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 the 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.
"You ever think about flying yourself?" the pilot asked after they climbed up over the airport.
Remo looked down at the tangled remains of the vintage Barnes Stormer, now surrounded by crash trucks and fire engines.
"Not in the last half-hour," he said. His tone was worried. He hoped there was nothing wrong Upstairs.
But most of all, he hoped Chiun was all right.
"You fly, then?" asked the pilot.
"I had a plane but it crashed my first time up. How do you think I got this bump?" added Remo, who in fact had no idea how he'd acquired the lump.
Chapter 3
Remo Williams didn't bother counting out the pilot's money. He just extracted cab fare and handed the man his entire wallet, including ID cards and phony family pictures.
"Hey, don't you want-?"
"Keep it as a war souvenir," Remo said, jumping from the plane. He collared a taxi driver who was sitting in his cab sipping black coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
"Folcroft Sanitarium," Remo called from the back seat.
As if a spring had popped from the cushion, the driver jumped straight up in his seat. His head banged the cab roof and his coffee scalded his lap.
"Hey, what the "
"I'm in a rush," Remo said, throwing money into the front seat. "Take me there, and no lip. I'm a famous war hero. Only today I brought down a Barnes Stormer flown by a fiscal terrorist."
The driver turned around in his seat and started to protest.
He hadn't heard the cab door open or close and had no inkling of how the strange guy in the T-shirt appeared in his back seat. But the dark eyes that looked back at him were so cold and deadly that the driver swallowed his protests.
He peeled out of the cab stand, asking, "Folcroft, where is that exactly?"
Folcroft Sanitarium was exactly situated on the portion of Rye, New York, that overlooked Long Island Sound. It was nestled in a rustic section of the shoreline like a sore tooth in clover.
"Don't drive up to the gate," Remo warned as they drew near. "And kill the engine."
The driver obediently killed the engine, coasting to a stop in a copse of poplars by the side of an unmarked road. He glanced at his fare in the rearview mirror, thinking that the guy looked more like a Vietnam vet than he did a Gulf War hero. He had those thousand-yard-stare kind of eyes. Cold.
"I'll get out here," Remo said quietly, shoving a fifty-dollar bill through the partition slot. "You never brought me here. You never even saw me."
"Tell that to my scalded balls," the cabby muttered.
But he made no other protest as he watched the tall, skinny man in the T-shirt ease soundlessly into the woods. He watched him for several seconds. It was broad daylight, the woods not dark. Just kind of dim, the way thick woods are even at noon under a heavy canopy of foliage.
The man simply disappeared after slipping behind a tree. The driver dawdled ten minutes, and eventually lost interest.
By the time the taxi driver had gotten his cab turned around, Remo Williams was slipping over the perimeter fence surrounding Folcroft Sanitarium, ostensibly a private hospital but in fact the cover for the organization that employed Remo in the service of America.
Breaching Folcroft's gate was no feat, even for someone without Sinanju training. It was simply a matter of slipping up to an unguarded spot and scaling the stone fence. Pausing momentarily, Remo dropped soundlessly to the other side.
Although Folcroft concealed one of America's deepest deep-cover installations, high-profile security-not to mention out-of-the-ordinary secret surveillance equipment was not present. The very existence of such equipment would have signaled that Folcroft was more than it seemed. And attracted attention.
Attention was the last thing that the director of CURE-the supersecret organization that Folcroft harbored-wanted.
CURE had been set up in the early sixties. A United States President, destined never to complete his term of office, conceived it after he had come to the reluctant realization that his country faced a period of lawlessness and anarchy unequaled in its history.