“You know my name,” Samuel said, pursing his lips. “Very well. What’s yours?”
“John, and that’s all you’re going to get from me until you stop fighting.”
Samuel shrugged, and instead, rushed forward, trying to tackle John, who brought both elbows down on the man’s upper back.
Playtime’s over, John. End this, Amira’s voice sounded calmly in his head.
John twisted to his left and raised a knee into the bent-over Samuel’s midsection. He repeated the move two more times until he felt the man go slack in his arms. He stepped to his right and flung the man away, sending him to the platform in a heap of battered bones.
He moved closer to restrain Samuel when the fallen man somehow rose to his feet and turned to face John one last time. In his right hand was a small black knife with a curved tip and serrated back. He stared at John, and then he motioned with his left hand for John to come to him. It was the act of a man who wanted one last opportunity to prove himself before his conqueror.
For the briefest of moments, John considered the challenge, but then he thought of Amira, and rational discourse took control in his head. I’m too old for this shit.
In a blinding move, he drew his Kimber and fired a .45-caliber slug that struck Samuel in the upper right leg, shattering his femur. The man shrieked in pain and collapsed backwards through the opening in the railing for passengers to load and unload the gondolas.
John recognized what was coming, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. By trying to preserve Samuel’s life, albeit with a severe wound to his leg, he’d inadvertently doomed him to death. It was like watching a horrific car accident in excruciating slow motion.
Samuel howled in pain as the fifteen-hundred-pound, climate-controlled gondola descended on to the platform with less than ten inches of clearance below the massive carriage. He sensed the presence of the car and turned to his left, just in time to see the black bottom of the car smash into his face, breaking his nose and left cheekbone. His head twisted to the right as the car traveled over his body, rolling and breaking it inch by inch as it slowly worked its way across him. He screamed in agony, but his cry was cut short as his head was pinned next to his shoulder and the carriage snapped his neck with a loud crack that made John wince.
The car cleared the body, and John stepped forward and grabbed Samuel’s legs. He pulled the dead man clear of the opening, and Samuel’s eyes stared up accusingly from a head that had been internally and bloodlessly decapitated.
John stared down at the man, but he felt no sympathy for the cop killer who lay dead before him. “You brought this on yourself. No one else,” he whispered, and turned away to find the wounded operator to turn off the Wheel. Whatever passengers were left onboard were about to find out that they’d paid for a ride that included homicide as an added attraction.
Chapter 26
Amira stepped off the mobile staircase and into a hellish landscape of twisted metal, leaking fluids, and dark shadows. Immediately to her left was the nose of the plane where the museum had reconstructed the presidential sleeping quarters. She’d seen pictures of it in the press coverage that had announced the Air Force One Experience – two blue-blanketed beds, one on each side of the nose angling in towards each other, wood paneling shelves, a wooden chair, and even a large desk at the foot of the bed on the starboard side of the plane. But that picture had been wiped away, replaced with something ripped from a disaster movie.
With dusk approaching, the presidential quarters were shrouded in darkness. The bulbous glass of the cockpit stretched across the space, a black glossy reflection that touched each bed as if the mechanical beast slumbered upon them. There was a gap where the open compartment of the helicopter intersected with the skin of the plane, but all she saw was darkness, taunting her with hidden threats. Overhead, chunks of the airplane’s skin had been torn from the frame by the rotors as if a giant clawed beast had swiped at the nose. The desk had been toppled over and amazingly stood on its left end as if at attention, a deep crack running down the middle of the bottom of the desk. Hissing and popping noises rose from the helicopter’s ruined engine, and the pungent odor of hydraulic fluid and aviation kerosene filled the space. She realized the cockpit glistened because of the fluids leaking down it like a slow-moving lava lamp.
She held her pistol close to her chest, ready to extend and fire at the first moving object. Here we go. She took a step forward so she could peer into the cockpit and determine if Trevor was trapped inside with the pilot. Part of her hoped he’d died in the accident, but either way, she had to know for certain. She took a second step towards the plexiglass when she sensed movement from her right, and she instinctively sidestepped to the left as the axe sailed by her right arm, missing by inches.
Bastard, she thought as she shot out her arms to neutralize Trevor, whose face was a red mask from the lateral gash he’d sustained above his forehead when he’d struck the windshield in the crash. He wielded a crash axe constructed of a titanium handle, stainless-steel blade, and a stainless-steel pike. Lightweight, it had gaps in the handle and looked like it had been constructed out of metallic bones and belonged in the hands of a Viking, not a former CIA employee. Trevor
