Survival Course

Destroyer 82: Survival Course

By Warren Murphy apir

Chapter 1

Not everyone agreed the President of the United States should go to Bogota.

A Pan American drug summit was scheduled for the next day in Bogota, Colombia. The embattled President of Colombia was the host. Leaders from as far north as Canada had already arrived. All that remained was for the President's arrival, which everybody did agree would be a tremendous show of support in the long war against the Colombian drug cartels.

The polls were evenly split on the matter. It was a hot topic on radio call-in shows, Sunday-morning TV information programs, and in bars. In Washington, politicians debated the subject with unusual intensity. Only the White House staff was unanimous in its support of the President's brave decision. In public.

In private, it was a slightly different matter.

"For the last time, you gotta cancel!" pleaded the President's chief of staff: "Tell them you have the flu."

"I'm going," the President said firmly in his slightly nasal voice, a voice that mixed New England consonants with a Texas twang. When excited, the President sometimes sounded like an out-of-tune steel bango. He was not excited now. He was firm.

"I'm going," he repeated firmly.

"The drug barons are blowing up buildings all over Bogota," the chief of staff pleaded. "This thing is a security nightmare. If we postpone it-just postpone-there's time to work out a change of venue. Relocate the thing to Texas, or even northern Mexico. Say, Nogales. On the U.S. side of the border."

"How would it look if the President of the United States bowed to the threats of these narco-terrorists?" the President demanded. He was seated at a kidney-shaped desk, trying to finish a thank-you note.

"A damn sight better than if the presidents of Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Canada, and Mexico all ended up in body bags-provided there are any nonliquid parts left over to bag," the President's press secretary said pointedly.

The President stood up. Outside the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, a Marine helicopter was whining to life, ready to ferry the President to the waiting Air Force One.

"No," he said, "I'm going to Bogota. Now, you two get on the train or stop playing with the whistle."

"If we can't talk you out of Bogota, how about we move the conference to another Colombian city?" the chief of staff whined. "Just to throw those narco-thugs off-balance?"

"Can't," the President said irritably. "You know that. The other delegates are already settled in."

"Think of your family."

"I have. And of millions of other families wounded by drugs."

"Then think of the Vice-President in your job!" the chief of staff blurted.

The President stiffened. He adjusted his glasses. His voice grew chilly. "He's a good man. He'll grow."

The chief of staff subsided. "Fine," he grumbled. "Let's hope if they do bomb the conference, they do it before you get there."

"Let's hope they don't do it at all," the President added pointedly, reaching for his blue poplin windbreaker with the presidential patch.

At Massachusetts' Hanscom Air Base, where Air Force One was being refueled, the topic of the President's trip to Bogota was on the lips of the ground crew as they pumped Jet-A fuel into the thirsty 707's fuel tanks.

"He's crazy to go," said a corporal as he kept one eye on the truck's gauge. The fuel truck resembled a common oil truck that delivered fuel oil to residential homes. Except it was shorter and painted a military gray. "Those Colombians, they're cold," the corporal added. He snapped his fingers. "They'd snuff him out just like that."

"He's committed," said the other, an airman. "He can't back down now. He'd lose face."

"Better to lose a little face than have your legs and everything between them blown away. Know what I mean?"

"If we back down to these scum, they'll only get braver," the airman retorted, frowning in perplexity at the round grille he suddenly noticed under the fuel intake. He could have sworn it hadn't been there a moment ago. "We'll lose Colombia, then Peru, and the rest of South America. How long before Mexico is run by drug lords? Then what do we do? Build a fucking wall like the East Germans?"

"We execute the pushers in this country, that's what. Dry up demand, and those bastards are out of business. "

"You know," the airman said in a funny little voice, "I could have sworn that grille wasn't there a minute ago."

The corporal looked up. He noticed the chrome-ringed mesh grille. It looked like a tiny speaker.

"What do you suppose it is?"

"Probably some electronic sensor or something. This bird is loaded with the latest electronic warfare equipment. What I'm wondering is, how come she's drinking so much fuel? We've been here quite a while. "

"That's what I was thinking too." The corporal tapped the gauge. The pointer stayed where it was.

"If I didn't know better," he muttered. "I'd say we just pumped in more fuel than this bird's capacity."

"Well, you know that ain't so."

"Yeah, you're right. I guess we were jawing when we should have been paying attention. Ah, there it goes. "

A little cough-syrup-red fuel sloshed back from the intake and the corporal hurriedly threw a lever, cutting off the flow. He pulled the nozzle from the intake and capped it.

"I still think the President is a fool for going," he added, dragging the hose back to the truck. "Prestige is important, but survival's what counts."

"That's what this is all about, America's survival."

Together they retracted the hose in silence, and then drove away.

After they were gone, the chrome-ringed grille retreated from sight and the white metal skin healed over as if from a wound.

In the cockpit, Captain Nelson Flagg was running through the preflight cockpit check with his copilot. The damper switch was stuck.

"Hit it again," the copilot said.

The captain did. A telltale amber light came on.

"This thing hasn't been right since eighty-eight," he growled. "I can't wait until the replacement comes in."

"They should have retired this bird years ago. It guzzles gas like a Cadillac, the controls are finicky, and she burns oil like a Sherman tank."

"Just a few more months. If they ever get the wiring fixed in the new bird."

"Yeah. And if we survive this trip. I don't know about you, but I belong to the club that says the President is a fool to go."

"I'll be sure to pass your vote along to the chief executive if he pokes his head into the cockpit. You got the booster pumps?"

"Center off, main on," said the copilot, unaware of the chrome-ringed microphone disk that appeared on the floor beside his shoe like a metallic eye opening. It had appeared, as if on cue, when the copilot uttered the word "survive."

Then the clatter announcing the arrival of Marine One and the President caused them to forget their argument and focus on the remainder of their flightline check.

Hours later, over the sparkling blue of the Gulf of Mexico, Fort Worth air-traffic control handed over Air Force One tracking to Mexican air-traffic control in Monterrey.

"Here's where it gets hairy," Captain Flagg warned his copilot. "Just remember. These Mexicans traffic controllers may sound like they understand English, but half the time they don't catch what you're saying. Ask 'em if we can put her down on an oil platform in the Gulf and they'll happily roger the request. Or as they say, 'royer' it.

The copilot laughed. "It can't be that bad."

"They also like UFO reports. Report an in-flight problem and they ask you to confirm it as a UFO sighting. And that's just Mexico. It'll get worse the further south we go. Listen."

Captain Flagg hit his throat mike and began speaking.

"Monterrey air-traffic control, this is Air Force One. Over."

"Air Force One, we welcome you into our airspace. Say your heading."

"Gracias. We're proceeding on a southerly course to Mexico City."

"Royer."

The captain flashed his young copilot a lopsided grin.

"Royer," he muttered.

As the Gulf fell behind and Air Force One came in over the Mexican coast, the copilot looked down. Barren ranges of mountains rolled under the starboard wing, looking for all the world like a herd of dusty brontosauruses had collapsed and petrified there a million years ago.

"Brrr. I'd hate to have to ditch down there," he muttered.

"Royer," Captain Flagg said, laughing.

The U.S.-made Stinger missile destined to bring down Air Force One was built in General Dynamics' Pomona Division and shipped via the CIA to Pakistan and then across the Khyber Pass by pack mule to the Afghan Mujahideen. It lay for an entire winter in a cold cave controlled by the Hezb-i-Islami faction, along with three others, until it was finally brought into service.

A Soviet MIG Flogger was sweeping the desert floor and a rebel commander ordered it shot down. A goatherd-turned-freedom-fighter named Kaitmast brought the Stinger to his shoulder, uncapped it, exposed its optics, and braced himself for the blowback.

The Stinger sat on his ragged shoulder like a length of inert pipe.

Hastily Kaitmast thrust it aside and brought another to his shoulder. That one ignited, sending a rocket racing for the Flogger's glowing yellow tailpipe. The Stinger was designed to home in on the craft's superhot tailpipe. This one instead went crazy, zigzagging all over the sky like spastic skywriting.

The MIG vectored away. The Stinger gave a last sputtering gasp and dropped straight down, denting the top of a mountain.

Kaitmast cursed and drew back a boot to kick the dud Stinger in frustration. His rebel commander stopped him with a word.

"No," he spat. "We can sell it."

Back to Pakistan went the Stinger, where it was bartered to representatives from Iran for AK-47 ammunition. The Iranians, in turn, passed it along to Shiite fighters in Lebanon, where, after a complicated series of events, it fell into the hands of Bishara Hamas, a.k.a. Abu Al-Kalbin. In English, "Father of Dogs."

Among Palestinian terrorists, Abu Al-Kalbin was not a major player. Unlike some terrorists who pretended to be committed to Islamic revolution-and not merely murder and money-Abu AI-Kalbin was for sale to the highest bidder. It was that simple.

But when your nom de guerre is Father of Dogs, bids are usually low, even if you do have possession of an operational Stinger missile.

So when the Cali drug cartel of Colombia contracted with Abu Al-Kalbin for his services, Bishara Hamas indulged in no rug-merchant bazaar bargaining.

"Whatever is it, we-my Krez militia and I-will accomplish it," he confidently told his potential employer over a bottle of Omar Khayyam in his Beirut apartment.

The man who called himself "El Padrino" was dark of complexion, with the shiny black eyes of an Arab. But he spoke with a Spanish intonation as he carefully explained what he desired.

It was nothing less than the extinguishing of the President of the United States.

"Done," said Abu Al-Kalbin, who hated America because all his friends did.

And so it was that the Father of Dogs found himself, with both members of his ragtag Krez militia, crouched in the chilly top of a bare Mexican mountain in the desolate Sierra Madre Oriental range, beneath the air lane where their employer had assured them Air Force One would travel.

The hours dragged by as his men shivered and examined their precious Stinger-now nearly five years old-as if it were their firstborn.

"Put that down, you donkeys!" Abu Al-Kalbin snapped. "It is our only one. If you damage it, we will forfeit our payment. Worse, the prize we have sought for years will never be ours."

The men hastily lowered the Stinger to a blanket, careful not to jar it.

Abu Al-Kalbin brought his night-vision glasses back to his eyes. He had been told to look for an ordinary 707 flanked by F-14 Phantoms flying escort.

He frowned, thinking once again how the escort complicated matters. What if he knocked down one of the Phantoms? No, the heat-seeking missile would seek the closest heat source, the multiengined 707, not the fighters flying high cover.

The night wore on. He wrapped his kaffiyeh more closely around his mouth. He had worn it for disguise purposes-not that he expected to be spotted in this desolation of mountains-but the high thin air was chilling. His stomach rumbled hungrily, and he thought of the tostada he had bought from the street vendor back in Mexico City, only hours before.

He hoped he would eat again soon. Decent food. There were Arabic restaurants in Mexico City. He contemplated a feast in the best of them before the night was over. Lamb. Or stuffed pigeon. Perhaps sorrit issit for dessert. And a bottle of Laziza beer.

Then all thought of his next meal departed Abu Al-Kalbin's thoughts. They careened back to the tostada as, suddenly, urgently, he felt his bowels gurgle in warning.

"I suddenly do not feel well," Abu Al-Kalbin said slowly.

"What is wrong?" asked Jalid.

Abu Al-Kalbin did not answer. He was looking about the barren mountaintop for a bush or shrub to go behind. But there was no vegetation to shelter his modesty.

"I have the turistas," he moaned. "I must do my business here. Both of you-turn your backs!"

And as he began to drop his pants, a distant drone cut the night. Abu Al-Kalbin blinked.

"It comes!" a voice shrieked. It was Walid.

"Not now!" Abu Al-Kalbin cried, his eyes sick as they lifted to the star-blasted Mexican night. "You cannot come now!"

But it was coming now. Just as the smelly contents of his bowels were abruptly erupting onto the ground.

"You must do this yourselves," Abu AI-Kalbin moaned. "I am helpless." He moaned like a wounded cow, seeing his chance for immortal glory running from him like the hot contents of his digestive tract.

His men fell onto the Stinger. They fought for the honor of being the one to bring the hated American President down in ignominious flames.

"One of you! Just one!" Abu Al-Kalbin shouted.

Walid wrestled the Stinger from his fellow, Jalid. He hefted the clumsy black tube to his shoulder, removed the cap which came off too easily, he thought and sighted.

"I have it!" he shouted, spotting Air Force One in the optical sight. It was a winged shadow studded with lights.

"Do not hesitate! Launch!" Abu Al-Kalbin shouted, his face miserable with shame.

Walid triggered the Stinger. The protective tube kicked, expelling its contents. The first stage carried it away. The second stage ignited, sending it screaming into the night like a Roman candle.

At his electronic nest aboard Air Force One, Electronics Warfare Officer Captain Lester Dent spotted the heat source far below. Then the radarscope picked up an incoming object.

"Something coming at us," he shouted to the flight crew. "This sucker is traveling!"

"Disengaging autothrottle," Captain Flagg said, taking the plane off autopilot. He took immediate evasive action, hitting the right rudder. The big four-engine jet heeled sharply.

"Deploying phosphorous bombs!" Dent called out. From pockets in the aircraft's skin, phosphorous bombs were ejected. They ignited, providing convenient targets for any heat-seeking device.

Unfortunately, the five-year-old Stinger, improperly stored and manhandled for much of its life, was not homing in on anything in particular. It zigzagged for one sputtering phosphorous bomb, careened past it, and vectored back in the direction of Air Force One.

"Monterrey ATC," Captain Flagg called urgently. "I have a problem."

"Roger. Are you declaring emergency?"

"Affirmative, Monterrey. Advise we are at thirty-two thousand feet and taking evasive maneuvers to evade unknown approaching object."

"Are you reporting UFO?"

"No, dammit. I don't know what this thing is!"

"UFO. Royer, Air Force One," Monterrey said laconically.

"Dammit," Captain Flagg muttered, feeling the flying wheel go stiff in his hands. "Oh, my God!" he said.

"What?" gasped the copilot.

"The wheel. It's not responding."

"Hydraulics are fine," the copilot said, looking at his array of warning lights. They were amber, not red.

"It won't move."

"I'll try mine."

Before the copilot could take over, his flying wheel moved of its own accord.

"You got it?" the captain asked.

"No."

"What?"

"I'm not touching it," the copilot snapped. "See for yourself."

Captain Nelson Flagg looked over to the copilot's wheel. It was moving to port, putting the aircraft into a slideslip.

"What the hell is happening here? She's flying herself."

"Let's try to bring her back together."

The captain and the copilot put their shoulders into it, trying to hold their wheels steady. The wheels moved as if unseen hands had control of them.

"No go!" the copilot said in defeat.

"This damn ship!" Flagg grated.

Then he forgot all about his cursing as a sputtering incandescent object shot up past their windscreen and, turning sharply, came right at them.

The elevators abruptly moved of their own accord, throwing Air Force One into a steep dive. The approaching rocket disappeared from view.

"I lost it!" the copilot barked, craning to see out his side window. He caught a flash of one F-14 coming around, and only then became aware of the pilot's anxious chatter in his earphones. He ignored it, thinking, where'd that bogey go?

Then a flash of light burst off to starboard. The aircraft shuddered and the controls seized up.

Three red lights lit up, accompanied by the enginefire warning bell, shrill and insistent.

"Number four engine," the copilot called hoarsely. "EPRS on one, two, and three dropping fast."

"Fire the bottle and shut it down," Captain Flagg said crisply. Into his mike he said: "Monterrey. Monterrey. This is Air Force One."

"Royer. Go ahead."

"I am declaring a special emergency at this time. We're going to have to make an emergency landing in the desert."

"Royer. Happy landings, Air Force One," Monterrey said unconcernedly.

"Did he understand what you just said?" the copilot asked Flagg.

"No," returned Captain Flagg, looking down at the intensely black wrinkled mountains that were coming up to greet him. He hit the ident button, which automatically doubled his radar blip for Monterrey's benefit, and switched the transponder to emergency frequency. He wondered if it would matter.

In his private compartment, the President of the United States had already assumed the crash position -crouched over, hands on ankles and head between his knees-when he heard the mushy whump! of the explosion.

It had all happened so fast. A steward had come in to say there was a problem. That was all his Secret Service guards needed. They were on him like reporters, practically smothering him with their bodies, pistols raised ineffectually, looking at one another in sick fear.

"What was that?" one croaked.

"Explosion. "

"Oh, dear God, no."

The President heard them as if through a curtain of roaring in his ears. He was thinking that this was a highly undignified way for the leader of the free world to die. He felt the blood rush into his brain as the craft began to plummet.

He wondered if he would black out before the worst came. In his mind's eye he could see the seats in front of him accordion toward his helpless fetal-positioned body, the way he knew they did in airline crashes.

Crushed between airline seats. It was a ridiculous way for a President of the United States to die, he thought again.

And then he felt the seats in front of him press against the back of his neck, pushing his chin back into his seat. He didn't hear the horrible sound of impact, and he wondered why. In fact, he felt no fear. Only the comforting warmth of the seats around him as they pressed protectively against his coiled body. He felt safe. It was an odd feeling.

Then came a sudden jarring and the President of the United States thought no more thoughts.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was trying to convince the guerrilla leader that, despite his UPI credentials, he was indeed an American spy.

"You admit this?" the guerrilla leader asked. He wore a colorful poncho over striped trousers. His tall charro hat was the least riotous bit of his costume. He looked like an Incan cowboy.

They were in the heart of the rain forest. Monkeys and macaws chattered in the distance. Remo, whose white T-shirt and black chinos were not exactly jungle attire, nevertheless did not sweat in the Turkish-bath atmosphere. Instead, he was idly wondering what the dozen or more members of El Sendero Luminoso were thinking of. As guerrillas of the Mao-inspired Shining Path revolutionary movement, they were dressed for moving unseen through a pinata forest, not a Peruvian rain forest. Or were pinatas Mexican, not Peruvian? Remo had no idea. He didn't get down south of the border much.

"Sure," Remo said nonchalantly. "I admit it. I'm an American spy."

"I do not believe you," the guerrilla leader-whose name was Pablo-said flatly.

"For crying out loud," Remo said in exasperation. "I just confessed. What more do you want?" His hands, which had been lifted to the canopy of foliage, jumped to his hips. The Belgian FAL rifles, which had started to wilt, came up again. Remo ignored them. There were only seven Senderistas. And only two had their safeties off. That made five of them dead meat from the get-go. The others would be a nuisance if things got sticky. But only that.

"The last time a man claiming to be a reporter came to this province," the Shining Path unit leader said, "we executed him on suspicion of being a CIA spy. Later we were told he was truly a reporter."

"That's right," Remo said. "He wasn't CIA at all."

"But before that," Pablo went on, "a man came here, also claiming to be a reporter. We did not molest this man, and later he bragged that he was DEA."

"He was stupid," Remo growled. "He should have kept his mouth shut. He got an innocent journalist killed. But you clowns are no better. You keep shooting the wrong people."

"Terrible things happen in war."

"What war? You guys are insurgents. If you go away, there's no war."

"We are the future of Peru," the rebel leader shouted, raising his machete in a macho salute. "We are spreading the revolutionary thoughts of Chairman Mao in our homeland."

"The way I hear it," Remo pointed out, "you also cut the fingers off little children."

"That is not our fault!" the rebel leader said. "The oppressors have coerced the people into participating in their sham elections. They make them dip their fingertips in ink and then make marks on their ballots, so the oppressors know by their blue fingertips who has voted and who has not." He smiled wolfishly. "We know too."

Remo's deep-set eyes narrowed. "So you chop off a finger from a child here and a child there, and pretty soon the parents get the message."

"It works."

"It's barbaric."

"You do not understand, yanqui. We are forced to do these things. We tried shooting peasants as an example, but the survivors still insisted on voting."

"Imagine that."

"We find it puzzling too," Pablo mused. "But we are in the right. These children suffer so that future generations will grow up in a Maoist workers' paradise where there are no oppressors, and everyone thinks in harmony. As Chairman Mao once said, 'The deeper the oppression, the greater the revolution.' "

Remo yawned. This was taking longer than he'd expected.

"Mao's long dead," he said. "And Communism is on the march into the boneyard of history. Just ask Gorbachev. "

On hearing that name, the guerrillas spat into the dirt. Remo moved one Italian-made loafer out of the way of a greenish-yellow clog of expectorate.

"Capitalationist!" Pablo muttered.

"I guess word hasn't gotten this far yet," Remo said. "Look, this is really fascinating, conversing with you political dinosaurs, but how can I convince you that I'm really, truly a U.S. spy?"

"Why do you want to do that? You know we will execute you for that. We despise the CIA."

"Actually, I work for a secret organization called CURE."

" I have never heard of it," Pablo admitted.

"Glad to hear it. That's the way my boss likes it."

"And you have not answered my question."

"If you want the truth, it's because I know you'll take me to your leader."

"Who will kill you," Pablo said fiercely.

Remo nodded. "After the interrogation. Yes."

The guerrilla leader looked to his fellow companeros. Their mean close-set eyes looked quizzical. Pablo's blanketdraped shoulder lifted in confusion. Remo heard the word "loco" muttered. He didn't speak Spanish, but he knew what "loco" meant. Fine. If they thought he was crazy, maybe they'd get this show on the road faster.

The buzz of conversation stopped. In the background, the drone of insects continued like a subliminal tape.

Pablo wore a cunning look when he asked, "You have-what you call-DI?"

"It's ID," Remo said, "and what kind of spy carries ID?"

"A real one." The guerrillas nodded among themselves.

"Can you guys read English?" Remo asked suddenly.

"We cannot read at all, yanqui. That way we are not subject to faceless lies."

"And you want to lead Peru into the twenty-first century," Remo muttered. Louder he said, "Okay, sure. I got ID. It's in my wallet." He patted a pocket.

"Javier!"

One of the guerrillas reached into the right-front pocket of Remo's chinos and gingerly extracted a leather wallet. He brought it to the commander. The Peruvian pulled out a MasterCard in the name of Remo Mackie.

"That's my American Express card," Remo lied. "I don't leave home without it."

"I knew that," Pablo said.

"Good for you. And that white one is my social-security card."

"Ah, I have heard of the infamous Social Security police." The Senderista compared the two cards. "But why is the last name not the same? I can see that by the shape of the . . . how you say it?"

"We shamelessly literate Yankees call them letters."

"Si. By the letters. Por que?"

"Because I'm a spy, for heaven's sake," Remo said in exasperation. "I gotta have a lot of cover identities to get around people like you."

The Senderista blinked. Remo could tell he was getting through to him. Maybe by Tuesday the guerrilla would consent to take him to his commander. But Tuesday would be too late. The Bogota summit would be over by then.

So Remo decided to cut to the chase.

"Those are my CIA credentials," he told the man when the latter held up a library card in the name of Remo Loggia.

"You lie!" the Senderista spat. " I know the letters CIA. They are not on this card."

"You're too smart for me," Remo admitted cheerfully. "You're right. It doesn't say CIA. It says DEA. You see, when we CIA types go into the field, we never carry CIA ID. Otherwise, when we're captured-such as in this case the CIA would get the ransom demands or the blame, whichever applies. By carrying DEA credentials, the agency escapes the heat and the DEA picks up the bad PR."

The Senderista frowned like an Incan rain god about to pour his bounty upon the forest. His slightly crossed eyes almost linked up like a sperm and egg trying to become a zygote.

"You yanqui running dogs are full of treachery!" he snarled.

"That's us. We're even trained in the sneaky art of reading."

"How do we know you are not a DEA operative telling me this to confuse me?" Pablo demanded.

"Hey, I don't come with guarantees. And what difference does that make? CIA. DEA. CURE. PTA. Any way you slice it, I'm up to no good. You gotta take me to your leader for interrogation."

"You are too eager. I need more proof."

"Tell you what," Remo offered. "I left a conferedate back in town. He's a wiley old Korean. The jungle was too hot for him, so he stayed back in what passes for a hotel in whatever that town is called."

"It is called Uchiza, ignorant one," the Senderista leader snarled. And everyone laughed at the stupidity of the gringo americano who could read but could not name one of the most prosperous towns in the Upper Huallaga Valley.

"Whatever," Remo said dismissively. "Chiun-that's my friend's name-is a spy too. He'll vouch for me. Why don't you ask him?"

The Senderista nodded to two of Remo's captors. "Paco! Jaime! Vamos!"

The two guerrillas with the safeties off their FAL's hastened back in the direction of the town of Uchiza.

"Don't rough him up too much," Remo called after them. "He's over eighty, but he's a stone killer." He smiled to himself, thinking: Two down, five to go. He made a mental note to pick up a couple of garbage bags on his way back to town. Leaf-bag size. The two departing guerrillas looked about leaf-bag size.

"Well," Remo said, lowering himself to the spongy jungle floor, "I guess we wait. Hope it's not more than half a day."

"No. We take you to our delegate commander. We will receive our compadres' report there."

Remo shot back to his feet. "Fine by me," he said brightly. At last he was getting somewhere.

The guerrillas crowded behind him, their Belgianmade rifles prodding his back.

"You will walk with your arms raised high in abject surrender," the Senderista leader named Pablo ordered roughly.

"Not me," Remo said in a nonthreatening tone.

"We insist."

"Insist all you want," Remo countered. "Be thankful I'm going quietly. And whoever has my wallet, try not to lose it. I'll need my passport for the return flight. "

Pablo bared crooked teeth. "You will never see the Pentagon again, warmonger," he snarled.

"Amen to that. It's ugly and the basement is full of roaches. "

They walked through the jungle for nearly an hour. The guerrillas started to pant with exertion. Remo, not even sweating, picked up his pace. Time was wasting if he was going to interrogate the rebel commander before the drug conference.

Except for the long commute, it was a relatively simple assignment. U. S. intelligence had received tips that Colombian narco-terrorists had increased their long-standing bounty on the U. S. President in anticipation of this latest drug summit. Message-traffic intercepts indicated that they had offered the assignment to the Shining Path, with whom they had an uneasy alliance here in the Upper Huallaga Valley, and who levied so-called "people's taxes" on all shipments of coca paste going north.

Remo had come to Peru to find out if the reports were true and to eliminate the problem. His superior, Harold W. Smith, director of CURE-the agency for which Remo truthfully worked-had added that eliminating as many Shining Path guerrillas as practicible, guilty of complicity or not, would not be frowned upon.

Remo was looking forward to that almost as much as he was to the interrogation.

The Sendero Luminoso headquarters was a long plywood house set on stilts in a particularly thick section of jungle. They had to duck under a huge tree trunk that had fallen across the dirt path to reach it. The fallen trunk-covered with moss and creepers and looking as if it had been there since Elvis died-effectively blocked the path of any Land Rover or off-road vehicle.

"Comandate Cesar!" one of Remo's escorts called out.

A squat muscular man in a salmon-colored T-shirt and red baseball cap stepped out onto the bare sunporch.

"Who is that?" he demanded.

"He calls himself Remo. We think he is DEA."

"CIA," Remo corrected. "Get it right. I'm CIA. I'm only pretending to be DEA."

The man walked down to meet them. He carried no weapon, only a blue can of Inca Cola in one hand. He drained it quickly and dropped it to the ground.

"Litterbug," Remo said pleasantly.

"What you call me?" the Senderista comandante demanded.

"You the boss of this chicken outfit?" Remo asked.

" I am Cesar. I am a delegate to the People's Republic of the New Democracy."

"Got news for you. The old democracy's stronger than ever."

"Why are this prisoner's hands not fettered?" Cesar asked abruptly.

A handful of FAL rifles poked at Remo. Remo smiled unconcernedly.

"You will allow your hands to be tied," Cesar said flatly.

"Maybe after the interrogation." Remo smiled good-naturedly.

"Bring him," Cesar spat.

Remo was escorted into the sparse one-room interior. At a glance, he could tell it was an abandoned cocaprocessing factory. There were vats and the flat trays on which the paste was dried by sliding the screen-mesh trays into an electric oven. The rough interior was bare of furniture and lacked plumbing. The house had been built of raw plywood. There wasn't even a door, just a frame covered by tattered mosquito netting.

Cesar whirled and demanded, "Now, what is this about your being a CIA spy?"

"I admit it. Freely," Remo said soberly.

Cesar hesitated, looked to the others. They shrugged.

"He admitted it from the first," Pablo explained. "How could we believe him? Only a fool would admit this to us."

Cesar looked Remo up and down. He saw a tall Anglo man who might be a mature twenty-nine or a youthful forty-two, clad in a white T-shirt and black chinos. American-made chinos. His shoes were of very fine leather, the kind Americans called loafers. His dark, humorous eyes sat above high cheekbones.

As the man's wallet was passed to him, Cesar noted that he was well-muscled but on the lean side. His wrists were very thick. They looked hard, as if carved from fine pale wood. He rotated them absently, as if limbering up for a workout.

Cesar looked to the ID cards.

Big mistake. Suddenly the wallet flew from Cesar's hands.

He looked up in anger. The wallet had returned to Remo's hands. Cesar hadn't seen him reach out for it.

"Take him!" Cesar barked.

Rifles swapped positions. Gun stocks lifted. They drove down for the americano's head and unprotected shoulders.

It looked for a satisfying instant as if the Yankee would be driven to his knees. Cesar saw the stocks come within a hair of his head.

Then they went chunk! against the hardwood floor, carrying their owners with them.

The cream of Delegate Cesar's Shining Path guerrilla unit fell all over one another, their ponchos flapping, their rifles tangled among one another.

The gringo was absolutely nowhere to be seen.

"Donde? Como?" Cesar sputtered.

A tapping finger caused him to turn around. It was a reflex action. Had he not been so stupefied by the sudden vanishment of the americano, Cesar would not have turned. He would have run. Instead, he did turn-to see the American's goofy grin. Steellike fingers took his throat.

Cesar suddenly went as stiff as the hardwood flooring under his feet.

He watched out of the corner of his eyes as the thin americano went among his companeros, calmly and methodically snapping necks and shattering skulls with stiff-fingered blows until the squirming heap of ponchos became an inert heap of ponchos, much like a stack of Andean rugs.

Then the americano came back for him.

"Time for the interrogation," he said, his fingers returning to Cesar's throat. Cesar found he could suddenly move. And he did. He ran.

And fell flat on his face, never seeing the foot that tripped him.

A hard knee pressed on the small of his back, holding him down by the spine. Cesar couldn't move.

"Please," he panted. "What do you want?"

"Believe I'm a spy now?" Remo inquired coolly.

"Si! Si,"

"Good. Not that it matters. Let's start the interrogation. "

"Hokay. Who do you work for, really?"

"You got it backwards, pal. You're the interrogee."

" I will tell you nothing, imperialista!" Cesar spat.

"I've heard that one before. Usually before I do this. "

Remo reached up under Cesar's throat, found the Adam's apple, and gave it a sharp squeeze. Cesar's tongue jumped out of his suddenly open mouth like Jack coming out of the box. It stuck out so far Cesar could plainly see the taste buds on its blunt pink tip.

"Now, let me see . . . where did I put that butane lighter?" Remo wondered airily, making a pretense of slapping his pockets with his free hand.

Cesar's eye widened. He experienced an immediate vision of his tongue shriveling into crisp charcoal before his helpless eyes. Who was this americano who could manipulate his highly trained body as if he were a puppet?

He tried to tell the yanqui imperialist that he would talk. All he managed to produce was a nasal hum and some leaking drool.

"If that's a si, stick out your tongue," Remo said cheerfully.

Cesar pushed at his tongue. He thought it was already all the way out. To his eternal surprise, it emerged another half-inch. He had had no idea it was so long. He hoped the root would hold. It felt very strained back there at the root of his tongue.

"If I let your tongue back in, will it wag for me?" the yanqui named Remo said.

Cesar tried to nod. No nod came. He pushed at his tongue, mentally damning the stubborn root-anything to spare him this humiliation.

Suddenly the fingers were at his throat again. His tongue recoiled like a turtle's head. The crushing knee lifted from his spine.

Shakily Cesar was rolled over to a sitting position. He felt his throat. It hurt. His tongue felt like sundried beef. He swished it around his stickily parched mouth. Eventually he got it semimoist--enough to spit.

"What do you wish to know?" he croaked.

"Word is, you Maoist throwbacks are in league with the Colombian cartels," Remo suggested.

"We spit on all narco-trafficantes!" he said, suiting the words to deed.

Remo complimented Cesar on his power to expectorate and went on, "That's not what I hear around the of campfire."

"The narco-trafficantes made this valley the lawless place that it is," the comandante admitted grudgingly. "Perfect for us. And the campesinos-those who grow the coca leaf-their interests must be protected."

"I'll take that as an admission of guilt," Remo said. "Next question. Pay close attention. This is the big one."

"si?"

"The Colombians want the President killed before the summit. Some say you boys took the assignment."

"We do not need the Colombians' filthy drug money to bring down the American President. He is our enemy too."

"Do I detect another si?" Remo asked archly.

"Si. I mean, no. We were offered this thing. We turned it down."

Remo's fingers took the man's throat again.

"Not what I heard."

Cesar's eyes widened. "Very well," he said. "We were prepared to do what they wished. But the Colombians changed their minds. They hired others. I do not know who."

"You can do better than that," Remo prompted.

"'I truly do not know who," Cesar protested. "It is not my concern. I am a revolutionary, not a gossip."

"Great epitaph," said Remo Williams, who believed the man, and, having what he wanted, drove the heel of his hand into the Senderista comandante's face. The face was instantly transformed into a flat membrane in which faint hollows were the memory of the organs of sight, smell, and taste. There was no blood. It was all collecting behind the gravellike curtain of the facial bones, many of which had been pushed back into the brain with fatal consequences. Cesar the Senderista fell forward, his featureless face striking the floor with a gravelly beanbag sound.

On his way out, Remo picked up the can of Inca Cola and threw it back into the house with the rest of the trash. He smiled, even though it was a long, long walk back to Uchiza. He had done his part to keep the Peruvian rain forest free of litter. It was a good feeling.

Hours later, looking dusty but unwilted in the early-morning heat, Remo stepped out of the jungle to the sprawling town of Uchiza. It was a flat goldrush-atmosphere boomtown, thanks to the local coca growers. The so-called main drag was lined with boxy stucco hovels. There were a lot of house trailers too. Despite its flat primitiveness, it boasted a small airport.

Remo walked past the stalls where kerchiefed Peruvians sold black-market sunglasses and videotapes celebrating the exploits of high-roller drug kingpins-culture heroes to these simple destitute people by virtue of the fact that they brought money into the local economy. Patrolling Peruvian Army soldiers watched him with sullen interest.

Uchiza's only hotel looked like it had been abandoned, but the satellite dish atop it was shiny and new. Remo walked straight for it. Then, suddenly remembering something, he stopped and accosted one of the stall vendors.

"Trash bags, senor?" he asked. "Say, this big?" He spread his hands to indicate the length of an average Peruvian guerrilla.

The vendor happily produced a yellow box of trash bags. When Remo offered him American dollars instead of Peruvian currency, he dug out six more.

"One box is plenty," Remo said, making the exchange. "There were only two of them. Gracias."

He entered the hotel room minutes later without knocking or using the key. There had been no key. It was that kind of hotel.

Inside, Remo almost tripped over a body. It was one of the Shining Path guerrillas who had been sent back to verify his identity as an American spy.

The guerrilla lay on his back, his arms splayed, his teeth showing in a grimace or possibly a fixed smile. Remo decided to give the corpse the benefit of the doubt and smiled back.

"Nice to see you again too," he said pleasantly, breaking open the yellow box and withdrawing a green plastic trash bag. He snapped the mouth open and, kneeling, drew it over the corpse's head and on down to the dusty booted feet.

He noticed with a frown that the feet didn't quite fit.

"Wrong size," he muttered. So he sheered off both feet at the ankles with the side of one hand, tossed them in, and closed the bag with a twister seal.

Standing up, Remo looked for the second corpse, which he knew would be there.

"Must be in the next room," he said, and headed for the room from which the sound of stagy British voices was coming.

There, a TV set flickered. A small wispy figure in a purple-and-yellow silk kimono sat on the floor regarding the screen, paying no heed to Remo's entrance or the body under the table set with bottles or complimentary Electro agua purificada.

"How's it going, Little Father?" Remo asked pleasantly.

" I am not cleaning them up," Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, said querulously. ,

"Don't sweat it. They're mine. I sent them here."

"I know. They rudely entered just as Derek was breaking the harsh news of his secret past to Lady Asterly. "

"You know," Remo said in a cheerful voice, stopping to cram the second corpse into a fresh bag, " I never thought I'd see the day when you returned to watching soaps."

"These are not mere American soaps, which wallow in filth and sexual perversion," Chiun said. He lifted one desiccated finger to the ceiling. It was tipped by an impossibly long nail. "These are the finest of British dramas. Would that your backward land still produced such richness as this."

"Satellite feed from America coming in clear?"

"It serves." Chiun's eyes never left the screen. The back of his head was shiny with age. Two white clouds of hair floated over his ears.

"Good. Because Smith must be paying a fortune in satellite time to feed you today's crop of British soaps. "

" I am worth it."

"Do tell."

"Without me, Harold Smith would not now be poised on the brink of greatness."

Remo looked up from his work. "What greatness is that?"

"Stepping forward as the true ruler of America."

"Got news for you. Smith only runs CURE. He has no designs on the Oval Office."

"Then I fear for the future of your country, now that the President of Vice is about to assume the Eagle Throne."

"What are you talking about?"

"The President of Vice," Chiun repeated. "The one everyone is ashamed of, whom they keep from view like an idiot child. He now rules your country."

"Where did you get that?"

"From Smith. He called an hour ago to inform me that your President had perished at the hands of villains."

"What!"

Chapter 3

Abu Al-Kalbin watched as the navigation lights of Air Force One plummeted in the darkness of the Mexican night.

"We have done it!" he croaked, holding his kaffiyeh close to his mouth to keep out the putrid smell of the puddle slowly collecting between his squatting legs.

"It is trying to stabilize!" Jalid cried, pointing.

Air Force One dipped, then rose as if fighting to stay in the air. They could not see the damaged engine nacelle, but they spied a sputtering flare that told them of the damage their Stinger had inflicted.

"No," Abu Al-Kalbin said hollowly. "It is falling. It is doomed." The enormity of what he had done was sinking in. He felt like an ant that had brought down a tiger.

Air Force One went in. Its engines continued straining until it pancaked to the ground and the sparks spurted from its squealing underbelly. They cut off as if suddenly depowered.

From his mountainous vantage point, Abu Al-Kalbin watched Air Force One slide along the desert floor, breaking up as it went. An engine disintegrated. A wing tip snapped and cartwheeled away. The aircraft seemed as if it would slide forever. It slewed toward the base of an adjacent mountain. The nose crumpled upon impact. The tail section literally broke off. Luggage spilled from the burst holds.

The sounds were horrible, wrenching, metallic.

"Is that screaming?" Abu Al-Kalbin asked, momentarily forgetting what he was doing and standing up in awe.

"It is the tortured metal," Jalid said.

"It sounds like screams to me," Abu Al-Kalbin muttered.

"It is metallic," Walid agreed.

"Still. It reminds me of dying screams."

Air Force One lay inert in the desert far below. The lights had gone out in cabin and fuselage. One surviving engine burned with fitful yellow flames. A stinging smoke smell was already fouling the still air.

Abu AI-Kalbin and his men watched it burn in silence.

After a while, Jalid and Walid turned to their leader.

"We have done it, Abu!" Jalid cried. "We have extinguished the American President like a candle."

They noticed Abu AI-Kalbin'a naked legs.

"Are you done?" Walid asked.

Abu AI-Kalbin looked down, and very quickly he crouched down to finish what he had started.

When he stood up again, several agonizing and embarrassing minutes later, he used his kaffiyeh to wipe himself and then threw it away.

Walid and Jalid stood off to one side, watching the F-14's circle helplessly.

"They cannot see us," Jalid suggested.

"Neither can they land," Walid added.

"Then we are safe to examine the fruit of our triumph," Abu Al-Kalbin decided. "Come, take up your weapons."

Walid and Jalid followed Abu Al-Kalbin down the barren mountainside to the desert floor. The air was cool, and bitter with the smoke of the burning engine. But Abu Al-Kalbin preferred that stink to the other, which trailed him like a miasma.

Reaching level terrain, they crept to the wreckage cautiously.

"No one could survive such a crash," Walid said quietly.

"For this brave feat," Jalid said, "we will attain the prize we have for so long sought without question."

"Yes, Brother Qaddafi will not deny us this time," Abu Al-Kalbin agreed, his voice rising in exultation.

Still, they approached with raised rifles. Not that weapons would help them if the aircraft unexpectedly exploded, as they feared it might.

"We will need proof," Abu Al-Kalbin muttered. "Which one of you has the camera?"

Walid and Jalid stopped in their tracks and looked at one another, eyes widening in their kaffiyehs.

" I thought you had the camera, Abu," they said together.

"It must be back in the safe house," Abu Al-Kalbin muttered. "Maleesh. Never mind. The President always travels with the media, who are like flies around dung. There will be a camera in the plane. We will use that. Come."

The fallen Air Force One was even more impressive up close. Debris littered the crash site. The tail sat apart and almost upright like a big abstract kite with a U.S. -flag emblem on it. Except for the broken tail, the fuselage had survived largely intact.

They went in through the open-end tail. It was like entering a dark tunnel.

Abu AI-Kalbin immediately tripped over the body of a Secret Service guard, instantly recognizable by his sunglasses and coat-lapel button. Abu Al-Kalbin shot him three times in the chest to make sure he was dead. The body jerked. The sunglasses jumped off. The eyes that looked up were glassy and sightless.

Abu Al-Kalbin stepped over the body and pushed on. Faint starlight picked out details.

The next section of the plane was a roomy bedroom. The silk covers had come off the mattress. Beyond it was a private lavatory. Past the lavatory was a passenger cabin. Seats and cushions were thrown everywhere. They had to push aside uprooted seats to get into it. Here were many more Secret Service bodies.

That told them they had come to the presidential section.

"One bullet for each, to make certain!" Abu AIKalbin barked.

Walid and Jalid applied the muzzles of their weapons to every sunglass-festooned forehead, giving each a single bullet.

One agent stirred in a tangle of cushions. There the seats were mashed out of shape. The man had landed or thrown himself over the nest of compressed seating. The attitude of his body was one of protecting another. He moaned.

Abu AI-Kalbin stepped up to him and yanked his head up by the hair.

"President. . ." the agent croaked, his eyes twitching in their sockets.

"Where is he?" Abu Al-Kalbin asked urgently. "Tell us!"

"Must . . . protect President . . ."

"Where!"

The agent expelled a rattling breath and his head went limp.

Abu Al-Kalbin jammed the AK-47 muzzle into the man's open mouth and fired twice to make sure death had claimed him.

He withdrew the suddenly red muzzle and said, "He must be forward."

They passed into the next section, where the overhead bins had spilled a profusion of video and camera equipment.

"Excellent!" Abu Al-Kalbin cried. "Take one, each of you. Brother Qaddafi will have ample proof of our mighty deed."

Abu Al-Kalbin fell upon a camcorder. He dropped his rifle in order to get it.

"This is perfection," he cried, looking through the viewfinder. He panned around the cabin, past the bodies of dead journalists. Through the shattered cabin windows, the burning engine cast a campfirelike illumination. He fiddled with the buttons until he got a video light. He pointed the lens at his men, who were pointing cameras back.

Camera flashbulbs flashed.

"Yes;" Abu exclaimed. "Good! Photograph all the bodies, and I will record all with this video camera."

They spent several minutes recording the carnage aboard Air Force One for posterity. They worked their way forward to the electronic-warfare compartment, just behind the cockpit. They managed to get the cockpit door to open, but didn't enter. They couldn't. The cabin had been mashed flat to the bulkhead. The contents of the cockpit-instruments, controls, and crew-had been rammed into the bulkhead wall. Once they had got the door open, a shattered arm popped out from the tangle.

They took film of that, too, taking turns posing with the sight. Abu Al-Kalbin took the unknown crewman's dead hand in his and pretended to shake it. He smiled broadly, a proud and pleased smile. It went out like a cheap flashbulb when he felt his belly gurgle suddenly.

He hurried back to a rear cabin. He never made it to the lavatory. Instead, he squatted on the dark blue rug, depositing his load on the Presidential Seal.

Minutes later, Abu Al-Kalbin drew on his trousers, feeling drained and weak.

"Come, Abu!" Walid cried. "We have found him. The President."

Abu Al-Kalbin hurried to the sound of Walid's voice. It came from the journalists' compartment.

There, Walid and Jalid knelt beside a well-dressed body. Walid was holding up the head by its hair. The body lay inert.

"See!" he said proudly. "Take our picture, Abu."

"Fool!" Abu Al-Kalbin spat back. "That is not the President!"

"But I recognize him. He has been on television."

"That is because he is a television reporter, you ignorant donkey. That is the one who covers the White House for SBC, one of these American networks. "

"Oh," said Walid unhappily. He let the head drop. It went click on the carpeted floor.

As he stood up, Jalid hissed at him, "I told you so."

"Shut up!"

"Both of you shut up," Abu Al-Kalbin told them. "Where is the President's body?"

Walid and Jalid looked at one another.

"We do not know, Abu. We have not seen him."

"Find him! We must record the sight of his crushed and broken body, otherwise the Qaddafi Peace Prize will never be ours."

They split up, going to different sections.

But the body of the President of the United States was nowhere to be found. He was not in the bathrooms, nor in the galley, nor hiding in one of the large luggage racks.

They gathered together in the tangle that had been the presidential compartment, their video and camera equipment dangling from numbing fingers, their weapons completely forgotten.

"Could he be in the crushed nose?" Walid asked.

"Do not be a fool," Jalid retorted. "He is-was-the President. He would not fly the plane."

"Perhaps he become frightened and went there to seek safety. Do you not think this is possible, Abu?" Walid said hopefully.

"No, I do not," Abu Al-Kalbin said flatly. "Everyone knows that in an emergency, it is the nose of the plane which first strikes the ground. The safest place is in the tail section. Here. He must be here."

They looked around the tangled compartment, taking care not to step on the brown mess that had pooled over the floor over the Presidential Seal.

"Yes," Jalid said. "This is where his guards are."

Walid picked up a shattered photograph that crunched under his boot. He lifted it.

"Who is this man?" he asked Abu Al-Kalbin. "A reporter? He looks like a reporter. "

Jalid peered over Walid's shoulder. "No, it is the famous American actor Robert Redford."

Abu Al-Kalbin took up the photograph. He looked at the ripped photograph. It showed a sandy-haired young man with a strange cumbersome round bag slung over one shoulder and an odd club in his right hand.

"No," he said. "This is the Vice-President."

"No longer." Jalid sneered. "He will be thrown out of power now that his President is dead. Perhaps executed."

Abu Al-Kalbin shook his head. "That is not the way America works. This man will be made President, but that is not our problem. We must find that body. Look harder, both of you!"

They fell to ripping the cabin apart. The President was not under the tangled cushions, or in a long shallow closet where spare clothing was kept.

"Could he have escaped into the night?" Walid asked in confusion.

"Do not be ignorant," Abu Al-Kalbin snapped. "No one else survived."

"Except for that one," Walid said, pointing to the body of the Secret Service guard Abu Al-Kalbin had shot earlier. He was still sprawled protectively over a cluster of compressed seats.

"Hmmm," he mused. "Those seats. Look at them."

Walid and Jalid looked. They saw nothing. "So?" Jalid said.

"They are smashed together very tightly," Abu Al-Kalbin explained. "But it is not the case on the other side of the aisle. Those seats are ripped up from the floor. What caused these seats to come together as they have?"

Walid and Jalid muttered that they did not know.

"Remove that corpse," Abu Al-Kalbin ordered.

Dropping their camera equipment, the two men did as they were told. The Secret Service agent's body was pulled off the tangle of seats and unceremoniously flung out the gaping tail section.

When Walid and Jalid returned, they found Abu Al-Kalbin in a frenzy, pulling at the seat cushions with his bare hands. Fabric tore under his fingernails, disgorging white polyester stuffing.

"Do not stand there!" Abu Al-Kalbin said urgently. "Help me!"

Walid and Jalid fell to. Together, all three men took hold of a cushion wedged between two others and began straining. It came loose slowly, reluctantly. When it finally jerked free, they fell back with it, landing together in a heap.

Abu Al-Kalbin pushed the others aside and scrambled to his feet. Enraged, he attacked the tangle of seats. Where the cushion had come loose was another cushion. It was wedged under an aluminum chair support twisted in a peculiar way, as if subjected to a convulsive strain, not a crash impact.

"This is wrong," Abu Al-Kalbin muttered. "This leg should not be bent this way. It makes no sense." He took hold of it and pulled. It would not budge.

Feverishly he turned to his men.

"Find an ax. I need an ax. Do this now."

Walid and Jalid stumbled to their feet and went in opposite directions. Walid came back with a fire ax and presented it to his leader.

The ax flew out of his hands and, guided by Abu Al-Kalbin's wiry arms, started to chop at the aluminum leg. It cracked open, spilling multicolored wiring.

Seeing the wires, Abu Al-Kalbin stopped. His nightblack eyes narrowed. He reached out and took the frayed wires in his grimy fingers.

"Be careful," Walid said. "They may be electrified."

"No," Abu Al-Kalbin said, touching the wire. "They are dead." As proof, he pulled out a handful. They came and came, until finally they were trailing around Abu Al-Kalbin's feet like plastic spaghetti. And still there was more. He gave up.

"These wires should not be in a chair leg," he complained. "There is no purpose to them."

Walid and Jalid looked at one another and shrugged their shoulders. Walid spoke up quietly.

"Abu, why are you behaving this way? Metal bends as it will, and wires are where one finds them. Who is to say these things are not ordained by Allah?"

"While you two were disposing of the American," Abu Al-Kalbin said without looking away from the mashed conglomeration of seats, " I heard the groan of a living man." He pointed. "From within this mass. "

"Who could have survived being crushed within so much metal and cushion?" Jalid asked reasonably.

"That is what I would learn." Abu Al-Kalbin picked up the ax again, this time chopping away the seat covers. The ax bounced off the cushions at first, but finding hidden metal under them, he used that as a target. Methodically he chopped the cushion into segments as Walid and Jalid risked their fingers to pull the fragments away. He wielded the ax carefully, pausing often to feel under the tightly packed cushions with his hands.

After several hard minutes of this, they exposed the back of a human head.

Abu Al-Kalbin lowered his ax and touched the back of the man's neck with trembling fingertips.

"Warm," he whispered.

He reached down under the throat, feeling the steady pulse of the carotid artery.

"Alive," he added.

He dug further, taking the man's Adam's apple in his hand. It felt hard under the warm throat.

Taking a deep breath, Abu Al-Kalbin pulled the man's head back.

The angular face of the President of the United States lolled back in the harsh Mexican moonlight coming through the porthole glass. His glasses were askew. Miraculously, the lenses were unbroken.

No one said anything for a long time. Then Walid went away. He came back with his AK-47 and offered it to Abu Al-Kalbin in a hoarse voice.

"You deserve the honor of finishing the hated one."

Abu Al-Kalbin slapped the weapon away.

"Fool!" he snarled. "Fate has handed us something greater than the Qaddafi Peace Prize, which is unquestionably ours anyway. Do you realize how much this man is worth alive?"

"How much?"

"Millions. The Colombians, the Iranians, the Libyans-any of them will pay millions for this man."

"How many millions?" asked Walid.

"As many millions as there are stars in the night sky," Abu Al-Kalbin assured them.

"I have an idea," said Jalid, who quickly counted seven stars through one porthole alone. "Why do we not cut him up? Perhaps each of them will pay much for an arm or a leg. "

"Yes," Walid put in. "But we should be certain to keep the head for Brother Qaddafi. Surely he would want to have the head."

"Sons of camels!" Abu Al-Kalbin spat. "Dead, he is worth nothing. Alive, he is a prize beyond measure. Come, help me extricate him. And carefully. Do not break anything. He may be injured. I want no further damage."

It took two hours of hard work with ax and gun butts to hack and pry the insensate President of the United States from his cocoon of crushed seats. They felt the bones of his arms for fractures and found none.

They pulled him out then, hoping that his feet and legs were not broken, and laid him on the pile of seat cushions.

"Do you see any blood on his legs?" Abu Al-Kalbin demanded with concern.

"No, Abu," Walid said as Jalid felt the President's legs. "His trousers are not even torn. It is as if the crushed seats respected his limbs and harmed him not."

"It is as if they gathered around him like a mother's arms," Abu Al-Kalbin agreed, nudging the rope of wires on the floor. They twitched spasmodically, but he failed to notice this phenomenon.

Walid and Jalid looked up at him in doubt. Their expressions were stiff, but their eyes said: Is he mad?

"No, I am not mad," Abu Al-Kalbin retorted, reading their thoughts. "Find a sheet. We will carry him to the safe house in a sheet."

It turned out that Walid and Jalid were to do the carrying as well as the loading of the sleeping form onto a sheet stripped off the on-board presidential bed. Knotting the sheet at either end, they used these knots as handles to hoist their captive up and out to the chill of the Mexican night.

Abu Al-Kalbin was the last to emerge. He carried his AK-47 slung over his shoulder as he recorded the capture of the President of the United States by his loyal Krez soldiers.

"Do not be silent on this historical occasion," he complained as they struggled to keep the hammocklike carrying sheet steady. "Say something immortal."

"How about Bismillahi Rrahmani Rrahim?" Walid offered.

"Yes. Yes. Good. Shout it."

"Bismillahi Rrahmani Rrahim!" Walid and Jalid shouted in unison.

"Stop!" Abu Ali-Kalbin said suddenly, his face going slack.

"What?" They looked at their leader in horror, fearing the worst.

Abu Al-Kalbin said nothing. He hurried back into the shattered tail of Air Force One, and Walid and Jalid hastily lowered their burden so they could hold their kaffiyehs closer to their nostrils as the unmistakable sounds of their leader in intestinal distress floated out.

When Abu Al-Kalbin finally rejoined them, he had only one thing to say.

"What is good for this miserable curse?"

"Rice," said Walid.

"Yes. Eat much rice," added Jalid.

"I hate rice," Abu Al-Kalbin said morosely.

Chapter 4

In the Peruvian hotel he had nicknamed "La Cucaracha Grande," Remo Williams sat stone-faced on a striped sofa, his dark eyes on the telephone as if willing it to ring.

"Tended water boils slowly," the Master of Sinanju called from his reed mat in front of the television set.

"And a watched pot never boils," Remo said morosely.

"That is an impossibility," Chiun squeaked.

"It's the American version."

"Americans are impossible. And why do you not call Emperor Smith again if you cannot wait?"

"Because I can't get through this frigging antiquated phone system," Remo said peevishly. "Smith should get my telegram any second now. He can get through to me. It's better than ending up on the line with Tibet, which is what happened last time. How the hell can these operators get Tibet when they can't connect to America?"

"Perhaps they are watching the famous American pot that never boils," Chiun sniffed.

Remo frowned. But his eyes were sunken with worry. He had been sent to Peru to head off a plot on the President's life. If Chiun had gotten Smith's message correctly-not a sure thing-then they had blown it. Or Smith had blown it. The President was dead. Remo wondered what Smith would say. No President had ever died on Smith's watch-not while he had Remo and Chiun working for him. Remo worried that Smith had suffered a heart attack. It was the only thing that could keep him from getting back to him.

Remo's eyes narrowed. He was actually concerned about Smith. He was barely speaking to the old SOB these days, the result of a complicated situation in which Remo had been "retired" to death row and nearly executed all over again as a result of a CURE operation that was triggered when Smith fell gravely ill.

It had been Smith who originally selected Remo, then a young Newark patrolman, to become the enforcement arm of CURE. Framed and sent to the electric chair for a murder he never committed, Remo had been revived with a new face and identity. A dead man. CURE's dead man. Placed in the hands of Chiun, the last Master of Sinanju-a legendary Korean house of assassins- Remo had developed into what he was now. A finely tuned human killing machine.

Remo had long ago gotten over Smith's manipulation of his destiny. But the recent near-brush with the electric chair had reopened old wounds.

Remo shook off the bad memories. He wondered what he would do with his life if Smith truly did die. He didn't know. He put the thought out of his mind. If the President had been assassinated, it would be up to him to assassinate the assassins.

It was an irony not lost to Remo Williams. CURE had originally been created by a young President who had later been assassinated after only one thousand days in office. Remo hadn't been part of CURE then. And Chiun, heir to the five-thousand-year-old tradition of Sinanju, sun source of the martial arts, then dwelt forgotten in North Korea. So much had changed since then. Remo was now an assassin-America's secret assassin-and he had grown proud of it.

The phone rang. Remo bounced out of the sofa as if a spring had burst through the colorful threadbare fabric.

He scooped up the receiver.

"Smitty?"

"Remo?" Dr. Harold W. Smith's lemony voice asked. "I received your telegram. I was just about to call you again."

"How bad is it?"

"Bad. Air Force One went down over the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains. A National Air Transport Safety go-team is en route by helicopter, along with Secret Service and FBI forensic teams." Smith paused. "We do not expect survivors."

Remo's voice was hoarse when he found it. "What do you want Chiun and me to do?"

"What have you learned down there?"

"The Maoist crazies claim they were approached by the Colombians, but the deal didn't go through. I wasted them anyway. I didn't agree with their voting habits. "

"Then the Colombians are our prime suspects," Smith said. "I am booking you on an Aero-Peru flight to Lima. Call me when you get there. I should have specific instructions for you by then."

"Right. What's happening in Washington?"

"Controlled chaos. The news is being suppressed until we have confirmation of fatalities. The Vice-President doesn't even know."

"The Vice-President," Remo said suddenly. "Oh, my God, I forgot all about him. What are they going to do? I hear he can't find a lit bulb in a dark room."

"Press exaggerations," Smith said flatly-but the worry in his voice was unmistakable.

"I read that he thinks there are canals on Mars, filled with water."

"Apocryphal. "

"His wife can't even spell."

"A slip of the pen."

"He collects anatomically explicit dolls."

"A souvenir ."

"He has the IQ of a geranium."

"He may also be our next President," Smith said flatly.

"Let's pray for a miracle," Remo said fervently.

"Go to Lima, Remo," Smith said coldly, and the line abruptly disconnected.

Thousands of miles to the north, helicopter sounds bounced off the high ramparts of the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains in the predawn darkness. Fingers of intense white light combed the cracked desiccated ground, creating shape-shifting halos of light.

There was no moon. Starlight was plentiful. The helicopters crisscrossed methodically, twice narrowly impaling the burst airframe of Air Force One.

As the dawn approached, only the distorted doppler sound of rotors disturbed the eerie coffin that had been the presidential aircraft. A tiny flame burned within the surviving starboard engine, shielded by the shattered nacelle cowling.

And deep within the airframe, circuits and microchips that had not been installed by the manufacturer came to life, beginning to process information.

Injured . . .

Diagnostics began to run. Messages came back to a central processor in the crushed cockpit.

Tail shattered. Wires severed. Fiberoptic cables sheared at critical junctures.

A tiny flame in the inner engine nacelle was sensed and a C02 bottle was triggered, extinguishing it with a jet of foam.

At various points along the fuselage, skin-mounted sensors emerged like sluggish organs of sight and hearing. No sounds were detected from within the airframe. No hearts beat. The data were processed, and in the presidential section, twisted aluminum spars quivered.

A rope of multicolored cables twitched, then withdrew into its aluminum housing-the twisted leg of a chair. The two broken sections groaned as the sentient metal twisted, rejoined, and healed as if by an organic process. Wires established connections like veins regenerating themselves.

And overhead, a domelike ceiling light unscrewed itself, dropping its plastic casing, aluminum rim, and screws. The reflector and bulb dropped next, revealing a glass lens.

The lens looked straight down, and seeing the twisted metal and chopped-up seat cushions, shifted frantically, and seeing nothing, stopped like a frozen fish eye.

All over Air Force One, ceiling lights disassembled themselves and myriad glass eyes raked the tangled cabin for signs of life or a certain body.

Finding nothing, relays clicked. And an electronic imperative repeated itself.

It said: Survive . . . survive . . . must survive. Sounds approaching . . . aircraft overhead . . . survive . . . must survive.

The section of seating that had sheltered the President of the United States during the crash landing of Air Force One came to life. Aluminum legs began to grope blindly. They twisted like an undersea plant in a suboceanic current, waving and wavering, shifting and combining, straining mightily.

Floor bolts popped and an octopus tangle of aluminum legs marched into the litter-strewn aisle. Two of them flung up to form aluminum arms, and other limbs combined into a long semirigid spinal column.

The aluminum biped stumbled blindly forward toward the electronic warfare nest aft of the compressed cockpit. As the thing hunched over the electronics, blunt wrists belled into knobs, which sprouted flat flexible fingers. It seized the radarscope, extracting it, glass and all, wires trailing like stubborn ligaments.

The jointed prehensile metal fingers lifted the radarscope to the top of the biped's spinal column. A nub formed and the dark glass disk settled into place with a click. Instantly the radar screen came to life, a luminous green line sweeping around the face like a radium second hand.

Digging into the radar housing, it pulled out connectors and gold-plated microchips and began slapping them to its gleaming stick-figure form. Electronic elements melted into the accepting aluminum skin, adding bulk and function.

All the while, a tiny element deep within the caricature of a human being repeated a single electronic concept:

Survival . . . survival . . . survival . . .

The creature moved through the cabin, salvaging other useful components. Copper piping from the galley sink. Elements from the galley microwave unit. PA speakers were ripped from over bulkhead doors and attached to either side of the radar-dish face. Sound. Hearing. The helicopter noise became audible as more than skin-sensed vibration. It was closer now.

Must hurry. Must survive.

In the lavatory, a shattered mirror reflected the creature's own improbable image.

Wrong, wrong, it thought. Not optimum survival form. Must reconfigure.

Returning to the aisle, the thing stooped to avoid smashing its oversize pie-plate head on the overhead bins.

It went among the bodies, searching for a certain one.

Yes, that one, it thought. That form will assure continued survival.

But the body it sought was not to be found within the fuselage.

The creature swiveled its ground-glass radar face to the gaping tail section. One aluminum hoof of a foot stepped in a puddle of semiliquid organic matter, and artificial olfactory receptors immediately identified the matter as human excrement. The odor of it was leading away from the aircraft, its former host.

Outside, there was another body. Not the one it sought, but a parasite protector, called a Secret Service agent by the meat machine known as the President of the United States.

Sweeping the horizon with its multiple sensors, it tracked the human-excrement odor going south.

It instantly determined to go south. After a suitable survival-assuring reconfiguration.

Returning to the cabin, it began to dismantle the dead-meat machines, taking a portion of epidermis from the back of this one, hair from that one, slapping and stretching them over its metallic frame, adding a layer of human skin.

Soon the nude body of a man stood in the cabin, looking pale, corpselike, and human except for the radar screen of a head.

Humanlike arms, with aluminum bones under the cold unfeeling skin, swept up and knocked that anachronistic head off: The screen shattered on impact with the floor.

And now-humanlike hands lifted a human head to the stump of a neck. Filament connectors entwined with spinal-cord ganglia, making connections never intended by nature.

The dissynchronized eyes rotated in their orbits like a pinball machine gone amok. They synchronized at last, lining up to focus on the floor.

Eyes that saw, even if they did not live.

Teeth that smiled, even if they were rooted in metal, not bone and gum.

The thing dressed quickly, selecting clothes at random. The helicopter sound increased in the night. Glass lenses behind the dead human corneas detected the faintness of the approaching sun.

Must hurry. Locate the important meat machine. There is safety in the company of the one called President.

In the bathroom, a last look into the mirror.

The stiff face showed a flicker of disappointment.

No. Wrong. Unfamiliar face. Must assume trusted face. Components do not match.

The creature went back to rummage through the presidential section. There the floor was covered with pictures that had fallen off the blue cabin walls. The thing picked them off the floor, scanning them in quick microseconds, discarding them with careless glass-shattering flings.

One photograph held its attention an immeasurable microsecond longer than the others.

Yes, it thought. This one. He will trust this one face.

He repeated the thought aloud, testing his mechanical voice box.

"Yes." The voice was a croak. Intonation was wrong. It tried again.

"Yes. This face trust. This one. Yes."

Syntax wrong. Circuits not fully repaired. Selfrepair diagnostics continue troubleshooting.

It looked again at the picture of the man. It pressed one hard strong hand to its own face, pushing the cheekbones higher, pinching the chin, to add a cleft. Better. But the modified skin called hair atop the head was the wrong color. The hair color should be sandy, not black.

The thing went among the cabin dead, looking for wheat-straw-colored hair. He found a journalist with thick hair. It was almost perfect. He tore the scalp free and chewed the hair to the correct configuration with his dead human teeth.

The hair settled atop his shiny cranium perfectly, knitting scalp to facial skin.

Blue eyes were plucked from a shattered skull and exchanged for the gray ones in his borrowed head. New teeth were extracted by aluminum pinchers from another dead mouth, and one by one, they were made to fit.

Finally the manlike simulacrum examined his own reflection in the glass of the framed photograph. The features matched. All that remained was the cylindrical bag carried over the shoulder, filled with aluminum instruments. There was ample aluminum in the discarded host aircraft to fashion them from.

The creature set to work ....

Chapter 5

At Lima International Airport, Remo Williams got a call through to Harold Smith in Rye, New York, on his first try.

"They are still searching for Air Force One," Smith told Remo. His voice was tinny.

"What's the holdup?" Remo demanded.

"Air Force One went down in very rugged territory," Smith told him. "Er, there also seems to be a jurisdictional problem."

"Tell the Mexicans to get lost," Remo said heatedly. "He's our President."

"The Mexicans are not the problem. It's an interagency problem. The FBI is claiming jurisdiction, but the Secret Service is insisting on leading the search. The Air Force has sent in helicopters. And then there is the National Transportation Safety Board."

"I don't believe this," Remo groaned.

"Between these agencies and the darkness, we have nothing. It is fortunate that it is night. Easier to maintain the news blackout."

"Screw the news blackout," Remo grumbled. "What do you want us to do?"

"Go to Mexico City."

"And then?"

"Check in with me."

"That's all? Check in?"

"Until we know more, I want you close enough to the situation for insertion if that's advisable."

Smith hung up.

Remo turned to Chiun. The Master of Sinanju stood resplendent in a flaming scarlet kimono. His wise face was a landscape of mummy wrinkles, like the surface of a dead yellowing planet. His eyes were a clear hazel. They were a young man's eyes, full of fire and humor and wisdom all at once.

Chiun was over eighty. A tendril of pale straggly hair clung to his tiny chin, passing for a beard. The puffs of hair over his ears were like frozen smoke. He was otherwise bald as an egg.

"We're going to Mexico City," Remo told him.

"Then we go to Mexico City," said the Master of Sinanju in a mouse-squeak voice. "Has Smith taken control of the government yet?"

"No, and he's not going to."

"He is very foolish," Chiun said as Remo hurried to the Aero Mexico counter to book the flight north. "This is his golden opportunity."

National Transportation Safety Board Investigator in Charge Bill Holland had never seen anything like it in thirteen years of investigating air crashes.

From the air, it looked bad-real bad. Air Force One had come in on its belly, making an unusually long ground imprint. The tail had been knocked off and the nose mashed into the foot of one of the Sierra Madre Oriental Mountains. The plane looked like a graceful white Roc that had fallen from another world.

"Looks like the flight crew got the worst of it," the helicopter pilot told him.

"Better that than if she hit the side of the mountain in flight," Holland said aridly. "That's one hell of a long imprint. Who found her first?"

"Air Force. Spotted her at first light. Scuttlebutt is there are no survivors."

"There hardly ever are," Holland said as the chopper settled on the dusty ground, throwing up billows of fine brown grit.

A man in a conservative gray suit and polished wing-tips shielded his face against the sandy onslaught as he pushed into the rotor wash. He had FBI written all over him, Holland thought ruefully.

The man's first choking words confirmed that.

"Holland? I'm Lunkin, FBI. Special agent in charge. You'll be coordinating with me." He looked like a desk jockey, not a brick agent.

"What about the Secret Service?" Holland asked. "I heard they are hopping mad over this."

"They're still liaising with the Air Force, trying to get on-site."

"Good. Maybe I can get some work done before they arrive."

The site was guarded by a contingent of Air Force SP's in camouflage utilities, standing at attention, rifles at the ready. They looked to Holland as useful as balls on a ballerina.

"I understand there are no survivors," Holland said as the sand died down with the descending rotor whine.

"Confirmed."

"Then the President is dead."

"Unknown. We haven't found the body."

"God, I hope it didn't fall out of the tail when she came in," Holland moaned. "It would be a nightmare trying to find one body in these mountains."

"Could be," Agent Lunkin said as they walked past the unmoving SP's and into the open fuselage. "One body came out with the tail. The others are in rough shape. Some of the damage is pretty sickening."

"You get used to it," Holland said tersely as he pushed a dangling cabin partition aside. "Did the FDR survive?"

"What's Roosevelt got to do with this?"

"The flight-data recorder. It'll be a long black-and-yellow-striped box. Should be in the tail. From the look of the nose, I'd say the cockpit voice recorder is a lost cause."

"We didn't touch anything."

When Holland entered the presidential seating section, his tight-lipped expression tightened further. He had investigated countless air crashes, become inured to every conceivable freak of collision, from decapitated heads to side-by-side seats lying on runways, their intact passengers still calmly seated in them, holding hands in death.

It was not a body that surprised him. It was the condition of the seat cushions. They looked as if they had been torn to shreds by some wild animal.

"Any sign of animals when you got here?"

"No. The Air Force had already secured the site. We just counted the bodies."

Holland suddenly pinched at his nose. "What's that smell?"

"Shit."

"Smells pretty bad."

"Looks like someone lost it during the descent. They crapped right in the middle of the aisle."

Bill Holland blinked. He had never heard of such a thing. If anything, the pucker factor would have prevented anyone from defecating under the stress of an emergency descent.

"Show me," he said quickly.

FBI Agent Lunkin escorted Bill Holland to the press section.

"It's that sloppy puddle."

"No shit," Holland said, kneeling beside it. He sniffed, and had to turn away. The smell was strong here amid the members of the press corps.

Holland stood up.

"This is weird," he muttered. "Whoever made that mess had a bad case of the screaming shits. Montezuma's Revenge."

"Well, we are in Mexico," Lunkin pointed out.

Bill Holland looked at FBI Agent Lunkin as if to ask: How did you get hired?

"The plane never landed in Mexico," Holland said edgily. "Whoever made that mess did not belong with the passengers or crew."

"Diarrhea is not exactly unique to Mexico," Lunkin ventured.

"But the bacteria that causes it are. I know that smell. I've had the turistas myself."

Bill Holland pushed on toward the plane's nose, noting other anomalies on the way. The radar screen had been extracted from its housing and lay smashed two cabins back. Possible, but not probable. A corpse was missing its eyes. Another its teeth. Others had been skinned. No air crash Bill Holland had ever investigated, no ripping shards of glass or flying debris, could pull a man's eyes or teeth out of his head. Or skin him like a chicken.

"These bodies have been vandalized," Holland told Lunkin. "No question of it."

"How can you tell?" Lunkin asked, looking at one mangled corpse. Its yawning mouth exposed raw, toothless gums.

"Experience," Holland said. "Long brutal experience. Come on. I want to see if the FDR survived."

Holland found it bolted to the inside of the separated tail section. He tapped it with his knuckles. The heavy steel casing appeared intact.

"I'll want to ship this back to Washington on my chopper," Holland said.

"I think we'd better check with my office before we remove any evidence," Lunkin said cautiously.

"Check all you want," Holland shot back as he unbolted the FDR. "But I'm sending this thing back to Washington."

He lugged it back to the waiting chopper, thinking this was the damnedest crash site he'd ever seen. There were too many anomalies.

On the flight to Mexico City, Remo Williams tried to explain to the Master of Sinanju, for what seemed like the zillionth time in their long association, that although Harold W. Smith, as director of CURE, wielded enormous power, he was not a secret emperor and did not covet the Oval Office, which Chiun referred to as the Eagle Throne.

"He's not going to seize power." Remo insisted. "So forget it."

"Then he will allow the stripling President of Vice to assume the Eagle Throne without interference?" Chiun asked in disbelief.

"I know it sounds crazy, especially in this instance, but that's the way it works."

"The President's wife," Chiun mused. "She should be next in line. There have been many fine queens in history. Catherine the Great was an excellent ruler."

"Your ancestors worked for her, no doubt?" Remo said.

"Why are you changing the subject?" Chiun wanted to know.

"Look. If the President is dead, I got a feeling you and I are going to be pressed into overtime. It will be all Smith can do to hold things together while that airhead is in charge."

"I think it is a plot."

"What makes you say that?"

Chiun's hazel eyes squeezed into walnut slits.

"Last year, the surgeon general mysteriously disappeared. One moment he was on television constantly stroking his magnificent beard and issuing proclamations. Then he was gone." Chiun looked across the aisle for eavesdroppers. " I suspect he was done away with," he whispered, low-voiced.

"I think he resigned. There's a new surgeon general now, one that doesn't look like a Dutch admiral."

"If you say so. I had thought that the postmaster general or the Attorney General would be next, but they have continued to cling to power. Perhaps they are in league with the President of Vice."

"Right," Remo said, looking out at the mountainous ground below. "That Postmaster General. He's a pretender to the throne if one ever lived."

Chiun arranged his silken skirts, saying, " I am pleased you agree with me. We will bring this matter to Smith's attention at a propitious moment. More emperors have been toppled from their thrones by military coups than popular revolts. It is an unfortunate truism of history."

The engine whine changed pitch and Remo felt the pressure build up in his ears. He opened his mouth slightly and his eardrums cleared instantly.

A mountaintop poked up on Remo's side of the plane. Another appeared on the opposite side. The plane began buffeting.

"Looks like we're here," Remo said as the plane tipped its right wing, showing the sprawling Valley of Mexico below.

"What ruins are those?" Chiun demanded, pointing to a vast jumble of gray stone dominated by a great flat-sided pyramid.

"One of the Aztec ruins, I guess," Remo guessed.

"We never worked for them," Chiun said, dismissing the entire sweep of Aztec civilization with a papery frown.

"Too bad," Remo said. "They were right up your alley. Made the czars look like muppets."

On the ground, Remo went to change his American dollars for pesos so he could use the airport pay phone.

He returned to the Master of Sinanju with his pockets bulging with heavy coins.

"This place is worse than Great Britain," Remo complained as he fed coins into the pay-phone slot. "They got a million different coins and no paper money under a five-peso bill. If they ever get around to abolishing the dollar bill back home, I vote we move to Canada."

"There is no work in Canada," Chiun pointed out. "Nothing goes on up there."

Remo grinned. "Sounds like retirement paradise."

Smith came on the line, his voice lemony and sharp.

"They cannot find the President's body," he said glumly.

"Does that mean he could have survived?" Remo asked, hope rising in his voice.

"Impossible," Smith said. "Air crashes of that severity rarely allow for survivors. We have to operate under the assumption that we have lost our chief executive."

"Damn," Remo said. "Is there anything Chiun and I can do?"

"Yes, I've booked you on a Mexicana flight to the town of Tampico. That's the staging area we're using to process the crash site. You're now Remo Jones, a cultural attache with the U. S. embassy in Mexico city. "

"That means I'm CIA, right?"

"You will contact Comandante Oscar Odio of the Mexican Federal Security Directorate, the DFS, in Tampico. The Mexicans are requesting an on-site observer. Soon they will be demanding it. Your task will be to handle their on-site person. That will be your entree to the crash site."

"Sounds like we've just pulled baby-sitting duty," Remo grumbled.

"Call it what you will," Smith returned. "I want you in the area in case something breaks."

"What about the Colombians?"

"We'll close the barn door later. Just follow orders."

"You're a prince, Smith." Remo hung up. He turned. Chiun was looking up at him, his head cocked, his hazel eyes narrow.

"What?" Remo asked, placing his hands on his hips.

"Why did you refer to Smith as a prince?" he asked suspiciously.

"Now, don't get the wrong idea. It's just-"

Chiun's hand shot up. "No lies. Speak the truth only, Remo. If Smith is making his move now, I must know it. Matters of succession require delicacy and correctness. I will not be party to a sloppy palace coup."

"It's just an expression," Remo shouted. And noticing that he was attracting attention in the busy terminal, he continued in a low, controlled voice, "I was pulling Smith's leg."

"Over the telephone?" Chiun said skeptically.

Remo looked ceilingward. "It's another expression."

"I do not want to hear expressions or excuses," Chiun snapped loudly. " I demand the truth."

"Okay, okay," Remo relented. "Congratulations. You've figured it out. It is a coup. Smith is deposing the Postmaster General. All those free stamps just for the taking have pushed Smith to the brink."

"How does eliminating the President figure into this?" Chiun went on in a mollified tone as they sought the Mexicana Airlines counter.

"It's really, really complicated," Remo said distractedly.

"Ah," said Chiun, and lapsed into silence. Then: "You may explain it to me on our flight. I assume we are going to fly again?"

"Yeah, we're going to the crash site."

"Yes, of course. To cover up the evidence of Smith's plotting. A wise move, and politically expedient."

Harold W. Smith made the appropriate phone calls to the State Department, which contacted the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, which in turn put in a call to Comandante Oscar Odio's office in Tampico.

So when Remo Williams presented himself at the headquarters of the Direccion Federal de Seguridad in Tampico, no one asked to see his identification as he entered the white Spanish-colonial building.

A blue-uniformed guard at the main desk, however, looked at Chiun quizzically as he listened to Remo identify himself and then escorted them to the comandante's office.

Tampico Zone Comandante Oscar Odio didn't ask Remo for his identification either. He smiled broadly under a mustache so thick it looked as if it had been grown in a refrigerator. The first words out of his mouth were a silken, "Bienaenidos, senores."

"Hi," Remo said sourly.

Comandante Odio looked at Remo's casual attire, and his attitude cooled.

"You are the attache from the American embassy," he said, his black jewellike eyes gleaming. "Dressed like that?"

"I was on vacation," Remo told him with a straight face. "In Cancun. Didn't have time to change."

"And this man?" Comandante Odio indicated the Master of Sinanju.

"This is Chiun," Remo said without skipping a beat. "My interpreter."

Odio frowned. "He is not Spanish."

"Neither are you, Mexican," the Master of Sinanju snapped in perfect Spanish.

Comandante Oscar Odio winced. "I see. Still, you will have no need for this man, I assure you. For I speak impeccable English, as you can plainly hear, Senor Yones."

"Jones."

"Yes. That is what I have said. Yones."

"He comes anyway," Remo said flatly. "Or none of us goes."

Comandante Odio stiffened. "As you say," he said, the smoothness leaving his voice again. "A helicopter awaits us. As soon as the representative from the Federal Judicial Police arrives, we will be on our way. "

"The who?" Remo said suddenly.

"I represent the Federal Security Directorate. The Federales have insisted on having an observer also."

"Look," Remo said testily, "this is an emergency. Do we have to stand on ceremony?"

"This is our country, Senor Yones. Not yours. Please be good enough to enjoy our hospitality while we wait. Would you care for a drink?" Odio reached into a desk drawer and extracted a large bottle. "Tequila?"

"No," Remo said flatly.

Odio turned to the Master of Sinanju, saying, "You, senor?''

"It has a worm in it," Chiun sniffed.

A peculiar smile settled over Odio's handsome features as he returned the bottle to its place unopened.

Remo looked out the window, where an olive helicopter with side-mounted machine guns sat under a tall ahuehuete tree. Worry rode his hard features. The President dead. Terrorists involved. He wondered where the Vice-President was now and if they were still keeping the news from him.

Deep within the Sierra Madres, Walid cocked an ear to the roof over his head and listened to the clatter. It was thin, and growing thinner.

"The helikobters are not so loud now," he ventured.

"The roof," Jalid observed, "it is covered with sand. Perfect camouflage against the Americans."

Abu Al-Kalbin shoved another wooden spoonful of steamed rice into his mouth. He wolfed it down greedily.

"Are you sure this will help?" he demanded of Walid and Jalid, white grains clinging from his half-open mouth.

"The rice, it absorbs water in the bowels," Walid said sincerely.

"Soon you will have firm solid stools," Jalid added, smiling.

"At this moment, I want that more than anything," Abu Al-Kalbin said fervently. "Even more than the Qaddafi Peace Prize."

He upended the bowl to let the clumpy rice tumble into his yawning mouth like dead white ants.

They spoke in Arabic, so that the President of the hated United States could not understand them. The President sat in a rude wood chair in the tar-paper-and-tin safe house nestled in the Sierra Madres, which had been arranged for them by their Colombian employer. Fki.rom the smell, they guessed it was a marijuana stash house.

The President sat, his head tipped forward and resting on his chin. A colorful embroidered blindfold shielded his eyes; his hands were bound to the two crosspieces of the chair back with twine. His feet were looped to the front chair legs with his own belt. It was a very fine belt. Abu Al-Kalbin hoped to keep it as a souvenir once they had sold the man into servitude.

Over in one dim corner, Walid was playing with a video camera. He pointed it at the President, and Jalid quickly jumped into the frame, throwing his arms around the President's thin shoulders, striking a pose and showing strong white teeth.

Pausing in his greedy rice devouring, Abu AlKalbin noticed Jalid's raked teeth and hissed a warning.

"You fool! Put on your kaffiyeh! If these films fall into bad hands, your foolish face will be on every wall and police bulletin board from here to Cairo."

Stung, Jalid reached behind him and pulled the tail of his fringed kaffiyeh around to his mouth. He restruck his cocky pose.

"How will we get him out of the country?" Jalid asked as Walid filmed him.

"I have not figured out that part," Abu Al-Kalbin mumbled through a mouthful of rice. "I am too busy setting my disgestive tract to rights. Curse these Mexican dishes. They go down like fire and come out of you the same way."

Walid and Jalid burst into laughter. Their raucous merriment died when a low groan escaped the President's compressed lips.

All heads turned to the President.

At that exact moment, there came a knock at the door.

All heads swiveled to the door.

"Who?" Abu Al-Kalbin blurted, rice grains dropping onto his lap.

"The Colombian?" Jalid suggested. "El Padrino?"

"He would not come here," Abu Al-Kalbin hissed. "Not while the U.S. helikobters comb the skies." He indicated the door with a sharp inclination of his head.

Walid grabbed up his AK-47 and went to answer the door. Jalid followed him with the whirring videoeam, while a second groan escaped the lips of the President of the United States.

Walid snapped off the safety of his automatic rifle. He held it low on his hip with his right hand, set himself in a widelegged combat stance, and reached out to throw open the door with his left.

At a nod from Abu Al-Kalbin, he yanked open the door.

He never fired.

For framed within the door was a tall blue-eyed, vacuously smiling man of young middle age.

Walid's jaw dropped. He recognized the face of the man in the doorway. His astonishment caused him to hold his fire.

And while his stupefied brain was registering the seemingly impossible sight of Robert Redford at the door, the American actor calmly reached over his shoulder and extracted a nine iron from his golf bag. He lifted it to his shoulder like a baseball player.

The club came around with such easy grace that Walid never saw the aluminum pole that dashed his brains out of his skull, sending hot yellowish brain matter splattering like grease.

A splash of it struck Abu Al-Kalbin in the face, momentarily blinding him. Curds of it dropped into his rice bowl, which fell from his hands and cracked on the floor.

Abu Al-Kalbin shot to his feet, pawing at the organic matter in his furiously batting eyes as the attacker stepped into the tar-paper shack, hurling his mangled nine iron away and selecting a driver.

The driver caught Abu Al-Kalbin in the jaw, knocking it off with a bone-meal crunch. The driver went back to the wielder's shoulder. This time it drove in for the exposed neck. It connected with such inhuman force that it tore Abu AI-Kalbin's head off his shoulders.

The head struck and bounced off the wall.

Jalid watched all of this through the range finder of his video camera. The range finder made the rapid series of violent actions seem as if they were very, very far away. Jalid retreated to a far wall, still recording the sight as if the camera offered him not only distance and perspective but also protection. Many war correspondents caught in free-fire zones had made that mistake. A few survived it.

Jalid did not survive his.

A putter lifted in very bad form like an ax about to chop down. It struck Jalid or the exact top of the head, separating skull plates that had been fused since Jalid was only six months old.

The golf-club wielder released the putter. It went down with the corpse, sticking up from the broken bleeding head like a fifth appendage. It quivered. So did Jalid's other appendages. The ones whose nerves were receiving electrically disrupted signals from its disrupted brain.

Ignoring the corpse, the man walked over to the bound form of the President of the United States, whose head groggily lifted off his chest. He craned his long Ichabod Crane neck as if trying to see past his blindfold.

"Hello?" he croaked, his voice anxious. " I can't see. Where am I? Can anyone hear me? I hear you moving around. Hello? Answer me!"

The President of the United States felt strong fingers touch his forehead, plucking away the blindfold with an easy rip that broke the fabric as clean as a knife. He lifted his face. The early-morning sunlight coming through the single window was not strong, but it hurt his eyes nevertheless. He looked up at the figure that towered over him, his vision gradually clearing.

The figure spoke. It said, "Hello is all right."

"Dan?" the President of the United States croaked in disbelief.

Chapter 7

The woman in the fawn-colored uniform had the saddest face Remo Williams had ever seen on a woman.

She ignored Chiun and himself as she stepped into the office of Zone Comandante Oscar Odio, executed a crisp salute, and announced herself.

"Federal Yudicial Police Officer Guadalupe Mazatl reporting, Comandante."

Comandante Odio returned the salute with only a slightly annoyed expression on his face.

"We have been awaiting you, senorita,'' he murmured.

"Officer," Guadalupe Mazatl corrected. She was a short woman, perhaps only five-foot-four, with a sturdy body that made up in rounded strength what it lacked in grace. She had coffee-colored skin, strong high cheekbones, and extremely black eyes. They might have come from the same military store as her shiny black boots and gunbelt. Her dark hair was short and severe.

"And these are the gringos?" she said, indicating Remo and Chiun with a toss of her black hair.

"You must excuse Officer Mazatl," Comandante Odio said, throwing the woman a hard glance while bestowing a smooth smile upon Remo and Chiun. "She has evidently left her manners behind."

"My manners are fine," Mazatl snapped. "It is the gringos who have swooped down upon us, despoiling our sovereignity. just as they did in Panama."

"Look," Remo said tensely. "Can we just go?"

"Naturally," Comandante Odio returned with a quick bowing of his head. He took his service cap off his desk and put it on. A white silk scarf went around the neck of his blue uniform. "Follow me, por favor," he said, adding mirrored aviator sunglasses to the ensemble.

Officer Mazatl fell in behind them without a word.

As they walked to the waiting helicopter, Comandante Odio whispered to Remo, "My apologies, senor. The Federales are notoriously lacking in pleasantness. The few women especially so. And corrupt."

"I'll keep that in mind," Remo promised, inwardly wanting only to get on with it.

The helicopter lifted off with a clattery whir and angled toward the foreboding Sierra Madres. Comandante Odio himself piloted the ship. Remo sat up front beside him, looking down as the brown ridges floated under the ship's skids. His Sinanju-trained eyes raked the barren peaks, looking for signs of life-or death. He saw neither. There were roads and railroad tracks crossing the range, but the peaks and mountainsides looked as if the First Wind had scoured them clean and no foot had known them since.

In the back, Guadalupe Mazatl put a question to the Master of Sinanju. "Are you Yapanese?"

"No. What are you?"

"I am an azteca," she said with a trace of pride. "Ciento por ciento. One hundred percent Aztec."

"You are proud of this?" Chiun asked doubtfully.

" I am."

"Then why do you look so sad?"

"I am not sad. I am Mexican," said Guadalupe Mazatl, as if that explained everything. "What are you?"

The Master of Sinanju pretended not to hear her over the rotor clatter. It was exactly what the rude woman who dressed like a man deserved after calling him a Japanese. No wonder his ancestors had not seen fit to exploit the Aztec market.

Presently the crash site came into view. Comandante Odio talked to the orbiting Air Force helicopters, was cleared to land, and set the chopper down well away from the knots of investigative teams.

Remo stepped out onto the crusty sand. The caterwaul of argumentative shouting lifted over the dying rotor whine.

An Air Force officer in a blue uniform was shouting down a man in mufti. The man in mufti was getting red in the face. He looked like he was about to explode. When the Air Force officer paused in his tirade to catch a breath, he did.

"You listen to me, Corporal!" he began.

"Colonel. "

"To me, it's all the same," the other shot back. "The President of the United States is technically missing. Not dead. Missing. That makes it a Secret Service matter."

"Last I heard, the Secret Service didn't have helicopter search capabilities. You want to hitch a ride in our birds, mister, that's fine. Otherwise, you remain on the ground. Read me?"

"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 attache, 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 Comandant Odio and the yanqui 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.

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 over heard. 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 acrinkle 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.

"Whatever you say. I trust you."

"Trust," the Vice-President repeated. "We cannot trust anyone until we are reunited."

" I miss my family too. Whatever you say."

" I say we go. Must return to the United States, your home."

"okay," the President said slowly. "Let's go. "

Only then did the too-firm hand release the President's windbreaker sleeve.

The President stepped into the sunlight first, the Vice-President walking closely behind, like a child pretending to be his shadow. He was met by a bleak brown expanse of desert and distant mountains.

"Looks like we got a long walk," the President said unhappily.

They had not gone more than a quarter-mile when the clatter of a distant helicopter came from the nearby mountains.

The President lifted waving arms. "Hey!" he called.

Without warning, the Vice-President pushed him down behind a great spike-leaved ground plant that resembled a giant artichoke. His hands squeezed off his cries for help. He kept him pressed to the ground until the clatter dissipated.

Only then did the Vice-President's heavy hand leave the small of his back.

Getting to his feet, the President dusted off his windbreaker, saying, "I appreciate what you're doing for me, but not so rough next time. Okay?"

"There will be more machines. Hurry we must."

"Gee, I don't know. Maybe they're friendly."

"They threaten our mutual survival."

The President's face twisted in concern. "More terrorists?"

"We must reach optimum position of safety. Come."

They trudged on. The sun climbed in the sky. The cool morning air warmed. The President grew parched and hungry.

The Vice-President found solutions to both of those problems. He uprooted a rubbery plant with his bare hands and squeezed precious drops of water into the President's eager mouth as if from a sponge.

Then he stalked a rattlesnake with a putter, decapitating it with one swift, sure blow. He broke off the head, and then skinned the snake by pulling on the skin with one hand and on the exposed neck meat with the other. The snake came apart like an entwined rope.

The President declined the raw meat with a polite, "No. You go ahead."

" I am self-sustaining, thank you."

They went on.

"Gotta hand it to you, Dan," the President said as they skirted the base of a mountain range. "You amaze me. These survival skills of yours-pick them up in the National Guard, did you?"

"I have known how to survive since I was created," the Vice-President replied, placing one ear to the flat parched ground.

The statement surprised the President for two reasons. Not the least of which was that it was the first coherent sentence the Vice-President had spoken all morning.

The Vice-President listened in silence. He shot to his feet suddenly and, with a combination of speed and stealth that astonished the President, gathered him up in a fireman's carry.

He began running.

His head dangling upside down, the President was unable to see where he was being taken. The sandy ground raced by so fast that he got dizzy. If he hadn't known it was an impossibility, the President would have sworn they were running at a clip of over sixty miles an hour. He closed his eyes. He was grateful he hadn't eaten that snake. It wouldn't have stayed down in this kind of activity.

Several bouncing minutes later, the sound of a train startled the President into opening his eyes.

The ground was moving, if anything, still faster.

And the sound of the train grew louder and louder and louder until it was on top of the President. He craned his fear-twisted face around.

He saw an old diesel engine, making good time. The President barely registered its massive bulk, and then the sky was in his face. He felt weightless, disconnected. Then every bone in his lanky body shook with unexpected impact and he gave out an involuntary yell.

For a nightmarish instant he thought they had been sucked under the big steel wheels.

Instead, he found himself gently deposited on a hot rattling metal surface.

"Where the hell are we?" the President demanded, pulling himself together.

The answer was all around him.

The President found himself sprawled on the platform of a caboose. The smell of diesel smoke was in his nostrils. His teeth shook and the train went clickety-clack on the rail segments. Grit popped under the spinning steel wheels. A mournful whistle gave out.

On either side of them, huge mountains reared up. They were traveling through a mountain range. "Is it safe here?" the President asked, hanging on to the railed back of the platform.

"Safe here it is," the Vice-President said, his fixed-smile face lifting to the sky, visible above the caboose's roof overhang.

Two helicopters zipped past like harridan vultures. They flew low, but from this vantage point the President could make out only their sun-shadowed underbellies. There were no markings visible.

"This is awful," the President groaned. "We're in deep doo-doo."

"I do not understand 'doo-doo,' " the Vice-President said without evident humor.

"You will," the President said unhappily as the desolate landscape unfolded around them. "Down here, it's everywhere you go."

Chapter 9

They could smell the bodies before they sighted the desolate shack.

Remo and Chiun had stepped up on a tumble of dusty rocks in an effort to see more clearly.

Chiun spotted the forlorn-looking shack in the brown foothills.

"The smell of death," he intoned, pointing. "It comes from there."

"Come on!" Remo said, rushing for the cabin.

"I do not understand your unseemly haste, Remo," Chiun said as they sprinted through the scrub desert, their light feet leaving only the merest prints on the sand.

"He's the President," Remo hissed.

"But we work for Smith."

"And Smith works for the President," Remo added.

"But is not answerable to him."

"That's the way the organization was set up in the first place. So no one could abuse CURE. America isn't a police state."

"A good thought. Only Smith is privileged to abuse the organization."

"Smith would never do that. That's why he was chosen for the job."

"He is a mere man, and therefore corruptible."

"I'll give Smith this," Remo said. "He does his job. Sometimes too well. But he does it."

"I still fail to understand your concern. You have lost a President. But they are like rugs. You dispose of them every four years. Sometimes every eight years. But they are clearly superfluous. I have heard some boast that any waif can grow up to be President. If that is true, then there is nothing special about any of them. They are not a bloodline, so no dynasty is threatened by the death of this President. He is voted in. And is voted out. So? This one has been voted out by terrorists."

"Terrorists don't vote," Remo said grimly. "And I don't believe he's dead. Yet."

"I smell death," Chiun warned. "You should be prepared. "

Remo should have slowed down when he got within range of the cabin. But the Master of Sinanju saw with a frown that he did not. Remo plunged into the open door like some ninja blunderer.

Chiun had no choice but to follow him in, and he did.

He found Remo ranging around the single room, upsetting tables and chairs and ignoring the three Middle Eastern corpses that were flung around the interior like so many unwanted dolls.

"No sign of him!" Remo said anxiously.

The Master of Sinanju strode immediately to one of the chairs Remo had upended in his controlled fury.

It was damaged, and lengths of snapped twine clung to the pieces.

"He has been here," Chiun said loudly. "And he was alive. No one binds a corpse to a chair."

Remo stopped what he was doing. He accepted frayed ends of twine from Chiun's long-nailed fingers.

"So who freed him?" Remo wondered. "And where did they go?"

"I do not know," said the Master of Sinanju, looking about the room. His eyes gleamed and he brushed past his pupil. Remo followed him with his eyes.

The Master of Sinanju reached down and lifted a black video camrecorder.

"Probably taken from Air Force One," Remo suggested.

"How do you work this device?"

"If it's one of those that give you instant playback, you rewind it and just press the trigger like on a gun. Then you look through the viewfinder."

"I cannot find this so-called viewfinder," Chiun complained.

"Give it here."

The Master of Sinanju retreated away from Remo's outreaching hand, saying, "No! I will do this myself."

Remo folded his arms in annoyance. "You won't see anything useful anyway. These ragheads probably stole it just to hock it. They wouldn't actually record the abduction. They're not idiots."

The Master of Sinanju paid no attention to his pupil's prattle. He found the proper buttons and lifted the device to one eager hazel eye. He depressed the trigger.

And before his eyes an amazing procession of images was displayed.

"I see the President!" Chiun cried in triumph.

Remo started. "You do?"

"He is answering questions put to him by unseen interrogators."

"Oh," Remo said, subsiding, "press-conference stuff."

"Wait! There is more!"

"What?" Remo said, reaching out again. Chiun faded back even though one eye was closed and the other was glued to the viewfinder.

"I see these three corpses lying dead about us, but in life."

"You do?"

"Yes. And they are recording the abduction of the true President, who appears to be unconscious, much like your President of Vice, except that the President's eyes are closed."

"He's alive!" Remo blurted.

"They are carrying him off, the imbeciles."

"Yeah?"

"Now they are posing with him," Chiun squeaked. "The President is bound to the chair with twine and a belt."

"Are they torturing him?"

"If he were awake, it could be called that," Chiun snapped.

Remo's fists clenched. "No!"

"They are capering around him like baboons, making inane comments and acting in jest. They are truly imbeciles." Chiun stopped speaking.

"What's happening now?" Remo demanded.

"I am coming to that," Chiun said, turning the video camera this way and that, as if to get a better view. "Ah!" Chiun breathed. Then, in a hard voice: "Oh! Oh, no!"

"What? What?" Remo asked anxiously.

"It is a plot!" Chiun cried in triumph. "I was right. "

"What? About what?"

"Behold," the Master of Sinanju said, quickly passing the video recorder to Remo.

Remo caught it up to his eyes. He pressed the trigger. He saw the late Abu Al-Kalbin at the exact moment he was beheaded by a number-one wood, wielded by familiar hands.

"It's the Vice-President," Remo said in disbelief.

"The schemer!" Chiun added indignantly.

"My God, he's pulverizing these terrorists."

"A subterfuge," Chiun cried. "He is disposing of his underlings so they cannot betray him. We will be vindicated in Emperor Smith's eyes, after all. He sent us on a ferocious goose quest."

"Wild-goose chase."

"The very same!" Chiun's voice rose with the indignation of it all. "And while we were dealing with foreign enemies, this stripling, this callow pretender to the throne, was manipulating his hireling killers, who performed the dastardly deed for him. And now the President of Vice has taken the true President off to some dank dungeon for possible execution or some worse fate."

"I see it, but I don't believe it," Remo said in a low voice.

"Believe it. Sony would not lie."

"He's gotta be almost as strong as us," Remo said doubtfully.

"Not if he must use mere tools to work his wicked will," Chiun countered. "Sinanju has not employed implements of destruction in generations."

"I never heard of killing someone with a golf club."

"There is no limit to what certain persons will stoop to in the unholy quest for ill-gotten glory," Chiun said sagely. "We must hasten back to America to warn Smith. No doubt the treacherous President of Vice is even now preparing to assume the Eagle Throne."

"No," Remo said as the tape ended. He popped the cassette from the camcorder. "We gotta find the President. He can't have gotten far."

A sudden voice came from the open door.

"Who could not have gotten far?"

Remo's hand shot behind his back, concealing the cassette.

"Whoever did this," he told Federal Judicial Police Officer Guadalupe Mazatl without skipping a beat. Beside him, Chiun's hands joined within his scarlet kimono sleeves.

Guadalupe Mazatl stepped into the shack.

"I do not understand this," she said, indicating the stiffening terrorists with a toss of her short hair. "Who are these pistoleros?"

"Terrorists," Remo said. "From the Middle East. Looks like they were the ones who knocked down Air Force One."

"How did you know to come here?" Guadalupe asked suspiciously.

"Hunch," Remo said evasively.

"Because we are who we are," Chiun said in the same breath.

"And who are you really? CIA?"

"Maybe," Remo admitted because it was far enough away from the truth to be comfortable.

"And what have you behind your back?"

Remo's hand came around. Empty. The cassette nestled in the waistband of his chinos. "Nothing. I had an itch." He grinned faintly.

"To another dog with that bone," Guadalupe said disdainfully.

"What?"

"It is an expression," she said. "And I believe you know what it means."

"Not me," Remo said honestly.

"We must report this matter," Guadalupe Mazatl said.

"Fine," Remo said. "Go ahead. We'll just wait here. "

Officer Guadalupe Mazatl did not move.

"I do not trust you yanquis. You are op to something."

"Who, us? Op to what?" Remo forced a light tone, but the anxiousness in his voice came through like a drill.

"I am not leaving without you," Officer Mazatl said firmly.

Remo looked to Chiun. Chiun looked back. Their expressions matched like red and green socks.

"Look, maybe I can level with you," Remo ventured.

"Remo," Chiun warned. "She is not to be trusted."

"Hah! Who said that of me?" Guadalupe demanded hotly.

"Comandante Odio," Chiun returned smugly.

"That puerco! Everyone knows that the DFS is corrupt. "

"Funny, they say that about you Federales," Remo retorted.

"It is not true!" Guadalupe flared. "Of me!" she added in a metallic tone.

"Time's getting away from us here," Remo said quickly. "Listen, we have reason to believe these are some of the men responsible for shooting down the President's plane. You get word back to the others. Tell them to be on the lookout for . . ." Remo's voice trailed off as he realized what he was about to say. His eyes went to the putter sticking up from one terrorist's shattered skull.

"si?"

"Anyone suspicious," Remo added carefully. "Have them scour every mountain. Extend the search area. If there are others, they're probably on foot. They couldn't have gotten far."

"You cannot get far on foot either."

"That's our problem," Remo shot back. "Not yours. We're outta here. Come on, Little Father." Officer Guadalupe Mazatl followed them outside.

"Those gringos are op to something," she muttered as she watched them sprint away.

Then, clutching her pistol in its side holster, she began running back to the crash site, pacing herself so that she did not run out of breath.

Chapter 10

The chief of staff met with the other Cabinet members in the White House conference room.

"Gentlemen, you all know the situation. Our President is no longer with us."

No one spoke a word. Their faces were gloomy.

The chief of staff went on. "Technically, the Vice-President is our new chief executive."

To a man, their faces drained of color. They looked like unhappy corpses.

"Has he taken the oath yet?" asked the Secretary of Defense uncomfortably.

"He has no inkling what has transpired."

"Wish we could keep it that way . . ." someone muttered.

"At this moment, Air Force Two is taking him to a Detroit location, where he will deliver a prepared speech. He knows this speech is important, but he does not know its contents. His handlers don't even know. "

"Does it matter?"

"It matters very, very much," said the chief of staff. "I have had the staff prepare a speech in which the Vice-President immediately tenders his resignation for health reasons."

A husky gasp raced around the conference table.

The chief of staff silenced it with a raised hand. "I believe he can be persuaded to give this speech on one condition."

"What is that?"

"That he believes it is the President's wish that he resign. "

"My God, you're talking about a palace coup!"

"No," the chief of staff countered. "I am talking about a necessary political preemptive strike. The Vice-President resigns. Then and only then do he and the nation learn that the President has died."

"But consider the political firestorm."

"Imagine, worse still, the Vice President taking his rightful place at the head of this table."

"But the next in line is what's-his-name-the Speaker of the House-a Democrat."

" I can't help that. You all know the Vice-President. He can't chew gum and walk at the same time."

"Hell, we lived through one of those presidencies back in the seventies. And the VP's a much better golfer than that guy was. At least the Vice-President never brained anyone with his nine-iron. "

The Secretary of Housing gave a nervous little laugh. It came out like a giggle. He swallowed it.

"Gentlemen, if you have any arguments that might persuade me not to put this plan into operation, give them now. Just remember that your party is your party, but we're considering the future of America. Can the ship of state navigate these uncertain times with such an unseasoned man at the helm?"

The Cabinet exchanged unhappy, sick-eyed glances.

They talked among themselves in low, urgent tones.

The chief of staff waited, his fingers steepled. He knew their decision even if they did not as yet. It was the only decision that could be made. Once again he rued the day the President had made his choice of a running mate without consultation. If only he had picked one of the other aspirants.

The decision was reached and the chief of staff looked up from his grim thoughts.

"Do what you have to," he was told.

"Thank you, gentlemen. I would join you in a prayer at this time, but every moment counts. Feel free to go ahead without me."

And as the chief of staff left the room, the remaining Cabinet members folded their hands and closed their eyes. Their lips moved, but no audible words came forth.

Chapter 11

Federal Judicial Officer Guadalupe Mazatl strode across the flat sierra, her broad face a copper mask of resentment.

Overhead, the helicopters were clattering like tiny Erector Set dragonflies. The sight of their Estados Unidos insignia made her blood boil.

She did not hate the norteamericanos. She merely resented them, just as she resented the criollos who had subjugated her Indian ancestors four hundred years ago under Cortez and his mad dogs. No, she despised the criollos, who considered themselves more Mexican than the pure-blooded Indians, even though they were Spanish.

Glancing back over her fawn-colored shoulder, she saw the gringo and the old Asian he called papacito-"Little Father"moving through the twisted, tortured cacti like the almighty lords of the desolation.

And as much as she despised the criollos, they had already done their damage. That was in the past. The norteamericanos threatened manana.

She hurried back to the crash site to speak with the arrogant criollo, Comandante Odio. More was happening under the hot Mexican sun than an American airplane accident.

Remo Williams' eyes read the flat sierra like an open book.

The winds had disturbed the sand little. It was dark, hard-packed stuff, retaining footprints in shallows, but not in the flat crusty stretches where rainwater had stiffened the sand.

"Two men," Remo said, his eyes on the broken ground as he walked.

"Yes," Chiun said. "But one walking strangely."

"Maybe the President," Remo muttered, looking up toward the nearby mountains. "Wounded."

The Master of Sinanju shook his frail old head. "He walks heavily, but not from injury. He walks with heavy tread. As if grossly fat."

" I wondered about that," Remo said. " I thought mabye he was wearing heavy boots or something."

"Boots made of lead might leave such marks," Chiun intoned.

"Doesn't make sense," Remo said. "Let's just see where they lead us."

They led into a passage cut between two towering mountains, where ancient and rusted railroad tracks followed sunbleached ties.

"Footprints stop here," said Remo. "See how the toes dig in, then vanish? He hopped the train."

The Master of Sinanju placed one delicate ear to a rusty rail.

"Anything?" Remo asked, looking down the tracks, which converged at the horizon line.

"There is no vibration," Chiun intoned. "The train passed some time ago."

"Well, we got something," Remo said as Chiun stood up and looked back toward the crash site. "Now all we have to do is find out where that train went, without tipping our hand."

"We should inform Smith."

"You carrying a telephone up one sleeve?"

"Of course not," bristled the Master of Sinanju.

"'Then finding a phone has to be step one. Let's get back to the site."

They had covered most of the distance back to the blue-and-white broken-backed bird that had been Air Force One when a Mexican Army helicopter suddenly lifted up and roared toward them.

Inside the helicopter, Comandante Oscar Odio smiled broadly beneath his mirrored sunglasses. "You will be very wise to keep silent," he told FJP Officer Mazatl. "These matters must be handled with diplomacy. I will do all the talking, mestiza."

"I am no mongrel mestiza!" Officer Mazatl spat. "I am pure azteca."

"Still, you will remain silent." He patted her knee. "And I would not be so proud of ancestors who cut the hearts out of the living, thinking their blood fueled the sun."

"The blood of the Inquisition was no less red," Guadalupe retorted.

Comandante Oscar Odio only laughed.

He set the helicopter down in the path of the approaching Americans.

" Hola!" he called through the open bubble. "Que pasa ?"

Remo came up first.

"Look," he shouted over the rotor whir. "I've got no time to go into details. We need to get to a phone. Pronto!"

"Your Secret Service have-how you say-ceyular telefonos at the crash zone."

Remo shook his head vigorously. "No. I don't want theirs in on this."

"Ah," said Comandante Odio. "It is mucho top-secret, no?"

"Just give me a lift back to your base, okay?"

"At once," Comandante Odio said as the two climbed aboard.

The helicopter lifted up at an angle, the big rotor blade tipping in the direction they were traveling, like a buzz saw chewing through the dry air.

"Officer Mazatl tells me you have found a shack," Odio said nonchalantly.

"That's right," Remo said woodenly.

"And there were dead men in this shack."

"Right again," Remo said, looking down at the ground.

"Is there anything you would like to tell me about this matter?" Odio said good-naturedly.

"No." Remo folded his arms stubbornly.

FJP Officer Guadalupe Mazatl clenched her strong teeth. This was Mexico, not Texas. Who did these gringos think they were?

Then the old one spoke up.

"Where do these lead?" he asked, pointing to the railroad tracks below.

Comandante Odio glanced down.

"That is the Central route to Mexico City," he offered. "They call the train El Aguila Azteca-the Aztec Eagle. Despite the name, it is a very slow train. In Mexico, everything runs slowly --- comprende?"

"Except helicopters, I hope," Remo put in.

Taking the hint, Comandante Odio shut up. He concentrated on his flying. He felt the burning gaze of Officer Mazatl boring into him. He could also read the brown Indian woman's mind. She was thinking: How dare you let these gringos push you around in your own land?

He bestowed on her a dazzling smile, causing her to look away in abrupt anger.

Twenty minutes later, Comandante Oscar Odio was turning the full radiance of his Latin smile on Remo and Chiun as he escorted them into his simple office.

"Yentlemen, mi oficina es su oficina, as we Mexicans say."

"Thanks," Remo said brusquely, grabbing up the telephone.

"The switchboard operator will connect you to a U. S. operator," Comandante Odio added, closing the door behind him.

Fortunately for Remo, the operator spoke English. Remo gave the U. S. operator the number of a fictitious comicbook company in New York City, which relayed the call automatically to the office of Dr. Harold W. Smith on an untappable line.

While Remo listened to the line buzz, the Master of Sinanju spoke up.

"Do not forget to tell Emperor Smith that I had deduced the terrible truth before we found proof of the Vice-President's perfidy," he hissed.

The line clicked. Remo waved Chiun away.

"Smith, Remo. The President isn't dead."

"What!"

"We don't have him, but we think we know where he's heading."

"Is your line secure?" Smith asked suddenly.

"Screw security," Remo snapped. "Do you want to know about the President or don't you? I've had it with bureaucratic bullshit. We're talking about our President!"

Smith subsided. "Go ahead, Remo," he said in a sober voice.

"We followed some tracks to a little shack in the middle of nowhere," Remo explained quickly. "Found three dead terrorists there. Middle Easterners. Probably Palestinian. They had the President, but he went off with someone else."

"Who?"

Remo took a deep breath. "This is going to be hard to believe."

"Go ahead, Remo."

"Do you know where the Vice-President is right at this minute?" Remo asked in an odd voice.

"As a matter of fact, yes. They've got him on a photo opportunity tour at a drug-rehabilitation center. It's part of the White House's plan to keep him occupied until we have definite word of the President's fate."

"Well," Remo said, "sometime in the last ten hours, he was here in Mexico. He rescued the President from the terrorists."

"No!" Chiun broke in. "Remo, you are telling it wrong. The President of Vice is a conspirator. He merely dispatched his unnecessary underlings after they did his will and abducted the unfortunate President. "

Remo clapped one hand over the receiver. "Let me tell it, will you, Chiun?"

"What's this?" Smith asked, his voice twisted with concern.

"At the shack we found a videotape of the abduction," Remo explained. "The President was carried from the wreckage alive. The terrorists were filming him inside this shack when the Vice-President burst in swinging-I know how this sounds-golf clubs. He took the terrorists apart. It was a massacre."

"The Vice-President of the United States?" Smith asked doubtfully.

"No," Remo shot back sarcastically. "The Vice-President of Exxon. I've got the tape to prove it, too. "

"Remo," Smith said firmly, "the Vice-President was awakened this morning in his own bed, by his own handlers and at the request of the White House, and bundled off to this drug-rehabilitation-center appearance."

Are you sure he's the real Vice-President?" Remo asked.

"How do you know the man on the tape is?" Smith countered.

"Looks like him, right down to the golf swing."

"The Vice-President would never plot against the country."

"No? Remember that stock-market thing we dealt with a few months back? And the secret English descendants infrastructure that was dedicated to selling the US out to Great Britain? The Vice-President was on the list of secret British loyalists."

"That threat has been terminated. I cannot believe the Vice-President would act to undermine this country. "

"Well, something's screwy down here. Look, we think they hopped a train to Mexico City."

"Then go to Mexico City. But keep this to yourself."

"From my lips to God's ears," Remo said, hanging up.

In the next room, Comandante Oscar Odio waited for the extension receiver to click before he hung up. His face wore an uncharacteristic frown. It was astonishing, what he had overheard. The American Vice-President in Mexico? A coup underway in the United States?

But most intriguing was the intelligence that the President himself was not dead, but alive somewhere in Mexico. It was very, very valuable information to a man who knew how to disseminate such things correctly.

He left the room of his secretary and rejoined Officer Mazatl in the hall outside his own office. Mazatl stood there, her brown thumb hooked into her black belt like some caballero de pulqueria. She did not at all resemble a woman, Odio thought.

Nevertheless, he smiled at her pleasantly. The smile was not returned. If anything, Mazatl's obsidian eyes grew harder.

"If you would like to use the men's room, Officer, it is down the hall." His smile didn't waver as he delivered the insult.

"Hijo de la chingada!" Mazatl spat venomously.

The comandante only laughed. He grew sincere when the americanos stepped into the hall.

"We've got to get back to our embassy," the one called Remo said urgently.

"By all means," Comandante Odio said. "I understand perfectamente. Please accept my condolences on the loss of your beloved presidente," he added sorrowfully.

"Thanks," Remo said distantly.

"And," Comandante Odio added, "as a gesture of solidarity with you in your bereavement, please allow Officer Mazatl to escort you back to Mexico City."

Officer Mazatl whirled.

"I am not under your command!" she spat.

"Of course not, senorita," Odio said oilily. "But I am certain your superiors would want you to see that the American diplomats are well taken care of. You would not want them to become lost in our very large country."

"We can take care of ourselves," Remo said flatly.

"But the officer will expedite your trip," Odio insisted. "I am certain you do not wish to wait for a Mexicana flight, since they often meet with unfortunate delays. I will arrange military transportation for you."

"Okay," Remo relented, "but only because we're in a rush."

Odio turned to Officer Mazatl. He smiled. "Senorita?"

"I will go with these two," she said sullenly, "but not because you expect it."

"As you wish, Officer Mazatl."

The comandante departed to make the arrangements.

FJP Officer Mazatl stepped up to Remo and Chiun. She looked Remo hard in the eyes.

"You are concealing something," she hissed. "I can tell that."

"Prove it," said Remo, feeling the hard edge of the videotape in the small of his back.

Chapter 12

Jorge Chingar sat beside his telephone in his palatial hacienda outside the Colombian town of Cali. All morning long the calls kept coming in.

"Padrino, the U.S. President has not yet arrived."

"Padrino, still no sign of Air Force Uno."

"Padrino, the other conference representatives are beginning to wonder what is keeping the presidente."

All morning long. But no concrete word on the U. S. President's fate. It was maddening. His spies in Bogota faithfully updated him every half-hour. But there was yet no word from his Palestinian compadres. Surely they would have called by this time. Perhaps they had been captured in Mexico. It was a pleasant thought. Death to the American President, and Jorge Chingar could keep the money promised for the deed. The Palestinians were fools of a sort, after all. No one else in their business would have undertaken such a daring task without first obtaining a substantial down payment.

But these men had been so eager to make their reputation that all that seemed to matter was getting the job.

Jorge Chingar, known as El Padrino-"The God father"-already had a reputation. He also had a million-dollar estate outside of Bogata-until the Colombian Army, backed up by U.S. DEA agents, swooped down upon it in the middle of the night, forcing El Padrino to flee into the hot jungle wearing only his silk underwear.

He was not without resources, principally caches of money and armaments. It had been a simple enough matter to set up again in a safe house, one unknown to the Colombian government.

But the indignity of it offended EI Padrino and he had sworn, even as his bare feet slipped on the wet jungle grasses that evil night, that he would make the President of the United States pay.

The phone rang again. He grabbed it with his many-ringed right hand.

"Si?"

"El Padrino?"

"Si."

"This is Comandante Odio. From the Mexican DFS. We have done business before."

"Of course. How may I be of service to you, comandante?"

"Ah," said the smiling voice. "You are mistaken. It is how I may be of service to you."

"Go on. I am listening."

"Your hatred of the American presidente is not unknown to me. I thought you might be interested in knowing that Air Force One crashed in the Sierra Madres last night."

"Ah!" said El Padrino with only a slight lifting of his voice. "This interests me. Pray, go on."

"The Americans have secured the crash site. They believe their presidente is dead."

"Muy malo," chuckled EI Padrino.

"They cannot find the body."

"Muy triste," EI Padrino said with mock sadness.

"But I happen to know that the President is very much alive."

El Padrino snapped to attention. "Que? How you know this? Tell me!"

"He has been taken to Mexico City, apparently by the Vice-President, his subordinate. I do not understand it myself, but even now there is a coup under way in Washington."

"A coup?"

"Engineered by the Vice-President, Padrino."

"Preposterous."

"I have this on excellent authority. Impeccable authority. "

"What does the Vice-President intend to do with the President?"

"I do not know, Padrino."

"I would like to know. And I would pay exceedingly well the man who brings me such information-or proof that the presidente is dead. Comprende?

"I will contact you directly that I have good news for you, Padrino," Comandante Oscar Odio said briskly. "Adios."

''Vaya con Dios," said EI Padrino, replacing the receiver. He snapped his fingers twice and a hulking bodyguard stepped in from the next room.

"Polio," he commanded. "Gather your best pistoleros. You are going to Mexico City. There is someone I would like you to kill there."

"Si, Padrino."

Chapter 13

It was the most miserable ride in the President's memory.

Going down in flames in the South Pacific during World War II had been no moonlight cruise, to be sure. But except for some bad moments bobbing in the water, it had been over quick.

The train ride through the brown desolation of rural Mexico seemed to go on forever, and nothing he said to the Vice-President, no plea, no veiled threat, could persuade him to enter the caboose.

"But I'm the President," he muttered, his teeth rattling like castanets. The springs on the caboose were either old or sprung. If it even had springs. "This is a friendly country, real friendly. People down here know my face. Hell, I got grandchildren who are Mexican."

The Vice-President turned his perpetually wounded eyes on him like blue lasers. "My prime directive is survival. Entering the train is not conducive to our survival. Must survive. Must ensure your survival. Your survival will ensure my survival. My survival will guarantee your survival. Our survival-"

"I getcha," chattered the President. The poor guy was still rattled. He'd been going on and on about survival like a tape-message loop. "But if I don't have some water soon, I don't know if I'm gonna survive. "

That got a reaction. "Wait here. I will get water."

And the Vice-President came to his feet like his knees had sprung. He clambered up an attached ladder to the caboose roof and disappeared. Over the clickety-clack of the rails, the President heard his feet clump away heavily.

"Amazing!" the President said, his newfound awe of his Vice-President swelling. "When this is over, I'm gonna put that guy up for a Congressional Medal of Honor. And screw those jerks who called him a draft dodger."

The President huddled at the metal railing of the caboose platform. He clung to it with one hand, fearful of falling off. It was warm. Not hot. The sun was high and eye-stingingly bright, but he could stand it. The wind cut through his poplin windbreaker relentlessly.

The Vice-President came down the caboose carrying a plastic cup. He offered it, saying, " I found this. "

"Thanks," the President said, taking quick gulps. The water tasted good. "Want some?"

"No. I do not need water."

"Great," said the President, who really hadn't wanted to share in the first place. He drained the cup.

"Damn! That was good. Wish I had more."

"I will provide more water," the Vice-President said. "Water is important for your survival."

"No, no," the President said quickly. "Stay put. No sense risking your neck again running along the train top."

" I will not need to do that. I now carry a reserve supply."

The Vice-President took the plastic glass, and turning his back on the President, did something with it. The President's brow wrinkled at the sound of gurgling water. He sneaked a look. The Vice-President held one hand over the glass. He thought he saw water dribbling off the man's fingertips.

The glass came back into his hand, and the President took a tentative sip. He made a face.

"Tastes oily," he said.

"It will not harm you. Nothing will harm you while I am with you. It is important that you know that."

"Know it?" the President said, draining the glass in quick gulps. "I'm gonna see that you get the best thank-you note ever written. The very best. What do you think of that?"

"The job of protecting you is a job," the Vice-President said blankly.

"Great, Dan," the President said with concern. "Could I ask you why you've got that smile on your face?"

"This is the smile that is always on the face of the Vice-President. "

"Yeah, true. But not like that. It looks kinda . . . fixed. You're starting to remind me of that joker fella, from the movie. Think you could relax just a little?"

The smile dropped two stops on the register. "Is this satisfactory?" the Vice-President asked.

"Better," the President admitted.

The smiled dropped another stop, with German lens precision.

"Is this best?"

"Good. Yeah, keep it like that."

I gotta make sure this guy gets a full psychiatric evaluation at Walter Reed, the President thought. He's acting loopier than ever.

"We are nearing a city," the Vice-President said as the mountains grew thinner around them.

"How do you know that?"

" I can smell the pollution. It is very dense. There are harmful elements in the air-sulfur dioxides, carbon monoxide, zinc particles, and fecal dust."

"Must be Mexico City," the President said, suddenly impressed by his Vice-President's keen sense of smell. " I understand on really bad days the birds actually drop out of the sky from the smog. Imagine that. Hey, we have an embassy in Mexico City. We'll go there."

"Will they assist our survival?"

"Damn right. They'll assure it."

"Then we will go there."

"Of course we will," the President said, sticking his hands between his thighs for warmth.

The train began to slow and shacks appeared on either side. They looked miserable, like something found on the outskirts of a war-torn third-world battle zone. The President had traveled through Mexico before, but had never seen the rural part up close like this. It was difficult to imagine that this kind of squalor existed only a few hundred miles below the Texas border.

A road appeared on the left, and as the train slowed, the road came closer and closer to the rail-bed until the train and the sparse traffic were running parallel to one another.

"Someone's gonna see us," the President warned.

"I will protect you."

"Glad to hear it, but that's not what I meant. Maybe they'll recognize us. Help us out."

A dull gray truck with a wooden flatbed rumbled past the train, going in the opposite direction. The President noticed it because the back was crowded with a dozen or more men standing up. As they zoomed by, they reacted with shouts and pointing fingers.

The truck executed a fumy U-turn and came up alongside the caboose. The men surged to the near side of the truck bed. One waved and shouted, "El presidente?"

"Si! Si!" the President answered, getting to his feet. He waved with one hand, clutching the rail with the other. "Soy el presidente de los Estados Unidos!"

A shout went up from the men, who wore dusty clothing. They looked like ragtag Mexican farmers.

The truck picked up speed and left them breathing its malodorous exhaust.

"They're going fox help!" the President shouted joyously. "We can relax, now. They must have been looking for us all along."

"They possess weapons which can harm you," the Vice-President said mechanically.

"Guns are real popular down here. It's that machismo thing."

The train was rounding a bend, giving the President an unobstructed view of the engine. The truck drew up alongside it. Suddenly a battery of rifles and automatic weapons came level, like a firing squad on wheels.

"Must be trying to get the attention of the engineer," the President ventured. "Fella probably can't hear them over the engine racket."

The guns opened up. The firing was intense, a rattling ineffectual pop-pop-pap mixed with the harsh snap of bullets bouncing off the heavy engine.

"What the hell are they doing?" the President said, ducking for cover. "That's a lot of shooting for a warning shot."

"We must escape," the Vice-President said with metallic urgency. The train was slowing down.

"For God's sake, what's going on?"

The train ground to a jerky halt and the truck came back, its human cargo shouting and caterwauling like Pancho Villa's army.

The President was no fool. He realized this was no rescue party. Before he could say, "Let's get out of here!" a firm hand took him by the waist and yanked him down behind the caboose, pushing him against a multiwheeled truck assembly.

"These wheels will protect you," he said. The Vice-President crept forward.

"Where are you going?" the President demanded anxiously.

The Vice-President did not answer. He disappeared between the couplings that joined the caboose to the rest of the train.

The President hugged his knees to his chest and tried to make himself as small as he could. He ruefully thought that whatever dangers had awaited him in Bogota, they would be infinitely preferable to what was happening right now.

He listened to the mixture of sounds-more excited shouting, the gunning of the truck engine, and the lengthy squeal of its tires in a wild turn. They were coming back.

The truck braked nearby, and feet hit the asphalt with hard leather slaps. They were jumping off the truck, yelling exultantly.

The President sneaked a peek around a heavy steel wheel rim.

He saw many booted feet. They surrounded another pair of feet-the Vice-President's. The Vice-President seemed to hold his ground as he was surrounded. They were the bravest feet the President had ever seen.

Nothing happened for a long moment, except excited shouting and questioning. One word was repeated: "Cabron." That meant "friend," the President recalled, thinking back to his high-school Spanish. No, wait-it meant "bastard," he decided, remembering his Texas oil days. They were calling the Vice-President a bastard, questioning him, but not hurting him. They repeated the words el presidente many times, with growing vehemence.

The President wondered if he should surrender. They might kill the Vice-President if he didn't answer-and it sounded as if he wouldn't. Brave fella.

As he was deciding, something happened. Two sets of boots suddenly left the ground. They just vanished. Then two broken bodies landed in the place where they had been. There came a scream. The President pulled his head back. He tried to make himself small again.

And the gunfire started in earnest.

Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Like distant firecrackers.

More screams. It went on for a long time. There were other sounds-meaty twisty ripping noises. Fleeing feet. Commotion.

The President waited tensely for it all to die down. He knew better than to run when bullets were ripping the air, although his nerves screamed for him to flee.

The gun sounds were still ringing in his ears when he heard footsteps coming for him. They crushed the railbed gravel.

The President's eyes snapped open. He got ready to duck under the caboose.

To his astonishment, the Vice-President-his eyes still holding that perpetual hurt light that never changed from debate to photo op, his clown grin almost ghoulish in its unwavering fixity-stepped into view.

"We are safe now," he said, reaching down. "We have survived." He held a bent putter in his other hand.

The President let himself be helped to his feet. His ankles and knees felt like Slinky toys waggling in opposite directions.

"What happened?" he asked shakily.

"The meat machines have been neutralized."

"Meat machines?" the President asked. Steadying himself against the caboose, he peered around to the other side.

He gagged. For he could see why the Vice-President had called their erstwhile attackers meat machines. They had been torn limb from limb. The fortunate ones. Their ham-bone joints gleamed white at the torn-off shoulders and knees.

The President threw up his water. The Vice-President straightened the putter's shaft with a quick two-handed motion and restored it to his bag.

"You did all that with a putter?" the President said incredulously.

"Yes. Why?"

The question was asked with such a straight face that all the President could do was mutter, "Well, not much loft in a putter." He felt very weak. " I don't think I can go on," he said.

"We must survive," said the Vice-President.

"Amen," said the President fervently.

" I will carry you."

"No, no-you've done enough."

But the Vice-President was having none of it. Like a caveman, he took the chief executive around the waist and hefted him onto his hip like a feather pillow.

"This isn't really necessary."

The Vice-President stepped out into the road and started walking with a steady metronomic gait.

"Isn't there a more dignified way to do this?" the President wanted to know as he bounced on the Vice-President's anvil hip.

"You are too weak to walk. I am strong. I am very strong. "

"Thank goodness for that. Those fellas were trying to kill us. You just took them apart."

"Yes. We cannot go to the embassy now. We must enter the city undetected if we are to survive."

"How are we gonna do that:"

" I will find a way," the Vice-President said. "We must seek sanctuary."

"Let's find one with food. I'm getting hungry."

"What would you like?"

"Anything. "

The Vice-President's camera-lens eyes regarded an approaching truck. "Bread?" he asked.

"Sure. Anything. Even plain white bread would taste good."

No sooner were the words out of the President's mouth than he was set onto the roadside. His head no longer hanging upside down over the concrete, he looked around him.

The train was not far behind. It stood there like a long inert worm of metal. Passengers' screams were more audible, but no one had ventured from the cars.

The Vice-President stepped into the middle of the road, his arms raised. He was trying to flag down a blue-and-white van coming up the road.

The van stopped and the Vice-President stepped up to the driver's side. The driver rolled down the window and asked, "Como esta?"

Without warning, the Vice-President delivered a straight-arm punch. The driver's head slumped out the window, unconscious.

When the Vice-President came back for him, he was wearing that idiot Alfred E. Neuman grin of his, as if nothing had happened.

"Did you have to hit him like that?" the President complained.

" I did not speak his language, and we can trust no one," the Vice-President said, and under his arm went the President again. He was bundled into the back of the van. The door slammed and darkness closed over him.

"Hey!" the President shouted.

"Enjoy your meal," said the Vice-President's voice.

The truck started up. It rattled worse than the caboose.

The President became aware of the tantalizing smell of fresh bread. On one hand and both knees, he felt around in the back, encountering plastic wrapping on shelves upon shelves of plastic wrapping.

He tore one open and began to devour handfuls of soft aeirated bread. It tasted like Wonder Bread. It would have tasted better, but the awful exhaust smell was coming up through the floorboards. Still, it was good to eat solid food again.

After he had filled his stomach, drowsiness set in. The President fell promptly asleep. His last loggy thought was to wonder what had come over the Vice-President. The guy had become a positive tiger.

Chapter 14

The plane that ferried Remo and Chiun to Mexico City International Airport was a rickety propellerdriven Douglas C-47 of museum vintage.

After a long period of silence-among the three passengers, but not the rattling cabin-Remo commented on that fact.

"How is it your helicopters are so modern, but your planes belong in the junkyard?"

"Do you insult my country's military?" Guadalupe Mazatl demanded hotly.

"Just wondering," Remo said, folding his bare arms. He wasn't in the mood for conversation anyway. Not with Chiun, who felt that as long as no blame fell on his shoulders, it didn't matter what happened to the President of the United States, and especially not with a sullen Mexican cop with a chip on her shoulder almost as large as her inferiority complex.

The ground below was endlessly mountainous. Remo wondered if all of Mexico was this barren.

"The helicopter, it belonged to him."

"What's that?" Remo asked, roused from his thoughts by Guadalupe's sullen voice.

"That was Comandante Odio's private helicopter. I have heard that he bought it himself and merely lends it to his command."

"They must pay DFS commandants pretty well down here," Remo remarked.

"They do not," Guadalupe Mazatl said flatly.

Remo's eyebrows shot up. "You suggesting the comandante is on the take?"

" I suggest nothing. You are a smart norteamericano. You put dos and dos together.'

"Two and two."

"I said that."

"Well," Remo returned, "he was very helpful to us."

"He is not a man worthy of trust."

"Not my problem. I'll never see him again."

"Then I trust you said nothing during your telephone conversation that you would not want him to know. "

Remo eyed Guadalupe's masklike profile. "Why is that?"

"He was undoubtedly listening in on your call."

"How do you know that?" the Master of Sinanju said, taking interest in the conversation for the first time.

"He left me alone in the hall," Guadalupe explained.

"Circumstantial," Remo suggested.

"And he can afford a modern helicopter on less than three hundred pesos salary per month."

Remo looked across the aisle to the Master of Sinanju.

"What do you think, Little Father?" he asked.

"I think I will be happy when I am out of this wounded metal bird."

"You're a big help. By the way," he asked Guadalupe, "what do they call you for short? Guad?"

"Lupe. "

"Loopy," Remo said. "Doesn't fit you, you know."

The plane set down at Mexico City International Airport and ground personnel rolled out an aluminum stairway so they could deplane.

"I gotta find a phone," Remo told Lupe as they stepped onto the tarmac. "Come with me."

They entered the busy terminal and FJP Officer Mazatl found the operations manager. After exchanging swift words with him in Spanish, she led him from the office, telling Remo, "We will be outside."

"Listening in?" Remo asked. But he smiled when he said it. His smile was not returned.

"Let's see what Smith has to say," Remo told Chiun.

" I do not like this place," Chiun said suddenly while Remo waited for a U.S. operator to come on the line.

"Already? We haven't even left the airport."

"This is an evil place," Chiun insisted. "The air tastes like metal."

"I did notice the sky was kinda brown, at that," Remo remarked. Then, into the phone: "Smith? Remo. We're in Mexico City. Any news? . . . Really? . . . Here? Well, it's a lead. No word on the President? . . I see.... Okay. We'll register at a hotel. I have a police escort I'll need to ditch, but that shouldn't be a problem. Her nickname is Loopy."

Remo hung up.

"Smith says there was a report that the Vice-President was seen in Mexico City only an hour ago," he told Chiun.

"You see!" Chiun said triumphantly. "Proof of all I said. What dastardly crime has he committed now?"

"He was seen driving a bread truck through the city."

"Perhaps the bread is poisoned," Chiun said as he followed Remo from the office.

"We've got to get to the embassy," Remo informed Lupe.

"I will drive you," she said.

"Thanks, but no thanks. Just call us a cab."

"I am your host and protector while you are in Mexico," Lupe said stiffly.

"Thanks again, but we don't need protection."

Lupe's hard eyes flicked toward the Master of Sinanju. "The old one. He looks pale."

"Don't let that fool you," Remo retorted. "He's healthier than I am. Right, Chiun?"

The Master of Sinanju said nothing. He sniffed the air with concern.

Remo looked more closely. "You do look a little pale, at that."

"I do not like this place," Chiun said again.

"Fine," Remo returned. "Let's be on our way."

Officer Guadalupe Mazatl led them out to the drop-off area, where she flagged a cab.

"No official vehicle?" Remo asked as they got in.

"An FJP jeep might arrive in five minutes or five hours. This taxi is here now."

They pulled into traffic a moment later, and were soon traveling through a rundown area of scabrous stucco buildings; there was a general air of forlorn hopelessness about the people walking along the streets.

Remo kept an eye on the traffic, looking for bread trucks. Smith had told him the brand name. What was it again?

"You ever heard of Bimbo Bread?" he asked Lupe suddenly.

"Si. It is a well-known brand here in the Distrito Federal. Why?"

"Oh, nothing," Remo said evasively.

They turned on an artery called Viaducto. Remo wondered if it was Spanish for "viaduct," and if it was, why it was called that.

After a while the avenue sank into the ground and their view of the city was cut off by ugly gray concrete walls lifting on either side, like a viaduct that carried traffic instead of water.

The city was incredibly congested, Remo saw. Noxious exhaust poured from the tailpipe of every car and truck. It was worse than New York or L.A. But there was something different about it, too.

As they turned off Viaducto, under a huge electric pinwheel of a sign-"TOME COCA-COLA"-back into ground-level traffic, a blue VW Beetle slithered out of their way, causing a chain reaction of near-collisions.

Their cabdriver kept going as if this were an everyday occurrence. Remo looked back. Miraculously, no one was hurt. Then it hit him.

"Don't the cars have horns down here?"

"Si," Lupe said. "Why do you ask?"

"In New York, you'd hear a million car horns during a near-disaster like that."

A faint smile touched the corners of Lupe's lips.

"Perhaps we are more civilized in Mexico than you would think," she said.

"Matter of fact," Remo added, "I don't hear any horns. It's unnatural."

The cabdriver spoke up. "Many drivers, senior, they carry pistolas."

"So much for civilization," Remo said smugly.

Lupe Mazatl said nothing. In the front seat, beside the driver, the Master of Sinanju was equally silent.

Remo looked around for trucks. He saw none that said "Bimbo Bread." Then he realized that it might not say "bread" at all.

"What's the Spanish for 'bread'?" he asked Lupe.

"Pan."

"How about 'bimbo'?"

" 'Bimbo'?"

"Yeah. 'Bimbo.' What's that in English?"

Lupe shrugged her uniformed shoulders. " 'Bimbo' is . . . 'bimbo.' "

"In the U. S. a bimbo is a girl who's not very bright. "

Lupe's brown forehead puckered. "She is dark?"

"No, unintelligent. Dumb. You know, stupid."

"Ah, senorita estupida. 'Stupid girl.' That is what you wish to know?"

"Maybe," Remo said, frowning. He didn't think that anyone would invent a brand name that meant "stupid girl." Maybe Lupe was right. Maybe "bimbo" was just "bimbo." He decided on another tack.

"What color are the Bimbo Bread trucks down here?"

A dark notch formed between Guadalupe's thick brows.

"Why this concern with Bimbo Bread?" she asked suspiciously.

"Nothing special," Remo said innocently. "Just trying to soak up local customs."

"Why do you not ask about our fine culture, then? Our great city? Do you know that Mexico City is the most populous in the world?"

" I can believe it," Remo said, looking out at the congestion. They were stopped at an intersection where a traffic cop in a chocolate-and-cream uniform was attempting to unsnarl traffic with a white baton. It looked hopeless. The red "ALTO" signs were being ignored in both directions.

"We have the longest avenue in the world here in Mexico City," Lupe said proudly. "It is called the Avenida Insurgentes. And our Chapultepec Park is unrivaled for its magnificence."

"Skip the tourist-brochure stuff;" Remo said. "I'm already here."

When they got going again, Remo noticed that the Master of Sinanju was staring out the window, his face a frown of wrinkles, like a parchment death mask left too long in the sun.

"You've been awful quiet, Little Father," he said solicitously.

" I have a headache," Chiun's voice was muted.

"You!" Remo said aghast, and the shock in his face was not lost on Guadalupe Mazatl.

"Is this serious?" she asked.

"Is it?" Remo asked Chiun solicitously.

"This is a foul place," Chiun said brittlely. " I have a headache and my breathing rhythms are not properly centered."

"Does it hurt behind the eyes?" Lupe asked.

Chiun turned. "Yes. What do you know of this?"

"It is a pollution headache," Lupe explained. "Many turistas get these things. They are not used to the thin air or the smog. Our smog, I regret to say, is also famous. Mexico lies in a high valley and the mountains that surround it form a natural-how you say-cop. "

"Cup, not cop," Remo said absently. He was looking at Chiun. He had never seen his teacher ill a day in his life. As old and frail as the Master of Sinanju appeared, under the wrinkles and semitranslucent skin, he was a human dynamo. "Are you going to be all right, Little Father?"

"We must leave this place as soon as we can," Chiun croaked. "The air is bad and the oxygen thinner than Tibet's."

"Soon as we accomplish our mission," Remo assured him.

"Mission?" Lupe asked.

"Did I ask you what color a Bimbo Bread truck is?" Remo said quickly.

"Si. And you would not tell me why you thought this important."

"Forget it," Remo said. "An idle question."

"Blue," said the Master of Sinanju. "Blue and white. "

Remo leaned forward. "How do you know that?"

"Because there is one in front of us."

Remo followed Chiun's pointing finger-it trembled almost imperceptibly-and saw the back of a blue-and-white bread truck. The word "Bimbo" was plainly visible, as were a loaf of bread and a fluffy white cartoon bear.

"Driver," Remo said urgently, "try to pull up on the driver's side of that truck."

"What is this?" Lupe demanded.

"Later," Remo said. "Driver, do it!"

The traffic was thick, but the driver tried. He jockeyed in and out of the traffic flow with a kind of wild precision.

At a traffic light, they pulled up alongside the truck.

Remo rolled down the window, getting a faceful of noxious warm air. He put his head out, but all he could see was a patch of sky reflected in the breadtruck driver's mirror.

"Can you see anything, little Father?" he demanded.

The Master of Sinanju put his head out. He looked up, and Remo saw his beard hair tremble. His tiny mouth dropped open.

And before Remo could react, Chiun burst out of the car, shaking a tiny furious fist.

"You!" he shrieked. "Traitor!"

Remo started to open his door, calling, "Chiun, what are you doing?"

The bread truck surged ahead, cutting off the taxi. The Master of Sinanju leapt after it.

Remo flew out of the back and gave chase, oblivious of Guadalupe Mazatl's shouting after him.

Up ahead, the Master of Sinanju was running like an octogenarian Olympic torchbearer, fists pumping high, legs working like spindly pistons under his flopping kimono hem.

The truck veered crazily, causing near-accidents at every turn. Still, not a horn honked. Not a curse was shouted in any language. Unless one counted the excited imprecations of the Master of Sinanju as he hauled after the zigzagging truck.

Remo drew abreast of the Master of Sinanju, his own running motions controlled and tight.

"Chiun! What did you see? Who's driving?"

"The . . . puff . . . President of . . . puff . . . Vice," Chiun wheezed. His voice rattled.

"You sure?"

"I would know that callow, treacherous visage anywhere!" Chiun wheezed.

"Look, you're not breathing right," Remo pleaded. "Leave this to me."

"No!" said Chiun, sprinting forward.

"Oh, great," Remo said. "Now he's got to show me up...

The Bimbo Bread truck came to a rotary of sorts, dominated by a huge white column surmounted by a gold-leaf angel. Remo grinned, knowing that the driver would have to slow down to manage the sharp curve.

But he did not slow down. With almost computerlike precision he sped into the circle and began orbiting the massive column like a satellite on wheels.

"What's he doing?" Remo muttered, falling in behind the truck. He stayed with it for one orbit. Midway through the second, he decided to cut across the monument. The noxious fumes of the exhaust were starting to make him feel whoozy.

Remo sprinted across the monument, up the shallow steps, and back down again.

He alighted on the opposite side-just in time to intercept the speeding truck.

His eyes flicked once toward the Master of Sinanju, pelting around in the truck's wake.

He saw a winded, red-faced Chiun, slowing down, his arms jerking unsynchronously, like those of a Boston Marathon runner at Heartbreak Hill, his legs wavering.

"He's in trouble," Remo muttered worriedly.

Suddenly, the Master of Sinanju stumbled, a big green colectivo bus only yards behind him.

Remo's eyes jumped to the approaching bread truck and went back to Chiun. The sun on the windshield obscured the driver's face.

Swearing to himself, he let the truck roar past and raced back to rescue his mentor.

The green bus was not stopping. The driver's dark eyes were fixed on the traffic, not the road. The Master of Sinanju was raising himself of the asphalt with trembling arms, his face dazed.

Remo's mind raced, making instinctual mental calculations he could not have duplicated with pen and paper. The speed of the truck, his own velocity, even the air resistance pressing against his chest. They all coalesced into some deep untranslatable knowledge.

Remo picked up speed, bent at the waist, and without pause scooped up the Master of Sinanju with bare inches between them and a big bus tire.

The bus whizzed by, sucking at the hairs at the back of Remo's head.

He deposited the Master of Sinanju on the grass of a little square park. He felt his own lungs burning slightly, as if he had somehow inhaled fire.

"Chiun! Are you all right?" he said with difficulty.

"The air is poison here!" Chiun wheezed. His eyes were closed, his thin chest heaving with each breath.

"Yeah. I'm starting to feel it too." Remo settled back. He concentrated on his own breathing. The air was heavy. He had been aware of it ever since leaving the airport, but he hadn't noticed the thin oxygen content. The pollution particles had masked that deficiency.

Now, in the strange humming drone of Mexico City traffic, he became slowly aware that his head was beginning to throb.

"This is not good," said Remo Williams, who had not had a headache or a cold or any other common minor infirmity since achieving the early states of the art of Sinanju. "And that Lupe is probably looking for us right now. Are you up to ditching her?"

"I am up to returning to America," Chiun said weakly.

"Soon as we can," Remo promised. He stood up, looking for a taxi.

He flagged down a yellow VW Beetle with black and white checks on the doors as it came around the circle.

"Where are the best hotels?" Remo asked the driver. "The ones with air-conditioning."

"In the Zona Rosa, senor. The Pink Zone."

"Then take us to the Pink Zone," Remo said, assisting Chiun into the back.

"Zona Rosa, si," the driver said. The cab scooted down a street and back up another. They passed streets with European names like Hamburgo, Genova, and Copenhague.

"You feeling any better, Little Father?" Remo asked.

"I will live," Chiun said stiffly. His eyes were closed. He looked very old all of a sudden, Remo thought. He always looked old. But Remo had long ago learned to trust-and respect-the power that flowed under the wizened shell of the man who was his teacher. He sensed that power ebbing, and it worried him.

Sooner than Remo expected, they were tooling down a street called Florencia, where a row of tall palms dominated a center island. They passed trendylooking boutiques and even some American restaurants.

Remo was about to ask the driver why it was called the Pink Zone when he noticed that the cobbled sidewalks were faintly pink from paint that had been worn thin by rain and the tread of countless feet.

Abruptly the driver pulled up to a corner. He turned around, saying, "Two hundred pesos, senor.''