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.
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.