The former president bristled. "Do not forget your contribution in all this," he growled.
Anna's spine stiffened. "I won't," she said. "Nor could I if I tried."
The current president wasn't interested in squabbling. "These men will accompany us back to Moscow," he said, indicating Sergei and the other five. "Four will guard me. I will assign one each to the two of you."
The big bear of a man was oblivious. He was draining dry a half-filled vodka bottle. A shaking hand tapped the last drops onto his eager, bloated tongue.
When the hat-wearing president objected to the inequitable division of guards, Russia's current leader shook his head angrily.
"It is your fault we are even in this predicament," the latest president snapped. "You started us down this road to insanity."
"What I did was for the sake of national security," the ex-president argued.
Anna had heard enough. "Every stupid thing that has ever been done in Russia has been done in the name of national security," she said impatiently. "And I do not have time for this. These are the men you requested. Do whatever you want with them. I am leaving."
Only Anna Chutesov could get away with speaking in such a way to one-let alone three-Russian heads of state.
She turned from the three politicians.
"Be careful," she advised Sergei and the others, knowing the foolishness of the wasted words even as she spoke them.
She hurried through the men and down the side aisle of the plane. At the still open door, her foot sought the ladder. When she turned to climb down, she found that the president had hurried out behind her.
"You still have some new recruits, do you not?" Russia's diminutive leader asked. "You should bring them with you."
Anna almost laughed in his face. The poor fool still didn't understand.
"I will go alone. Skachkov might still listen to me. Where he goes, the others will follow."
Across the crumbling tarmac, Anna's helicopter pilot saw her on the ladder. The wobbling rotors of the Kamov spluttered to life.
"And if he does not listen to reason?"
"Then, Mr. President, we are in real trouble," Anna said somberly. "For the only two men who might be able to stop him will want an explanation, and they will not stop until they get one. And they, unlike Skachkov, have never had any particular loyalty to Russia, its politicians or its spies."
Her final word delivered, Anna began to descend. The president quickly disappeared inside the plane. Anna had barely reached the ground before the ladder was being pulled back inside. The ladder vanished and the door thudded shut. The plane began to taxi almost immediately.
As Anna ran toward her waiting helicopter, the Ilyushin's engines whined in pain and the four big turboprops began to drag the plane slowly forward. Accelerating rapidly, it reached the end of the runway by the time she made it to her helicopter. Engines screaming, it was pulling into the air as she climbed aboard the Kamov. A thin stream of white smoke trailed the presidential plane into the cold sky. Anna's helicopter rose from the battered runway a moment later. As the Ilyushin banked toward Moscow, the helicopter turned east.
A military flight in Tambov would bring her as far across Russian Asia as the Kamchatka Peninsula. Another Kamov would be waiting for her there.
Settling back in her seat, Anna Chutesov pulled off her hood and stuffed her hands in the pockets of her heavy coat.
The three Russian politicians had been given the illusion of safety. Anna Chutesov had no such illusions.
She was flying into the grinning teeth of Death himself. And though she had cheated him before, she had her doubts that she could succeed this time. After all, if she was right, this time Death would come to Anna Chutesov wearing a familiar face.
She closed her eyes. Despite the din of the rotor blades, Anna quickly fell asleep. For the time being, there was nothing else for her to do.
Chapter 14
Instead of offering an igloo control tower and a terminal staffed by walruses and polar bears, the Fairbanks Airport proved to be as modern as any Remo had ever visited.
Outside, the climate left a lot to be desired.
"It's kind of chilly," he commented as he and Chiun walked through the parking lot to pick up their rented Jeep. "I think we might be underdressed."
The cold wind made the hair on Remo's bare arms stand on end. He looked down at his flimsy cotton T-shirt and tan chinos. His pants flapped in the subzero wind.
The Master of Sinanju nodded agreement. "Our current attire would be sufficient for a short trip," he said. "However, we do not know how long this will take. We should plan for an extended stay."
They were at their rental car. Remo popped the locks with a button on the key chain.
"Got you covered," Remo said as they climbed inside the Jeep. "Two sets of Admiral Bird casual outerwear coming up."
Trailing cold exhaust, the rental headed out into the streets of Fairbanks.
BOOTSIE KLEIN WAS talking on the phone behind the counter of the clothing store where she worked in downtown Fairbanks when the bell over the front door tinkled to life.
As she took a good look at the pair walking in off the street, she dropped her voice low.
"I've gotta go," Bootsie whispered to her girlfriend. "No, I'll tell you later.... Yeah. Bye."
She quickly hung up the phone.
"Can I help you gentlemen with something?" she asked the two men.
It was clear that she could. When Bootsie had driven to work that morning, the digital thermometer on the bank had read eight degrees.
The old one wore a yellow kimono that looked as if he'd swiped a pair of curtains from a Chinese brothel. The young one was dressed to unload shrimp boats in Key West, not traipse around the streets of Fairbanks.
"Hi, Boobsie," Remo said, reading her name from the tag on her ample chest. "We need some winter gear. Something to keep us from freezing to death for a couple of days in the tundra. What do you think, Chiun," he said, turning to the Master of Sinanju, "windbreakers?"
"The lining cannot be too thick," Chiun sniffed. "My precious pores must be allowed to breathe."
"You got windbreakers?" Remo asked Bootsie, leaning his bare forearms on the glass countertop. "The early-spring kind, with the liners?"
"You're kidding, right?" Bootsie asked.
"Oh, and we're gonna need hats," Remo added.
"I, um, think your friend's already found one he likes," Bootsie suggested, pointing. "I'll have to check out back for windbreakers."
As the sales clerk ducked through a nearby door, Remo glanced over to the Master of Sinanju.
"Oh, brother," he muttered.
Chiun was standing at a narrow door mirror. Nestled over his bald head was a red plaid winter hat. Long flaps hung down like lazy dog's ears. Happy hazel eyes peeked out from under the pinned-up brim.
"Should I even try to talk you out of it?" Remo sighed.
"Of course, Remo," Chiun replied. "You may do so after I have convinced you to trade in that undergarment you wear as a shirt for a proper kimono." He wiggled his head. His hat flaps flapped.
"Figured I'd be on the losing end," Remo said. He leaned back on the counter to wait for the saleslady. Bootsie returned a few minutes later with a pair of spring jackets. By then, Remo had a plain wool ski cap for himself on the counter.
Chiun immediately plucked one of the coats from the young woman's hand. His arms vanished, turtlelike, up the sleeves of his kimono, dragging the jacket inside. With a few wiggling contortions, he slipped into the windbreaker. His bony hands reappeared a moment later.
"Pay the woman, Remo," he commanded. Spinning, he marched out the front door.
Remo had tugged on his own coat. It was a snug fit around his thick wrists.
"Did you mean what you said?" Bootsie asked as she rang up both coats and hats. "Are you really going outside the city dressed like that?"
Remo stuffed his hat into his pocket. He pulled out his wallet.
"You b
et," he said, slapping a credit card on the counter. "And if we find a nice ice floe, a certain lucky someone might just be taking a one-way Eskimo cruise."
Bootsie's face darkened. "That's not a very nice thing to say," she scolded as Remo signed for his purchases. "He seems like a nice old man."
Remo's eyes met hers. "Who said I meant him?" Dropping her pen to the counter, he turned and left the small store.
REMO PICKED up a map from a gas station rack and called Smith from a pay phone. Between the map and Smith's directions, he was able to find the rural route to the Kakwik settlement.
Word had spread of the massacre, keeping highway crews from clearing the road after the recent storm. Luckily, a strong wind had blown snow to both shoulders. Remo's Jeep sped up the middle of the lonely road.
At one point, a crooked sign sprang up from a snowdrift to announce that Kakwik was five miles away. Remo saw something else printed in an unfamiliar language just below the English words.
"What'd that say?" he asked as they raced by the sign.
Chiun's face was bland. "How should I know?"
"I thought you were Sinanju's universal translator," Remo said. "You know every language known to man, including two dozen that everyone else has forgotten about."
"Languages, yes," Chiun admitted. "However, that was nothing I recognized. Those scratches were no doubt caused by a passing bear sharpening his claws."
"Didn't look like Gentle Ben scratches to me," Remo said. "Probably some kind of Eskimo dialect. Since I never saw any piles of whale blubber stashed away back in Sinanju, I guess the natives here never needed to hire an assassin."
The Master of Sinanju tugged at his hat flaps. "I have truly gone from one barbarian land to another," he grumbled.
Three miles shy of Kakwik, an Army blockade rose from beyond a pile of drifting snow. A few trucks and military jeeps were parked across the road
Remo stopped his rental near a wooden sawhorse. A young soldier hurried to the driver's-side window, an M-16 clutched to his chest.
"This area is off-limits, sir," the soldier announced.
"Remo Leiter, CIA," Remo said, holding up a laminated card for the soldier's inspection.
The young man looked from the ID to the two men in the car. Remo wore only a light windbreaker. Beyond him Chiun was playing with the flaps of his hat. He was holding them out like wings while making vrooming airplane noises.
"He's CIA?" the soldier asked.
"You bet," Remo said. "Right now he's practicing for his spy school pilot's exam. Makes you feel confident that America's ready to face the counterintelligence demands of the new century, doesn't it?"
"Rat-a-tat-tat," said the Master of Sinanju, as he and his hat strafed the dashboard.
The skeptical soldier found an officer who confirmed Remo's identification. Ten minutes later the two Masters of Sinanju sped up the main road to Kakwik.
There was really only one real road in town. The rest were merely glorified driveways. The main drag ran up between a pathetic collection of rusty tin huts.
The snow-clogged road became impassable at the edge of town. Remo and Chiun left their Jeep and continued on foot.
The fires inside the dilapidated homes had long ago burned to ash. The huts had grown cold in the day since the massacre. After Colonel Hogue's escape from town and the incredible story he had related of events there, federal and state authorities had descended on Kakwik like a human blizzard. Somberfaced men picked around bodies that lay frozen in the snow.
Some of the tin homes were doubling as makeshift morgues. With no need for refrigeration, some of the dead had been removed from the snow and stacked inside.
There was enough carnage still outside for Remo and Chiun to get a sense of what had happened. As they walked along, Remo noted a few of the National Guard corpses.
"Looks like you can breathe a sigh of relief, Little Father," he commented. "These guys were shot. Since we don't use guns, no Sinanju ghost army to worry about."
The tension on the old man's face never faded. "And if you would use your ears half as much as you use your mouth, you would have heard me say that the one who is to be of Sinanju but not, will summon the armies of death. The prophecy does not say that they themselves will be of Sinanju, nor of what form they will even take."
"Oh," Remo frowned. As he spoke, he noted a group of men clustered near the side of a small house. "Looks like the fun's over there."
He and the Master of Sinanju headed for the crowd. A middle-aged man with an FBI tag spotted them as they approached. "Hold it," he ordered. "You can't be here."
Remo flashed his CIA ID at the FBI agent.
"Any idea what happened?" Remo asked as the agent studied first Remo's identification, then the clothing the two new arrivals wore.
"Not really," the FBI man said. "Nothing beyond what you probably already know. The only witness is an Army Colonel. He was kind of out of it when they found him. Kept saying something about a Russian ghost army. I don't think we can put much stock in that. Aren't you guys cold?"
Remo didn't hear him.
There was an outdoor oil tank behind the nearest house. A body lay beside it. Leaving Chiun, Remo crossed over to the dead man. He crouched next to the body.
The man's head had been removed. It had rolled through the snow until it was facing the tin wall of the hovel.
"Uh-oh," Remo said quietly as he peered at the neck stump.
"Yeah," the FBI man said, walking up beside Remo. "A real mess. There's a couple like that. Weird thing is, there's no one from the other side dead. All this mess you'd think some of our guys would have taken out at least a couple of theirs. I'm thinking that whoever did this might carry off their dead and wounded with them."
"Or maybe their dead are already dead," Remo said grimly. He ignored the puzzled look the FBI agent gave him. "Chiun," he called.
The Master of Sinanju had been studying the ground around where the greatest concentration of men were working. He padded quickly over to Remo.
"What do you make of this?" Remo asked worriedly, gesturing to the decapitated corpse.
Chiun cast a wary eye at the body. "This was accomplished with a single stroke," he pronounced.
"No tools, right?" Remo said. "It looks to me like it was done by hand. And I don't know many people who can lop off a head with a single palm stroke, present company excepted."
Chiun nodded thoughtful agreement. "Here," he beckoned ominously.
Leaving the baffled FBI agent, Remo crossed with Chiun to the spot where the old man had been studying the snow. A long fingernail extended, aimed toward two separate sets of tracks that hadn't been stomped on by authorities.
Remo saw that one pair was deep and clumsy. A normal man's tread. It was the second set that made his stomach sink.
They were light. Virtually invisible to the untrained eye.
The faint footprints seemed to have danced and moved around the victim, hiding in every blind spot that would have been offered by a moving opponent. With footwork like that, the dead soldier whose boots had made the deeper impressions would never have even seen his killer.
More tracks touched the snow near the first: Many more kissed the periphery of the killing field.
There were only two men on Earth capable of such subtle movements. At the moment, they both were staring into the tracks of a killer who, though unknown, remained disturbingly familiar. With a sinking feeling, both men now knew without doubt that they were facing an enemy in control of an army trained in a deadly art forged in blood on the rocky frozen ground of a tiny fishing village on the West Korean Bay.
Chapter 15
Remo looked up from the tracks. His eyes as he stared at the Master of Sinanju were dull. "I don't know about you, but right now I'm feeling real nostalgic for the day our house got incinerated," he exhaled. "Guess this clinches it. We're dealing with a bunch of guys trained in Sinanju."
Chiun nodded seriously. The earflaps of his winter hat bobbed in the
chill air. Alert hazel eyes scanned the area.
The desolate town of Kakwik was a slaughterhouse at the top of the world. And somewhere out there lurked an enemy with knowledge of the most deadly killing art to ever brush Earth's frail mantle.
"Hey, what about the Dutchman?" Remo asked suddenly.
The Dutchman, whose real name was Jeremiah Purcell, was one of the most dangerous adversaries Remo and Chiun had ever faced. Skilled in the ancient art of Sinanju, he had spent the past decade in a coma, confined to Folcroft Sanitarium's security wing.
"I checked on him before we left," Chiun replied. "He is still asleep in Smith's dungeon."
"So this is somebody new. Swell," Remo grumbled. "The tracks lead that way," he added as he dragged his ski cap out of his pocket, pulling it down over his ears.
The footprints headed away from the investigators, threading between two tin houses. Others had fallen in line with the path of the leader. Though not as lightfooted as their leader, they were far more graceful than ordinary men.
"We better get a move on," Remo announced glumly. "Another few hours and we'll lose them completely."
Even to their trained eyes, the tracks weren't easy to follow. Wind pushed the powdery snow.
The FBI agent in charge watched the two men wander off alone, their eyes downturned as if following some invisible trail. Shaking his head, he returned to his work.
The two Masters of Sinanju passed between the last hovels at the edge of the tiny village and continued into the snow-blanketed field beyond. In the deceptively close distance, blue snow-capped mountains held up the sky. Nearer, snow-brushed hills rolled up from the vast plain.
They lost the tracks at the midpoint to the low hills. Punishing wind had erased all traces of the men they were following. Rather than turn back, they forged onward.
Four miles out of Kakwik, the faint trail became visible once more at the mouth of a narrow gorge. By now there were only ten of them. At some point on the plain, the others had to have veered off in another direction.
Up ahead, a small range of frozen hills rose from the canyon floor. Beyond them, a thin thread of smoke touched the sky. Exchanging tight glances, Remo and Chiun scampered up a hill, assuming a cautious crouch near the top.
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