We didn’t stop to rest when we finally dragged ourselves out of the water. The feeling that Hazar and Morris were right behind us kept us pressing on.

“This way,” the president said, and I followed, trudging along the corridor, water pouring from my clothes onto the beige carpet. Around us, the plane groaned and creaked as if it were preparing to die.

We passed a meeting room strewn with chairs and files, with a large oval table fixed in the center. There might have been a pair of legs protruding from beneath the table, but I looked away and fixed my eyes on the president’s back as he led me through a large, heavy door. When we were both on the other side of it, he sealed the door behind us and locked it shut.

“We should be safe in here.” The president wiped his face and ran his hands along each arm to squeeze some of the water from his shirtsleeves. “Even if they come into the plane, they’ll never get through this door. It’s designed to keep terrorists out.” He forced a smile at me. “You’re on my turf now, Oskari.”

I nodded and copied what he was doing, trying to wring some of the lake out of my clothes.

“That’s the galley in there.” The president pointed to the room on my left. “The medical office and my suite are just back here.” He pointed over his shoulder. “These stairs lead up to the comms center and the flight deck. Come on.”

I flicked water from my hands as I followed him, glancing into the medical office and bumping into the president when he stopped in front of me.

“This is our way out,” he said, putting a hand on the door to our left. The large exit was set into the wall of the aircraft, with a red handle to one side of it. The words TURN TO OPEN were printed around it.

“We can open it from in here and get out if we need to.” The president looked down at me. “Have you ever seen the President of the United States coming out of Air Force One? Waving to the crowds?”

I shook my head.

“Never seen that on TV?”

I shook my head again.

“Well.” He sighed. “If you ever did, it’s this door he comes out of — I come out of. Should’ve been coming out of it this morning.” He paused. “Anyway, first things first. This way.” He pushed open the door to his right and we walked through into his office.

“You ever been in the White House, Oskari?”

“No.”

“Well, you have now. If I’m in this room, it’s the White House.”

The dark wooden desk, set across the far corner, was still fixed in place, but there was nothing on top of it. The papers, files, and laptop that had probably been there were now strewn across the brown carpet or piled on the leather corner couch that was opposite. The president’s office chair was there, too, wheels turned up toward the ceiling like a dead animal. A curtain was pulled back along the far wall, revealing a blue-and-gold presidential seal and a row of five porthole windows. The blinds were all down, letting in only a few cracks of white light. The whole place smelled of wood and leather and polish.

“Have a look over there.” The president pointed at the couch. “See if you can find my cell phone; this one’s ruined.” He pulled the bodyguard’s phone from his pocket and threw it aside as he hurried over to the desk and began yanking out drawers. Above him was a small opening in the ceiling, with a plastic tube hanging down like a thread of spider silk. On the end of it was a yellow face mask that swung and jiggled about when he bumped into it. There were more masks just like it close to me, hanging from the ceiling above the corner couch.

I rummaged through the papers and files, throwing them onto the floor behind me until I spotted a black smartphone wedged between two of the seat cushions. “Here!”

“Well done.” The president came around his desk and took it from me. He switched it on and waited for the screen to light up. “Surprise, surprise,” he said. “No signal.” He held it up and turned around a few times, then threw it onto the floor and kicked the desk. “Damn it! Why don’t I have a satellite phone like traitor Morris?”

“You have any other ideas?” I asked.

“Right.” He rubbed his face. “What now? Think, think, think. Ah! Upstairs. Comms center and flight deck. If there’s any chance of calling for help, it’ll be up there.” He turned and hurried from the room. “Come on, Oskari.”

We made our way back along the corridor and climbed the stairs into the communications center where, despite the angle of the plane, the desks were still in place, fixed against the walls to our left and right. Everything else was a mess. Above the desks were large banks of charred electronic equipment, with every screen cracked, as if broken deliberately. There were pieces of broken plastic and wires hanging out of them like entrails. Five large office chairs and other pieces of broken electronic equipment were lying against the left wall, covering what looked like more bodies, and the floor was littered with loose papers and wires and laptops with their screens smashed. Yellow oxygen masks dangled from the ceiling, gently swaying from side to side. A tangy smell hung in the air, mixed with a hint of burning.

The president stopped in front of me and looked around. He put one hand on the wall to support himself and shook his head in disbelief. “No chance of using any of this to call for help.”

“But how are the lights still on?” I asked.

“Emergency power, I guess. This is no ordinary plane. The hull is ten times stronger than a civilian passenger jet. It’s designed to withstand a nuclear blast on the ground — all the windows are armored, it has enemy radar jamming, flares to confuse enemy missiles, infrared to confuse enemy guidance systems —”

“So how did someone shoot it down?”

The president raised his eyebrows. “That’s a good question, Oskari, and there’s only one answer I can think of. Morris. He must have sabotaged the systems. There were twenty-six crew members on this plane. My security detail, staff members … more than forty people in total, and he just … threw them away like that. A man who I thought was my friend. Maybe he was right — maybe the president can’t have friends.”

“I’m your friend,” I said.

“Yes, you are. And you’ve proved it often enough. Come on, flight deck’s this way, maybe we’ll have better luck there.” He stepped past the debris and went through the door into the next room, saying, “crew lounge,” but I kept my eyes on his back, not wanting to see any more bodies as I followed him to the far end and entered the cockpit.

I thought it would need a massive flight deck to fly a beast like this, but it was actually quite cramped. There was enough room for a small table with a couple of chairs behind the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, but that was it.

The nose of the plane was raised slightly because it was resting on the shallows of the small island, so the curved window gave us a good view of the surface of the lake on either side. Over to our left I could just about make out the shore, but it didn’t look like much more than a dark strip from here.

“You think we could make it over there before they spot us?” I asked.

“Might be worth a try.”

The mist still hung over the water, but was a little thinner than before. There was a growing brightness that suggested the sun was trying to come out and burn it away, so maybe it would be gone by midday. I imagined the sky would be blue this afternoon, with just the slightest wisp of cloud. I wasn’t sure we’d live long enough to see it, though.

There was the same tangy, smoky stink of burned-out electronics in here as there had been in the communications center, and a variety of insistent pinging and beeping noises pulsed every few seconds. The alarms sounded in a chorus that fell in time with some of the lights flickering around the cockpit.

The president went straight to the front, standing between the pilot and copilot’s seats, leaning in to look at the array of equipment. There was a baffling assortment of switches and dials and screens and buttons. Some of them were dead, but others were alight, flashing as if they were expecting attention.

“Gotta be something here,” he said. “There has to be a radio or something.” He scanned the dials and buttons, touching this and that, shaking his head. “How the hell do they ever learn what all these are?”

He leaned closer, putting his hand on the throttle. Right away, the plane heaved and started to shake as if the engines were trying to start up. A warning siren began to scream, filling the flight deck, and a series of red lights erupted on the instrument panel.

The president jumped back in shock, releasing the lever. The lights stopped flashing, the siren stopped screaming, and the plane stopped shuddering.

He put one hand on the back of the pilot’s seat and the other on his chest. “Damn. Almost gave me a heart attack.” He turned to look at me. “Incredible. It’s like there’s still power to the engines. They always told me it’s designed to withstand impacts that would obliterate a normal plane.”

“I guess people aren’t designed to withstand the same impacts.” I pointed my chin toward the front of the seat, and he looked down to see the pilot lying in a heap on the floor.

The president took a jacket from beside the copilot’s chair and draped it over the dead man.

I turned away and looked out of the window, watching the lake rippling a few yards below the level of the glass to my left. There was something about it that bothered me.

“Did you find a radio?” I asked. “Is there anything we can use to call for help?”

The president looked at me for a long moment, then shook his head. “Truth is, I don’t know how any of this stuff works, Oskari.”

“What are we going to do, then? What do we do now?”

He sat on the edge of the pilot’s seat so our faces were level, and he put his hands on my shoulders. “Look at me,” he said, making me turn to meet his eyes. “We’re going to make it, Oskari.”

“How?”

“All we have to do is sit tight and wait for the military to arrive. They must have found us by now.”

“Using their satellites?”

He nodded.

“The same ones Morris is using?”

“Most probably.”

I turned and looked out of the window again, watching the water. Something wasn’t right. I leaned closer, peering down and frowning.

“What is it?” the president asked, getting to his feet. “You see something?”

“It’s getting higher,” I said. “The water.”

“No, it can’t —” He pressed in beside me and looked down.

“President, I think we’re sinking. I don’t think we can wait here much longer.”

But there was something else about the water, too. As we watched, the mist swirled around like a tornado and the movement on the surface grew larger and more troubled, buffeting more and more until a large ripple formed. The way it looked reminded me of the time a rock had bounced up and hit Dad’s windscreen. The glass had stayed in one piece, but had cracked in a circular pattern, with a hole in the middle and a thousand tiny fractures running away from it. That’s what the lake looked like now.

“Helicopter?” I whispered.

A vibration shook through the plane — not violent like it had been when the president touched the controls, but a gentle shaking.

“Yeah.” The president nodded. “But whose? The military’s, or Morris’s?”

The vibration continued to shake through the plane as other eerie sounds echoed in the cockpit, making us both look up at the ceiling. There was a rasping and shuffling of something being dragged across the top of the fuselage, then a strange metallic scraping noise followed by two heavy thuds.

“Someone’s on the roof.” My voice was barely audible, my throat tightening in fear. “You think it’s your soldiers?” The unmistakable noise of boots clomping just above us resonated through the flight deck. “Navy SEALs?”

The president didn’t answer. He just shook his head and continued to look at the ceiling, as if doing it for long enough might give him X-ray vision.

The footsteps moved right over our heads toward the front of the plane.

“I don’t like it …” the president said.

I didn’t like it, either, and I turned my head, following the noises until they stopped above the pilot’s seat. “Sounds like two sets of boots to me.”

“Just two?”

I nodded and glanced at the president. Just two sets. We both knew what that meant. And to confirm our worst fears, a face appeared at the top of the window, upside down, peering into the cockpit.

Morris.

There was a look of surprise when he first saw us, then he locked eyes with the president and grinned. In that moment, he looked like a devil, eyes glinting with victory. He tilted his head a touch and waggled his fingers before disappearing from view.

The next thing we saw was Morris’s hand, swinging down hard to stick a lump of what looked like putty to the window.

The president reacted right away, grabbing my arm and dragging me back toward the door. “Explosives!” he shouted. “Get out of here!”