He turned the radio off.
So it had started. The hunt was on and he was the quarry.
He turned off the interstate and followed the twists and turns of a county road for several miles until he reached a landfill. He pulled up to the booth.
The woman inside had the radio on.
“Five dollars,” she said distractedly.
He took out his wallet and gave her the money. She pushed a small clipboard at him. On it was a form, a certification that he was not disposing of hazardous materials. False swearing, the form said, was perjury in the second degree.
“What’s happened?” Charon asked as he scrawled something illegible by the printed X.
“President Bush’s helicopter has crashed.”
“You’re kidding? Is he dead?”
“They don’t know yet.”
Charon handed the clipboard back and was waved on through.
More luck. His was the only vehicle there to dump trash. A snorting bulldozer was attacking a small mountain of the stuff while a huge flock of seagulls darted and swooped.
Henry Charon opened the trunk and got rid of the galoshes and the two missile launchers wrapped in carpet. He threw the cylinders down toward the base of a garbage pile that looked as if it would be next. Then he got the sandwich wrapper, bag, and coffee cup from the floor of the rear seat and added them to the garbage wasteland spread out at his feet.
He pulled the car out of the dozer’s way, carefully avoiding the soft ground off the vehicle ruts. A pickup truck loaded with construction debris parked a little further down the cut and the driver began throwing off trash. He was still at it when the big dozer shoved a hill-sized pile of garbage and dirt over the rug-wrapped missile launchers.
Special Agent Thomas Hooper got the news at the FBI facility in Quantico. Hooper, Freddy Murray, and an assistant federal prosecutor were interrogating Harrison Ronald when the call came.
Prior to his assignment three years ago to the drug crimes division, Hooper had served for five years as special agent in charge of the FBI SWAT team. He was still on call. Use of the FBI for paramilitary operations was rare, but occasionally a situation arose. When the situation required more men than the SWAT team had available, the watch officer went down the standby list of qualified agents. He wanted Hooper to go to the crash site. He passed the news, the order, and the location in as few words as possible.
Hooper hung up the phone and found the other men were staring at him, no doubt in reaction to the look on his face. “The President’s helicopter just crashed,” he told them, “with him in it. I gotta go.”
“Is he dead?”
“Don’t know,” Hooper muttered to his stunned audience on his way out of the room.
Jake, Callie, and Amy Grafton were returning to their apartment from a shopping mall when they heard the news on the radio. The family carried the packages upstairs and Amy ran for the television. Regular programming had been interrupted and the networks were using their weekend news teams.
Like tens of millions of viewers all over America, the Graftons got the news as the networks acquired it. Four people were dead in the wreckage and four were injured, three critically. Both the pilots were dead, as was the secretary of state and the national security adviser. One of those critically injured was the President, who had been flown to Bethesda Naval Hospital by another helicopter. Mrs. Bush, on vacation in Kennebunkport, was flying back to Washington.
Footage of the wreckage was shown, shot from about a hundred yards away.
Later in the evening witnesses to the crash were interviewed. One elderly woman working in her flowerbed had seen the craft fall. She searched for words as the camera rolled: “I knew they were going to die. It was falling so fast, twirling around, I closed my eyes and prayed.”
What did you pray for?
“For God to take to Himself the souls of those about to die.”
Amy decided she wanted to sit beside her father on the couch. He wrapped his arms around her.
In the newsroom of The Washington Post Jack Yocke was assigned to assist a team of reporters in writing a story assessing the presidency of George Bush, a story that would not run unless he died. Two weeks ago Yocke would have chafed at not being sent off willy-nilly to the crash site. Not this evening. As he called up the major stories of the Bush presidency on his computer screen and perused them, he found himself trying to get a sense of this man chosen by his fellow citizens to lead them.
World War II naval aviator, Texas oil entrepreneur, self-made millionaire, politician, public servant — why did George Bush want the toughest job in the world? What had he said? How did he approach the job? Why did he avoid the spotlight’s glare? Did he have a sense of where America should go, and if so, what was it? These questions Yocke wrestled with, though he occasionally took a moment to read the wire service ticker and listen to the television.
He also took a moment to call Tish Samuels.
“Heard the news?”
“Isn’t it terrible?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I feel for his wife,” Tish said. “I admire her so. This must be extraordinarily tough on her, to be so frightened with the whole world watching.”
The helicopter had crashed in a pasture just a hundred yards west of the Potomac, which flowed south at this point. In the glare of portable floodlights Special Agent Tom Hooper caught a glimpse of at least three dead cows. One of them was ripped almost in half. He asked the Virginia state trooper escorting him toward the helicopter.
“Shrapnel from the rotor blades,” the trooper said. “The forward blades were still turning when it hit the ground.”
The wreckage looked grotesque in the glare of the floodlights. The chopper had impacted nose low, so the cockpit was badly squashed. The crew hadn’t had a chance. A team was cutting through the wreckage to get the last body out of the cockpit. Another team wearing army fatigue uniforms was examining the engines. The rest of the machine was almost as badly mangled as the cockpit, but not quite. Hooper marveled that four fragile human beings had survived the helicopter’s encounter with the earth. Maybe.
The senior Secret Service agent was holding an impromptu meeting beside the machine. Hooper joined the group.
“The army experts are ninety-nine percent certain that this machine was struck by missiles. At least two. Probably heat seekers. We’ll know for sure tomorrow when we analyze the warhead fragments.”
“You’re saying that this was an assassination attempt?” someone asked, the disbelief evident in his voice.
“Yes.”
Hooper was stunned. He turned slightly to look at the wreckage, and now the evidence leaped at him — a hole and jagged tears in the right engine compartment, and another spray of small holes near the exhaust.
“When are you going to announce this?”
“That’s up to the White House. None of you are going to say it to anybody. Now there’s a ton of things that have to be done as soon as possible, so let’s get at it.”
The Secret Service assigned the FBI the job of locating the place from where the missiles had been fired. Hooper walked back toward his car and its radio with his mind racing. He would draw a circle with a ten-mile radius around this spot and seal it. Then he would search every foot of ground within the circle and interview every human being he could find. For that he would need people, as many as he could get. The local sheriffs and state police could help with roadblocks. But the searching, for that he would need a lot of people. Perhaps the Marines at Quantico could lend him some.