“We’ll see about this!” And the Secret Service man marched off in a huff to another civilian, who handed him a cellular telephone.

  Remo walked up to the colonel.

  “You in charge?” he demanded.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Remo Jones. U.S. embassy.”

  The colonel subsided. His voice was still testy as he asked, “And who are these people?” He pointed to the Master of Sinanju and the Mexican representatives.

  “Chiun’s my interpreter. The others can introduce themselves. I want a look inside the plane.”

  The colonel shook his head. “Sorry. The damn NTSB has it roped off. Won’t let anyone inside. The FBI is having fits. They say it’s a terrorist bombing. And there’s the NTSB. They say it’s an air disaster, and therefore falls under their purview.”

  Over by the broken tail, two civilians stood shouting at one another. One wore a blue jacket and baseball cap labeled: NTSB.

  “I take it that’s the flip side of this mess?” Remo said.

  “It’s a bureaucratic nightmare!” the colonel snapped. “No one’s ever had a situation like this. It’s an air disaster, a possible kidnapping, and an international incident all rolled into one, with terroristic overtones. No ones knows where the jurisdictional lines should be drawn.”

  “It’s also a national catastrophe,” Remo said. “Come on, Chiun.”

  Officer Mazatl started to follow, but was stopped by the colonel. That led to a sudden argument over Mexican territoriality, with Comandante Odio trying in vain to placate both sides.

  The Master of Sinanju drew up beside Remo, and Remo marched toward the argument, his fists tight.

  “That woman spoke words of wisdom to me,” Chiun said.

  “What are those?”

  “She says that the Mexican DFS is notoriously corrupt and not to trust the comandante.”

  “Funny. That’s what the comandante said about her,” Remo muttered. “Nobody seems to care about what happened out here. Just how it affects their freaking turf.”

  “Do not take it so hard, my son. You have seen many Presidents come and go in your young life. How is this different?”

  “One,” Remo said tightly, “we don’t know that he’s dead yet. Two, it happened on our watch.”

  “While we were doing our duty elsewhere,” Chiun pointed out. “This is all Smith’s fault. Had he possessed good information, this embarrassment could have been avoided.”

  “You too?” Remo snapped. “The President is missing, and all everybody is concerned about is their backsides. Wonderful.”

  “Remo!” Chiun said, blowing out his cheeks in anger. But when his pupil did not stop to engage in an argument, the Master of Sinanju hurried to join him. He said nothing. He had never seen his pupil this way. Perhaps Remo had voted for the man. They approached the two shouting whites.

  “Look, Lunkhead, or Lunkin,” Bill Holland was screaming, “I’ll say it once more. The FBI can observe. It cannot–repeat, cannot–participate in processing the site!”

  Remo waded into the argument between Bill Holland of the National Transportation Safety Board and Agent Lunkin of the FBI like a referee breaking up two hockey players. He took them by the backs of their necks and shook them until their teeth rattled.

  “Shut up! Both of you! Now!”

  “Who are you?” Bill Holland demanded, unable to break Remo’s steel-strong finger grip on his neck.

  The FBI agent said nothing. He had inadvertently bitten his own tongue in the shaking and was busy stemming the flow of blood by holding it with his fingers.

  “Remo Jones. Cultural attaché, U.S. embassy. I’m here as an observer, and what I see stinks. I want a report.”

  “I don’t report to you,” Holland said sullenly.

  Remo’s fingers dug into Holland’s spine and suddenly he was reporting freely.

  “She was shot down,” he gasped. “We found a Stinger fire unit in the hills. We’ve accounted for all passengers and crew, except one. There’s a body missing.”

  “The President’s?” Remo demanded.

  “Could be. Some of the corpses are so mutilated it’s impossible to tell until the forensic team goes to work.”

  “So the President might have survived?” Remo asked in a quieter tone, after releasing Holland’s neck.

  Holland shook his head. “If he was aboard when it came down, he’s gone. You can go to your grave believing it.”

  “I’d rather see for myself. I’m going in.”

  “The forensic team has not been inside yet,” he warned.

  “Ask me if I care,” Remo said, starting off.

  Before Bill Holland could reply, a civilian helicopter clattered into view over a mountaintop. It settled to the ground, making their clothes ripple.

  “That will be them,” Holland said, shielding his eyes against the high Mexican sun. “We can walk through the site with them–if you’ve got the stomach for it.”

  “I’ve seen worse than this,” Remo said, watching as two gangling men in identical black business suits emerged from the back of a Bell Jet Ranger. They each carried a black briefcase. At the sight of Holland’s lifted arm, they made a beeline for him.

  “That’s Murray and Murphy, the Merry Morticians,” Holland told Remo out of the side of his mouth. “You’ll see in a minute why we call them that.”

  Remo stood about, arms folded impatiently as Holland greeted the pair. Together they entered the broken blue-and-white shell that had been Air Force One.

  “Never mind this one,” Holland told Murray and Murphy as they stepped over a body. “He’s already identified. Did you bring the President’s dental records?”

  “You bet,” Murray said.

  “He should be easy to ID,” Murphy added. “All we need to see are the teeth. He had a gold-filled back molar. Right side.”

  “No, the left,” Murray corrected.

  “A gold-filled molar, anyway,” Murphy said in a genial voice.

  Inside the downed aircraft, they picked their way to the presidential section. The craft’s interior had been stripped down to the braces and wiring by the impact. They stopped before a mangled corpse. The metallic smell of blood filled the narrow confines.

  “Where’s his head?” Murray wanted to know.

  “Hasn’t been found,” Holland said.

  “Without the head,” Murphy added in a disappointed voice, “we don’t have our gold-filled molar. Somebody better find the head.”

  “That’s not the President,” Remo inserted. “Must be a journalist. Look at the cheap suit.”

  Everyone looked. They all agreed with Remo’s supposition. They moved on to the next body.

  The next one had been practically rendered into raw meat.

  “What happened to him?” Remo asked, taken aback by the mutilation.

  “There are a lot of anomalies on this one,” Holland told him. “Never seen anything like it.”

  “Oh, well, time to get to work,” Murray said, setting his briefcase beside the barely human remains.

  Murphy did the same. They opened their briefcases in concert-hall synchronization and with careful fingers drew on identical rubber surgical gloves. Then they proceeded to poke and prod the exposed viscera of the abdomen like children playing in mud.

  Bill Holland turned away.

  Remo signaled Chiun to keep Holland distracted, and moved through the cabin. He stepped over bodies, quickly dismissing those that were too short or too fat or the wrong sex. He noticed the damage to the radarscope and other equipment, and although he possessed no air-crash investigative experience, he intuitively understood patterns of destruction and realized that he was looking at manmade, not natural destruction, in many places. Kneeling, he examined obvious bullet wounds.

  Remo went back to join Chiun and Bill Holland in the open air. On the way out, he smelled the sour sick smell that he had noticed only subliminally on the way in.

  He stopped, tracking it with his nose. A messy, trampled-on stain in the dark blue rug, directly over the Presidential Seal. It looked like puppy excrement.

  Remo rejoined the others.

  “I don’t think the President’s body is in there,” Remo told Holland.

  “I had a crash once,” Holland mused, “where a DC-4 went down in the Rockies. Up in Montana. We combed the crash radius and for six miles in all directions, collected every rivet and wire of the airframe, and every lost soul about, except one. The copilot. It was the wildest thing we’d ever seen. Totally unexplainable.” Holland’s eyes went out of focus, as if he were reliving the experience.

  “Yeah?” Remo prompted.

  “Until we went through the passenger manifests,” Holland added firmly. “Found out the copilot’s girlfriend was flying in coach. Started me thinking. What if he had gone back to talk to her? What if the plane turned over in flight?”

  “He went out a window?” Remo suggested.

  “No, out the astrodome. The aircraft encountered turbulence and inverted while he was walking up the aisle, and down he went. We found his body thirty miles from the crash site. What the coyotes left.”

  “Air Force One have an astrodome?” Remo wanted to know.

  “No,” Bill Holland said, looking out toward the mountains. “It’s totally inexplicable.” He turned to Remo. “But there’ll be a reasonable explanation for this one too. And we’ll find it. If the FBI, Secret Service, and Air Force just stay off our back long enough for us to do our jobs,” he added.

  Saying that, Bill Holland sucked in a deep breath and reentered the wreckage.

  Remo glanced over to the Master of Sinanju. Chiun’s head was up. He sniffed the dry desert air, his hands tucked away in his joined kimono sleeves. He looked like a scarlet silk genie.

  Remo fixed his eye on Air Force One’s tail assembly, which lay nearby, tilted onto one bent stabilizer. The ground was hard brown sand. The kind that formed a cracked crust after rainstorms, the kind that would not show footprints, but breaks in the crust.

  His eyes tracked a necklace of such breaks going off to the horizon.

  “Looks like someone headed off in that direction,” Remo ventured. “South.”

  “Yes. The direction of the awful smell.”

  “Smell?”

  “Did you not smell it, Remo? That belly-sickness stink?”

  “Yeah. I smelled it back in the plane. Almost stepped in it, too.”

  “It is fainter out here. But to those with senses such as ours, it is an odor that could be followed to the one who reeks of it.”

  “Good thinking,” Remo said, looking around slowly. “We could cover a lot more ground by helicopter.”

  “True. But we could not follow the scent from the air,” Chiun pointed out.

  “Yeah. And we’d be bogged down in a lot of bureaucratic infighting too.”

  Remo considered the situation. He rotated his thick wrists impatiently, a habit he had when he was thinking. He was thinking furiously.

  Over by the Mexican helicopter, the Air Force colonel, Officer Guadalupe Mazatl, and Comandante Odio were talking earnestly. Odio’s smile was turned up to one hundred candlepower. It seemed to be working. Officer Mazatl and the colonel were scowling at one another, but no longer shouting.

  Finally Remo made a decision.

  “Let’s cut out,” he told Chiun. “Subtly.”

  They began to drift off, trying not to seem to be obvious as they moved away from the crash site. The NTSB personnel milling around the site were so preoccupied with their work–or their arguments–that no one noticed that they had slipped away.

  Until Officer Guadalupe Mazatl looked up from her huddle with Comandante Odio and the – colonel and noticed the figure of the white gringo and the yellow old man receding in the distance.

  She took a step back from the huddle. The men were ignoring her. Officer Mazatl worked her way to the other side of the crash site, ignoring, and being ignored in turn, by the gringos.

  They ignored her until she was far from the site, and after she had melted into the sierra, they did not miss her.

  Chapter Eight

  The President of the United States was amazed at the change in his Vice-President.

  The man had been, frankly, an embarrassment from the day the presidential nominee had announced his selection before an eager Atlanta campaign crowd, and the then-Vice-President-designate had hugged him like a long-lost brother, shouting inanities like “Go get ’em!” That started all the Son of the President jokes.

  Then came the National Guard enlistment story, but the President–then merely his party’s nominee–had hung tough. And it had paid off. The National Guard thing had blown over.

  The jokes, however, had never blown over. Every stand-up comedian had a phone book full of them. How the Vice-President had kept his home state safe from the Vietcong during the war. How he resembled Robert Redford. How he was for sure no Jack Kennedy. The golfing jokes. And the cruel one that had it that the Secret Service were under orders to shoot the Vice-President if anything happened to the President.

  It got so bad that even the Secret Service had gone along with it. They had code-named him “Scorecard.”

  And yet, after the early trying months on the campaign trail, it had worked out. For the President. After the election, the media continued to lampoon the Vice-President. And the more of a lightning rod he became, the less fun the media made of the President of the United States. His approval rating went through the roof.

  It had been a good choice after all. And in the privacy of the Oval Office, the President himself had fallen into the habit of repeating the better zingers he had overheard. Strictly in fun.

  He was not laughing now.

  He had discovered new respect when the Vice-President removed his blindfold and said, in a strained, halting voice, “Hello is all right.”

  Well, it was no big deal. The Vice-President always had problems with his syntax. The President himself had had to be coached by his handlers not to mangle his own sentence structure and to keep his often-jerky body language under control.

  But when the Vice-President, his eyes a-crinkle over that fixed smile of his, bent down and pulled his leg bonds apart with his bare hands, the President had been really impressed.

  “Gee, I never knew you were so strong,” the President had blurted out foolishly. It was the only thing he could think to say.

  The Vice-President stepped behind him and performed the same Samson-like feat on his bound hands. The wooden chair back actually came apart under the grip of his firm hands like a balsa sculpture.

  The President had to be helped to his feet.

  “This is amazing!” he had said. “Been working out, have you?”

  “Survival, this is,” the Vice-President had said.

  “Yes, adrenaline. I understand. It does incredible things, really incredible. But, Dan, how did you get down here? How did you find me?”

  “Protect you. My mission is to.”

  The poor guy sounded like Yoda from Star Wars, but the President understood his meaning.

  “Take a deep breath,” he had said as feeling returned to his numb limbs. “Calm down. Tell me what the heck’s going on. The last thing I remember is Air Force One going down. Then I sorta blacked out.”

  “We survived.”

  “You mean I survived. You weren’t aboard.”

  “Surviving is the most important element in survival. To survive is to survive. To have survived is to be in existence.”

  “Yeah, I think I get your drift,” the President had said, patting his Vice-President on one nerve-rigid shoulder. The poor fella was really rattled. He looked around the dim cabin for something cool to drink, possibly to throw over the Vice-President. He looked really overheated, despite his fixed, too-perfect smile. Not only that, but his suit didn’t match. He was wearing a brown coat over navy-blue slacks. He also sported the worst haircut this side of Borneo. Perhaps it was the Vice-President’s attempt at being incognito, he mused.

  Then the President of the United States noticed the bodies.

  “Oh, my God.”

  The kaffiyehs were all the President needed to see to know that they were Middle Eastern terrorists of some sort. In a way, it was a relief. Middle Eastern terrorists had never directly threatened a United States President. Colombian narco-terrorists, on the other hand, were capable of anything. Most of them used their own product.

  “What happened to these guys?” the President croaked.

  “They threatened our survival. Their survival became a threat to your survival. Their survival was interrupted.”

  The Vice-President lifted a driver from the golf bag that, for the first time, the President noticed slung over his shoulder.

  “You took them out with a driver?” he asked, incredulous.

  “Was it the correct tool?”

  “To tee off, yeah, but for this...” The President looked around the shack. It had been a long time since he had seen dead bodies. Not since World War II.

  “I am very creative,” the Vice-President said simply.

  “Where exactly am I?” the President asked suddenly.

  “With me. With you I always am. With you I will always be.” The Vice-President replaced the driver like Conan the Barbarian holstering an over-the-back broadsword.

  The President put both hands on the Vice-President’s shoulders, once again amazed by the unyielding hardness of his musculature.

  “That’s a really, really noble sentiment, and I appreciate it. I really do.”

  “The task of serving the President is a task,” the Vice-President said with all the warmth of a Swiss watch ticking.

  “Right,” the President remarked. “That’s fine. You take another deep breath. I want to look around a bit.”

  A sudden hand stopped the President. It was the Vice-President.

  “There is no time,” he said in a mechanical monotone. “Must escape. Must survive. If you survive, I will continue to survive. Separated, must not be. We.”

  The President took in that unalterable fixed smile and decided to say yes. It could be the Vice-President was verging on hysteria. His eyes were definitely glassy, and instead of making sense, he was babbling more and more.