"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.