Spoils Of War td-45

by Warren Murphy

  Randy growled. "She was a traitor." She gestured

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  toward Remo. "Kill this man or you will be executed," she said hoarsely.

  "And you offered the ufe of my charge, this innocent man with the mind of a tiny child, for your own."

  "He's a moron," she spat. "His life is worthless."

  "No life is worthless," Rajii said quietly.

  Randy sobbed. "Please," she begged. "Please help me, Rajii."

  The man nodded. "I will help you in the only way I can," he said, and threw the dagger straight into Randy Nooner's heart.

  Her eyes opened wide in astonishment. She raised her hands feebly to remove the knife, but it was imbedded in her chest up to the hilt. As she sank to the floor, Rajii came foward to join Remo before her.

  "You ass," she hissed. "He'll kill you, too."

  "I know," Rajii said. "May the peace of ages be with you."

  Then the sound of death rattled in her throat and she died, her beautiful, cruel eyes blazing with the light from the thousand candles burning in the chandelier above her.

  Rajii was the first to speak. "The official documents to the sheikdom are locked in a vault behind the throne," he said. "I will open it for you before you kill me, if you wish."

  "Why would you do that?" Remo asked.

  "The sheikdom is yours to do with as you like. I ask only that you allow the sheik to live. He is sterile, so there will be no heirs. He cannot harm you in any way. This I beg you. Please grant him his life, for he is innocent of all wrongdoing in this terrible place. Grant me this one request, and I will prepare

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  all the documents to declare you regent and official heir. Then you may dispose of me as you will."

  Neither of them noticed Chiun move silently beside them. "Who are you?" Chiun asked.

  "Only a servant," Rajii said.

  "You do not have the bearing of a servant. I ask you again. Who are you?"

  The man paused, clenching his jaw, then he spoke. "My name is Rajii Zel Imir Adassi," he said. "The name belonged to one of the wealthiest families of the region. Then Vadass—the sheik's brother —took over the throne and executed everyone who could usurp his power, including the males of all the noble families, and confiscated the fortunes of these families. Mine was among them."

  "Then why didn't he kill you?"

  Rajii's head hung in shame. "Vadass disliked me particularly because I would not permit him to take my daughter for his sport." He spoke so quietly that his words were nearly inaudible.

  "My wife died when she was very young, and I never remarried. My daughter, Jola, was all I had. I treasured her. I wanted to save her for a man who would treasure her as I did."

  Remo saw Rajii's hands tremble, and was filled with sadness for the broken man. "So when Vadass began his purge, he first took my daughter to be his concubine, his toy. . . ." He bit his lip and tried to compose himself. "And then, as a prank, he took me as his servant so that I might watch her in her degradation. He said that my job would be to serve his feeble-minded brother, to be reminded always that even this Vadass was master to me.

  "But, in believing that every man's heart was as small as his own, Sheik Vadass made a great error.

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  For my daughter was still alive, and because of that, I counted myself a lucky man. And the boy became an even greater joy, because with him and his simple ways, I was needed. He will never grow and understand like other men, but he has my love." "Did Randy Nooner know any of this?" "No. They didn't care. When the Americans came—the woman and her father—I knew that the end was near. They took everything by force. They were even worse than Vadass. At least the sheik never used his poor brother, as the American

  woman did."

  He sighed deeply. "I knew that one day we would all die hi a bloody coup. That day is come. Jola is dead. But the sheik need not die. He has harmed no one, and never will. Please," he said. "My Ufe is no longer of use to me. I give it to you willingly. But I will remember you in all my prayers through all eternity if you will grant my charge his life."

  Chiun unfolded his hands from within the sleeves of his kimono. "Show us the documents," he said.

  Rajii nodded, defeated, and led them past the throne, where the sheik made happy gurgling sounds inside his curtained domain. Behind the wall draperies stood a large metal vault with a combination lock, next to a broadcasting hookup with a television monitor. It was from here that Randy had observed and tortured Remo with the deafening sound from the loudspeakers. Rajii opened the vault and pulled out several yellowed parchment documents sealed in wax and tied with red ribbons.

  "Herein rests the official une of succession," Rajii said as he unraveled the scrolls on a low table beside the vault. "The American woman and her f a-

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  ther never saw these. They could never have had a legal claim to the throne. I will amend these to make you the rulers of Quat." He* picked up a quill and dipped it in ink.

  "Halt," Chiun said.

  "But it will be official. I have the seals."

  '1 trust that it will be official," Chiun said. "But we do not wish to be rulers. That is not our place in this life."

  Rajii looked, bewildered, from Chiun to Remo. "I do not understand."

  "Affix your own name to the documents, and we will witness. You will be regent. You will find a wife and marry and bear children who will become your heirs. And you will pass on to your children your wisdom and loyalty, so that the people of your land need never again starve or suffer for the whim of their sovereign."

  "I . . ." Rajii said, astounded. "Surely, I cannot—"

  "You will," Chiun commanded. "It is the only way. Quat has been a plaything for incompetents long enough. You can try. That is all we ask. If you fail . . ." He shrugged. "Quat has been failing for centuries."

  "I don't think Rajii will fail, Little Fattier."

  "Perhaps not," Chiun said. "He who possesses a heart will always find hope to fill it." He smiled kindly and bowed to Rajii.

  Rajii returned the bow. "May I ask you a question, sire?"

  "You may."

  "It is the same one you asked of me. Who are

  you?"

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  "I am the Master of Sinanju, and this fellow is my ... as you say of your sheik, Remo is my charge."

  The sheik belched in the background. "I really appreciate the comparison," Remo said.

  "I have read of you in the legends of other lands," Rajii said respectfully.

  *'Quat has never been worthy of the services of my ancestors before. But perhaps you will rule differently. If so, and you find your domain in need, you have my permission to call upon my services."

  "Thank you," Rajii said. "I am deeply honored."

  "For free," Remo added. "Oof." He caressed the spot on his ribs where Chum's elbow had attacked luce a viper in the night.

  "For a reasonable fee," Chiun corrected.

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  Fifteen

  Senator Osgood Nooner was having a nightmare.

  It had to be a nightmare, because sensations such as the pain he was feeling just didn't happen in real life.

  There he was, the People's Senator, tucked away in the safety of his bed, feeling his skull being crushed to powder'by a thin young man with thick wrists who looked disturbingly familiar.

  He knew it had to be a dream because when he opened his mouth to scream, no sound came out. It was a classic indication.

  Then he realized that he wasn't screaming because the underwear he had tossed on the rug for the maid to pick up in the morning had been stuffed into his mouth.

  "Hi," the stranger said.

  Nooner tried to place the face, but couldn't

  "The reporter at the Vadassar press conference," Remo reminded him.

  The senator's rounded eyes glimmered with recognition.

  "Well, I just wanted you to stop worrying about

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  us nosy reporters. I'm not going to
print a thing about you."

  Nooner nodded, trying to seem appropriately grateful.

  "See, Senator, I'm not really a reporter at all."

  The-senator's eyebrows arched inquiringly.

  "I'm an assassin."

  Slowly Nooner's eyes closed, and he thought he was going to faint.

  "Do you know why I'm here?"

  The senator gulped, swallowing some cotton lint and a loose string.

  "I want you to write a letter."

  A whinny of relief sounded from Nooner's nose. He nodded enthusiastically, eager to demonstrate his willingness to write whatever craziness the stranger had in mind. One phone call to the president in the morning, and everything would be straightened out, possibly with this nut behind bars.

  Remo held fast to the senator's head while he rummaged in the nightstand with the other. "Now, here's a paper and pen," he said patiently, as though he were talking to a small child. "You just write what I tell you, okay?"

  Effusive nodding.

  "Okay. Address this to the director of the CIA."

  For a moment, the senator shot Remo a glance from the corner of his eye, but a new pain in his head brought his attention riveting back to the page. He wrote down the director's name and address.

  "Very good," Remo said. "Now you write down that all the Pentagon files on Fort Vadassar are false, and that you were responsible for tampering with the records. That ought to be good for a couple of years in the pokey, don't you think?"

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  The senator's pen hesitated in the air.

  'That is, unless you'd rather be murdered right here and now by me. I think I've already told you that's my profession."

  Nooner wrote vividly of the replaced files.

  "Now put down that the property Fort Vadassar is on belongs to your daughter, who's been in on the whole scheme from the beginning."

  With a shrug, the senator did as he was told.

  "And that you hired Artemis Thwill to drug the troops at those army bases and have the chaplains killed."

  Senator Nooner banged his fist on the nightstand and shook his head adamantly. Soon a sensation having the same effect as the sound made by a razorblade on a chalkboard streaked down the side of his face.

  He wrote.

  "Let's see," Remo said. 'What else?" He drummed his fingers on the top of Nooner's shining bald head.

  Finally free of Remo's grip, the senator whirled around and yanked the stuffing out of his mouth. He opened it to call for help. Suddenly Remo's fingers grazed the senator's throat, and Nooner uttered a sound like the tail end of a scratchy record.

  "Help," the senator wheezed.

  "Whazzat?"

  "What the hell do you want from me?" Nooner asked, his voice a passable impersonation of Marlon Brando playing the Godfather.

  "I want a confession, Nooner, so that the blame for this fiasco falls where it belongs." Remo smiled, pleased with his eloquence. "Sit down," he ordered.

  When Nooner sat, Remo pinched a cluster of

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  nerves on his neck, which paralyzed every muscle in the senator's body except for those of his writing arm. "Okay," Remo said. "So far you've tallied up ninety-nine years or so. How about including the Quat story—how you had Vadass assassinated, how you planned to marry off your daughter to the retarded sheik, how you imported the commanding officers at Fort Vadassar from Quat. Hey, I'll bet they're illegal aliens, too. Senator, you're going up the river for a long time."

  The senator's whole right arm trembled, but he wrote down the information.

  "Now, for the grand finale, let the CIA in on your plans to control the United States with your zombie deserter army. And don't forget to mention that you engineered the massacres at those four army bases to get your recruits. That ought to wow 'em out in Langley."

  Nooner wrote until the final period was placed near the bottom of the page.

  Remo released him. "Is that all?" the senator asked.

  "Put down that you swear the above to be true and verifiable, then sign your name. I saw that in a movie once. It made everything legal or something."

  "All right." He signed his name with a flourish. "What are you going to do to me?"

  Remo folded the paper and placed it in an envelope. "Got a stamp?"

  The senator pointed at a desk. Remo placed the stamp on the envelope, addressed and sealed it, and put it in his pocket. 'Til mail it, just to be sure," he said with a wink. "To answer your question, I don't know. I was planning to kill you, you know, but you've been so cooperative and everything. Besides,

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  sending you to jail for three hundred years or so might be more interesting. If you're dead, nobody will care much whether you were guilty or not."

  The two men sat staring at each other for what seemed to both of them like a long time. "Tell you what I'm going to do," Remo said, slapping his thigh. "You call the director of the CIA at home right now and tell hún everything in the letter, and I won't kill you."

  "How do I know I can trust you to keep your word?" the senator asked.

  Remo smiled. "You don't. Now you know how your constituents feel."

  Wearily the senator picked up the telephone and dialed. He greeted the sleepy voice at the other end of the line with a monotonal rendition of the contents of his letter.

  "Whaaat?" the CIA director said, yawning. "What kind of crap is this?"

  'Tell him that if he doesn't send a team to pick you up within five minutes, you're going to blow up his house," Remo whispered.

  Nooner gave him a disgusted look and parroted the words back into the phone.

  "Well, okay, Ozzie, if that's the way you feel about it. I'll get a car over there right away. You just hang loose, okay? Okay?"

  "Sure," Nooner said, and hung up. "Satisfied?" Remo nodded. "And just in case you think you can get away with saying you were forced to lie under duress, the president is personally going to order an investigation of you in the morning. You've left tracks, Senator, and this letter points to the trail. Bye bye."

  He waved and placed one leg outside the window.

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  "I'll hunt you down," the senator threatened. "You'll be exposed for the crackpot you are. I'll be cleared in a minute."

  Remo slapped his forehead. "Oh yeah. There's one thing I forgot to tell you. Just slipped my mind, I guess."

  "Whaf s that?"

  "I don't exist," Remo said, and slithered down the face of the building minutes before the CIA car arrived.

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  Sixteen

  It was high noon on the parade grounds at Fort Va-dassar. Chiun grumbled and complained all the way up the barbed-wire fence.

  "Is Emperor Smith never satisfied?"

  "We just have this one last little job to do, Little Father, and we're done with the assignment." Remo paused at the top of the fence to get an overview of the base. "After this mess, I'd say we were entitled to a couple of weeks of R and R in the sun. The tropics, maybe. Jamaica, or Martinique—"

  "Or Sinanju," Chiun said dreamily. "The sun shines nicely in Sinanju."

  Remo cleared his throat. "Maybe Smitty'11 put us on another case."

  "What else remains to be done here? We have eliminated the false priestlet. We have eliminated the red-haired woman. We have eliminated the senator. What is left?"

  "We have to eliminate this army," Remo said grimly, watching Fort Vadassar's 100,000 recruits in drill formation. "They deserted in herds after the press conference."

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  "But you said the newspapers would retract their statements today."

  "That's not going to stop these zombies," Remo said. "They've been brainwashed. Anybody who tries to disband this army is asking for war."

  He looked out over the parade grounds. The number of soldiers had swelled to fill the base, and all their faces bore the blank, burned-out stamp of Randy Noonefs control. Each platoon on the grounds was at least 8,000 men strong and led by top Quad officers, their telltale sab
ers dangling from their belts.

  Remo shook his head as the officers shouted their commands. Each of the thousands of men in each platoon obeyed in perfect robot precision.

  "Tahiti. If we get through this, we deserve no less than Tahiti."

  "Sinanju," Chiun insisted.

  "We'll talk about it later." Remo let go of the barbed wire and dropped to the ground. "Let's start in the officers' mess. If s lunchtime."

  The officers' dining room hardly qualified as a mess hall. Silken draperies adorned the walls, and ornate filigreed brass outlined both entrances. Candles lit the room, their flickering light seemingly in rhythm with the droning ancient music in the background. The hearty laughter of men rang out over the babble of Quati spoken at the tables. On a small stage, a rotund woman in harem costume gyrated seductively. Other women similarly clad made the rounds of the tables, offering drinks and honeyed desserts.

  Spotting Remo and Chiun in the doorway, two of the officers rose and asked them to state their business. Remo stuck a finger through one man's left

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  temple. "That's my business," he said. Chiun dispatched the other officer with a swift kick to the crotch, causing the man's legs to part near his navel.

  In an instant, the place was in an uproar. The woman hid, screaming shrilly. The men rushed toward Remo and Chiun, their sabers bared.

  One by one they fell, their swords flailing wildly in the air. Remo and Chiun worked a double inside line attack, systematically knocking down the crowd of officers as though they were dominoes. When they had completed the inside line near the far entrance, they doubled back in an outside line, obliterating the rest.

  "Your elbow was bent," Chiun snapped.

  "Save it, Little Father. We've got too much work to do."

  "It is important. Without a straight arm, it is possible to maim without killing. That is both cruel to your target and dangerous to you."

  Remo was abashed. "I'll remember next time, Chiun," he said. "There's no time to check the bodies now. We've got to get to the parade grounds before someone shows up here."

  "Very, very dangerous," Chiun said, visibly angry. They left through the back entrance.

  Beneath the rubble of broken bodies, a hand moved slightly. It pushed to remove the weight of five men piled on top of it, but could not. The hand snaked slowly between the bodies as the owner of the hand gasped and panted for breath. Then the hand shot out past the topmost corpse, a little flag signaling the life Remo's faulty elbow had spared.