Gently, Remo lay Pierre down in the snow, and with his hands he covered over the man's body. There would be time for burying later, and this would be the spot, among the trees that LaRue loved. Dragging the big woodsman's axe behind him, Remo went back to the
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log cabin. When he reached Alpha Camp, he drew his arm 'back and angrily slung the axe, end over end, across the clearing. The blade hit clean and buried itself three inches deep into the trunk of a ponderosa pine.
Chiun was still sitting where Remo had left him.
He looked up as Remo came in. "I am glad you are here," he said. "Should I call this chapter 'Chiun Saves the Barbarians' or 'Chiun Saves Everybody'?"
"Who the hell cares?" Remo said.
"That is a stupid title," Chiun said.
But Remo wasn't listening. He was on the telephone,
dialing Smith. It was after midnight on the East Coast,
¦but Remo knew that did not matter. When Remo was
off on an assignment, Smith could almost always be
found in his office.
He was there now.
"Don't you ever sleep?" Remo asked.
"How is that relevant?" Smith asked.
"Never mind," Remo said. Quickly, he filled him in on the death of- Pierre LaRue and Mrs. Winston-Alright. ,
"Did he kiU her?" Smith asked.
"I don't think so. I think somebody else did, then bushwhacked him; and was trying to wrap the frame all in a neat package by getting pictures of me, too."
"That might be," Smith agreed. "What did he mean 'A rat did this'?"
"I don't know. Have you found out anything about the dead men? The tape recorder? The Mountain Highs?"
"That is why I'm waiting here," Smith said. "The computer has not yet finished scanning its memories."
"Swell," Remo growled. "People are getting swatted
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around here like flies, and we're waiting for some big goddamn machine to finish scanning its memories."
"I will call as soon as I have anything," Smith said blandly.
Remo slammed the phone down onto the base. He looked to Chiun, but before he could speak, the telephone rang.
"What now?" he growled into the mouthpiece, thinking it was Smith calling back.
It was Roger Stacy.
"What the hell is going on?" Stacy demanded.
"What are you talking about?" Remo said.
"I've just heard that those Mountain High lunatics are massing down at their camp. They're screaming murder and protests and who knows what else. You murder somebody?"
"Not yet," Remo said coldly. "Stacy, I want you to send some guards down here."
"What for?"
"To guard Joey. I'm going to be out."
"All right. They're on their way. But listen, O'Syl-van ..."
"What?"
"Don't cause any trouble."
By the time Remo and Chiun reached the encampment of the Mountain High Society, carnival time had begun. The night before, the society had had only a hundred demonstrators in its candlelight march, but already, more than five hundred people had swelled the small camping ground. With them came a full complement of entertainers, souvenir vendors, and instant health-food snack bars set up by local impresarios who knew nut cases when they saw them.
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As Remo and Chiun moved through the crowd, Chiun was besieged by pimply-faced sixteen-year-olds and face-lifted thirty-eight-year-olds looking for guidance and wisdom. He told each in Korean that they were lower than snake droppings. Each accepted this bit of Oriental wisdom and went off enriched.
Remo was listening to snatches of conversation. Something big was supposed to happen. Something big was going to be announced.
"What's happening?" Remo asked a young woman whose shirt proclaimed that she liked dogs better than men, apparently having sampled both.
"The fascists have gone too far this time," she said.
"What's that mean?" Remo asked her.
"I don't know. That's what I was told," she said.
Remo moved off. He heard other rumors. That the police were going to arrest all the demonstrators; that Tulsa Torrent goon squads were going to use tear gas, mace, and nerve gas against the demonstrators just to protect their filthy profits. Both these rumors were generally believed. A third was offered up as just a rumor, probably groundless. According to this least believable rumor, one of the leaders of the Mountain High Society had been hacked to pieces by a Tulsa Torrent lumberjack.
A makeshift stage had been set up. A trio of superannuated, beatnik folk singers who had never been known to miss a paying date climbed onto the stage and began running through a catalog of their greatest hits from twenty years before. The crowd began pressing forward. Remo and Chiun moved along with them.
After the crowd had been warmed up, Ararat Carpathian came onto the bandstand. Remo recognized him as Cicely Winston-Alright's aide-de-camp and
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heard the people around him call the curly-haired man's name. "Ari. Ari. Ari." Then he heard others yell "A rat. A rat. A rat."
"What are they yelling?" he asked a nearly hoarse young woman who was screaming the name with almost religious fervor.
"Arat," she said.
"That's not a nice thing to call him," Remo said.
"That's his name. Ararat Carpathian. He's Mrs. Winston-Alright's right-hand man. We call him Arat."
"Oh," said Remo, remembering Pierre LaRue's last words. "Thank you."
"That's okay," the woman said. "Anyone ever tell you you've got nifty dark eyes?"
"No," Remo said. "You're the very first."
"That's him," Remo told Chiun. "He's the one who killed LaRue." He muttered to himself: "A rat. A rat."
Carpathian had raised his arms for quiet and the crowd followed his lead.
"Friends," he yelled into a microphone. "I have bad news."
There was a groan from the audience.
"Our leader, the beloved Cicely Winston-Alright, is dead."
- There were screams of anguish from the crowd, sobs, shouts of disbelief.
"This loving woman, who so loved us and so loved the good earth, was struck down in the prime of her life by a murderer most vicious and foul," Carpathian bellowed.
The crowd surged forward as if physically expressing its anger.
"Who did it? Who? Who?" the crowd screamed.
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"The pig police have not arrested anyone yet, but we know who did it," Carpathian said.
"Who? Who? Who?"
"A lumberjack for Tulsa Torrent. A lumberjack probably insane with guilt from the crazy demands of his job. Or else just one whose palm was greased with blood money."
Remo and Chiun moved closer to the speaker's platform. Ararat Carpathian screamed, "Are we going to let them get away with it?"
The crowd screamed no, no, no, in one long, full-throated yell. Carpathian looked down and below his feet saw Chiun and Remo. He saw Remo smile and raise one finger, pointing it squarely at Carpathian's chest. The man's smile was cold as death.
Carpathian moved back from the microphone. By the time Remo brushed aside the crowd and hopped up onto the platform, Carpathian was gone and nowhere to be seen. Remo turned just as the crowd began charging the speaker's platform, deciding to take out their frustrated anger on their own property.
Remo looked around. He saw Carpathian's back disappearing through the trees across the road. Remo walked through the small glade of trees and into a clearing on the other side. A dozen snowmobiles were parked there. Carpathian was sitting astride one of them, talking to Harvey Quibble, the government inspector.
Remo called out: "A rat."
Carpathian looked around. He saw Remo. Then he seemed to slump forward over the controls of his machine, and the snowmobile jumped into action, driving straight ahead down a snow-covered trail.
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Remo ran off after it. He had almost caught up with Carpathian when the trail made a s
harp right-hand turn. Carpathian's snowmobile did not. Instead, it kept going straight ahead, plunging through a dense tangle of low underbrush and then out and over a hundred-foot-high drop-off.
By the time Remo got to him, Ararat Carpathian was little more than a sausage skin filled with once-human jelly. . .
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Company guards and the town police arrived just before the disorderly gang of protesters could turn into a surging mob, and slowly herded them back into the protesters' camping grounds.
Arriving with the police was Roger Stacy, who walked away from the mob scene, went through the thin bank of trees, and entered the clearing where Remo was approaching Harvey Quibble.
Quibble saw Stacy approaching, and he pointed a long, tremulous finger at Remo and squeaked, "He did it again. I saw him with my very own two eyes. This . . . •this ersatz tree inspector chased that poor man over the side of the cliff." As Remo drew near, Quibble drew himself up to his full height. "You, sir, are not merely an ¡incompetent," he said, "you are a mur--derer." He turned to Stacy. "He is, he is," he said.
"Shove it," said Remo.
Stacy looked from Quibble to Remo, from Quibble to Remo, then back to Quibble again.
"I'm sure Mr. O'Sylvan didn't kill anybody," he said. He turned once again to Remo. "Did you?"
Remo said nothing. He saw Chiun approaching from across the road. Behind them, the police were setting up barricades penning in the protesters.
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"See," Quibble said. "What did I tell you? He won't even dialog with us. We have no room on the government team for these kind of people . . . these killers. I don't jzare how much you may miss him, Mr. Stacy, but after I contact Washington tomorrow, this Remo O'Sylvan is going to be off the job." Quibble puffed out his tiny sparrow's chest.
"I told you, shove it," Remo said. "He was dead before I ever reached him."
"How do you know that?" Stacy said.
"I don't believe it," Quibble said.
"He didn't scream," Remo said. "He went ass over teakettle off the edge of a hundred-foot cliff and he didn't scream. He was either dead or unconscious already."
"Oh," said Stacy.
"You can give that lame excuse to the personnel department," Quibble said, "but my report goes in as I saw it."
The federal job inspector and Stacy began a heated argument and Remo, disgusted, walked over to Chiun. The old man was sniffing the air.
"They're using tear gas," Remo said. •
Chiun shook his head. "Not that," he said. "Something else. Something sweet."
As he and Chiun disappeared into the woods, Remo looked back. Stacy and Harvey Quibble were still arguing.
No one challenged Remo and Chiun as they went back to the log cabin. When they went inside, Joey Webb was sitting in front of the fire, reading.
"What happened?" she asked Remo quickly. "Tell me all about it."
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"Nothing happened. Where're the guards that were supposed to be here?"
"I don't know," Joey said. "I didn't see any guards."
"I told that horse's ass Stacy to send guards down here," Remo snarled.
"I'm all right. Stop worrying. What happened up there?"
Remo thought of telling her about Cicely Winston-Alright, about Carpathian, and about Pierre LaRue's death earlier in the night; but he decided not to—the girl had had enough to worry about in the past weeks, and the rush of events of the last twenty-four hours might be enough to snap her spirit, no matter how strong.
"Nothing much happened," Remo repeated as hé walked to the telephone. "A lot of speeches,, yakety-yak, the cops broke up the march, and that was that."
"Oh, you got a phone call," Joey Webb said.
"Who was it?"
"I think it was Dr. Smith. He said you are to call your Aunt Mildred."
"That was Smitty. I don't have an Aunt Mildred," Remo said.
He took the phone with him into the corner of the room and dialed Smith's direct number.
"Yes?" came Smith's voice.
"What was it? You called."
"The two dead men were Rhodesian nationals. They had no history in this country. Salisbury police suspect they might have been contract killers, but there is no firm evidence either way."
Remo nodded. "It's safe to assume that if they were here, they were here working for somebody," he said.
"That's right," Smith said.
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"How about the Mountain High Society?" Remo asked.
"I don't know about that," said Smith. "Hiring killers would not seem to be their style. Basically, they have been just another one of hundreds of protest groups. Perhaps a little better financed than most organizations like that, but otherwise not much different."
"How about their leadership? That broad with two names. That little greaseball Carpathian?"
"Both clean," Smith said.
"Both dead, too," Remo said.
"Oh," said Smith. Quickly Remo told him what had happened, without mentioning Pierre LaRue, trying to keep his voice down so that Joey could not hear him.
"Mrs. Wins ton-Alright was one of the founders of the society," Smith said. "And until a few years ago, she bankrolled it."
"And then what happened?" Remo asked.
"Her second husband, Lance Alright, left her. He left her penniless. There was a suspicion that he took her money and ran off to indulge in oil speculation. Nothing's been heard of him since."
"She didn't live like she was poor," Remo said.
"I don't know. She had no income. Carpathian drifted into this society right after graduating college. It upset his family, who are wealthy merchants in the Middle East."
"Oil. Middle East," Remo mused aloud. "What about the tape recorder? Anything?"
"A cheap type made by the hundreds of thousands. Most of this particular model was bought up by the federal government for its own use. I'm still trying to track down the specific model."
"Keep in touch," Remo said. He hung up, disap-
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pointed. The bodies were piling to the sky, and still there was no hard information, no solid lead. Just a lot of unanswered questions.
He vowed that he would not leave Joey Webb alone or out of his sight, until everything was cleared up.
Remo was wakened by Chiun standing over him.
"What's wrong?" Remo asked; instantly awake.
"The forest is afire," Chiun said.
Remo jumped to his feet. "Those damn Mountain Highs," he snarled as he ran to the front door.
"Perhaps," Chiun said.
The two men went outside. To the north, the hillside was an undulating wall of flame. To the west and east and south, it was the same. The woods were filled with smoke and mist as the fire ate its way down the hillsides toward the valley in which Alpha camp and the grove of copa-ibas sat.
"We're surrounded," Remo said.
"Exactly," Chiun said.
"What about Joey?" Remo said. There was no need for him to explain to Chiun that they could escape, but fighting their way through the fire could mean the young woman scientist's life.
Even as they spoke, the area around the log cabin began to turn into a maelstrom of sparks. Nearby, they could hear the thud of falling limbs from trees and the explosion of vehicles and bulldozers and tree-yanking machines that were parked all through the forest.
Joey met them at the door, rubbing her eyes.
"Oh, Christ," she said. "How the hell do we get out of here?"
"If we want to save the copa-ibas, we don't," Remo
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said. He looked at Chiun, almost helplessly. "Everything is burning."
"Not everything," Chiun said.
Remo stopped and looked. Around them, the fire was moving down the mountainsides like syrup down the side of a bowl. Trees were burning. Outbuildings. Logging equipment. What was not burning?
The snow.
The snow was not burning.
; He nodded to Chiun, and together he and the old man began to pile up snow. They built a mound in the center of the biggest clearing in front of the camp buildings. When they had dug out a big hollow, Remo told Joey, "Get in."
"What?" she exclaimed.
"Just get inside that snow wall." The girl, frightened now by the growing insidious crackle of the flames, gulped, nodded, and obeyed. Quickly, Remo and Chiun built a sloping roof of snow over the structure. The girl was sealed off from the flames. Hopefully, the igloo would last long enough for them to do their work. She was safe. Now save the copa-ibas. Then save themselves.
"What now, Chiun?" Remo said.
"Just follow," the Oriental said.
The old man's plan of attack was simple. "Every tree," he said, "wants to fall over on its side as much as it wants to stand up straight. We will help them."
They moved up the north side of the sloping mountain, until they were only fifty yards ahead of the mam wall of fire, which was swooping down the mountainside, leapfrogging from burning tree to burning tree. As Remo watched, Chiun felt the side of a tree trunk,
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searching with his hands for the point of critical balance. Then, with a push that was almost childlike, Chiun pressed against the tree, and with a ripping, cracking sound, the big timber toppled to the ground.
Remo understood. He and Chiun flashed along the line of trees, pushing them over. Big trees took down smaller trees. Slowly, they were creating a clearing, in which toppled trees were piled one on top of another. As the flames coming down the hillside met that wall, there would be no more standing trees for the flames to jump to. The fire would burn itself down toward the ground and ignite the fallen trees, but it would be a slow process, and the fire would not have enough energy to jump across the firebreak.
Without resting, without waiting, Chiun kept working his way around the rim of the bowl of the mountain. Remo raced ahead, leveling a broad swath of timber, then would feel Chiun run past him to do the same thing ahead. They leapfrogged their way around the entire mountain, cutting a wide path through the standing pines.
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