They went on.
"Gotta hand it to you, Dan," the President said as they skirted the base of a mountain range. "You amaze me. These survival skills of yours-pick them up in the National Guard, did you?"
"I have known how to survive since I was created," the Vice-President replied, placing one ear to the flat parched ground.
The statement surprised the President for two reasons. Not the least of which was that it was the first coherent sentence the Vice-President had spoken all morning.
The Vice-President listened in silence. He shot to his feet suddenly and, with a combination of speed and stealth that astonished the President, gathered him up in a fireman's carry.
He began running.
His head dangling upside down, the President was unable to see where he was being taken. The sandy ground raced by so fast that he got dizzy. If he hadn't known it was an impossibility, the President would have sworn they were running at a clip of over sixty miles an hour. He closed his eyes. He was grateful he hadn't eaten that snake. It wouldn't have stayed down in this kind of activity.
Several bouncing minutes later, the sound of a train startled the President into opening his eyes.
The ground was moving, if anything, still faster.
And the sound of the train grew louder and louder and louder until it was on top of the President. He craned his fear-twisted face around.
He saw an old diesel engine, making good time. The President barely registered its massive bulk, and then the sky was in his face. He felt weightless, disconnected. Then every bone in his lanky body shook with unexpected impact and he gave out an involuntary yell.
For a nightmarish instant he thought they had been sucked under the big steel wheels.
Instead, he found himself gently deposited on a hot rattling metal surface.
"Where the hell are we?" the President demanded, pulling himself together.
The answer was all around him.
The President found himself sprawled on the platform of a caboose. The smell of diesel smoke was in his nostrils. His teeth shook and the train went clickety-clack on the rail segments. Grit popped under the spinning steel wheels. A mournful whistle gave out.
On either side of them, huge mountains reared up. They were traveling through a mountain range. "Is it safe here?" the President asked, hanging on to the railed back of the platform.
"Safe here it is," the Vice-President said, his fixed-smile face lifting to the sky, visible above the caboose's roof overhang.
Two helicopters zipped past like harridan vultures. They flew low, but from this vantage point the President could make out only their sun-shadowed underbellies. There were no markings visible.
"This is awful," the President groaned. "We're in deep doo-doo."
"I do not understand 'doo-doo,' " the Vice-President said without evident humor.
"You will," the President said unhappily as the desolate landscape unfolded around them. "Down here, it's everywhere you go."
Chapter 9
They could smell the bodies before they sighted the desolate shack.
Remo and Chiun had stepped up on a tumble of dusty rocks in an effort to see more clearly.
Chiun spotted the forlorn-looking shack in the brown foothills.
"The smell of death," he intoned, pointing. "It comes from there."
"Come on!" Remo said, rushing for the cabin.
"I do not understand your unseemly haste, Remo," Chiun said as they sprinted through the scrub desert, their light feet leaving only the merest prints on the sand.
"He's the President," Remo hissed.
"But we work for Smith."
"And Smith works for the President," Remo added.
"But is not answerable to him."
"That's the way the organization was set up in the first place. So no one could abuse CURE. America isn't a police state."
"A good thought. Only Smith is privileged to abuse the organization."
"Smith would never do that. That's why he was chosen for the job."
"He is a mere man, and therefore corruptible."
"I'll give Smith this," Remo said. "He does his job. Sometimes too well. But he does it."
"I still fail to understand your concern. You have lost a President. But they are like rugs. You dispose of them every four years. Sometimes every eight years. But they are clearly superfluous. I have heard some boast that any waif can grow up to be President. If that is true, then there is nothing special about any of them. They are not a bloodline, so no dynasty is threatened by the death of this President. He is voted in. And is voted out. So? This one has been voted out by terrorists."
"Terrorists don't vote," Remo said grimly. "And I don't believe he's dead. Yet."
"I smell death," Chiun warned. "You should be prepared. "
Remo should have slowed down when he got within range of the cabin. But the Master of Sinanju saw with a frown that he did not. Remo plunged into the open door like some ninja blunderer.
Chiun had no choice but to follow him in, and he did.
He found Remo ranging around the single room, upsetting tables and chairs and ignoring the three Middle Eastern corpses that were flung around the interior like so many unwanted dolls.
"No sign of him!" Remo said anxiously.
The Master of Sinanju strode immediately to one of the chairs Remo had upended in his controlled fury.
It was damaged, and lengths of snapped twine clung to the pieces.
"He has been here," Chiun said loudly. "And he was alive. No one binds a corpse to a chair."
Remo stopped what he was doing. He accepted frayed ends of twine from Chiun's long-nailed fingers.