The lake below was racing up toward them. Those who survived the impact had a chance to live if they all kept calm. Every nerve, every muscle fiber in Remo's body was pulled violin-string-tight. He had no time for horror and none for rage, even though he knew this had not been an accident.
The muffled thunder he had heard had come from the belly of the plane, not its engine. As soon as he had heard it, he knew it was a bomb. Some lunatic had somehow managed to plant an explosive inside the plane.
Some lunatic, he thought, as a piece of the plane hurtled down the last few dozen feet toward the lake. Why hadn't he thought of it before? It had been set up so simply. Someone had wanted him dead, someone careless enough about human life to be willing to sacrifice a hundred innocents just to kill him.
Who else but A. H. Baynes? He caught an old woman who was sliding down the aisle toward the ripped-open front of the craft and held her in his arms. He glanced behind him. Twelve feet. Six. Impact.
The plane hit with the flat slap of an egg dropped onto a tilted kitchen floor. As soon as he felt the first pressure of contact under his feet, he put the old lady into a seat and unstrapped a stewardess who was still buckled in.
"Are you all right?" he asked her.
She looked at him, in shock, as if unable to comprehend what had happened. Remo reached behind her head and pressed a hard index finger into a cluster of nerves at the back of her neck.
Suddenly her eyes cleared and she nodded decisively. In the rest of the plane, people were screaming, breaking from their seat belts, starting to claw their way to the front of the plane to get out.
"All right," Remo said. "You help these people. Make sure they've got floats or whatever they need. Get all the uninjured ones off. Give me room to work." She got to her feet.
"We're going to die. We're going to die. We're drowning." Voices came down the aisle of the plane. Remo's voice barked above all the others. "Shut up and listen. You're not going to die and you're not going to drown. One by one, you're going to leave this plane and get away from it before it sinks. Just do what this lady says."
"What are you going to do?" the stewardess asked. "I've got to see if anybody's alive in the forward section. If I can find it."
Remo turned and dived out into the cold black water of the lake. As he surfaced, he heard the stewardess's calm voice behind him, telling the passengers to remove their seat cushions and use them as floats and then slide out into the water.
Through the darkness, he saw a faint bump in the water fifty yards away and moved to it, not slapping his way through the water like a high-speed competition swimmer, but sliding through it like a fish, in movements so smooth that someone might look at the lake and see, not a human swimmer, but just one ripple among many.
When he was closer, he saw that the small bump he had seen was the hump atop the cockpit. The front half of the plane was settling, sinking down into the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Another minute or so and it would be totally submerged.
He dived down under the water and into the forward section of the plane, past the twisted ripped metal that showed where the bomb had exploded.
The pilot and copilot were still in their seats. Peering like a fish under the inky water, Remo could see that their eyes and mouths were open. They were beyond help, and he only hoped that their deaths had been swift. They hadn't deserved this.
He felt the rage he had been controlling starting to rise in his throat. The plane had been snapped apart just slightly behind the pilot's cabin. All the passengers were in the section that Remo had left behind, and he swam through the forward section of the plane for a few moments, but there were no other bodies. He felt the pressure as the plane began to slip under the water, and he swam out and surfaced.
On the shoreline of the lake, he could see the revolving lights of emergency vehicles, and his ears picked up the onrushing whirring of a helicopter.
Good. Help was coming. He looked quickly around him, but he saw no bodies floating, no one who needed help.
As he swam back to the other section of the plane, he was able to see the stewardess moving people out in a rapid line, one after another, into the water.
But the section of the plane had begun to tilt forward, and soon it would knife its way under the lake.
Remo slipped back to it and pulled himself into the cabin section.
"How we doing?" he asked the stewardess.
"I lost one," she said. Tears streamed down her face. "A little boy. He dropped his float and then went out. And I couldn't reach him. He went under." She was sobbing even as she was continuing to help people into the water.
"We'll see what we can do," Remo said. He let the air from his body and dropped like a stone under the waters of the lake. As he dropped, he rotated his body in the Sinanju spiral so that he commanded a full 360-degree view. The Sinanju spiral, he thought. This is how it should be used. For people's good. The last time he had used it, it was to kill a pigeon.
He saw a dark shape floating aimlessly in the water a dozen feet away. It was the young boy, and Remo wrapped him in his arms and shot back to the surface like a bubble.
He hoisted the boy's body into the cabin and put him on a seat.
"Oh. You got him. Oh . . ." The stewardess could barely talk. The plane had now been emptied except for six people who lolled unconscious in their seats. The others bobbed like cork chips in the water, away from the plane.
"Will he be all right?" she asked.
"Get yourself a float and get out of here," Remo said as he pressed his fingers into the boy's solar plexus. He had stopped breathing, but it had only been a minute or so. There was still time. With his fingertips, Remo grasped a small clump of tissue and twisted it.
"He's dead, isn't he?" the stewardess said. "He's dead."
The boy's mouth opened and then a flood of water and bile came pouring out. The boy gasped and sucked up a huge mouthful of air.
"Not anymore," Remo answered her. "He'll be all right. Take him with you."
He handed the boy to the stewardess, who wrapped her arms about him, then took a seat-cushion between her hands and slid out smoothly into the water.
She was a good one, Remo thought, moving toward the back of the plane. She deserved a medal.
The water now was above his waist and he knew that in only a few minutes this section of the fuselage would go under the lake waters.
The six people still in their seats were unconscious, and a mere glance told Remo that their injuries were more serious than he was able to deal with.
He couldn't let them drown.
He remembered the emergency kits he often saw in the rear of plane compartments, and he went under the water to the very tail of the plane, where he found a large metal container. It was closed and locked, but he ripped off the metal top and felt vinyl under his hands. As he brought it closer to his face, he could see that it was an inflatable raft.
He surfaced again.
The water in the cabin had risen another foot.
He pulled the control on the raft and it began to hiss and expand. Remo moved it toward the jagged opening of the fuselage and pushed it out into the waters of the lake. Then one at a time he came back for the passengers and carried them out and placed them in the raft. He had just gotten the last one on the bright yellow float when he turned and saw the silver section of the plane tip once, as if making a final bow, and then slide down under the water.
He heard the sound of boat motors racing across the water toward them. Fifty feet away he saw the stewardess, still clinging grimly to her life preserver and to the young boy, and he pushed the raft over to her.
When he tried to take the boy from her, she tightened her grip around his body until Remo said, "It's me. It's all right." She recognized him and released the boy, and Remo put him in the raft.
"You're a helluva lady," Remo said, and then he let himself slide under the water and propelled himself toward the shoreline. He didn't want to be "rescued," and he didn't want to be interviewed, and he didn't want to be seen. Perhaps it would serve his purposes best if A. H. Baynes was allowed to think that Remo had died as planned.
He swam away from the large cluster of people standing on the shore, manning emergency lights and playing them on the faces of the survivors a few hundred yards out into the lake. When he was sure that no one could see him and he was out of the ring of lights, he walked slowly onto dry ground.
And couldn't believe his eyes.
There stood Ivory. Her white suit was rumpled and her face looked tense and anxious. "Oh, Remo," she said, and ran into his arms. "Somehow I knew," she said.
He kissed her and immediately felt a rush of triumph flood over him. This is why I'm alive, he thought. And all the guilt and self-recriminations about the people who had died because of him retreated to a remote area of his mind. He was alive and Ivory had come back for him. "How did you know?" he asked.