"In that case, the Great Frontier is what exists between your ears," the Master of Sinanju offered.
"Ha-ha," Remo said dryly. "Say, Anna," he called, one sly eye on the old Korean, "gimme the name of one of these Russians. I'm in the market for an assassin's helper."
He saw a flash of silk just before a whizzing snowball caught him square in the back of the head. "No? Okay, maybe a Frenchman," Remo muttered as he went to retrieve his hat from a snowbank near Anna.
Anna was at the tenth and final body. It was the man whose mask Remo had earlier removed. She looked down on the face of the corpse, her own expression one of disgust.
"Lavrenty Skachkov," she announced.
Remo was knocking snow from his hat. "God bless you," he said.
She fixed him with a dull eye. "You asked for the name of one of these," she said, waving a hand across the field of Russian dead. "Skachkov is one. The most dangerous of all these. And he is not here."
She spun away, marching past Remo.
"So is this Crotchcough the guy in charge here?" Remo asked, following. Chiun fell in behind.
"Unfortunately, no," Anna admitted as she walked. "Skachkov is a follower, not a leader." She quickly amended her own words. "Or, rather, he is leader to a select few. Whatever is going on here is not his doing."
In the valley at the mouth of the narrow ravine, Anna's pilot saw them approaching. The Kamov's twin rotor stacks spluttered to life.
"All right," Remo said. "So whose doing is it?" Anna stopped dead, turning on the two Masters of Sinanju. Snow thrown up from the helicopter's downdraft whipped the fringe of fur on her parka.
Her ice-blue eyes were deadly serious.
"An utter madman," Anna Chutesov insisted with cold certainty.
Jaw locked in grim determination, she turned, hurrying for the waiting helicopter.
Chapter 17
Crazed. Demented. Mentally unbalanced.
When being kind, that was what they said about him.
Insane. Psychopath. Sociopath.
These terms filled psychological profiles stashed away at intelligence agencies all around the world. But informally, when they were discussing Vladimir Zhirinsky, men and women from all shades of the political spectrum, both at home and abroad, often found themselves agreeing with the private assessment of an American State Department official: "It is my sincere opinion that Vladimir Zhirinsky is a raving, ranting, slobbering, foaming, nuttier-than-a-fruitcake loon-with a capital L."
For Vladimir Zhirinsky their words had no sting. After all, it was only natural for the weak to attack the strong. And if strength could be judged by the viciousness of verbal attacks, then he was by far the strongest man to stride the face of the planet since Hercules.
Not that he believed in ancient myths of gods. Vladimir Zhirinsky knew with a certainty as deep as the marrow of his Russian-born bones that there were no gods. No heaven. No hell. Eternal judgment was a bedtime story.
There was only man and his environment. Or, as he liked to put it, the Worker and the State.
A truer Communist than Vladimir Zhirinsky had never been born. Even after the Iron Curtain collapsed and communism became as hopelessly out of fashion as last year's bourgeois French fashions, Zhirinsky remained a rabid believer.
The State, he argued to anyone who would listen, was supreme. The Worker existed to benefit the State. And when the State prospered, so did the Worker. Russia, Zhirinsky screamed from atop soapboxes in Moscow's Gorky Park, needed communism. It was dead without it.
The world would never respect a Russia lacking the ideological purity of communism. The Soviet philosophy was the unifying force that had kept the nation strong for seven decades after the October Revolution. Without it, Russia was nothing more than a Third World country. A husk. A pathetic shell of its former glorious self.
In the early 1990s the Russian experiment in democracy was still new. Luckily for Zhirinsky, the changes were frightening to enough old-fashioned zealots. When election time came, his brand of fiery finger-waving and venomous rhetoric gained him a seat in parliament. He attacked both his job and the new Russia with demented glee.
It wasn't unusual for Vladimir Zhirinsky to get into fistfights in the great senate chamber of the Kremlin.
One representative from Belorussia who disagreed with him wound up with a bust of Stalin to the side of the head. A Moldavian senator who accidentally sat in Zhirinsky's chair went home that night to find his apartment broken into and his cat, Buttons, drowned in the toilet.
Trying to steer clear of Zhirinsky did no good. Even when he had no specific ax to grind, Vladimir Zhirinsky still tripped colleagues down the Duma stairs, slammed doors into people's faces and keyed cars in the Kremlin parking lot.
Everyone knew that when a smile appeared beneath the crazed senator's great bushy mustache, it was time to run back and see if the office or the wife and kids were on fire.
For a time his unorthodox behavior made him a hero. Zhirinsky the iconoclast challenged authority, ironically by seeking restoration of a government that would crush such challenges. He had even run for the Russian presidency.
Alas for Vladimir Zhirinsky, his brief popularity bubble among the Russian people had burst unexpectedly. It happened during a nationally televised debate. On the live broadcast, Zhirinsky's opponent had said something that the senator couldn't counter and, in rebuttal, Zhirinsky had done the first thing that came to him. He bit off the man's nose.
Worse, when the hapless moderator demanded he spit the nose back out, the ultranationalist smiled a blood-smeared smile before swallowing visibly. His great Adam's apple bobbed, and the screaming politician with the hole in his face lost his nose forever. It was little comfort to him as he was led, bleeding, from the Moscow studio that the night that robbed him of his nose was also the night that ended the career of Vladimir Zhirinsky.
In the wake of this event, the crazy nationalist lost not only the presidency but also his senate seat. And around the world was quiet relief that a man so unstable was no longer a serious candidate to assume the leadership of Russia.
Soon Vladimir Zhirinsky was forgotten.
It was the lowest time in his life, this public exile. To be forgotten while stuck in some faraway Siberian labor camp was one thing, but to be shunned on the very streets of Moscow was worse than any gulag.
His life for the past several years had been lived in shadows. But as he rode through the streets of Moscow this bleak February day, Vladimir Zhirinsky no longer felt the heavy depression of days past. His time of public exile was now, at last, coming to an end.
The sky over the capital was a sallow gray. Here and there snowflakes whispered to the pavement. Frozen pedestrians scurried past piles of dirty snow. Scarves and collars met in tight fists as men and women hurried home to cold walk-up flats.
Winter in Russia was a depressing season. One could feel it in the air. But that same cold made weak men strong.
Vladimir Zhirinsky sat bundled in his greatcoat in the rear of his battered Zil limousine. The rusted old car coughed and spluttered through the cold streets of Moscow.
Through careful eyes he studied the city as it passed his tinted windows.
They had just driven by McDonald's. Burger King, too. Radio Shack, Dunkin' Donuts and Pizza Hut all had franchises in Russia's capital. A few days before, Zhirinsky had traveled on business to San Francisco. It sickened him to see the same capitalist logos adorning buildings in his beloved Moscow as he'd seen in America.
An old Russian proverb spoke of the land of his birth as "not a country, but a world." If that was true, then in his lifetime, Vladimir Zhirinsky had seen the world grow smaller.
For the Communist it had been a waking nightmare. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were gone overnight. They were followed by Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Kirghizia, Georgia, Uzbekistan and a hundred other puny states no bigger than a mile across.
All of them were ingrates. And they wo
uld each one pay.
The Soviet Union was gone only temporarily. If Vladimir Zhirinsky had his way, Mother Russia would rise again.
As he drove through the cold streets, the Kremlin rose up under the gloomy sky, its great onion domes touching the gray clouds. When he saw the buildings from the rear of his car, a smile curled beneath Zhirinsky's drooping mustache.
"Pray to your capitalist gods," he said with low menace, "for your end is near."
"Comrade?"
The nervous question came from the front seat. Even though the term was long out of fashion, Zhirinsky insisted his people use "comrade," the old Soviet form of address.
When he looked up, he found the fearful face of his young driver staring back at him in the rearview mirror.
"Nothing," Zhirinsky grunted with an impatient wave of his hand. His brow sank low in thought. "Their lackey president has a small nose," he mused as the Kremlin disappeared behind them, replaced by the bland facades of Moscow's downtown buildings. "Not like the last president. Now, there was a big Russian nose."
As he considered the nose of the last Russian leader, a thin dollop of drool rolled from the corner of his mouth.
He was patting his belly hungrily when the Zil pulled to the curb minutes later.
Zhirinsky's building was a good, solid Soviet-era affair. This was clear by the chunks of broken concrete on the sidewalk. Zhirinsky had to dodge hunks of falling mortar on his way to the cracked front door.
Inside, the elevator wasn't working. Even though it had never worked since it was installed in 1968, Zhirinsky blamed the capitalists who now owned what was rightly state property. He took the stairs.
Those people he met on his way up ran for the nearest exits when they saw the wiry, middle-aged man with the pale complexion coming toward them. Even while running, they kept their hands clamped firmly to their noses.
On the third floor, Zhirinsky steered down the dingy corridor. A crude hammer and sickle was outlined in red on the cracked veneer of one warped old door. Zhirinsky grabbed the wobbly doorknob, flinging the door open with a vengeance.
As the former Russian senator stomped into his cramped office, a pair of startled eyes shot up across the room.
"Comrade Zhirinsky," said the breathless young man from behind an overflowing desk.
Ivan Kerbabaev had been assisting Zhirinsky ever since he'd lost his job as a file clerk in the office of the chairman of Material Reserves.
Ivan jumped to attention, knocking a stack of pamphlets to the dirty floor. Mouth locking open in horror, he shot a look at his employer. Luckily, Zhirinsky seemed distracted.
He pulled off his hat, flinging it to his own desk. A tousled mess of brown-turning-to-gray hair spilled out.
"What is the latest intelligence?" Zhirinsky barked. Ivan's eyes grew wider. "Oh. The intelligence," he stammered. "About that..."
Fearful eyes darted around the office, but other than his desk drawers there was no place to hide. Ivan had a sudden mental image of Vladimir Zhirinsky stuffing his dismembered body parts into his desk. He shivered.
"Well," Ivan continued carefully, "everything seems to be going along perfectly. Better than perfectly. It is fan-socialist-tastic."
When he smiled weakly, Zhirinsky fixed Ivan with cold black eyes. His demented gleam sparkled with flecks of gray.
"So the capitalists have surrendered Russian America to us?" Zhirinsky said, his voice flat.
Ivan hedged. "Not yet, comrade," he admitted. "Not technically surrendered. I suspect they are getting things together. Packing, phoning ahead to see if there are hotel rooms ready, that sort of thing."
As he spoke, he pretended to scratch a persistent itch on the bridge of his nose.
"There should have been something by now," Zhirinsky said to himself. "I have crippled their oil pipeline and destroyed an entire village. Not to mention the demonstration against their army. I- Take your hand away from your face!" he snapped, suddenly distracted.
Jumping, Ivan slapped his hands to his sides. "The Soviet Union must be rebuilt piece by piece," Zhirinsky continued. "Russian America was lost even before the Revolution. By retaking it, we will signal the start of the new Revolution. The new age that will bring order back to this nation of thieves and whores." Before Zhirinsky, Ivan's hands quivered at his sides.
"Actually, comrade, there may be a slight problem." Ivan hated to admit it, but he feared the repercussions if he did not. His eyes were fixed squarely on his employer's sharp teeth. "The Kosygin Brigade has not reported in."
Black eyes narrowed. "Where were they last located?"
"Near Kakwik," Ivan explained. "There was not enough room to airlift them out with the rest. They were to be collected tomorrow."
Zhirinsky's next word was a hiss. "Skachkov?" he asked.
"He was not with them, comrade," Ivan promised. The brief flash of concern faded. "Is it a communication problem?" he suggested.
"There was some snow in that region of the Alyeska Republic," Ivan said, visibly relieved at his employer's calm acceptance. "The storm could have affected communications."
All remaining tension drained from Zhirinsky's bushy eyebrows. "Then that is what happened," he insisted. "Given their abilities, there is no other explanation." He frowned as he took a seat at one of the desks. "I do not like the fact that the Americans are ignoring us. Contact Skachkov. Tell him to purge another village. If they will not evacuate our property willingly, we will remove them one by one."
Ivan almost tripped over his own feet in his haste to leave the office. He couldn't use an office phone to call. The Moscow telephone company could rarely get them to work. He'd have to run around the corner to Arby's.
He was bounding out into the hallway when Zhirinsky's voice boomed behind him.
"Ivan!" the ultranationalist bellowed.
When the terrified young man turned, the former Russian senator was thoughtfully stroking his bushy mustache.
"Tell him to save the noses," he commanded. There was a hungry look in his demented eyes.
As Ivan left, shuddering, Vladimir Zhirinsky bowed his graying head and began sorting through the day's mail.
Chapter 18
The ground flew by beneath the belly of the racing Kamov, a blanket of soothing white stretching off to the horizon.
Remo, Chiun and Anna were in the back of the helicopter. The two Masters of Sinanju were side by side. Anna sat across from them.
"What the hell's a Zhirinsky?" Remo was asking Anna.
"He is an ultranationalist," she explained. "He was a senator in my country at one time. He is also one of many who would like nothing better than to see a return to the old Soviet totalitarian system."
"So much for my first guess," Remo said. "I thought it was one of those shitty kerosene-powered Eastern European cars with the bicycle tires. So where'd these guys of his get Sinanju training?"
"It is not Sinanju," Chiun interjected firmly. "Whatever it is they possess was not given them by a true Master and is therefore false. Since it is not Sinanju, it is less than Sinanju. These are no different than the thieving ninjas or Sherpas or all the others who would steal embers from the flame that is the true Sun Source."
"Sherpas?" Remo asked.
"Not now," Chiun intoned. "Your prostitute is about to speak."
"These men do have a Master," Anna said, ignoring the old man. "Lavrenty Skachkov is the most skilled of them all. He has guided the training of the rest of the men, who look on him with awe. They even call him Mactep. 'Master.'"
Chiun's face grew concerned. "This is true?" he demanded of Anna.
She nodded. "Skachkov is a true danger," she said. "He is not like the rest. I caution you to be very careful if you encounter him."
Remo's brow furrowed. "That Mactep thing sounds familiar," he said. "Where did I hear that word before?" He snapped his fingers. "I know. That whacko general with the death wish in California. Fraidykov."
"Yes," Anna said, nodding. "He apparently mentioned the wo
rd to you before he died. I told you that it was the name of the program General Feyodov led that was intended to bring Sinanju to Russia."
"Yeah, but you said it was just to get me and Chiun to work for you. And that was years ago. You didn't say anything about any other recruits."
"I am afraid I was not completely truthful with you," Anna admitted. In her blue eyes was a hint of genuine shame.
"There's a surprise," Remo said with a scowl. "I suppose I shouldn't have expected any more. This from a woman who managed to make a full recovery from being dead for thirteen years."
"Forget her," Chiun said in Korean. "We have a danger far greater here."
"What danger?" Remo asked. "These guys are no great shakes. We just took out ten of them without breaking a sweat."
"Did you not hear the woman?" Chiun insisted. "Or did you forget so soon the prophecy of Wang? 'Of Sinanju, yet not of Sinanju.' And what are these night tigers if not an army of death? We must beware this Master, Remo."
"I don't know, Little Father," Remo said. "I figured the false Master would be Korean, not Russian. After all, just saying you're a Master of Sinanju doesn't automatically make you a Master of Sinanju."
"That is not entirely true, either," Chiun said, his lips pulled tight, as if relating some painful truth.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Remo asked, noting the sudden stiff posture his teacher had affected.
"It means listen to this woman's advice," the Master of Sinanju said. "We must both exercise great caution, for the future of the line of the Great Wang rests on both our shoulders. And it is you who must ultimately face the false Master alone."
"Who says?" Remo asked.
"It was part of Wang's prophecy. I may assist you to remove his night tigers, but the Master must be dealt with by the youngest of the line. That is you."
Remo exhaled. "No pressure there," he muttered to himself. He turned his attention back to Anna.
"What was that all about?" she asked. Since she could not speak Korean, she had been unable to follow their conversation.
"Same old, same old," Remo sighed. "Last train for sanity's already left Removille, and I'm not on it. So where'd these soldier guys learn their moves?"
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