Bill Holland turned away.
Remo signaled Chiun to keep Holland distracted, and moved through the cabin. He stepped over bodies, quickly dismissing those that were too short or too fat or the wrong sex. He noticed the damage to the radarscope and other equipment, and although he possessed no air-crash investigative experience, he intuitively understood patterns of destruction and realized that he was looking at manmade, not natural destruction, in many places. Kneeling, he examined obvious bullet wounds.
Remo went back to join Chiun and Bill Holland in the open air. On the way out, he smelled the sour sick smell that he had noticed only subliminally on the way in.
He stopped, tracking it with his nose. A messy, trampled-on stain in the dark blue rug, directly over the Presidential Seal. It looked like puppy excrement.
Remo rejoined the others.
"I don't think the President's body is in there," Remo told Holland.
"I had a crash once," Holland mused, "where a DC-4 went down in the Rockies. Up in Montana. We combed the crash radius and for six miles in all directions, collected every rivet and wire of the airframe, and every lost soul about, except one. The copilot. It was the wildest thing we'd ever seen. Totally unexplainable." Holland's eyes went out of focus, as if he were reliving the experience.
"Yeah?" Remo prompted.
"Until we went through the passenger manifests," Holland added firmly. "Found out the copilot's girlfriend was flying in coach. Started me thinking. What if he had gone back to talk to her? What if the plane turned over in flight?"
"He went out a window?" Remo suggested.
"No, out the astrodome. The aircraft encountered turbulence and inverted while he was walking up the aisle, and down he went. We found his body thirty miles from the crash site. What the coyotes left."
"Air Force One have an astrodome?" Remo wanted to know.
"No," Bill Holland said, looking out toward the mountains. "It's totally inexplicable. " He turned to Remo. "But there'll be a reasonable explanation for this one too. And we'll find it. If the FBI, Secret Service, and Air Force just stay off our back long enough for us to do our jobs," he added.
Saying that, Bill Holland sucked in a deep breath and reentered the wreckage.
Remo glanced over to the Master of Sinanju. Chiun's head was up. He sniffed the dry desert air, his hands tucked away in his joined kimono sleeves. He looked like a scarlet silk genie.
Remo fixed his eye on Air Force One's tail assembly, which lay nearby, tilted onto one bent stabilizer. The ground was hard brown sand. The kind that formed a cracked crust after rainstorms, the kind that would not show footprints, but breaks in the crust.
His eyes tracked a necklace of such breaks going off to the horizon.
"Looks like someone headed off in that direction," Remo ventured. "South."
"Yes. The direction of the awful smell."
"Smell?"
"Did you not smell it, Remo? That belly-sickness stink?"
"Yeah. I smelled it back in the plane. Almost stepped in it, too."
"It is fainter out here. But to those with senses such as ours, it is an odor that could be followed to the one who reeks of it."
"Good thinking," Remo said, looking around slowly. "We could cover a lot more ground by helicopter."
"True. But we could not follow the scent from the air," Chiun pointed out.
"Yeah. And we'd be bogged down in a lot of bureaucratic infighting too."
Remo considered the situation. He rotated his thick wrists impatiently, a habit he had when he was thinking. He was thinking furiously.
Over by the Mexican helicopter, the Air Force colonel, Officer Guadalupe Mazatl, and Comandante Odio were talking earnestly. Odio's smile was turned up to one hundred candlepower. It seemed to be working. Officer Mazatl and the colonel were scowling at one another, but no longer shouting.
Finally Remo made a decision.
"Let's cut out," he told Chiun. "Subtly."
They began to drift off; trying not to seem to be obvious as they moved away from the crash site. The NTSB personnel milling around the site were so preoccupied with their work-or their arguments-that no one noticed that they had slipped away.
Until Officer Guadalupe Mazatl looked up from her huddle with Comandant Odio and the yanqui colonel and noticed the figure of the white gringo and the yellow old man receding in the distance.
She took a step back from the huddle. The men were ignoring her. Officer Mazatl worked her way to the other side of the crash site, ignoring, and being ignored in turn, by the gringos.
They ignored her until she was far from the site, and after she had melted into the sierra, they did not miss her.
The President of the United States was amazed at the change in his Vice-President.
The man had been, frankly, an embarrassment from the day the presidential nominee had announced his selection before an eager Atlanta campaign crowd, and the then-Vice-President-designate had hugged him like a long-lost brother, shouting inanities like "Go get 'em!" That started all the Son of the President jokes.
Then came the National Guard enlistment story, but the President then merely his party's nominee had hung tough. And it had paid off. The National Guard thing had blown over.
The jokes, however, had never blown over. Every stand-up comedian had a phone book full of them. How the Vice-President had kept his home state safe from the Vietcong during the war. How he resembled Robert Redford. How he was for sure no Jack Kennedy. The golfing jokes. And the cruel one that had it that the Secret Service were under orders to shoot the Vice-President if anything happened to the President.
It got so bad that even the Secret Service had gone along with it. They had code-named him "Scorecard."
And yet, after the early trying months on the campaign trail, it had worked out. For the President. After the election, the media continued to lampoon the Vice-President. And the more of a lightning rod he became, the less fun the media made of the President of the United States. His approval rating went through the roof.
It had been a good choice after all. And in the privacy of the Oval Office, the President himself had fallen into the habit of repeating the better zingers he had over heard. Strictly in fun.
He was not laughing now.
He had discovered new respect when the Vice-President removed his blindfold and said, in a strained, halting voice, "Hello is all right."
Well, it was no big deal. The Vice-President always had problems with his syntax. The President himself had had to be coached by his handlers not to mangle his own sentence structure and to keep his often-jerky body language under control.
But when the Vice-President, his eyes acrinkle over that fixed smile of his, bent down and pulled his leg bonds apart with his bare hands, the President had been really impressed.
"Gee, I never knew you were so strong," the President had blurted out foolishly. It was the only thing he could think to say.
The Vice-President stepped behind him and performed the same Samson-like feat on his bound hands. The wooden chair back actually came apart under the grip of his firm hands like a balsa sculpture.
The President had to be helped to his feet.
"This is amazing!" he had said. "Been working out, have you?"