"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.