“Three cars ahead of us,” she said. “It’s gone out for some reason.” She stopped in her tracks. “Kevin, I don’t like this. Let’s get out.”
“Get out? What do you mean?”
“I mean, back to the main street.”
“Margaret, the car’s right there. If you want to get out, we should get in the car and go.”
This seemed obvious enough to Kevin. For some reason Margaret wasn’t buying it. She stood there indecisively for a few moments, then strode forward and snatched the keys from Kevin’s hand. “Let’s do it,” she said.
She was in her seat and shoving the keys into the ignition before he’d even got his door open. By the time he’d sat down and closed the door, she was furious about something. “Goddamn it!”
“What’s up?”
“Car won’t start.”
“Want me to give it a try?”
“Sit back and don’t move!” she said in a strong voice, a voice of someone who was used to giving commands.
Kevin looked over at her, astonished, and saw that she was gazing out the windshield. Kevin looked up and saw a man on the sidewalk right outside the car, a bulky man wearing a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pulled up around his head. He had brown skin and a thick mustache and dark glasses. He was pulling something out of his waistband.
There was a crisp metallic sound in his left ear. He looked over to see that Margaret had reached down between her legs into her purse and pulled out something big and heavy.
It was a gun. A semiautomatic. Right in front of Kevin’s face. He could see the maker’s mark and serial number stamped on the barrel. She had just chambered a round. The hammer was cocked. She shouted something, not at Kevin but at the person outside. Two different male voices began shouting in an unfamiliar language outside the car. They seemed startled and upset. But Kevin’s eyes were fixed on the gun in front of his face. He actually saw the hammer spring forward.
For a long time, then, he didn’t hear anything except explosions.
The windshield shattered immediately. It held its shape but turned into a web of finely spaced hairline cracks, so that it was nearly opaque. The figures outside were vague shadows, desperately out of focus. Kevin had noticed another one in the street, on Margaret’s side of the car.
The cracks in the glass all flashed brightly when flames erupted from the barrel of Margaret’s gun or the guns outside the car, and at these times the entire windshield seemed to become a sheet of fire. From place to place the glass had a large circular hole in it. The number of holes increased as the explosions continued.
After a while he realized that he hadn’t heard any explosions in a long time. They were still sitting there, he and Margaret, just as they had been a few moments ago, when she’d been about to start the car, about to drive back to Kevin’s hotel room for some to-be-specified additional socializing. Except that now most of the windshield was gone and the car was full of smoke. The key chain still dangled from the ignition, swinging back and forth like a pendulum.
He remembered, then, the thing Margaret had shouted after she had pulled out her gun, and just before the explosions had started. She had been shouting, “FBI! FBI!”
“What was all that about?” he said.
Margaret didn’t answer.
Chapter Thirty
Other than the sporadic visitations of the mighty Antonov transport ship, the twelve-thousand-foot runway at the Forks County Regional Airport was used only for a couple of weeks each year, when the Guard unit would perform its annual maneuvers. Boys would converge on the airport, leaning their bicycles against the fence, watching the C-141’s and occasional C-5A’s stain the runway with long streaks of molten rubber.
The Guard unit had been mobilized immediately after the invasion, and the runway had begun to see more use. Doug Parsons, the shop teacher at Nishnabotna High School, was pulled away from his classes and put back in uniform and back in the cockpit, flying C-141’s hither and thither, first on short hauls within the continental United States and then on epic journeys to Saudi Arabia.