I’m too tired,” Plissken replied. “Maybe later.”
The man’s eyes softened somewhat, like an ice cream cone melting in the hot, summer sun. “Did you… did you see…” He was stumbling with the words, and the Snake flashed to a crazy in an old, dark building.
“Yeah, I did,” Plissken answered. He started to tell him, started to tell him the truth, but he couldn’t get it out. There had been too much murder already, both mental and physical. “He’s okay,” he said. “He’s… happy where he is. Doesn’t need anything.”
Hauk could probably have not believed him if he was bent that way. But he wanted to believe. He wanted to. Plissken watched years of tension drain out of the man’s face. He nodded quickly, thankfully, and that was the end of it.
“I got another deal for you,” he told Plissken.
The Snake fixed him with his good eye, the pain in the bad eye strangely dissipated.
Hauk took a breath and continued. “I want you to think about it while you’re taking a rest,” he said. Then, “I want to give you a job.”
The Snake’s cigarette had turned stale in his mouth. He threw it down and lit another. He didn’t know what he wanted out of life, but none of it included having anything more to do with Bob Hauk or the New York Penitentiary.
“We’d make one hell of a team, Snake.” Hauk said.
“The name’s Plissken, ” he said evenly. Then he turned and limped away down a long row of bunkers. He never turned around again.
As he moved away, he could hear the President’s voice coming through loudspeakers mounted on the truck’s roof.
“… and though I am unable to attend this historic summit meeting, I present this tape recording in the hope that our nations may live together in peace.”
The Snake smiled as he heard the familiar strains of Cabbie’s tape blaring through the speakers.
“Got the time for… gettin’ even.”
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the other cassette. Pulling a long strand of tape out of the plastic casing, he touched the glowing end of his cigarette to it. The thing sizzled, a small flame consuming the tape. He threw the burning thing away and walked, contented at last, into the cold, dark night.
His bad eye didn’t hurt anymore.
