Eighteen Acres: A Novel (17 page)

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

After about ten seconds, Roger started screaming at the pilot again. “Put it down! Put the helicopter down on the ground now!”

“I can’t do that, sir,” the pilot said, climbing higher.

“Land this fucking helicopter now!” Roger shouted. “That is an order.”

“The helicopter is fine, sir. It was just dust in the prop,” the pilot protested.

“I said land it!” Roger roared.

“Yes, sir,” the pilot said.

The helicopter returned to the ground. Roger stood up and jumped out of Marine One.

“Roger, what are you doing?” Charlotte screamed.

“Marine One isn’t working properly, Charlotte,” Roger said.

“Put the president on the other helicopter!” Roger barked at the agents.

They hoisted Charlotte off Marine One and started running toward the next helicopter.

“Who rode over in this helicopter?” Charlotte yelled as they got closer. “How will they get out of here?”

The agents didn’t say anything. Charlotte stopped and grabbed Roger’s arm.

“I am not leaving anyone here. Who rode in this one? How are they getting out of here?” she asked.

“They’ll get Marine One off the ground, Charlotte. Just get on this one. Everything will be fine,” he said.

Roger pushed her into the Chinook and climbed in after her. They lifted off the ground before all of her agents were even onboard. Two of her agents climbed in as the aircraft swerved violently from side to side to avoid sniper fire.

“They are trying to get the fuel tank,” she heard one of them say.

“Go, go, go!” she heard Roger yell.

She couldn’t see anything.

She could barely breathe.

She freed her hands and wiped her hair from her mouth.

“Madam President, take these, please,” the White House medic said to her, shoving three white pills in front of her face.

“What are they?” she asked.

“It’s Cipro—in case of a bio attack, it might help a little bit. Just take them,” he said, smiling sympathetically.

He handed her a bottle of water, and she swallowed the pills. She looked over the medic’s shoulder and saw Marine One. It was still on the ground. She was relieved when a minute later, she saw it lift off the ground and begin to rise into the air behind them. She saw people running toward Marine One. She thought they were going to help, but seconds later, she saw one of them load something onto his shoulder and take aim. She tried to scream, but when she opened her mouth, nothing came out. Everything slid into slow motion.

She kept trying to scream at the pilot to go down and help whoever was on Marine One, but she couldn’t scream. She could only watch.

“Get her the fuck out of the area, now!” Roger yelled at the pilot.

“All cars, all stations, Wayfarer depart,” Charlotte heard over the radio system.

She turned her gaze to Marine One and saw smoke coming out of it. Seconds later, there was an explosion, and it struggled to stay airborne.

“Go help them!” she screamed at the pilot. “We need to go help them. They’re going to crash!”

“Charlotte, we need to get back to Bagram right away,” Roger said. He got on the radio and started barking orders.

“Please go help them!” she pleaded. But they were speeding away in the opposite direction. No one was talking to her. She had never felt more helpless in her life.

She watched everyone aboard the helicopter as they worked quietly and efficiently. After a couple of minutes, one of the military officers came and sat next to her.

“Ma’am, our guys took out the enemy, and a recovery mission is under way,” he said.

She nodded. “Who was on Marine One when it went down?” she asked.

“It was the news crew, Madam President,” he said.

Charlotte felt as if she might pass out. “And it went down from the missile, right?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Were there mechanical problems with Marine One?” she asked.

“Not that registered in the logs, Madam President, but we need to do a full AAR,” he said.

She looked at him blankly.

“After-action report, Madam President. Standard procedure for an incident like this,” he said.

“Of course. And the crew?” she asked.

“We’ll take care of them, ma’am,” the officer said.

“Are they—I mean, did they survive?” she asked.

“We don’t know their status yet, ma’am, but we’ll get an update as soon as we get back to the base.”

“Thanks,” Charlotte said, wrapping her arms around herself and praying as she’d never prayed before.

Melanie

Melanie dug around in her lingerie drawer for the lacy black bra-and-panty set her sister had sent her for her thirty-fifth birthday. It had never been worn, and while she didn’t plan to go to bed with Brian on their first date, she figured it didn’t hurt to be prepared. He’d e-mailed her the morning after their White House tour to say that he’d forgive her for not telling him about Charlotte’s secret trip if she’d meet him for coffee. At the Starbucks across the street from the White House, he’d insisted that she promise him that the next time Charlotte ventured to Iraq or Afghanistan, they’d both be on the trip. “Deal,” she’d committed.

And tonight they were going on their first real date. He was taking her to Bistro Lepic, a tiny French restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. It was Melanie’s last night of freedom before Charlotte returned from Afghanistan. Having Charlotte out of the country had allowed Melanie’s anxiety to ebb a bit. In the days since her confrontation with Charlotte in the Rose Garden, she’d come to see Michael’s affair rumor as less catastrophic than it had initially felt. If Charlotte was having an affair, which Melanie doubted she was, they would deal with it, she decided. She’d convinced herself that the rumor would prove false and that she and Charlotte would laugh about it when they finally discussed the topic again. She also had come to terms with the
fact that it was time to step off the treadmill and get out of politics. Her sister had urged her to come live in New York, and Melanie was considering it. As much as she didn’t want to admit it after knowing him for only a week, she wanted to see if there was any potential for something real with Brian.

Melanie had struggled with the wardrobe decision. She didn’t want to wear a suit, but it was a graver sin to overdress than to underdress in Washington. She’d settled on a black wrap dress that flattered her small waist and gave her a little bit of cleavage. Brian wore dark slacks and a button-down shirt. Melanie thought he looked even younger and more attractive in his casual attire than he had in a texedo. They were seated in the corner, and they shared a laugh about the brusque French service. They drank two bottles of wine with their entrees and shared a chocolate mousse for dessert. The conversation between them was easy and comfortable, and Melanie found herself wanting the night to go on longer than she knew it would. D.C. had no nightlife to speak of for adults over twenty-eight years old.

When they were done with dinner, Brian paid the bill, and Melanie thanked him.

“I have a live shot in the morning, and I know you have to be at the office at the crack of dawn, so I should probably let you go home and get some sleep,” Brian said.

Melanie was disappointed, but she smiled. “Sounds like a plan,” she said.

She stood up and felt the effects of the wine. She put her hand on the chair to steady herself, and Brian put his arm around her waist. They walked to the car like that.

“Can we give you a ride?” Melanie said.

“That would be great,” Brian said. She debated asking him to come back to her apartment for a drink. She didn’t want to misread his signs. He had ended the date, but he’d been the one pursuing her all week. She glanced down at her BlackBerry. He did the same.

“Anything good on yours?” he asked her, skimming his messages.

“Nothing,” she said, smiling at him, “How about yours? Anything good?”

“Nothing,” he answered.

As they rode the short distance to Melanie’s building, Walter and Sherry were doing their best imitation of invisible people. Brian glanced toward the front seat, but neither of them looked up. He moved closer to Melanie and leaned in to kiss her. She kissed him back.

They stopped at the last traffic light before Melanie’s building.
What the hell
, Melanie thought.

“I was wondering if you’d like to come up for a drink,” she said quietly.

“I would like that,” he said, smiling and kissing her again.

Walter and Sherry were silent when they pulled up to Melanie’s building, but Melanie could swear she saw Walter wink at Brian when he got out. She cringed.

“Good night, guys,” she said to them. “See you tomorrow.”

They waved. “G’night,” they said in unison.

Melanie felt some butterflies in her stomach on the elevator ride up. Once inside, he pulled her toward him and kissed her again. It was a long, flirty kiss that felt like the beginning of exactly what Melanie had been preparing for when she’d pulled out her lacy underwear.

He untied her wrap dress, and it fell open as they stood in her entryway kissing. It was so natural, but she needed to slow things down a bit. She pulled away from him slightly.

“Why don’t you open the bottle of wine on the counter, and I’ll just be one second?” she said to him.

“I can handle that,” he said.

She went into her bedroom and sat down on her bed. She slipped out of her dress and sat on the bed in her underwear. It had been so long since she’d had a man in her apartment. Charlotte would have gotten a kick out of the fact that Melanie had lured a younger man back to her place.

Thinking of Charlotte made her look at her BlackBerry. She saw an urgent message to call the Situation Room at the same time her cell phone and home phone rang. She heard another phone ringing that didn’t sound familiar to her. It was Brian’s cell phone. She heard him answer before she could get to her own phones. She opened the
door to her bedroom and saw his face turn white before he hung up his phone.

“Marine One crashed in Afghanistan,” he said. “I need to confirm that the president is still alive.” He looked at Melanie as she stood in the doorway between her bedroom and the living room, suddenly feeling foolish in just her black bra and panties.

Dale

Dale heard voices, but she couldn’t make them out. She thought, at times, that they were talking to her, but she couldn’t be sure. She knew someone had been hurt. Something had crashed.

Was I in a crash?
she wondered. She wasn’t sure.
No, I’m fine,
she decided.

But then she tried to open her eyes, and she couldn’t. She’d start to try to talk, but there were tubes in her mouth. She’d try to move her hands, but they were tied down. She felt panic growing in her chest and legs. Where was she?

But then the woman with the cool hands and familiar voice would put her hand on her arm or her face and talk in low, soothing tones. The woman would call for someone else, and that person would come into the room and put something into the bag hanging above her arm, and she’d sleep again.

Dale kept trying to make out her face. She recognized the voice but couldn’t place it yet. At first, she thought it was her mother, but it wasn’t her mother’s voice.

And her mother’s hands were always warm. Besides, her mother wouldn’t be this calm if someone had crashed.

Dale could hear the woman breathing in the chair next to her bed.
The woman didn’t talk, and when she left the room, it was never for long.

She always came back and sat in the chair next to her bed.

Dale was tired again.

She’d figure it out the next time she woke up.

Charlotte

How is she?” she asked the doctor for the hundredth time.

“We don’t know, Madam President. We won’t know until she wakes up,” she said.

What she did not and would not say was that they didn’t know for sure
if
she would wake up.

Charlotte didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there. It felt like days, but there wasn’t a chance that she’d be left alone that long, especially after what had transpired. She’d stood in the operating room while they worked on Dale. It wasn’t like scenes of operating rooms in the movies or on television shows. It was quiet and calm. No one talked. The doctors just worked on her for what felt like twelve hours but was probably more like five or six. She had shrapnel in her lower abdomen. It had hit her just where her flak jacket stopped and had gone almost all the way through her body, from just below her belly button all the way through to her back. At first, they were concerned that she’d be paralyzed, but her spinal column had been spared. They worked to repair her stomach and intestines for hours, and just as they repaired one organ, they found bleeding in another. The doctors asked Charlotte to leave a few times, but she made it clear that she wasn’t planning on going anywhere.

Charlotte hadn’t been more than twenty feet away from Dale since
they’d brought her in from the crash site. When they moved her to the ICU, where she’d stay until her condition was stable enough to travel to the military hospital in Germany, Charlotte sat in a chair in her room.

A military aide knocked on the door. “Madam President, Secretary Taylor would like to see you,” he said.

“Please tell him to stay away from this room.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What time does Melanie Kingston land?” she asked.

“She left Andrews at one
A.M.
, Madam President.”

“I don’t have any idea what time it is here, or in Washington. Please just tell me how much longer until she lands,” Charlotte snapped.

“About an hour and a half.”

“Please send her straight here,” Charlotte ordered.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Charlotte looked at Dale. She was breathing through a ventilator, and various other machines and monitors surrounded her. Even with a sheet and a blanket covering her wounds, Charlotte could tell that her body was swollen and mangled. Charlotte stood up and walked to the table where they had set up a secure phone for her to use. She picked it up and asked the military operator to connect her to Melanie on the military transport plane that was rushing her to Afghanistan.