Survival Course td-82 Read online

  "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 St
ates 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.