Crying, he began to spit the foul-tasting cranberries from his mouth.
Wally had almost cleared his mouth of the bitter crushed pulp when they made him kneel at the edge of the bog.
"You were supposed to fix it," a harsh voice said.
" I tried! I really did!" Wally had protested. "You need a media recovery specialist. I'm only a CE."
"You ever hear that saying: the customer is always right?"
"Yes. "
"Then you shoulda fixed the box. No questions asked."
Then they pushed his head into the cool foul water. The hand that had been around his throat did this. Wally knew this because he could feel the same strong thumb and fingers putting merciless pressure on his Adam's apple.
Wally did the natural thing. He held his breath. And while he was holding the precious air in his lungs, the others took hold of his ankles and wrists and slammed him spread-eagled on the edge of the bog, whose cold waters were getting into his nose.
He hoped it was a hazing. He prayed it was a hazing. But it did not feel like a hazing. It felt serious. It felt like he was being drowned for failing to fix a computer.
He held his breath because there was nothing else he could do. His limbs pinioned into helplessness, Wally simply waited for them to release him. He waited for the mean-spirited IDC hazing to be over with.
This did not happen.
By the time Wally Boyajian realized this would never happen, he was tasting the gritty brackish water of the cranberry bog in his gulping mouth. It infiltrated his nose, splashing down his sinuses and into his mouth. Then it was filling his lungs like triple pneumonia. The shock of the cold water made him pass out.
Fear of drowning brought him back around almost at once.
It had been too good to be true, Wally realized, sobbing inwardly. Now it was too unbelievable to comprehend. He was being coldly murdered.
In the last panicky moments of his too-short life, consciousness came and went as he made furious bubbles amid the hard bitter cranberries.
When the last bubble had burst, they consigned Wally Boyajian's limp body to the bog, where his decomposing remains would nourish the ripening cranberries and give flavor to the holidays, which he was destined never to experience again.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he was learning to fly.
"Let's see," Remo said, thinking back to what he knew about airplanes, which was precious little. "To make a plane go down, you gotta crack the flaps. No, that's not it. You lift the elevators. Right, the elevators."
Reaching down with a foot, Remo toed the elevators up just a hair.
The aircraft-it was a gull-winged scarlet-and-cream 1930's-era Barnes Stormer-responded instantly by going into a lopsided climb.
"Oops! That's not it," Remo muttered, removing his foot. He noticed that only one elevator actually went down.
The Stormer leveled off quickly as Remo tried to retain his balance against the fierce slipstream. When the plane was again on an even pitch, he tried again. This time he pressed down on both elevators with both heels.
The plane slid into a dive. The elevators fought him. Remo increased the pressure.
Up ahead in the Plexiglas cockpit, the pilot fought the controls. He was losing. He couldn't figure out why. Remo imagined it would come to him eventually.
Looking down, Remo realized he was no longer over the airport. He wanted to be over the airport. If he was going to land this thing over the objections of the pilot, he would need an airport underneath him, not a forest.
This part was easy. The plane was steered by the rudder, just like on a boat. Except that the rudder stuck up in the air and not down into the water. The rudder happened to stick up right in front of him, attached to the tail assembly, to which Remo clung with both hands. His feet were planted on the stabilizer.
He removed one hand from the tail fin and used it to nudge the rudder a hair.
The aircraft responded with a slow, ungainly turn. The distant airport came into view like an oasis of asphalt at the edge of the forest.
"I'm starting to get the hang of this," Remo said, pleased with himself. He would have been more pleased had he been able to catch up with the pilot before takeoff: Remo had missed the man at his house. The maid had cheerfully told Remo that her employer was on his way to do some sport flying. Remo had reached the airport just in time to have the taxiing 1930's-era aircraft pointed out to him.
Remo had sprinted after it without pausing to think his actions through. By the time he had caught up, it was lifting its tail preparatory to leaving the ground.
Impulsively Remo leapt aboard. It was an impulse he had begun to regret at twelve thousand feet.
In the cockpit, the pilot was now fighting the stubborn controls like a man possessed. He had no inkling that his tail empennage had acquired a human barnacle as he was taking off. Probably he would have dismissed the thought out of hand if he had.
The pilot, whose name Remo understood to be Digory Lippincott, had her throttled up to five hundred miles per hour, a speed at which no living thing could retain a precarious perch on the tail.
Yet, a mere nineteen feet behind him, Remo straddled the tail like a man wind-surfing. The right foot resting on the right stablizer and the left on the left. He had been holding on to the upright rudder post like a boy hitching a ride on a dolphin's back.
The slipstream plastered his gray chinos against his lean legs. His black T-shirt chattered like a madly wind-worried sail. His dark hair was combed back by the wind, exposing a forehead on which an upraised but colorless bump showed plainly.
Remo 's dark eyes were pinched to narrow slits against the onrushing wind. Under the high cheekbones that dominated his strong angular face, his cruel mouth was closed.
He was actually enjoying this. The plane was doing whatever he wanted.
"Look, Ma, I'm flying!" he shouted.
His shout carried right through the Plexiglas of the pilot's cockpit. The pilot look around. His mean eyes became saucers.
Remo saluted him with a friendly little wave.
Furiously the pilot flung back the sliding cockpit.
"You crazy guy! What're you doing on my plane!"
"Trying to land it," Remo called back over the rushing air.
"Is this a hijacking?"
"Nah. You're my assignment."
"I'm your what?"
"Assignment. I gotta kill you."
"By crashing us both?" the pilot sputtered.
"Not if I can help it," Remo said sincerely. "Tell you what. You land this thing yourself and I'll do you on the ground. No muss. No fuss. How's that sound?"
"Like a bad deal."
"Suit yourself;" said Remo, bringing the weight of his heels down on both cherry-red elevators.
The aircraft went into a dive. Frantically the pilot fought the bucking controls, attempting to level off:
Remo let him think he was succeeding. After the elevators had righted themselves, he nudged one up with the toe of an Italian loafer.
Instead of fighting, the pilot let the Stormer spiral upward. Its nose strained toward the clear blue bowl of the Connecticut sky.
A notch puckered between Remo's dark eyes. He wondered what the Stormer's ceiling was and if there would be enough air for him to breathe up there.
Remo never found out because the engine began to sputter. It missed a few times, and as gravity drained the last of the aviation fuel from the carburetor, the single propeller just stopped dead.
Like a nose-heavy dart, the Stormer dropped. Its tail, Remo still clinging to it, flipped up like a diving salmon. The plane had gone into what aviators call a tail spin.
Below, the forest turned as if on a giant CD player.
Remo wondered if the pilot was trying to shake him or commit suicide. He asked.
"You trying to crash this thing?" Remo called.
"You figure it out."
The ground was coming up so fast Remo didn't think he had that kind
of time. He retained his grip, knowing the centrifugal force of the spin would hold him in place.
He wasn't sure what would happen if the plane stopped spinning. His understanding of his predicament was purely instinctual, not cognitive. That was Sinanju for you. Your body learned but your brain sometimes didn't have a clue.
While Remo was listening to his body, the engine sputtered, coughed an oily ball of exhaust, and roared back to life.
With a wiggle of ailerons, the Stormer came level.
The pilot pushed back the cockpit and said, "Thought we were going to crash, didn't you?"
"Something like that," Remo growled.
"It's an old trick. When you stand her on her tail, the engine stalls out. If you try to restart it yourself, you crash. Have to let gravity do the work."
"Now I know," Remo muttered under his breath.
"If you don't stop screwing around with my aerodynamics, I can do it again."
"No, you won't."
"What's going to stop me? You're way back there."
Remo reached forward, took hold of the rotating beacon bubble mounted atop the rudder post, and exerted the same kind of twisting pressure he would on a stuck mayonnaisejar lid.
The bubble light assembly groaned and came loose, trailing wires.
Remo gave it a toss. It struck the spinning disk of the propeller. Pieces of the light flew in all directions. One struck the pilot in the face.
"My eyes!" he cried, clutching his face.
"My ass," said Remo, who didn't like to be taunted on the job. As the heir to the five-thousand-year-old House of Sinanju and the next in line to be Master, Remo expected respect. Even from his intended victims.
The pilot was screaming, " I can't see! I can't see!"
"Tell that to your victims," Remo yelled back.
"What victims?"
"The ones you robbed blind when you ran that bank you used to own into the ground."
"That wasn't my fault!"
"My boss says it was."
"He's lying! I'm a sportsman."
"You're a cheap crook who ripped off your despositors. Except one of the depositors happened to be my boss. And he has ways of dealing with financial losses undreamed of by the FDIC."
" I can't see to fly the plane!"
"That's okay," Remo said, pushing down on the right elevator with one foot and lifting the left with the other. "You're about to suffer an abrupt withdrawal from life."
The Barnes Stormer turned around in the air. The pilot, still pawing at his eyes, simply dropped out of the open cockpit, his seat-belt harness ripping free of its anchorage.
"Yaaahh!" he said when he took his eyes from his bleeding face. He still couldn't see, but the absence of the cockpit was hard to miss, as was the precipitous way in which he dropped.
"That," Remo said, "is putting gravity to good use."
The pilot hit a fir tree, impaling himself on his crotch like an ornamental Christmas-tree angel.
Remo righted the Stormer. It responded to his measured foot pressure as if he had been flying all his life.
Now all he had to do was figure out a way to land the aircraft in one piece. Without access to the ailerons and flaps. He knew the flaps functioned as brakes. He had sat over the wing of enough commercial jetliners to grasp that much.
By playing with the rudder and elevators, Remo managed to get the nose of the plane oriented toward the airport. He kept it on course with the occasional nudge and kick.
The forest rolled under him like a marching porcupine. It would not be a good place to ditch, if the pilot's fate was any indication.
When he could see the color of the windsock over the airport operations shack, Remo began his descent.
It was then and only then that he realized he would have to cut the engine if he wanted to survive the landing.
Remo looked around. Not much to work with now that he had used the beacon light, he realized glumly.
He decided that inasmuch as he was nicely on course, he didn't really need the rudder anymore. Not all of it, anyway.
Remo released one hand from the tail fin and used it to chop a piece off the aluminum rudder. Slipstream began to yank it away, but Remo snagged it just in time.
Aiming it like a Frisbee, Remo let fly.
The rudder segment flew true. It sheared off the propeller blades as if they were toothpicks. Remo ducked a gleaming needle of prop shard that skimmed by his head.
There was a lot more to flying, he realized, than just knowing how to work the control, surfaces. A person could get hurt.
Without a propeller, the Stormer naturally lost airspeed. Unfortunately it also began to vibrate rather alarmingly.
Remo was not alarmed. He figured that anything that slowed the headlong flight of the disabled craft could only work in his favor, since he would be attempting to land the aircraft without benefit of landing gear.
Remo, nudging what was left of the rudder, lined up on the black and yellow transverse lines at the near end of the runway. He noticed too late that the arrows were pointing toward him, rather than away. He hoped that didn't mean what he thought it meant.
As it turned out, it did.
And at the far end of the runway, a number of candycolored light planes were revving up for takeoff. Their glittering propellers were pointed in his direction like voracious buzz saws.
"Too late now," Remo muttered. "I'm committed."
He sent the plane into the final leg of its descent. The transverse lines rushed up to meet him like a shark's toothsome mouth.
They flicked by with the fleeting flash of a semaphore signal. And then the hot black asphalt was like a high-speed lava flow.
Remo wrestled to keep the vibrating aircraft level. He did rather well, losing only one wing. The right.
Hissing and sputtering sparks, the undercarriage began to scream in response to contact with the ground. It slewed sideways. The other wing caught and Remo experienced a momentary disorientation not unlike the split second in a roller-coaster ride before everyone screams.
His body told him this would be the perfect time to let go, and so he did.
The Stormer nosed over, which meant that it stubbed its snout and threw its tail up like a bucking stallion.
The plane landed on its back. Pitched into the air, Remo landed on its paint-scraped undercarriage, threw out his arms like a trapeze artist, and said, "Ta-dah!"
The first of several light planes roared only yards over his head. Remo waved them off. He understood how it was to be a pilot now. There was nothing on earth like it.
Next time, he promised himself as he stepped off the crippled plane, he would try soloing the old-fashioned way. From the cockpit.
At a pay phone by the airport restaurant, Remo dialed the code number and put a finger in his free ear to keep out the wail of the crash trucks. He wondered how the FAA would explain finding the plane and its pilot separated by five miles of terrain.
He stopped worrying when a testy voice answered.
"Yes?" it snapped.
"Sorry to interrupt jeopardy," said Remo dryly, "but I'm reporting in as requested."
"I'm sorry, Remo. I didn't mean-"
Suddenly there was another voice on the line, a cracked and aged voice.
"Is that Remo? Let me speak to him at once."
"I-"Smith began.
Remo had a momentary impression of the phone being yanked out of the bloodless hands of Harold W. Smith, his superior.
"Remo," said the aged voice urgently, "you must come right away. All is lost."
"What?"
The phone went abruptly dead.
"What the hell?" Remo muttered, batting the switch-hook bar and redialing.
For the first time in memory, the communications line to Folcroft did not ring. Thinking he had misdialed-which was possible even though the code number had been simplified to a series of ones-Remo tried again. The number did not answer.
Remo dug back into the recesses of his memory for t
he backup number. He thought there was a five in it. Maybe two.
He tried dialing all fives. That got him a nonworking-number message from AT&T.
"Damn(" Remo said. "I could be here all day trying to remember that freaking number("
Remo dashed to the operations shack.
"I need a pilot willing to fly me to Rye, New York," he announced.
No one batted an eye.
"Money is no object," Remo said, digging out his wallet.
Still no reply. A reedy man expectorated into the sand of a standing ashtray.
Remo's eyes narrowed.
"Won't anyone help a marine just back from the Gulf?" he wondered aloud.
A small riot broke out as the lounging pleasure pilots fought one another over the privilege of ferrying the heroic marine just back from the Gulf to his destination.
Remo waded in and shattered a lifted chair before it was employed to crown a man. Using just the flats of his hands, Remo immobilized as many as he could without inflicting serious injury.
When he had created a pile of squirming men on the tiled floor, Remo picked through them as if through a rag pile, looking for any pilot who seemed reasonably airworthy.
Remo dragged out a likely candidate.
"I choose you."
"Thanks, mister, but I don't own a plane."
"Then why the hell were you fighting?"
"I got carried away with patriotic fervor."
"There's an airport at Westchester," the reedy man piped up from under a tangle of limbs. "That good enough for you?"
"It'll do," Remo said, extricating him from the pile. 'Let's go...
The aircraft was a two-place silver-and-blue monoplane. Remo had to listen to the pilot natter on and on about how this was a home-built job, and once he finished building his wet wing, she'd be as sweet a thing as ever took to the skies.
Remo, who didn't know a wet wing from a wet bar, felt guilty about lying, but only a little. He had actually recently returned from the Gulf, and he had been a marine. Back in Vietnam.
"You know," the pilot was saying as the other aircraft pulled off to the side of the runway to let the plane carrying the war hero go first, "you look familiar to me. Ill bet I caught you on one of those TV news spots, saying hello to the folks back home."
"Yep, that was me," Remo said absently. He wondered why the pilot thought he recognized him.
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