King's Curse td-24

by Warren Murphy

  Twelve men, wearing the yellow feathered robes and the loin cloths, stood barefooted in ankle-high snow, oblivious to the cold, looking down a hill at a small cabin nestled in a stand of trees.

  The cold Maine mountain wind whipped around them, and the gusts flattened the feathers of their robes against their bodies, but they neither shivered nor shook because the ancient traditions had held it that a child could not become a warrior until he had conquered a snake and a jungle cat and the hammer of the weather, and despite the passage of twenty generations all of them, even fat old Uncle Carl, knew they were Actatl warriors, and that warmed them and gave them strength.

  They listened as one now as Jean Louis deJuin, dressed in heavy leather boots and a hooded fur parka, gave them their instructions.

  "The woman is for sacrifice. The man I must speak to before we offer him up to Uctut."

  "Will those two, the white man and the Oriental, come?" asked Uncle Carl.

  DeJuin smiled. "If they do, they will be killed-from within their own encampment."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mrs. Harold W. Smith was frumpy.

  At thirty-two, she hadn't known it; at forty-two, she had known it and worried about it; and now, at fifty-two, she knew it and no longer cared about it.

  She was, she often reminded herself, a grown woman and would act like one, and that included putting aside the childish fantasies about going through life doing exciting things with an exciting man.

  So she didn't have that. She had something better. She had Dr. Harold W. Smith, and even though he might be dull, she no longer minded, because it was probably inevitable with all that dull work he did dull day after dull day at Folcroft Sanitarium, pushing dull piles of paper and worrying about dull educational studies funded by the dull federal government in Jacksonville, Arkansas, and Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and other dull places.

  Harold-it wasn't Harry or Har, but Harold, Not only did she always call him Harold, but she had always thought of him as Harold. Harold might have been a far different man, she often thought, if he had simply been placed in different circumstances.

  After all, in World War II he had done some kind of secret work, and while he would never say anything more about it than that he had been "in codes," she had once run across a personal letter from General Eisenhower, apologizing that circumstances made it impossible for the United States to award Harold W. Smith the Congressional Medal of Honor, adding that "no man who served on the side of the Allies deserved it more."

  She had never mentioned to her husband that she had found this letter inside the front cover of a book on a shelf over his desk. To discuss it might have embarrassed him, but she often thought he must have been exceptional "in codes" to have merited such praise from Ike.

  The day after discovering the letter she got to worrying that she might not have returned it quite exactly to its spot inside the cover of the book, and she went back to look at it again. But it was gone, and in the ashtray in his study she had found bits of burned paper-but that couldn't have been it. What kind of man would destroy a personal letter of praise from a man who went on to become President of the United States?

  No one would do that.

  She listened to the coffee percolating on the stove, filling the small kitchen of their rented Maine cabin with the oily sweet smell of coffee, on which she had come to depend to start the day, and she regretted nothing.

  Harold might be, yes, admit it, dull, but he was also kind and a good man.

  She turned off the electric burner and took the pot off the hot grill and placed it on the cool metal of the stove to stop the percolation and let the grounds settle.

  It had been so nice of him to think about coming up here to Maine for a few weeks. She took two cups from a closet over the sink, rinsed them, and poured coffee into them.

  She paused a moment.

  Inside the bedroom she could hear Harold Smith's soft, methodical, regular breathing stop and surrender to a large sip of air, and then she heard the bed springs squeak. As he always did, Smith had awakened, had lain perfectly still for three seconds as if checking his surroundings, and then without any waste of time had clambered out of bed.

  Seven days a week, it was the same. Smith never luxuriated in bed, not even for a moment, after he was fully awake: he climbed out as if late for an appointment.

  Mrs. Smith carried the two cups back toward the small formica-topped kitchen table, glanced out the window, then stopped in her tracks.

  She looked again, then set the two cups on the table, and walked to the window, pressing her face near the cold damp glass so she could see better.

  That was odd, she thought. Definitely odd.

  "Harold," she said.

  "Yes, dear," he answered. "I'm up."

  "Harold, come here, please."

  "In a moment, dear."

  "Now. Please."

  She kept looking out the window and she felt Harold Smith move to her side.

  "Good morning, dear," he said. "What is it?"

  "Out there, Harold." She looked at the window.

  Smith put his head close to hers and looked through the pane of glass.

  Coming down the small slope of a hill toward the cabin were a dozen men, naked except for loincloths and feathered headdresses and robes.

  They were dressed in the fashion of some sort of Indians, but they did not have the skin of Indians. Some were yellow, some white, some tan. They carried spears.

  "What is it, Harold?" asked Mrs. Smith. "Who are they?"

  She turned to her husband, but he was not there.

  Smith had darted across the room. He reached up over the door and took down a 12 gauge shotgun that sat in a rack made of two sets of antlers. He locked the door's simple drop latch, then carried the gun to the small china closet in the room. From behind the dishes he took out a box of shotgun shells.

  Mrs. Smith watched him. She had not even known those bullets were there. And why was Harold putting them in that gun?

  "Harold, what are you doing?" she asked.

  "Get dressed, dear," said Smith, without looking up. "Put on your boots and a heavy coat in case you should have to go out suddenly."

  He looked up and saw her still at the window.

  "Now!" he commanded.

  Numbly, not really comprehending, Mrs. Smith moved toward their bedroom. As she stepped inside, planning to dress quickly, just to throw clothes on over the pajamas and robe she now wore, she saw Harold moving about the room, the shotgun folded in the crook of his arm like a hunter. He locked the windows of the small cabin, then pulled the curtains closed over the windows.

  "Does it have something to do with the bicentennial?" she called as she slipped her heavy snow-pacs over her booted pajamas.

  "I don't know, dear," he said.

  Smith emptied the box of shells into the left pocket of his robe. Into his right pocket he placed a 9mm automatic that he took from a niche between the couch and the warm air radiator in the main living room.

  He looked back into the bedroom. "Make sure that those windows are locked. Pull the curtains and stay in there until I tell you differently," he said, adding "dear" without meaning it. Then he slammed the bedroom door closed.

  The dozen Actatl moved silently across the snow field toward the small house, nestled alone in the tiny valley alongside the hill.

  On a snowmobile atop the hill, Jean Louis deJuin watched as his men-his warriors, his braves-moved nearer the cottage. One hundred yards. Ninety yards.

  He looked toward the snowed-over dirt road that cut its way through heavy pine growth to the cabin. ,

  As the Actatl warriors moved nearer the house, deJuin saw what he had been expecting: a puff of snow coming along the dirt road to the Smith cabin.

  A car.

  This was it. The Actatl would win now or lose now. It was that simple. He smiled, for he had no doubt that the battle would be a victory for the Actatl.

  Smith punched out a pane of glass from the kitch
en window with the muzzle of his shotgun and put the barrel of the gun through the opening.

  He sighted on the first of the feather-clad warriors, then coldly moved his aim toward the left, where a single shotgun blast might take out three men at once.

  How long had it been since he had fired a gun? To kill? It all flashed through his mind in a split second, the days in World War II when he had to shoot his way out of a Nazi trap after he had spent four months in occupied territory in Scandinavia, organizing a resistance movement and training its members in sabotage, aimed at one target: the secret Nazi installation where heavy water experiments, needed to build an atomic bomb, were being undertaken.

  A good cause then, a good cause now.

  His finger began to tighten on the right trigger, but he stopped when he heard a car jerking to a stop before the front door of his cabin.

  Was it more of them? Or was it Remo?

  The door was locked. He would wait a moment. The warriors were now thirty-five yards away, stumbling ahead through heavy snow, and Smith again took dead aim.

  At twenty-five yards he would fire.

  Before he could squeeze the trigger, he saw a flash of color to the right of his window and then Remo, wearing only a blue tee shirt and black slacks, and Chiun, clad only in a green kimono, moved around the corner of the building and ran toward the dozen spear-carrying men.

  The front pair of Indians stopped, set up quickly, and fired their spears. If Smith had not seen it with his own eyes, he would not have believed it. The projectiles sped toward Remo and Chiun. Both men seemed oblivious to them. At what seemed a fraction of a second too late, Remo's left hand moved before his face. The spear cracked in half and both parts fell harmless at his feet. He kept running toward the Actatl. The spear that went at Chiun seemed almost to have reached his stomach, seemed sure to penetrate, seemed certain to be deadly, when Chiun's long-nailed fingers reached down, and then Chiun was holding the spear in his own right hand. He had caught it in midflight.

  Neither he nor Remo lost a step in their advance toward the Actatl. Then they were on them, and Smith realized that in all his years as the head of CURE, he had never before seen Remo and Chiun at work together. And as he watched them, he understood for the first time the terror that the Master of Sinanju and his disciple, Remo, could strike into so many hearts.

  He understood too why Chiun believed Remo to be the reincarnation of the Eastern God, Shiva, the Destroyer.

  Remo moved in a blur, in among the group of twelve warriors, who had stopped their charge on the house to dispose first of the two intruders. About Remo all was speed, as if he were surrounded by a special kind of turbulence, and bodies flew away from him as if they held a different magnetic charge from his and were thrust away by invisible forces.

  While Remo charged into the center of the Actatl, Chiun worked around the perimeter of the group. His style was as different from Remo's as that of a rifle from a pistol. Chiun did not appear to move quickly; his hands and body were not blurred as he went from one spot to another. Smith noted almost scientifically that Chiun hardly appeared to be moving at all. But suddenly he was one place and then suddenly another place. It was like watching a film in which the camera had been stopped intermittently while shooting the picture, and Chiun's movement from one spot to the next had occurred while the camera lens was closed.

  And the bodies piled up in a huge mound of yellow feathers, like some kind of giant canary graveyard.

  Smith noticed another movement to his right and turned his head. A girl in a fur coat came around the corner of the cabin.

  That would be Bobbi or Valerie, Smith thought. Bobbi, judging from the full length fur coat. She paused at the end of the cabin for a moment, watching as Remo and Chiun lay waste the Actatl warriors.

  Not knowing she was being watched, she reached into the right pocket of her fur coat. She drew out a pistol.

  Smith smiled. She was going to protect Remo and Chiun.

  She raised the revolver at arm's length in her right hand. Smith wondered if he should call out to her and tell her to stop.

  He glanced back at the battle. All the Actatl had fallen. Only Remo and Chiun still stood, ankle deep in the powdery snow. They had their backs to Bobbi. Remo pointed up to the top of a hill, where a man sat on a snowmobile, watching the carnage below. Remo nodded to Chiun and moved off in the direction of the man on the hill.

  Smith glanced back at Bobbi. She extended her left hand and grasped her right wrist to hold the gun steady. She took deadly slow aim across the twenty feet between her and Remo and Chiun.

  She was going to shoot them.

  Smith wheeled in the window opening, moving to his left, and without aiming squeezed first the right trigger of his shotgun and then the left.

  The first blast missed. The second caught Bobbi in the midsection, lifted her in the air, folded her as if she were a dinner napkin, and set her down into the snow eight feet from where she had been standing.

  Remo turned, saw Bobbi lying on the snow, blood oozing out of her almost severed midsection, melting the snow where it touched it, creating a purplish brown paste. He looked at the window where Smith still held the gun.

  "Nice work, Smitty," Remo said sarcastically. "She's with us."

  Smitty passed by the bedroom door on his way outside. He called to his wife, "Stay inside there, dear. Everything's going to be all right."

  "Are you all right, Harold?"

  "I'm fine, dear. Just stay in there until I call you."

  Smith put the gun against the wall and went outside onto the porch, which wrapped around the small cabin.

  Remo looked up at him and laughed.

  "What's so funny?" Smith said.

  "Somehow I had this idea you slept in a gray suit," Remo said, gesturing toward Smith's pajamas. "I thought you always wore a gray suit."

  "Very funny," Smith said.

  Chiun was leaning over the girl. When Remo and Smith approached, she hissed to Remo: "You are one with the despoilers of the stone. You must die."

  "Sorry, but it doesn't look like you're going to be able to carry it off," Remo said.

  "She was trying to shoot you," Smith explained.

  "She wouldn't have," Remo said.

  "You had your back turned."

  "What has that got to do with it?" Remo asked. He knelt closer to Bobbi. "What's your interest in all this? Just because I wouldn't play tennis with you?"

  "I am a daughter of Uctut. Before me, my father and before him, his father, through many generations."

  "So you helped them kill your own mother?" Remo said.

  "She was not of the Actatl. She did not protect the sacred stone," Bobbi said. She sipped air heavily. It gurgled through her throat.

  "Who's left to protect the stone now, kid?" Remo asked.

  "Jean Louis will protect it and he will destroy you. The king of the Actatl will bring you death."

  "Have it your way."

  "Now I die with the secret name on my lips." She spoke again, and Remo leaned close and heard the secret name of Uctut as she spoke it Bobbi's face relaxed into a smile, her eyes closed, and her head fell to the side.

  Remo stood up. Lying on the ground in her fur coat, surrounded by bloody slush, she looked like an oversize muskrat lying on a red pillow.

  "That's the biz, sweetheart," Remo said.

  Remo looked up toward the hill. The man on the snowmobile was gone.

  "Oh, my god! Oh, my god!" Remo turned. The new noise was Valerie, who had finally worked up nerve enough to come see what was happening after having heard the shots.

  She stood at the corner of the cabin, looking at the bodies lying about the snowfield.

  "Oh, my god! Oh, my god!" she said again.

  "Chiun, will you please get her out of here?" Remo asked. "Muzzle her, will you?"

  "I do not do this thing because it is a command," Chiun said. "I do not take commands from you, only from our gracious and wise emperor in his pajamas. I do this thin
g because it is so worth doing."

  Chiun touched Valerie on the left arm. She winced and followed him back to the car.

  "Well, you've got to get rid of these bodies," Smith said.

  "Get rid of your own bodies. I'm not the dog-warden."

  "I can't get rid of the bodies," Smith said. "My wife's inside. She'll be nosing around in a minute. I can't let her see this."

  "I don't know, Smitty," Remo said. "What would you do if I weren't around to handle all these details for you?"

  He looked at Smith, self-righteously, as if demanding an answer that would not come. Remo went to the shed near Smith's front door and dragged out Smith's snowmobile. Every cottage and cabin in this part of the country came with one because the snow sometimes was so deep that people without snowmobiles could be cut off for weeks. And having guests freeze to death or die of starvation did nothing for Maine's tourist business.

  Remo started up the snowmobile and drove it to the pile of corpses, which he tossed onto the back of the ski-equipped vehicle like so many sacks of potatoes. He put Bobbi Delpheen on the top and then used some random arms and legs to tuck everybody in so they wouldn't shake loose.

  He turned the snowmobile around, aiming it toward the top of a hill, which ended at a big gulley with a frozen river in its bottom, then cracked the steering mechanism so the snowmobile's skis could not turn. He jammed the throttle and jumped off.

  The snowmobile lumbered away up the hill, carrying its thirteen bodies.

  Remo said to Smith, "They'll find it in the spring. By that time, you do something to make sure no one knows who rented this place."

  "I will."

  "Good. And why don't you go back to Folcroft? No need for you to keep hiding here."

  Smith glanced up the hill. "What of the king of this tribe?"

  "I'll take care of him back in New York," Remo said. "Don't worry."

  "With you on the job, who could worry?" said Smith.

  "Damn right," said Remo, impressing himself with his own efficiency.

  He looked around at the blood-stained snow, then picked up a loose yellow feather and began brushing snow around to cover the stains. In a few seconds, the yard looked as pristine as it had before the start of the battle.