"Acknowledge."
The tower ran Remo through the essentials of piloting a big bird. They told him where the throttle was. How to trim flap and deploy the thrust reversers. It sounded easy at first. Then they began piling on the details.
"Look, we need to keep this simple," Remo complained.
"This is the simplest version, sir."
"I need a simpler version. There's a lot of distractions up here."
Just then, another one reared its bulging head.
"Remo, the not-bee has returned," squeaked Chiun.
"Swat it. I'm busy," Remo called back.
The Master of Sinanju stepped around and blocked the door, saying, "Bumblebee-who-is-not, do not dare intrude, for here stands the Master of Sinanju to deal with you."
The bee, if it understood, only grew more determined. It swooped at Chiun's bald head, encountered a sweeping backhand and went corkscrewing away. Striking a bulkhead, it ricocheted, rebounded and came again.
This time, it tried to zip between Chiun's outstretched legs.
Chiun gathered up the hem of his kimono skirt, ripping out a swatch of silk lining. Snapping it between tense hands, he waved it before the bee like an Oriental matador with a too-small cape. The bee bobbed and weaved, but refused to retreat.
"Come, bee. Come to your doom ...." Chiun invited.
The bee zigged, then zagged, trying to get past the snapping silk. It made a dive for the space between Chiun's black sandals.
Twisting the swatch into a knot, the Master of Sinanju bent his deceptively frail-looking body, enveloping the bee expertly in a ball of fabric.
The bee hummed and buzzed in frustration.
"I have the culprit," Chiun announced to Remo.
"Good," returned Remo.
The tower was assuring Remo that he would land safely. They were telling him to lay his nose on the main radio beacon. Remo understood none of it in the technical sense. But when the nose was pointing toward the foaming runway, he began to feel a slow surge of confidence.
"Okay, I'm riding the beam," he said, copying the tower's terminology.
"Drop gear."
Remo pulled on the heavy lever that deployed the landing wheels. They rumbled out of their wells.
Remo lined up on the main runway.
"Now ease back. Not too hard on the throttle," the tower instructed.
Remo obliged. There was a sheen of perspiration on his forehead. It came from concentration, not fear. He kept trying to fly by the seat of his pants, the way he drove a car-by feeling every component of the vehicle, and becoming an extension of it. But this was a big, lumbering jet that operated by hydraulics and electrical controls. It was worse than power steering. It was power everything. Remo preferred to be the power in the cars he drove. Here, he was disconnected from total control of the aircraft. It made everything feel wrong.
As the jet dropped lower and lower on its Pacific approach, Remo heard a rare Korean curse emerge from the Master of Sinanju's papery lips.
"What now?" he demanded of Chiun.
"The bee ate through my kimono lining. It is ruined."
"What?"
Then the bee was dive-bombing Remo's head. And the tarmac came rushing up to meet the nose.
"Not now," Remo groaned. "I've almost got this thing on the ground."
The bee dancing before his eyes, Remo slapped at it in sheer frustration. It bounced off the side of his hand, unharmed, and regained its aerial equilibrium.
"What does it take to kill one of these things?" he complained. "Chiun, get in here!"
The Master of Sinanju was in the cabin now. There was hardly any room for him. Chiun made a lunge for the dancing bee.
"I have him."
"Get him out of my freaking hair."
Chiun's fists knocked the bee around the cabin. He was on Remo's right. Then his left. Finally, Remo called out, "You're worse than the freaking bee! Leave it alone!"
"It is trying to kill you."
"I gotta save the plane," said Remo as the rear tires unexpectedly made contact with the blacktop. They barked like stung dogs. The plane bounced, settled, and the barking came again.
Steadily, Remo lowered the nose. It touched down. Then the plane was rolling into the patch of waiting foam.
I did it, Remo thought. I saved the plane!
And he felt a tiny sting over his left carotid artery, and a very cold sensation began to well up inside him.
Chapter 17
At first, it sounded like a tornado.
Gordon Garret heard it as he walked between the corn rows.
The corn was coming up. Last week, there had been a goose-drowner of a rainstorm in this fertile corner of Iowa. That helped some. Not like it was down in the Southwest, where they were suffering from drought. In Texas and those parts, the winter wheat hadn't come up at all. There was a lot of suffering.
Gordon Garret understood suffering. His patch of earth, Garret Farms, had been in Garret hands going clear past the forgotten depression of the 1850s to before the Civil War. There had been a lot of hard times since then. It was a constant battle with corn borers and funguses and the like.
And, of course, there was the weather. Some years, it didn't rain, but it poured. Others, the fertile earth fell apart under the broiling sun. The Great Flood of '93 was still fresh in Iowa minds.
Tornados weren't that common. They happened, sure. But the last thing Gordon Garret expected to hear was the dull roar of an approaching twister.
For a moment, he froze, his boots sinking into the heavy soil. He felt no wind. That was peculiar. There was that dull, distant, freight-train roar, but no breeze.
On either side of him the rows of the new Super Yellow Dent corn-guaranteed to resist corn borers by fooling them into thinking corn smelled like uninteresting soybeans-three months from tasseling, just stood there like so many dull students with their long green-turbaned heads held up off the earth.
But the roar was the roar of a twister. So Gordon shook the fear out of his coveralls and made a dash for the barn.
He ran like the wind, boots crunching dirt. But the roar was moving faster. It was the wind.
The roar swelled. Weirdly, it didn't become that full, big-train roar he associated with twisters. It stayed low. Had a metallic kind of sound in it, like heat bees in summer. But this was April.
Flinging a glance over his shoulder, Gordon expected to see a funnel cloud. But there was no funnel. It was a cloud.
What he saw made him stop, stand stock-still and scrunch his seed cap in his uneasy hands.
The low sky was a mass of gray, hazy blackness. It hummed. Weird, that hum. Spooky. Not loud. Just insistent. Angry, maybe. But all hell-winds sound angry.
It looked like a dust cloud, but there was still no wind.
Then it hit.
Like a fury, it hit. The noise was the worst of it. It came churning in, all rage and viciousness. The fury of it dropped Gordon to his knees. He threw his arms across his flinching face and pushed the front part of himself into the dirt.
A whining buzz roared over and across him. The sound of it assaulted his ears. The sound changed as he cowered for protection in the good earth that supported him.
It chewed and ripped and tore, and it seemed to go on forever in its voracious frenzy.
Then, like a miracle, it passed.
Like a train moving down its assigned track, it had passed on by.
Fearfully, Gordon Garret uncrossed his arms and lifted his body.
The air was settling down. There was no dust, no grit-none of the airborne debris the natural wind stirred up.
Yet green things were falling from the sky. Green, and the smell was the smell of corn-shucking time. A fall smell. Here it was April and the air smelled of autumn.
Gordon looked to his left and to his right. And that deep, cold fear that comes to every farmer in his lifetime settled in his empty stomach.
The corn. The young corn was falling from the sky in tatters. Cornsilk drifted down like thin golden tinsel. The baby kernels were scattered like yellow hail. The green protective leaves were only now coming down on the quieting air. The stalks were gone. Chewed to ribbons as if by buzz saws.