"Yes, Brother Qaddafi will not deny us this time," Abu Al-Kalbin agreed, his voice rising in exultation.
Still, they approached with raised rifles. Not that weapons would help them if the aircraft unexpectedly exploded, as they feared it might.
"We will need proof," Abu Al-Kalbin muttered. "Which one of you has the camera?"
Walid and Jalid stopped in their tracks and looked at one another, eyes widening in their kaffiyehs.
" I thought you had the camera, Abu," they said together.
"It must be back in the safe house," Abu Al-Kalbin muttered. "Maleesh. Never mind. The President always travels with the media, who are like flies around dung. There will be a camera in the plane. We will use that. Come."
The fallen Air Force One was even more impressive up close. Debris littered the crash site. The tail sat apart and almost upright like a big abstract kite with a U.S. -flag emblem on it. Except for the broken tail, the fuselage had survived largely intact.
They went in through the open-end tail. It was like entering a dark tunnel.
Abu AI-Kalbin immediately tripped over the body of a Secret Service guard, instantly recognizable by his sunglasses and coat-lapel button. Abu Al-Kalbin shot him three times in the chest to make sure he was dead. The body jerked. The sunglasses jumped off. The eyes that looked up were glassy and sightless.
Abu Al-Kalbin stepped over the body and pushed on. Faint starlight picked out details.
The next section of the plane was a roomy bedroom. The silk covers had come off the mattress. Beyond it was a private lavatory. Past the lavatory was a passenger cabin. Seats and cushions were thrown everywhere. They had to push aside uprooted seats to get into it. Here were many more Secret Service bodies.
That told them they had come to the presidential section.
"One bullet for each, to make certain!" Abu AIKalbin barked.
Walid and Jalid applied the muzzles of their weapons to every sunglass-festooned forehead, giving each a single bullet.
One agent stirred in a tangle of cushions. There the seats were mashed out of shape. The man had landed or thrown himself over the nest of compressed seating. The attitude of his body was one of protecting another. He moaned.
Abu AI-Kalbin stepped up to him and yanked his head up by the hair.
"President. . ." the agent croaked, his eyes twitching in their sockets.
"Where is he?" Abu Al-Kalbin asked urgently. "Tell us!"
"Must . . . protect President . . ."
"Where!"
The agent expelled a rattling breath and his head went limp.
Abu Al-Kalbin jammed the AK-47 muzzle into the man's open mouth and fired twice to make sure death had claimed him.
He withdrew the suddenly red muzzle and said, "He must be forward."
They passed into the next section, where the overhead bins had spilled a profusion of video and camera equipment.
"Excellent!" Abu Al-Kalbin cried. "Take one, each of you. Brother Qaddafi will have ample proof of our mighty deed."
Abu Al-Kalbin fell upon a camcorder. He dropped his rifle in order to get it.
"This is perfection," he cried, looking through the viewfinder. He panned around the cabin, past the bodies of dead journalists. Through the shattered cabin windows, the burning engine cast a campfirelike illumination. He fiddled with the buttons until he got a video light. He pointed the lens at his men, who were pointing cameras back.
Camera flashbulbs flashed.
"Yes;" Abu exclaimed. "Good! Photograph all the bodies, and I will record all with this video camera."
They spent several minutes recording the carnage aboard Air Force One for posterity. They worked their way forward to the electronic-warfare compartment, just behind the cockpit. They managed to get the cockpit door to open, but didn't enter. They couldn't. The cabin had been mashed flat to the bulkhead. The contents of the cockpit-instruments, controls, and crew-had been rammed into the bulkhead wall. Once they had got the door open, a shattered arm popped out from the tangle.
They took film of that, too, taking turns posing with the sight. Abu Al-Kalbin took the unknown crewman's dead hand in his and pretended to shake it. He smiled broadly, a proud and pleased smile. It went out like a cheap flashbulb when he felt his belly gurgle suddenly.
He hurried back to a rear cabin. He never made it to the lavatory. Instead, he squatted on the dark blue rug, depositing his load on the Presidential Seal.
Minutes later, Abu Al-Kalbin drew on his trousers, feeling drained and weak.
"Come, Abu!" Walid cried. "We have found him. The President."
Abu Al-Kalbin hurried to the sound of Walid's voice. It came from the journalists' compartment.
There, Walid and Jalid knelt beside a well-dressed body. Walid was holding up the head by its hair. The body lay inert.
"See!" he said proudly. "Take our picture, Abu."
"Fool!" Abu Al-Kalbin spat back. "That is not the President!"
"But I recognize him. He has been on television."
"That is because he is a television reporter, you ignorant donkey. That is the one who covers the White House for SBC, one of these American networks. "
"Oh," said Walid unhappily. He let the head drop. It went click on the carpeted floor.
As he stood up, Jalid hissed at him, "I told you so."
"Shut up!"
"Both of you shut up," Abu Al-Kalbin told them. "Where is the President's body?"
Walid and Jalid looked at one another.
"We do not know, Abu. We have not seen him."
"Find him! We must record the sight of his crushed and broken body, otherwise the Qaddafi Peace Prize will never be ours."
They split up, going to different sections.
But the body of the President of the United States was nowhere to be found. He was not in the bathrooms, nor in the galley, nor hiding in one of the large luggage racks.
They gathered together in the tangle that had been the presidential compartment, their video and camera equipment dangling from numbing fingers, their weapons completely forgotten.
"Could he be in the crushed nose?" Walid asked.
"Do not be a fool," Jalid retorted. "He is-was-the President. He would not fly the plane."
"Perhaps he become frightened and went there to seek safety. Do you not think this is possible, Abu?" Walid said hopefully.
"No, I do not," Abu Al-Kalbin said flatly. "Everyone knows that in an emergency, it is the nose of the plane which first strikes the ground. The safest place is in the tail section. Here. He must be here."
They looked around the tangled compartment, taking care not to step on the brown mess that had pooled over the floor over the Presidential Seal.
"Yes," Jalid said. "This is where his guards are."
Walid picked up a shattered photograph that crunched under his boot. He lifted it.
"Who is this man?" he asked Abu Al-Kalbin. "A reporter? He looks like a reporter. "
Jalid peered over Walid's shoulder. "No, it is the famous American actor Robert Redford."
Abu Al-Kalbin took up the photograph. He looked at the ripped photograph. It showed a sandy-haired young man with a strange cumbersome round bag slung over one shoulder and an odd club in his right hand.
"No," he said. "This is the Vice-President."
"No longer." Jalid sneered. "He will be thrown out of power now that his President is dead. Perhaps executed."
Abu Al-Kalbin shook his head. "That is not the way America works. This man will be made President, but that is not our problem. We must find that body. Look harder, both of you!"
They fell to ripping the cabin apart. The President was not under the tangled cushions, or in a long shallow closet where spare clothing was kept.
"Could he have escaped into the night?" Walid asked in confusion.
"Do not be ignorant," Abu Al-Kalbin snapped. "No one else survived."