Warren Murphy - Survival Course

"Do not be ignorant," Abu Al-Kalbin snapped. "No one else survived."

"Except for that one," Walid said, pointing to the body of the Secret Service guard Abu Al-Kalbin had shot earlier. He was still sprawled protectively over a cluster of compressed seats.

"Hmmm," he mused. "Those seats. Look at them."

Walid and Jalid looked. They saw nothing. "So?" Jalid said.

"They are smashed together very tightly," Abu Al-Kalbin explained. "But it is not the case on the other side of the aisle. Those seats are ripped up from the floor. What caused these seats to come together as they have?"

Walid and Jalid muttered that they did not know.

"Remove that corpse," Abu Al-Kalbin ordered.

Dropping their camera equipment, the two men did as they were told. The Secret Service agent's body was pulled off the tangle of seats and unceremoniously flung out the gaping tail section.

When Walid and Jalid returned, they found Abu Al-Kalbin in a frenzy, pulling at the seat cushions with his bare hands. Fabric tore under his fingernails, disgorging white polyester stuffing.

"Do not stand there!" Abu Al-Kalbin said urgently. "Help me!"

Walid and Jalid fell to. Together, all three men took hold of a cushion wedged between two others and began straining. It came loose slowly, reluctantly. When it finally jerked free, they fell back with it, landing together in a heap.

Abu Al-Kalbin pushed the others aside and scrambled to his feet. Enraged, he attacked the tangle of seats. Where the cushion had come loose was another cushion. It was wedged under an aluminum chair support twisted in a peculiar way, as if subjected to a convulsive strain, not a crash impact.

"This is wrong," Abu Al-Kalbin muttered. "This leg should not be bent this way. It makes no sense." He took hold of it and pulled. It would not budge.

Feverishly he turned to his men.

"Find an ax. I need an ax. Do this now."

Walid and Jalid stumbled to their feet and went in opposite directions. Walid came back with a fire ax and presented it to his leader.

The ax flew out of his hands and, guided by Abu Al-Kalbin's wiry arms, started to chop at the aluminum leg. It cracked open, spilling multicolored wiring.

Seeing the wires, Abu Al-Kalbin stopped. His nightblack eyes narrowed. He reached out and took the frayed wires in his grimy fingers.

"Be careful," Walid said. "They may be electrified."

"No," Abu Al-Kalbin said, touching the wire. "They are dead." As proof, he pulled out a handful. They came and came, until finally they were trailing around Abu Al-Kalbin's feet like plastic spaghetti. And still there was more. He gave up.

"These wires should not be in a chair leg," he complained. "There is no purpose to them."

Walid and Jalid looked at one another and shrugged their shoulders. Walid spoke up quietly.

"Abu, why are you behaving this way? Metal bends as it will, and wires are where one finds them. Who is to say these things are not ordained by Allah?"

"While you two were disposing of the American," Abu Al-Kalbin said without looking away from the mashed conglomeration of seats, " I heard the groan of a living man." He pointed. "From within this mass. "

"Who could have survived being crushed within so much metal and cushion?" Jalid asked reasonably.

"That is what I would learn." Abu Al-Kalbin picked up the ax again, this time chopping away the seat covers. The ax bounced off the cushions at first, but finding hidden metal under them, he used that as a target. Methodically he chopped the cushion into segments as Walid and Jalid risked their fingers to pull the fragments away. He wielded the ax carefully, pausing often to feel under the tightly packed cushions with his hands.

After several hard minutes of this, they exposed the back of a human head.

Abu Al-Kalbin lowered his ax and touched the back of the man's neck with trembling fingertips.

"Warm," he whispered.

He reached down under the throat, feeling the steady pulse of the carotid artery.

"Alive," he added.

He dug further, taking the man's Adam's apple in his hand. It felt hard under the warm throat.

Taking a deep breath, Abu Al-Kalbin pulled the man's head back.

The angular face of the President of the United States lolled back in the harsh Mexican moonlight coming through the porthole glass. His glasses were askew. Miraculously, the lenses were unbroken.

No one said anything for a long time. Then Walid went away. He came back with his AK-47 and offered it to Abu Al-Kalbin in a hoarse voice.

"You deserve the honor of finishing the hated one."

Abu Al-Kalbin slapped the weapon away.

"Fool!" he snarled. "Fate has handed us something greater than the Qaddafi Peace Prize, which is unquestionably ours anyway. Do you realize how much this man is worth alive?"

"How much?"

"Millions. The Colombians, the Iranians, the Libyans-any of them will pay millions for this man."

"How many millions?" asked Walid.

"As many millions as there are stars in the night sky," Abu Al-Kalbin assured them.

"I have an idea," said Jalid, who quickly counted seven stars through one porthole alone. "Why do we not cut him up? Perhaps each of them will pay much for an arm or a leg. "

"Yes," Walid put in. "But we should be certain to keep the head for Brother Qaddafi. Surely he would want to have the head."

"Sons of camels!" Abu Al-Kalbin spat. "Dead, he is worth nothing. Alive, he is a prize beyond measure. Come, help me extricate him. And carefully. Do not break anything. He may be injured. I want no further damage."

It took two hours of hard work with ax and gun butts to hack and pry the insensate President of the United States from his cocoon of crushed seats. They felt the bones of his arms for fractures and found none.

They pulled him out then, hoping that his feet and legs were not broken, and laid him on the pile of seat cushions.

"Do you see any blood on his legs?" Abu Al-Kalbin demanded with concern.

"No, Abu," Walid said as Jalid felt the President's legs. "His trousers are not even torn. It is as if the crushed seats respected his limbs and harmed him not."

"It is as if they gathered around him like a mother's arms," Abu Al-Kalbin agreed, nudging the rope of wires on the floor. They twitched spasmodically, but he failed to notice this phenomenon.

Walid and Jalid looked up at him in doubt. Their expressions were stiff, but their eyes said: Is he mad?

"No, I am not mad," Abu Al-Kalbin retorted, reading their thoughts. "Find a sheet. We will carry him to the safe house in a sheet."

It turned out that Walid and Jalid were to do the carrying as well as the loading of the sleeping form onto a sheet stripped off the on-board presidential bed. Knotting the sheet at either end, they used these knots as handles to hoist their captive up and out to the chill of the Mexican night.

Abu Al-Kalbin was the last to emerge. He carried his AK-47 slung over his shoulder as he recorded the capture of the President of the United States by his loyal Krez soldiers.

"Do not be silent on this historical occasion," he complained as they struggled to keep the hammocklike carrying sheet steady. "Say something immortal."

"How about Bismillahi Rrahmani Rrahim?" Walid offered.

"Yes. Yes. Good. Shout it."

"Bismillahi Rrahmani Rrahim!" Walid and Jalid shouted in unison.

"Stop!" Abu Ali-Kalbin said suddenly, his face going slack.

"What?" They looked at their leader in horror, fearing the worst.

Abu Al-Kalbin said nothing. He hurried back into the shattered tail of Air Force One, and Walid and Jalid hastily lowered their burden so they could hold their kaffiyehs closer to their nostrils as the unmistakable sounds of their leader in intestinal distress floated out.

When Abu Al-Kalbin finally rejoined them, he had only one thing to say.