The captain's drawling voice came over the intercom, saying, "Nothing to be concerned about, folks. We're experiencing a little problem with our pressurization, so we're just gonna descend to ten thousand feet while we check it out. If you start feeling light-headed, that's what the yellow oxygen masks are for."
"Oh my God! We're going to crash!" the governor said, voice twisting.
"But he just said-"
"I don't care what he said!" the governor snapped, pulling the plastic oxygen mask to his face and hyperventilating wildly.
The lieutenant governor grabbed his mask with one hand and his stomach with the other. As he inhaled deep lungfuls of cold, plasticky oxygen, he prayed to God to keep him from throwing up in the mask and blocking the air line.
On the flight deck, Captain Del Grossman had his flight chart in his lap, as scraps and wisps of cloud whipped by the windshield.
The copilot was guarding the throttles. The captain looked up from his chart and peered out the side window.
Below, under the lower edge of the cloud layer, he saw a city-sprawl that looked like a transistorized circuit board.
"Looks like Fresno," he muttered.
"Can't be Fresno," the copilot said. "It's not possible that we could have wandered this far off-course."
"That's why I said, 'looks like.' " The captain took another look at the flight chart. "According to our heading," he said, "we should be on Low-Altitude Airway Number 47."
"Right," the copilot said, as a hanging hump of cloud swallowed all forward visibility.
"But if we're following that route," the captain added, "we should be seeing the San Joaquin River beneath us."
"Huh," the copilot grunted. They were barreling through a world of gloomy stratocumulus now. "Wanna go lower?"
"No," said the captain. "I want you to check your flight chart."
The flight chart came out of its compartment, and the captain took the throttles.
The copilot checked his chart, frowned, and compared it with that of his senior officer.
"Everything I see tells me we're on-course," he said, with almost no conviction in his voice.
"And everything I see," said the captain, "tells me we're off-course."
"Charts don't lie, you know."
"And I trust the evidence of my eyes."
They were silent while the jet nosed through seemingly impenetrable cloud. The pressurization problem, which had forced them down to this perilously low altitude, was forgotten.
"I'm going to try to get under this damn weather," the captain grumbled.
He reached for the throttles. And his hand froze.
"Jesus H. Christ!"
There was no time to react. No time for anything. They both understood that with complete and utter clarity. They had each logged over twenty-six thousand hours in the air and knew the limitations of their aircraft.
Visibility was less than an eighth of a mile. The 727 was slamming along at about three hundred and seventy miles per hour.
By the time the stone face of Mount Whitney broke the low-hanging clouds and filled the windshield like an implacable idol, there wasn't even enough time to become afraid.
The cockpit crew were snuffed out with an appalling finality that could only have been equaled if they had taken seats in a high-speed trash compactor.
First-class got it from both directions. The foot-thick wall of tangled steel and human detritus that the cockpit and nose had become rammed back, while the rest of the airframe, still under power, drove it toward the collapsing forward bulkhead.
The governor and his lieutenant had a heartbeat's notice. That was all. Then they were both inextricably intertwined, in a roaring metallic entanglement that was almost instantly awash in the poisonous stink of Jet-A fuel. The plane careened and broke up as it made its absolutely final descent.
Down the side of the mountain that shouldn't have been there.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo, and he had a dilemma.
Should he do the hit before, or after, the target was baptized?
It was, Remo had to admit, a first.
Remo had done hits many times. Too many to count. Big shots. Small fish. This particular fish was big. And ugly. There would be no mistaking him amid the small army of Federal marshals, FBI agents, press, and invited observers that, according to Upstairs, were due at any moment.
It couldn't be too soon for Remo Williams.
He was crouched in a thicket on a spongy isle in the heart of the Florida Everglades. It was hot. The air steamed. Love bugs danced in the heat. Remo showed barely a trace of sweat on his cruel face and bare arms. Still, that did not mean he was comfortable-only that he was the master of his own body.
For twenty years he had not felt cold, or heat, or pain or any ordinary discomfort that he was not able to will his body to ignore. For twenty years he had breathed not merely with his lungs, but through his entire body: nose, mouth, unclogged pores. For two decades he had been Sinanju. A Master of Sinanju. The latest Master of Sinanju in an unbroken line that stretched back to the dawn of recorded history. A line that had begun in a ramshackle fishing village on the West Korea Bay where men hired themselves out as assassins and bodyguards in order to feed the village, and now continued in Remo Williams, the first white Master of Sinanju, who served the newest empire on earth, the United States of America, as its secret assassin.
On a nearby hump, a heron flew up.
Remo had heard it unfold its wing preparatory to flight. The sudden upflinging of colorful feathers did not take him by surprise-although it startled an alligator into slithering into the water.
Why would anyone pick the Florida Everglades to be baptized in? Remo wondered, not exactly for the first time.
It was probably the least of the questions hanging in the humid Florida air.
Remo had been assigned the job of eliminating General Emmanuel Alejandro Nogeira, the deposed dictator of the Central American nation of Bananama. Snuffing out General Nogeira was something the Medellin drug cartel, assorted political enemies, and even the U.S. Rangers had attempted over the years.
Ever since he had risen up from rent-a-colonel in the Bananamian version of the CIA, to the day he was seized by U.S. forces as they liberated the country he had bankrupted through greed and corruption, Emmanuel Nogeira had proven immune to assassination.
The former general and self-proclaimed Maximum Chief had grinningly attributed his longevity to Voodoo-specifically to the red underwear he wore to ward off the Evil Eye. He ascribed his continual survival to a wide array of charms, friendly spirits, and ritual sacrifices-usually involving beheaded chickens. In actual fact, he had simply found the perfect-if somewhat inconvenient-sanctuary from his numerous enemies.
A United States federal prison.
The U.S. government had proclaimed a great victory on the day they captured General Nogeira. American servicemen had lost their lives in the effort to bring him to justice. He had been spirited into the U.S. and charged with violating American law through a pattern of drug-smuggling activities. The evidence against him was overwhelming.