This time as Remo got out of the vehicle something felt different. Rebecca didn't seem right.
Probably not her. More than likely it was Remo. His senses were still recovering. And then it was there. Her dazzling smile. Plastered across her beautiful face.
"Good luck," she said.
Blaming everything on the strange disorientation he was still feeling, Remo shut the door of the Jeep. "See you in a few," he said.
Rebecca nodded tightly. Without a word she turned the Jeep around and headed back up the long road. Alone in the subterranean chamber, Remo shook his head once more. "Thanks a lot, guys," he muttered.
Turning, he headed deeper into the complex. As he walked, he slowly began to extend his senses. It was like flexing sore muscles. He had spent so much time focusing around the spirits of men who weren't there that everything was out of whack. Still, he could feel his body adjusting.
It took another minute for his senses to return to normal. Once they did, he frowned.
"What the hell?" Remo grumbled.
There were no life signs. The cavern was a few hundred yards around. Except for the road in, he couldn't detect any other tunnels or chambers. It was small enough that he should have been able to sense an enemy. But there wasn't so much as a single heartbeat in the entire underground complex.
"I'm warning you," he called, "if there's a smelly Russian monk floating around down here, this time I'm harvesting eyeballs."
With great disappointment he suddenly remembered he'd left his eyeball-poking stick on Rebecca Dalton's plane.
"Crap," complained Remo Williams.
And in response there came a loud animal roar. The sound came from the direction of the tunnel. For an instant Remo thought Iraq had sent a herd of stampeding elephants to kill him. He wondered briefly if elephants were legal to use as tools of assassination in the Sinanju Time of Succession.
And then the choking dust cloud rolled in along with the growing, terrible roar, and Remo realized that it wasn't a herd of elephants after all, but an explosion so massive that it rocked the ground beneath his feet.
And in the same instant Remo realized who Iraq's hired assassin probably was, but it was too late to do anything about it because the roaring dust cloud was upon him.
OUTSIDE THE COLLAPSED entrance to the tunnel, Rebecca Dalton neatly tucked the tiny silver antenna back inside her cell phone. It had taken just a three-digit number and the pound key to set off the explosives buried in the rock above the tunnel. The shafts in which the bombs had been placed were drilled down from the mountain above so that there was no evidence of them inside. Men trained in Sinanju had amazing abilities of perception. She hadn't wanted to take the risk of drilling up from the inside.
Marveling at the technology available to assassins in this modern age, Rebecca tossed the phone into the big pocket of her beige desert jacket and drove over to a small shed that sat away from the palace. There was no one inside.
Rebecca sat down before a computer monitor. An old-fashioned microphone that looked as if it had been scavenged from Walter Winchell's attic sat beside it.
The keyboard and screen commands were in Arabic. That didn't matter to Rebecca Dalton. Like the pro that she was, Rebecca began typing swiftly at the keyboard. At the far end of snaking tendrils of wire, unseen locks popped open.
On the monitor a dozen red warnings flashed. That was all there was to it.
Brushing a little desert grime from one leg of her pants, Rebecca reached for the microphone. While there was still time to talk to the man she had just murdered.
ELECTRIC FANS successfully removed most of the dust from the air. They whirred for a few minutes before a second pair of explosions-these much smaller than the one that had sealed the tunnel-brought them to a spluttering stop.
A gasoline-fueled generator continued to chug in the distance, feeding power to dull lights. In the yellow glare, Remo found huge boulders blocking the tunnel a dozen yards along. Soft groans and puffs of dust rose from the newly formed wall.
Remo could sense no other openings. The chamber was completely sealed off from the outside world. It would take hours-maybe days-for him to dig through all that rock back up to ground level. "Great," Remo groused.
Tiny glass-enclosed laboratories were built into the walls on either side of the cave. Panes of glass had been carefully removed from each of the rooms, compromising what were supposed to be sealed environments.
As Remo stood in the middle of the chamber, he heard various pops coming from each of the rooms. Vaporous clouds began hissing out the open windows and into the main cave.
Remo instantly shut down his pores. Darting from the main section of the chamber, he raced up the tunnel. The wall of fallen rock stopped him dead.
He launched a fist into a rock, sending a shudder through the cavern walls. A fissure appeared along the broad face of the largest boulder. Another pummeling fist and the rock cracked in two. Wrapping his fingers around the edges, he pulled it free, hurling the half-ton piece of rock back into the chamber. It landed with a thunderous boom.
He was spinning back to the wall when he heard a voice behind him.
"Don't bother," Rebecca Dalton announced, her voice distorted by microphone feedback. "It's half a mile out through solid rock. You'll never make it." Remo didn't turn. He felt the waves from a video camera directed at his back.
His hand smashed the remaining section of rock, flinging it back in two large chunks.
"Let me guess," he grunted. "You work for Iraq."
"More or less," she replied, her voice as calm and sweet as ever. "They were the ones who hired me initially. But I'm getting a double salary for this. One from Iraq, the other from Benson Dilkes."
By her tone it was clear she thought the name should mean something to Remo.
Remo had moved on to the next rock. It was slow going. All the while he felt the tendrils of something soft and sinister moving through the air at his back. "Never heard of him."
"He was one of the best," Rebecca's echoing voice said. "Present company excepted, of course." Her tone was light, laughing. "Benson taught me a lot. Retired for a while, but he's back in the game again. He's got contacts around the world. More than anyone else in the business I've ever known. Benson is the one who's been pulling all the assassins before you could meet with them."
He knew it. There was a conspiracy. "Why?" he asked as he worked.
Even with fans off, shifting air currents within the underground chamber had continued to lazily circulate. Remo felt the first of the cloud-now invisible-roll over him.
Whatever was in the air was far more deadly than the simple poison gas Thomas Smedley had used against him in London. Remo's skin prickled hot. He redoubled his efforts.
"I don't know," Rebecca replied. "A job. A big one, by the way he sounds. Benson doesn't give much away. But it seems he's hiring an army of death to take over that village of yours. He's got a new employer who must really have it in for you. But they didn't want you to get too frustrated too soon, so Benson hired me to keep you busy. He'll be so proud that I was able to do more than that."
"Don't count on it," Remo said. He was thinking of Chiun. Alone in Sinanju. An Army of Death-wasn't there some ancient prophecy about that?
One thing was certain. Remo's threats were hollow. He was feeling it. Whatever was in the air was all over him. Crawling on his skin, burrowing in. Burning hot. His breathing low, he felt the heat in mouth and nose.
His movements were growing slower. He threw out another rock, climbing inside the opening. It was narrow, confining. He had barely tunneled a few feet. Not enough.
"Usually I'd just blow up your plane or hire someone to shoot you," Rebecca mused. "I'm not hands-on. I contract out. But I couldn't trust anyone else to do this job right. It's amazing the preparation that was necessary for you. At first I thought I could get you in there and collapse the whole chamber. But I've read up on you Sinanju escape artists. Just burying you under rock probably would
n't have done it. One air pocket big enough to hide in and you'd find your way out somehow. You people are veritable Houdinis."
"He stole everything he knew from us," Remo grunted.
He was still trying to dig. Still trying to fight for life. But it was no good. He could feel it going. Slipping slowly away. The life was draining from his arms and legs. The world was growing dark.
A sound echoed through his spinning brain. Rebecca. Somehow Rebecca was still talking to him. But she couldn't be near. She had driven away. Left him here. Left him to die. He hardly heard the words.
"If you're wondering what you're inhaling, what's soaking into your pores or crawling on your skin ...well, it's just everything. None of it nice." Rebecca's voice feigned sympathy. "Everything they have, biological and chemical. Anthrax, smallpox, nocardiosis, cholera. There's sarin, mustard gas, tabun GA, butolin. Your eyeballs will bleed, your skin will peel off. By the time it's all done working its magic, they'll be able to soak up what's left with a sponge. Not that even the Iraqis would be silly enough to dig you up. No one will ever find you. This tunnel will be sealed like a pharaoh's tomb. No one will even know what happened to you. It's a shame, really. I liked you, Remo. You're not like most of the men in this business. You showed some style. A pity. Well, ta."
There was a horrid squeal of feedback, then nothing.
As if taking its cue from Rebecca Dalton, the generator far back in the chamber sputtered loudly once, then died. The lights dropped dim, then faded to dark.
From the darkness came a feeble scratching. It was followed by a booming crash. More rocks falling. Then silence.
Chapter 31
Chiun tripped through the desolate wasteland. Thorns tore at his garments. He noticed not.
He came upon a silvery stream, half-frozen. The old man stumbled down the shore, falling across ice and splashing to the other side. Muddied, his wet kimono skirts already freezing, he crawled up the far shore.
He ran on, racing to nowhere.
As he lurched along, the voices of the dead sang a chorus of accusation in his tortured mind.
"You were the vaunted Master of Sinanju. Our champion, protector of the village. We trusted that you would defend us. Where were you, O Master, when we were murdered?"
He covered his ears and cried out in agony, but the voices would not be silenced.
He ran on.
At one time his arrogance made him think he would be remembered in the histories as "Great." But there would be no future history. The future was as dead as the present. As dead as the past would become with no one to remember it.
Chiun, the Greatest Failure. His true title. He would bestow it upon himself in these, his last hours on earth. Inscribe it in stone with his own blood so that those who discovered his desiccated body would know the truth.
They could bring the stone back to Sinanju and plant it in the lifeless square. A final marker to a dead village.
In his mind he could still see it, could not banish the terrible image. The village of Sinanju was gutted. Houses smoldered. Winter wind howled over frozen corpses.
The image burned his brain as he ran on, mile after mile. He knew not how far he had gone when exhaustion finally overtook his frail body. Feeling every tiring moment of more than a century of hard life, he fell to the ground.
His tears were dry. He had wept them all before. The tired old man lay there in the frozen dirt. The cold crept up his extremities. Chiun welcomed it.
His limbs would die first. Then the numbing cold would seep into his vital organs. Finally his brain would go.
In life Sinanju had been his home. But everything there he had lived for, fought for, bled for was now dead. His home on Earth was gone. His new home beckoned.
He had eluded the pull of the Void for a long time. Now, in exhaustion and despair, he awaited its embrace.
"Come to me, Death," he whispered to the ground, his shivering lips scarcely able to form the words. "We are old friends, you and I. It is long past time we met."
He didn't think he had spoken the words aloud. He realized that he had to have, for out of the desolate wind came a mirthful reply.
"I doubt he'd want to meet you. The way you operate, poor old Death would have a hard time keeping up."
That voice. He had heard that voice before. Chiun snapped his face up from the dirt.
A man stood there, smiling down upon him. As if the desolate land where nothing grew were home to him.
The man had a roly-poly belly and a broad cherub's face. He seemed perpetually on the verge of laughing at some private joke.
The instant Chiun beheld the vision standing above him, his jaw dropped in shock.
The figure was known to all Masters of Sinanju. His exploits had been described in many legends, for countless generations throughout the modern history of Sinanju.
But it could not be him. Chiun was hallucinating. Still, the figure seemed real. Intermixed with the jolly smile was the sympathy of a loving father. Standing in his simple robes in the North Korean wilderness, the figure gazed down on the pathetic little man lying in the dirt.
Chiun shook his head. "Great Wang?" he breathed. So shocked was he and so sore was his throat he was scarcely able to speak the words.
"In the flesh," the vision replied. He considered his own words. "More or less," he amended. Chiun understood well what he meant.
The Great Wang had been dead for thousands of years. Traditionally Wang's spirit appeared to a Master of Sinanju in a much younger stage of training. It was a great honor, and one that Chiun had experienced decades before. Since there was no record of the greatest of all Masters of Sinanju ever returning for a second visitation to the same Master, Chiun assumed that no one had lived to tell the tale.
Chiun felt relief wash over him. It was time. "You have come to aid me on my journey."
"Could be," Wang replied mysteriously. "That all depends on which journey you're going to take." And when he saw the confusion on Chiun's face, the spirit of the Great Wang smiled a knowing smile.
IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT when Colonel Mundhir al-Rasul's plane landed at the airport in the remote region of Iraq.
There was no one on the ground to greet him. The colonel wasn't surprised. The airport had been sparsely manned. The soldiers who guarded the small landing strip had radioed Baghdad earlier in the evening to say that there was something wrong at the nearby palace.
Baghdad had taken the news in stride. For some time now, every day brought a new risk of American attack.
When Colonel al-Rasul tried to reach the palace guard by radio, there was no response.
There were no indications that the Americans were attacking. No reports of explosions or planes flying in. There had yet to be a Pentagon briefing on CNN.
An old MiG-21 from the Iraqi defense force was sent up to overfly the area. There were no fires burning, no lights of any kind. The palace was completely dark.
After much discussion, Colonel al-Rasul was sent to investigate the mysterious blackout.
At the airport in the desert a few miles from the palace, the men he brought with him found a Jeep and two trucks. The soldiers got in the trucks while the colonel and his driver climbed in the Jeep. They headed for the palace.
The road was empty. Sand swirled around the Jeep. Two miles from the airport, the palace rose up from the desert floor. A dark, distant silhouette.
For some reason the great leader himself had visited this isolated palace earlier that day. Colonel al-Rasul didn't know why, but he was aware that there had at one time been some sort of weapons production facility hidden there.
As they drew closer to the outer walls, the colonel instructed his driver to shut off the Jeep's lights. The men in the trucks followed suit. Their eyes were adjusted to the darkness by the time they drove through the main gates.
The image inside the high walls stunned the colonel.
The palace towers had been collapsed by some phantom force. They lay in ruins, chunks of broken b
rick scattered across the inner courtyard. Most of the outer palace walls were knocked over, exposing dark inner rooms.
"The Americans have returned," the colonel's young driver whispered fearfully.
"Stop here," Colonel al-Rasul whispered gruffly. The driver stopped in the main drive. The trucks drew in behind. The colonel was first out. His shiny boots crunched grit. He addressed the men who were hurriedly climbing down from the trucks.
"The palace guards must be hiding," he snarled. "Find the coward in charge and bring him to me." As the soldiers swarmed the buildings, the colonel went to the palace.
Only a cursory examination told him this was no ordinary assault. There was no sign of missile attack. There was no burning, no charred stone or craters showing point of impact.
The colonel kicked a chunk of rock. In the moonlight he saw a dent in the surface. Kneeling, he put his fist in the hole. Nearly a perfect fit. The declivity in the brick was in the perfect shape of a balled human fist. By the looks of where the big brick sat, it had been part of the base of a tower. It was as if someone were trying to make it seem that brute human force had knocked the towers from the sky.
"This does not make sense," the colonel muttered. His driver stood dutifully at his side, rifle at the ready.
"What is wrong, sir?" the soldier asked. The colonel shot the young man a silencing glare. The devastation around the area near the fallen tower was great, yet there were no treads in the sand to indicate the use of heavy equipment. Cranes with wrecking balls certainly hadn't been secretly shipped into Iraq to destroy one palace and then shipped back out again.
No natural phenomenon could account for the damage. There had been no earthquakes or sandstorms. It almost was as if some huge shadow had marched into the Tigris-Euphrates valley and felled the towers with powerful blows.
"Colonel!"
The call came from beyond the rubble. The colonel and his driver ran back to the Jeep and drove to the rear of the palace. Four soldiers stood in a semicircle on a road around back.
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