"We are not of your ranks," Chiun sniffed.
"No talking, please. Thank you."
Remo and Chiun exchanged glances.
They were walked through a labyrinth of spotless tunnels. White-coveralled soldiers swabbed the pastel walls with ammonia-scented rags. Others dusted the exposed ductwork with white-enameled foxtail brooms.
Remo started whistling "Whistle While You Work" to break the silence, and the captain's head suddenly jerked around. For the first time, an expression crossed his set features.
"What's the problem, pal?" Remo asked. "You don't like my taste in music?"
The man said a tight-lipped nothing, but he picked up his pace. Consequently they all picked up their pace.
"These guys are too perfect to be U.S. military," Remo said, after some thought.
This time, the captain hissed for silence.
"Struck a nerve," Remo said.
The captain whirled, his corn-fed face white and tight. It almost matched his coverall uniform.
"I have instructions to shoot one of you to ensure the cooperation of the other."
Remo smiled tightly, "You forgot to say 'please.' "
"Separate them!" the captain snapped.
The Master of Sinanju shook his black silk sleeves off his pipe-stem forearms. He folded them resolutely, saying, "I will not be moved."
Remo folded his arms as well. "That goes double for me. I'm tired of all this pussyfooting."
"Shoot the old man."
Remo got between the captain and the Master of Sinanju and said in a low tone. "You forgot to say 'May I?'"
"Fi-yeeh!"
The captain's order had been interrupted by a sensation like a tightening vise in the specific area of his testicles. He looked down to see that the skinny man had grabbed his crotch with one hand. The old one now took him by the throat.
While he was still screaming, the captain went ballistic.
Had he not been wearing his helmet, his head would have been split open against the overhead conduit pipe. It was as large as a sewer main, and as heavy.
The helmet protected the top of his skull from being caved in. It punctured the pipe and hung there, forming a solid cup that collected the compressed remnants of his pulped head.
The other soldiers looked up at the dangling white boots, to the skinny guy with the thick wrists, and remembered the captain's unfinished final order.
They trained their weapons on the old Asian. Fingers squeezed triggers.
Remo moved among the soldiers. He came in low, bent at the waist, and slammed the AR-15 muzzles ceilingward, like a handball player deflecting a rebounding ball.
Bullets erupted straight up, riddling the pipe and making the limp body of their captain jerk and jitter and string blood from points along his torso.
The overhead pipe suddenly cracked apart with a roar and a section crashed down, spewing assorted paper trash, soft-drink cans, used camera-film boxes, and colorful napkins. All propelled by a hurricane of air.
Remo and Chiun retreated as the soldiers were swiftly inundated.
"What the hell is going on?" Remo shouted over the din.
"I do not know."
"What the heck is that thing?" Remo said, retreating from the spreading sea of refuse.
From the relative safety of several yards down the corridor, Remo and Chiun watched as the soldiers, weapons forgotten, tried to wade from the snowstorm of debris. They were not fast enough. The stuff covered them faster than they could wade. They slogged waist-deep, then shoulder-deep, and then, like men drowning in some frothy white water, their helmeted heads were soon covered.
Somewhere someone must have thrown a switch, because with a silence that made their ears ring, the whooshing roar ceased and all was quiet.
A final paper cup tumbled out of the fractured ceramic pipe, and all was still.
Remo and Chiun walked around the mound of trash, their faces bemused.
"They must have a whole division under arms, from the look of all these food containers," Remo pointed out.
The Master of Sinanju noticed a corner of the mound shift. The gleam of a white helmet appeared.
With the heel of his hand, he gave it a tap. The emerging helmet rang like an old bell, and fell silent.
Then the Klaxons started.
Remo looked up and down the gleaming corridor worriedly. "Uh-oh. Now we did it."
"Perhaps this might be the correct time to escape, my son," Chiun pointed out, his bearded chin indicating the severed pipe.
"Just a sec."
Remo went to a wall-mounted video surveillance camera and with an extended forefinger shattered the lens, blinding it.
"No sense leaving a trail," he said over the Klaxon howl.
Remo got under the ruptured pipe and took hold of its cracked maw. He pulled himself up. The Master of Sinanju, being somewhat shorter, leaped high, fading into the maw like a spider slipping into a web hole.
Crouched low, they moved along the pipe. It was dark and surprisingly clean, in spite of being a conduit for trash and food refuse. The inner walls were teflonslick.
The way was dark, but their visual purple compensated for the lack of illumination.
At a bend in the tunnel they came to a clump of trash.
Remo cleared it with distaste on his hard features.
They continued on.
They found the body of Comandante Leopoldo Zorilla wedged in a catch basin, where the pipe angled up into a sheer vertical well.
"Guess he was too heavy to make the turn," Remo said, checking the body's carotid artery and finding no pulse.
The body of Zorilla had landed in a kind of tangled ball of outflung limbs. They dragged him free and laid him out. There were no obvious marks or wounds. The man's eyes were wide, and already turning to dull glass. Remo noticed that his mouth was open and there was something in it.
He pried the jaws apart and saw the pink wad crushed against his wisdom teeth.
"Gum," he said, dismissing it without a second thought.
Remo went through the man's pockets and found a pack of gum in the blouse pocket. He barely glanced at it before tossing it aside. There was an INS green card, and a plastic syringe filled with liquid. The needle was stoppered. That was all.
"Must have been a drug addict," Remo said, dropping the needle.
"Or a gum fiend," sniffed the Master of Sinanju, retrieving it. He tossed the instrument aside after examining it curiously.
Remo straightened. "Well, they wasted him without wasting any time. Serves him right, too. Murdering his own men like that."
The Master of Sinanju moved to the point under the vertical length of pipe. His wise old face frowned tightly.
"It is time to see what lies above," he said firmly.
"Want me to go first?" Remo offered.
"No," said Chiun, making a fist like a block of old bone and punching a dent at the level of his head. He reached up and made another off to one side.
Then, leaping high so that one sandaled toe caught the lowermost dent and the other the next one up, the Master of Sinanju quickly created a ladder of indentations, climbing as he went.
Remo followed. He was halfway up when he heard a metallic screech.
Past his head came a ball of twisted steel.
"What was that?" he called up.
"An inconvenient propeller."
"Must be part of a pneumatic system," Remo said, continuing on. Unlike Chiun, Remo lacked the long fingernails of the traditional Sinanju master. He had to knock deeper holes here and there.
Near the top, Chiun's voice came, high and squeaky.
"Remo! Remo!"
"Yeah?"
"I know where we are!" "Where?" "Home! We are home!" "Huh?"
Chapter 15
"Director, I have bad news."
"What is it now?" demanded the petulant, chilly voice.
"The two unfriendlies are topside."
The Director looked at his famous smiling watch. "We're
two hours from opening. That should be enough time to erase them from the drawing board."
"Instructions?"
"Send the Wolf Pack after them."
"At once, Director."
"And have a mop-up team on standby to take care of the damned blood. I want topside to sparkle. And turn up the heat. I'm freezing in here."
"Yes, Director."
"Wolf Pack, you are go for the hunt."
Chapter 16
Warily, Remo emerged from the disposal pipe, not knowing what to expect.
A section of the pipe, an elbow, had been knocked aside by the Master of Sinanju. Remo found himself staring into another horizontal stretch.
He walked around it and saw that he was in a semidark concrete bunker, and that the final length of pipe was jutting from a giant piece of machinery studded with air-compressors.
"I was right." he said. "This is a giant pneumatic tube. That means it's like a vacuum in reverse."
Then he noticed the Master of Sinanju standing at a window, staring out with a pleased expression on his face. Chiun was standing at his full height now, his chin uptilted slightly, like an emperor surveying his domain.
"This doesn't look like any home I've ever seen," Remo said, approaching the window.
The Master of Sinanju stepped aside. "Open your benighted eyes to their fullest then," he said proudly.
Remo peered out the window. The expression on his face was an odd mixture of curiosity and bafflement.
He saw in the near distance the tessellated ramparts and spindly towers of a castle.
The curiosity drained from his face as the bafflement took over. His mouth dropped open. His deep-set eyes seemed to crawl out of their enshadowed orbits. He blinked. And blinked again.
No matter what he did, the castle was still there.
"What the hell?"
"Is it not magnificent?" Chiun asked, beaming.
"Huh?" Remo gulped.
"That is where we will live," added Chiun. He clapped happy hands together. "It is what I have always wanted."
"No doubt there," Remo growled, "but what is it?"
Chiun's tiny mouth went round. "You do not recognize this place?" he squeaked. "You, a child of this generous nation?"
"It looks familiar, sure," Remo admitted. "But I can't place it. I was expecting an orange grove."
"Come. Perhaps this wondrous place which Harold the Munificent has granted to the House of Sinanju contains such things."
The Master of Sinanju floated to a closed door.
Remo followed. "Smith gave you this?" he asked, small-voiced.
"It was my final demand, and he agreed to meet it."
Remo Williams was so befuddled by the disorienting experience of escaping an underground military installation, only to find above it a place Chiun called home, that he couldn't think of any comeback. He let his brain shift into neutral and went with the flow.
Chiun opened the door, and the building flooded with too-bright sunlight. They passed through and out into an immaculately landscaped fairyland that Remo instantly recognized.
"Oh my God!" he said.
Chiun drew in a long breath. "Smell, Remo. Orange blossoms." He beamed. "Here, all wishes come true."
"This is Beasley World!" Remo said, aghast.
"Yes," said Chiun happily.
"Beasley World. The Beasley World."
"Yes!"
"Somebody built a secret military installation under Beasley World!" Remo said, his voice incredulous.
"A minor annoyance which we will soon remedy," Chiun said.
Remo looked around.
The summit of Star Mountain reared up in the early-morning sun, the shadows of fast-moving clouds dappling it.
They were standing near an artificial pool. It appeared to be empty. At the far end of a long whitecobbled walk, past colorful children's rides, loomed Sorcerer's Castle, emblem of "the Enchanted Village," as Beasley World-the greatest theme park in the universe-was sometimes called.
"This is a dream," Remo muttered.
"A wonderful dream," Chiun said.
"A bad dream," Remo said. "A nightmare."
Chiun frowned. "What is wrong?"
"We can't live here. It's wide open!"
"The sun will be good for you, Remo. You look pale." The Master of Sinanju began to walk, his merry hazel eyes darting this way and that, his perfect white teeth dazzling in his tiny mouth.
Remo followed. "No, I mean this is a public place. Millions of people come through the gate every year."
Chiun shrugged unconcernedly. "I have left them Beasleyland. They may go there instead."
Remo's incredulous eyes took in an Alice-in-Wonderland panorama that was familiar to children throughout the entire world.
"I can't believe Smith gave this place to you."
"Why not? I deserve it-even if you do not."
"That's not what I mean, and you know it. It isn't Smith's to give. One of the biggest corporations in the world owns all this. And from what I hear their lawyers are real piranha."
"Let them plotz," Chiun said disdainfully.
Remo looked back. The building they had just left was some kind of disguised waste-disposal collection center. The walls were covered with open-mouthed cartoon faces. The mouths were round holes, and beside one of them was a pair of covered plastic barrels. The covers were adorned with puppet heads.
"That pipe we came through was part of the trash-disposal system for this place," Remo decided aloud.
"It is very efficient," Chiun agreed. "I hereby make you Lord High Sanitation Engineer of Assassin's World."
"Assassin's World?"
"The old name needs updating."
"You weren't listening to what I said," Remo said tightly.
"What else is new?" Chiun returned carelessly.
"That means the military guys are in cahoots with the Beasley Company."
Chiun turned, his mouth going prim. "Remo! Such blasphemy! Was this man Beasley not one of your childhood heroes?"
"Sure. What does that have to do with anything?"
"Uncle Sam Beasley would never go against the wishes of Emperor Smith."
"He never heard of Smith. Besides, he's dead."
"Nonsense."
"He died back in the sixties. Everybody knows that."
"Humph," sniffed Chiun, resuming his promenade. "If this is so, then who draws the wonderful cartoons bearing his illustrious name?"
"A bunch of artists, that's who. Uncle Sam never drew the cartoons himself."
"Slanderer! Defamer of greatness!"
Remo stopped, blinked, and said in a very small voice, "Uncle Sam . . ."
"Come, Remo. We must find Monongahela Mouse. I will accept the keys to the Enchanted Village from him personally. No lesser functionary will do."
"Chiun!" Remo croaked.
The Master of Sinanju stopped, turned, his eyes narrowing.
"What is wrong with you, Remo? This is the culmination of my years of hardship in your ugly country. This is a moment about which the future children of Sinanju yet unborn will sing. For no Master of Sinanju was ever bequeathed a kingdom as wondrous as this one."
"Chiun, listen! I just said the name 'Uncle Sam.' Uncle Sam Beasley-the founder of Beasleyland and Beasley World."
"You did," Chiun allowed.
"The creator of Monongahela Mouse, Screwball Squirrel, and Dingbat Duck."
"His reknown has reached even Sinanju," Chiun said. "Although he is a mere white artist, his greatness is unsurpassed."
Remo said, "Everybody from the captured Cubans to Zorilla swore Uncle Sam was behind the operation. Remember?"
Chiun's eyes squeezed to walnut slits.
"Not the Washington Uncle Sam, but Uncle Sam Beasley! This is a Beasley Corporation operation!"
"I will believe this only from the lips of Uncle Sam himself," Chiun said firmly. "Come, the famous rodent can wait. We must speak with Uncle Sam himself."
In a swirl of black silken skirt
s, the Master of Sinanju flounced off toward the towers that Remo had first seen what seemed like another lifetime ago, as a wide-eyed child watching a cheap black-and-white picture tube back at Saint Theresa's Orphanage.
There was a lump rising in his throat.
Ronald Phipps had grown up on Sam Beasley.
Every Sunday night, he had watched The Marvelous Realm of Sam Beasley in his fire-engine-red Dr. Denton's. He had collected Sam Beasley Comics and Cartoons. Colored in Mongo Mouse and Screwball Squirrel coloring books, with Sam Beasley-brand crayons. If it bore the flourishing signature of Uncle Sam Beasley, Ronald Phipps had collected it.
The first time he had visited Beasley World was akin to a religious experience. He was nine. By the age of eleven he had been to Beasleyland and Beasley World what seemed a million times. He liked Beasley World better. It was bigger and-more to the point-he could go more often. Ron Phipps lived just outside of Furioso, Florida, Vacation Center of the Galaxy, site of Sam Beasley World.
When he reached high school age and other boys were discovering cars and beer and girls, Ron Phipps spent his weekends at Sam Beasley World.
After high school, he horrified his parents by announcing that he wasn't going to Yale after all. He had applied to a much more exclusive institution.
"I'm going to be a greeter at Sam Beasley World," he announced proudly.
His father glared. His mother broke down. His younger sister asked, "Does that mean you can get me in for free?"
Ultimately, his disappointed parents had not stood in his way. They thought it was just a phase. It would pass. And Yale would still be there next year.
They were wrong. The day he first donned the furry costume and oversized lop-eared head of Wacky Wolf, Ron knew he had found his true calling. But being a greeter, he discovered, was not quite as much fun as being a greetee. There were rules, and violators could be summarily fired. One could never appear in public out of costume. Or with one's character head removed. One mustn't speak. One must be unfailingly polite and kind.
Once a greeter dressed as Screwball Squirrel had come upon a little girl who had fallen into the Phantom Lagoon. As her parents watched helplessly, the little girl splashed and cried piteously for rescue.
The Screwball Squirrel greeter had doffed his bucktoothed head and plunged in. He pulled the girl to safety and after applying mouth-to-mouth, brought her around.
The crowd had applauded the man.
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