"He is still a ronin, " Chiun returned. "And he is very dangerous."
"No argument there. But we're dealing with a guy in an electronic samurai suit. The House isn't haunted."
Chiun raised his nailless index finger. "If you fail to avenge this Japanese insult, I will haunt the House forever."
Chapter 22
Harold Smith was sorting files when his system beeped.
Hitting a key, he got a pop-up window and an AP news-wire report.
There was a derailment in Eerie, Pennsylvania, the town where the enemy ronin had presumably teleported himself. A Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey circus train had gone off the tracks approaching Eerie.
Smith's file beeped again as he read the report. A flashing message in one corner of the screen said, "Match found."
Smith hadn't asked for a match, so he was frowning as he instructed the computer to pull it up.
What he read made him gasp.
The wreck in Eerie was identical in every particular to the one that had cost a half-dozen lives in Lakeland, Florida, two years before. It, too, had involved a circus train.
"The pattern is changing again," Smith muttered under his breath.
It was clear that it was. The demolished engine was an ordinary GE Dash-8. Not new. Not new at all.
Thirty minutes later another AP report popped up, and Smith knew without being told by the system that it would be a match.
It was.
The Lakeshore Limited had jumped the track near Batavia, New York. Casualty reports were yet to filter out. But his system matched it to an identical event two summers previously, where 125 people had been injured.
"He is re-creating some of the most catastrophic disasters in recent rail history," Smith blurted. "But why?"
A moment later Smith forgot all about the why. He had a new angle to pursue.
Frantically inputting commands, he commanded his system to list all of the significant rail disasters of the past three years, in order of loss of life and property damage.
The list was not long. But the first entry was headed, "Bayou Canot."
Smith remembered it well. September 22, 1993. The Sunset Limited was barreling south to Florida through Alabama bayou country. A towboat had taken a wrong turn and struck a trestle bridge, weakening it. When the Sunset Limited went over the bridge, three lead engines and four trailing Heritage cars tumbled into the water. Forty-seven people drowned. That one event doubled the total number of fatalities in Amtrak history overnight. To this day it remained the most deadly Amtrak accident ever.
Suddenly Smith doubted the official NTSB explanation. Odds were Bayou Canot was about to be repeated.
Dialing the Maryland hotel, Smith reached Remo. "Remo. Here are your instructions. Go to Mobile, Alabama. Find the railroad bridge over Bayou Canot." Smith spelled it. "Then guard that bridge from sabotage. I have reason to believe the ronin will attack it."
"On our way," said Remo.
Hanging up, Smith returned to his computer. There was a lot to do, and he had relatively little hard data.
But he did have a name: Furio Batsuka.
Smith began a search of his data base first. It was unlikely to be legitimate, but the possibility had to be factored out first.
Smith was surprised when the global search came up positive. His gray eyes scanned the scrolling blocks of amber text. His expectant expression soon turned sour: "Seattle Mariners slugger Furio Batsuka strikes out at All-Star Game."
Smith didn't bother to read the rest.
"The name is an obvious alias," he said unhappily.
Hunching his shoulders, Harold Smith tried attacking the problem from another angle. Dead ends were to be expected when dealing with industrial-espionage operations, as this assuredly was.
GETTING TO BAYOU CANOT involved a car ride and then renting a motorboat. It was nearly dusk by the time Remo and Chiun got to the boat leg of the trip.
They were puttering down the sluggish river, Chiun standing in the stern like a watchful figurehead while Remo piloted the craft. A mist was rising from the water. The air was moist and humid. And behind them, a lonesome alligator was following lazily in their wake.
When they found the great steel trestle, it was still standing.
"Looks okay to me," Remo said. "Maybe we're in time."
Chiun said nothing. He was waving to the alligator as it followed them to shore with lazy swishes of its tail.
The craft beached on a bank, and Remo hopped out to secure it. Chiun waited patiently in the stern for Remo to pull the boat nearly out of the water. Only then did he deign to step off onto dry land.
The alligator decided to join them.
"Better watch the lizard, Little Father," Remo cautioned.
"Better that the lizard watch me," said Chiun, turning to face the waddling saurian.
The alligator crawled out on his stubby legs and made a determined lunge for Chiun. Chiun watched him approach, his hazel eyes curious.
"This is an inferior specimen."
"Compared to what?" said Remo, eyeing the long, eerie span over their heads.
"The royal crocodiles of Upper Egypt!'
"If he gets hold of your ankle, you'll think differently."
That seemed to be the alligator's intent. He kept coming. Chiun let him get within a snout's length. Abruptly the alligator scissored open his jaws and, with a furious forward convulsion, snapped them shut.
If an alligator could show surprise, this one did.
Its lizardy eyes were gawking at the spot where Chiun stood. There was no Chiun. It whipsawed its long head. Right, then left.
And standing serenely on the creature's pebbled back, the Master of Sinanju reached forward to tap the gator on the top of its knobby brown head.
"Yoo-hoo," Chiun taunted. "Here I am."
The gator threshed. Its tail whipped back. Its jaws snapped around like a dog trying to bite its own tail. It bucked. It squirmed. It let out a rare alligator roar.
But the Master of Sinanju rode it as calmly as if it were a lumpy log, not a leathery, muscular eating machine.
"Chiun, will you stop teasing that gator?" Remo warned. "We have work to do."
"I am teasing no one. He is trying to eat me."
"Stop giving him reason to think he can."
And since it was a reasonable request, the Master of Sinanju stepped forward, slamming the gator's fanged jaws shut, simultaneously mushing its head down into the spongy riverbank.
The gator's entire body convulsed, tail slamming in anger, then determination, finally in unmistakable terror as it realized it was utterly powerless to unseat the skirted annoyance on its back.
Chiun waited for the gator to settle down. It lay flat, panting like a flattened, exhausted dog. Calmly, with a sandaled toe, the Master of Sinanju nudged the gator's ribs until it rolled over once, it legs kicking out helpless as broken chicken wings.
"Behold, Remo. A trick you do not know."
Remo ignored the commotion. He was moving through the rank undergrowth, checking the bridge supports.
So Chiun, using only his toe, nudged the helpless alligator over and over like a log, maintaining his balance with nimble steps, until the saurian rolled into the oily bayou waters with a defeated splash.
Chiun stepped off at the last possible moment.
"Good riddance to you, sandworm," squeaked Chiun.
The gator was only too eager to go away. It swam off, tired of tail and discouraged of spirit.
Chiun joined Remo, who was testing the trestle supports with his hands.
"They're solid. Let's go up."
They climbed because it was the easiest way up.
Up on the span, the tracks looked stable. They walked them to make sure. By this time night was upon the bayou. Below, the turbid waters muttered, dark and oily.
"Wonder why Smitty thinks this bridge will be hit?" Remo said.
"It only matters that he does," said Chiun.
"I don't like bein
g way out in the boonies, out of touch, in case something happens somewhere else."
"What could happen? Smith's infallible oracles have whispered secrets to him, and we must all obey."
"Let's just hope we're on ground zero. It could be a long night."
HAROLD SMITH WAS TRYING to follow an audit trail through cyberspace.
The trouble was, trains kept crashing.
He had reasoned that the enemy was moving through the nation's telephone lines in order to attack its rail system. It was a logical deduction. Computerized airline-booking files showed no ticketed Japanese-surnamed passenger moving between the cities in question by air. Rail was too slow. As were cars.
Therefore, the Nishitsu ronin was traveling by fiber-optic cable, like a human fax. It had been the mystifying modus operandi of the Krahseevah before he had attempted to fax himself to Nishitsu headquarters in Osaka, Japan, in order to escape Remo and Chiun about three years before.
Nothing more had been heard of him since then. Smith had assumed that the Krahseevah-the name was Russian for "beautiful," which definitely did not fit the faceless white coverall garment he wore-had been unable to transmit himself via orbiting communications satellites as he did through fiber-optic cable. There was no reason to think otherwise. This new opponent's MO was different. He was engaged in acts of sabotage, not theft. And he displayed a callous disregard for human life, while the Krahseevah had never been known to harm anyone.
This was a different foe with a different agenda.
The audit trail assumed a telephone credit card was being used by the ronin to travel around. Smith was hunting for such a card.
As all over America new crashes, derailments and rail accidents were being reported, Smith input these new destinations into his exploding data base. Soon, he knew, something would bubble up. With luck only one or two phone cards were involved. The more they were used, the sooner the CURE system would make connections.
The trouble was, the longer it took, the more catastrophes the U.S. rail system suffered.
As he waited, the system beeped again.
This time it was in Boise, Idaho. Another Amtrak crash. The Pioneer had derailed in Boise on that exact same spot back in 1993. And Smith had a sudden flash of understanding.
The ronin was duplicating past accidents because time was running out, and it was easier to reengineer a successful derailment than create one anew.
Running out for what? Smith wondered.
REMO HEARD the strange sound long after darkness had fallen.
"What's that?"
"I do not know," said Chiun, head lifting.
As they listened, it became a monotonous metallic creaking, like slow gears going through a laborious cycle. An engine muttered.
Reaching in a back pocket, Remo pulled out an Amtrak schedule he had grabbed at the car-rental agency.
"According to this, the Sunset Limited isn't due for another hour."
Chiun cocked an ear. "It does not sound like a train, but a devil wagon."
"What's a devil wagon?"
"In the days of the renowned Kyong-Ji Line, a railroad man would ride before the locomotive on a wagon he propelled by pumping a seesaw handle. This was to examine the track to insure the way was secure. Also to lure lurking bandits to their doom."
"You had bandits on the Kyong-Ji?"
"Until the Master of that time, my father, ridded the countryside of these brigands-in return for a private coach."
"No gold?"
"The coach was filled with gold. Shame on you, Remo. It goes without saying."
"Let's see what it is."
BILLY REX DAUGHTERS WAS getting worried. Here it was after dark, and he had another ten miles of cable to lay.
The bulldozer creaked beside the rails at a sedate walking pace, its tracks grumbling as the giant spool paid out fiberoptic cable. It came out of the spool and followed the curve of the specialized frontmounted plow, falling flat into the trench as it was excavated. Later a work crew would tamp it down.
It was the damnedest thing, he thought, not for the first time. Laying the information highway of the twenty-first century on twentieth-century rail with a plow not much different from what men first used to till the soil back in the Stone Age.
But there it was.
And here he was. And if Billy Rex didn't get a move on, the Sunset Limited was going to catch him and his dozer on the Bayou Canot bridge and mash man and machine into the trackage like a discarded can of pop.
As he approached the great span, the mists rising from the sluggish waters below made him think of the spirits of the dead who had died in the diesel-soaked, alligator-infested waters below. Billy Rex slowed. There had been a heavy fog the night the Limited went into the bayou. It smothered the span so that the hapless engineer thought he was running over solid rail right up until the moment he rode his diesel into oblivion.
Trouble was, slowing down encouraged the damn mosquitoes. They began swarming.
THE TWO FIGURES materialized on either side of the right-of-way like ghosts from the Bayou Canot incident.
"Hold!" one said. He was a strange one, he was. Old as the hills and dressed for a Chinese square dance.
The other was a regular fellow. Lean as bamboo, with wrists like railroad ties. Neither exactly looked like track men. But they looked harmless enough.
Oddly enough, the mosquitoes didn't seem to have an appetite for them. They stayed off a ways, like careful moths shrinking from a flame.
"Can't stop," he called ahead in his friendliest voice as he approached the pair. "Got a schedule to make."
The tall, skinny one spoke up. "Is that a plow?" Yep.
"Kinda late in the year for clearing snow."
"Or early," Billy Rex returned sociably.
They were walking alongside him now. Not threatening, just interested. Billy Rex began to relax.
"What is this?" asked the little guy, pointing at the serpentine cable dropping into the fresh-turned earth.
"Fiber-optic cable. We're laying the information highway."
"Along railroad track?" the skinny one blurted.
"Hell, phone lines have been strung along the right-of-way and buried beside it for years and years. This here is just the latest wrinkle."
"I didn't know that."
"Well, a body learns something new every day, doesn't he?"
They were approaching the bridge now. The mosquitoes were really biting now. If the engineers were on the money, the cable would run out about now.
It did. The last plopped into the trench, for later splicing. Billy Rex hit the lever that raised the plow. Then he sent his machine up onto the tracks, jockeyed it true and prepared to cross the bridge as fast as reasonable.
"I wouldn't follow me any farther," he said, slapping at his arms. "Ain't safe."
Suddenly there was a business card in his face. He couldn't read it too well by moonlight, but the skinny guy's voice said, "Remo Bell, FCC," in a voice so self-assured, Billy Rex naturally accepted it. "Pull over."
"This is rail I'm on, not blacktop. I can't pull over."
"Then stop this vehicle or face the consequences," said the squeaky voice of the little old Asian.
"What consequences?" Billy Rex naturally asked.
That's when the bulldozer stopped. Dead. Billy Rex yanked out a flashlight to see what it had hit.
The tracks were clear, except for the leather shoe. It had arrested the plow somehow. Inside the shoe was the foot of the skinny guy from the FCC.
Deciding to be sociable, Billy Rex killed the engine.
"What can I do for you fellas?"
"Spot check."
"Check away."
They looked over his cable, peered under his vehicle as if looking for a bomb, checked his ID and for some reason looked real hard at the bulldozer manufacturer's plate before saying, "Okay, you can go now."
"Much obliged."
"You are very wise to buy American," the Asian squeaked.
Then they watched him start up and negotiate the bridge, ponderous tracks gripping steel rail it wasn't designed for.
The mosquitoes followed, as mosquitoes would. If any malingered to sample the two odd ones Billy Rex left behind, it wasn't noticeable.
AFTER THE BULLDOZER was lost in the darkness, Remo turned to Chiun and said, "I think I know what they're after now."
"And you are wrong," Chiun sniffed.
"I didn't say what I was thinking yet."
"You are wrong, whatever you are thinking."
"We'll see about that." Remo looked up at the moon, whose position in the sky verified what his internal clock was telling him. The Sunset Limited was due before long.
They retreated into the undergrowth to watch the bridge for trouble. The night was full of mosquitoes. But all avoided them as if their pores exhaled a natural insecticide, which was closer to the truth than not.
HAROLD SMITH WAS reading the first AP bulletins of the derailment of Amtrak's City of New Orleans at Poplarville, Mississippi, when the link-analysis program began reporting results.
There were three active phone cards.
One was issued to an Akira Kurosawa. The second to a Seiji Ozawa. And the third to Furio Batsuka.
A horrible thought crossed his mind. What if there was more than one ronin?
Double-checking the times of each accident, Smith decided not. Multiple saboteurs would not explain the short intervals or the lack of simultaneous crashes.
Smith then ran a check on the first name. Akira Kurosawa came up as a famous Japanese director of samurai movies. Seiji Ozawa was the Japanese-American conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Smith's brow furrowed distastefully at the dual significance of the word conductor. He detested opponents with humor.
The news wires were humming now. The multiple accidents were becoming hourly bulletins. And all were Amtrak trains. Another shift in tactics. The reasoning was self-evident. Derailed passenger trains meant significant loss of life compared to freight accidents: Amtrak was not hauling cabbages.
"Someone is deliberately bringing enormous pressure to bear on the U.S. rail system, both materially and politically," Smith said aloud.
The why remained elusive.
While his search programs trolled the net for more incidents, Smith began reviewing the state of the U.S. rail system.
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