Return Engagement td-71

by Warren Murphy

  Smith's hand tightened on the receiver. "What?"

  Chiun's voice came on the line as Remo started to reply.

  "Do not fear, Emperor. Ferris is not truly lost."

  "Where is he?"

  "We do not know."

  "Then he is lost."

  "No, merely misplaced. Here, Remo will explain his failure to you. Please do not punish him too severely."

  "Thanks a lot, Chiun," Remo said away from the phone. Over the line, Smith heard them lapse into a tense exchange in Korean. He waited for the bickering to subside because he knew neither man would listen to him as long as they were arguing.

  Finally Remo's voice came back on the phone.

  "He was kidnapped, Smitty. We saw it happen, but the kidnappers got away. They were driving a van that must have been built of steel."

  "Titanium," Chiun said in the background. "Mere steel would not have stopped us."

  Remo went on after a tired sigh. "It was a girl, young, blond, with an older guy. Really old."

  "But younger than me," Chiun chimed in. "will you let me finish?" Remo said.

  Smith rolled his eyes heavenward. Even at this moment of failure, his immediate reaction was that it felt as if Remo and Chiun had never left CURE. His second was that he felt the walls were closing in.

  "Anyway," Remo went on, "the old guy was in a wheelchair."

  "We must have a bad connection," Smith said. "I thought you said one of the kidnappers was in a wheelchair. Repeat please."

  "He was in a wheelchair. I know it sounds crazy, but there you go. Ferris has been kidnapped by a disabled person. They even rammed a car out of a handicapped parking space and killed the driver just to get the space. At least, that's how I read the scene."

  "This doesn't make sense," Smith said.

  "It gets worse. The guy who took the parking space had a shuriken lodged in his throat."

  "A which?"

  "A shuriken," Remo repeated. "It's a sharpened throwing star. Ninjas use them for killing."

  "Ferris D'Orr was kidnapped by ninjas?"

  "I don't think so," Remo said. "This wasn't the usual throwing star. It was shaped like a swastika, with the edges sharpened."

  "Nazi ninjas kidnapped Ferris D'Orr? Is that what you're saying?" He reached for a bottle of extra-strength aspirin.

  "No, I'm telling you what I saw and what I found. It's up to you to figure it out."

  "Is there anything more?"

  "We followed them. They ran us off the road and got away."

  "Remo wouldn't let me drive," the voice of the Master of Sinanju came faintly through the receiver.

  Dr. Harold W. Smith sat down in his leather chair wondering how he would explain this to the President. "I don't suppose you managed to get the van's license plate in all the excitement?" Smith asked acidly.

  "No, I didn't get the van's license plate," Remo repeated. "I don't work for you, remember?"

  "But I do and did," another voice said.

  Smith bolted up in his chair. "What was that? What did Chiun say?"

  "Here, you talk to him," Remo said.

  "Master of Sinanju?" Smith said, hope rising in his heart.

  "Never fear, Emperor, I have the numbers at my command. Truly, I have learned how important numbers are in American society. You have numbers for everything, for telephones, for houses, and for American Express. I saw the numbers of the offending vehicle."

  "Read them to me, please," Dr. Smith said, booting up his CURE computers. In a walled-off section of Folcroft's basement, the powerful bank of computers kicked into silent life.

  "DOC-183," said Chiun.

  "What state?" said Smith, in putting the numbers into the search file.

  "Moving fast," said Chiun.

  "I mean what state was listed at the bottom of the license plate. There is always a state name."

  "I did not notice," said Chiun unhappily. "Are states also important? I thought only numbers were. Should I remember the state the next time, or the numbers?"

  "Both," said Smith wearily.

  "Both. It will be extra work, but I will do this in your honor, O generous dispenser of American Express."

  "This is important, Master of Sinanju. Do you, maybe, remember the first letter of the state name?"

  "I think it began with A."

  "Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, or Arkansas?" asked Smith, his fingers poised to key in the answer.

  "Yes, one of those," Chiun said confidently.

  Smith's fingers went limp. "Do you remember the color?"

  "White, with red letters."

  "Alabama," said Smith, inputting the name.

  The computer searched its memory banks and generated an on-screen readout.

  "The van is licensed to the White Aryan League of America and Alabama," Smith said. Then he thought about what he had said. "Put Remo on, please," Smith told Chiun.

  "Smitty?" Rema said.

  "That swastika means something. The van is registered to a neo-Nazi group."

  "What would neo-Nazis want with Ferris D'Orr?"

  "I can't imagine, but it's going to be up to you and Chiun to find out and get D'Orr back before anything happens to him."

  "Talk to Chiun. I'm just along for the ride until this is over. Then I'm going back to Korea."

  "Would you tell him, Remo?" Smith pleaded. "I always get a headache explaining even simple things to him."

  Remo stopped the rented car in front of the big gates with the hand-carved pinewood sign, "FORTRESS PURITY," over them. He stuck his head out the window and called to the guard, who wore a brown uniform and a Sam Brawne belt.

  "Excuse me," Remo called, "Would you mind opening up?"

  The guard sauntered over to the car. Out of the corner of his mouth, Remo whispered to Chiun, "Remember, keep your sunglasses on."

  The Master of Sinanju adjusted his wraparound sunglasses over his almond eyes and pulled his white bowler down over his forehead. It matched his suit. His tie and breast-pocket handkerchief were a matching gold.

  "Don't worry, I am cool," he said, using a word he had picked up from television. Americans used it a lot. Therefore so would he.

  "What do you want?" the guard asked suspiciously. "We want to sign up. Where's your recruiting offices?"

  "We only let in the racially pure," the guard said, looking at Remo's brown eyes and dark complexion. "What's your name?"

  "Remo."

  "Doesn't sound very Aryan to me," the guard said slowly.

  "Remo White. And this is my father."

  "Chiun, Chiun Whiter," said the Master of Sinanju.

  "Whiter? Whiter than what?" Remo whispered in Korean.

  "Whiter than thou," answered Chiun, adjusting his tie.

  "What lingo was that you're speaking?" demanded the guard in a suspicious voice.

  "Aryan," said Remo. "We're the official Aryan tutors. By this time next month, you'll all be speaking it."

  The guard looked at them a long time and finally made up his mind.

  "Okay, you can go in. It's the big building with the flag. "

  "They all have flags," said Chiun as they passed through the grounds. Around them, men in brown uniforms marched in formation, "Nice ones. It is good to see the Zingh again."

  "The what?"

  "The Zingh," said Chiun, pointing. "It is a lucky symbol. "

  "Little Father," said Remo as they got out of the car and walked up the long ramp in front of the main building, "that's the swastika. It's the Nazi symbol. It's evil."

  Chiun spat. "Do the Japanese own the sun because they put it on their flags'?" he asked. "Or the Americans the stars? The Zingh is older than Germany. In ancient days it was a proud sign. Remind me to tell you about it someday."

  "Later. Right now, I want you to let me do all the talking. These people are Nazis. They may be dangerous."

  "Nazis are not dangerous," said Chiun. "They are idiots."

  "Dangerous idiots, then. Just let me do the talking. We've got to pass ourselves o
ff as good clean Aryans.

  "That will be impossible. Aryans never bathed and were blood-drinking barbarians."

  The man at the registration desk did not ask them if they were Aryans. He did not even ask their names. He asked only how much they made per year.

  Remo said, "I'm unemployed."

  Chiun said, "More than you can imagine."

  "Will you pay your friend's dues?" the man asked Chiun.

  "Surely," said Chiun.

  "That'll be twenty-five thousand dollars for the year. Prorated. "

  "Do you take American Express?" Chiun asked casually.

  "Everyone takes American Express," said the man, running Chiun's card through a credit-card machine. "I'll get you your uniforms," said the man. A moment later he was back with two cardboard boxes. He handed them to Remo.

  "These should fit you both. You bunk in the Siegfried Barracks. "

  On the way out the door, Chiun opened his box. When he saw the contents, he made a disgusted face and threw the box into a trash barrel.

  "We'll need that to blend in-" Remo said.

  "When you wear a uniform," Chiun pointed out, "you surrender your very soul to the rules of others. Surrender nothing to these people, Remo, or they will own you.'

  "How else are we going to blend in with these people?" asked Remo.

  "Sinanju does not blend in with others," said Chiun. "others blend in with Sinanju."

  "Uh-oh, trouble," Ilsa Gans said, looking out the window of Konrad Blutsturz' office.

  "What is it, Ilsa?" Konrad Blutsturz said absently. He pored over the blueprints that lay in profusion on his desk. With one eye, he watched Ilsa's rear end as she bent over to look more closely at whatever interested her. It was a nice rear end, very round.

  "Remember those two men? The ones who chased us in Baltimore?"

  "Government agents. Bunglers, no doubt."

  "Well, they're here."

  Konrad Blutsturz looked up. He hit the operating switch and his chair spun out from behind the desk and joined Ilsa at the window.

  Below, a tall man in chinos and a T-shirt walked to one of the barracks, carrying a White Aryan League regulation uniform across one arm. A smaller man in white walked beside him, looking around curiously.

  "Have them killed. I am busy. The doctor will be here shortly, and I must attend to many details."

  "Oh, goody."

  "Remember to use our expendable people."

  "They're not as good as your lieutenants. They always screw up."

  "Then use more of them. Soon we will have no need for any of them anymore. For soon I will walk like other men. And do the other things erect men do."

  "I like the way you said that-erect."

  Remo had given up trying to fit into his brown uniform when someone knocked at the door of the barracks room he and Chiun had been assigned.

  "What?" asked Remo, realizing for the first time that Chiun had thrown out the unifonn meant for him and that he had wasted twenty minutes trying to fit into a child's size.

  "First duty," a voice said. "Report to the shooting range."

  "I am not touching a firearm," Chiun said firmly. "Nor will you."

  "Maybe we can fake it." said Remo.

  They found the front door of the firing range locked and deserted.

  "Maybe there's a side door," said Remo.

  There was a small one. The words "Firing Range" were scrawled on a sheet of blue-lined paper torn from a loose-leaf notebook and taped to the door.

  "I guess this is it," Remo said.

  The door clicked shut behind them and there was no light.

  "This doesn't smell right," Remo said.

  "Gunpowder," said Chiun, wrinkling his nose. "It never does."

  "I mean this setup. I think it's exactly that."

  They felt their way along a wall in the darkness. Remo sensed a great open space to his right, and beyond that there was some movement and the faint smell of human beings, but it was muted, as if intercepted by a barrier.

  When the lights suddenly snapped on in the building, Remo saw the black silhouette targets of the firing range. They were not in front of them. They were on the wall directly behind them.

  At the far end of the building, men in brown uniforms stood behind the glass ports of firing stations. They hefted rifles to their shoulders and pointed them, "Is this a form of initiation?" asked Chiun.

  "No, it's a form of slaughter. And we're the objects." The rifles started cracking, sharp spiteful cracks. Behind Remo and Chiun white holes were punched into the black targets, and the air around them vibrated with the sounds of high-velocity slugs.

  "Weaver Pattern, Little Father," Remo said.

  "Agreed," said Chiun.

  Remo moved toward the soldiers of the White Aryan League in a straight line. The Master of Sinanju took a parallel course. Abruptly Chiun cut across the path of Remo's trajectory, and Remo slipped behind him in a similar, but opposite diagonal movement.

  To the soldiers working their rifles, it looked as if Remo and Chiun were panicking in all directions. That was the idea of the Sinanju Weaver Pattern. Each man ran a broken line, but it was an intersecting broken line, weaving across one another's paths. It had been originally devised as a form of attack against archers at the time of Darius of Persia.

  As Chiun had explained it to Remo years ago, a man running toward an assailant presented a static target that grew larger the closer he came to the attacker. A man running side to side presented a confusing target. But two men running a Weaver Pattern were confusion upon confusion, because an archer always picked the largest target. He would always fire when the two running men crossed paths to form a converging double mark. But by the time he loosed his arrow, the two men were running in diverging paths.

  It had worked against arrows. It worked against bullets, which were faster than arrows, but also smaller, and easier to avoid because they required more precise aiming.

  There were five riflemen. By the time they realized they could not pick their targets individually, Remo and Chiun had cleared half the space toward them.

  The marksmen switched tactics and started a murderous crossfire. But Remo and Chiun were already too close to them for that and they had to revert to individual targeting.

  It was too late for individual action as well.

  One rifleman sighted on Remo, waiting until his chest tilled his field of vision. He squeezed the trigger. Slowly, because that gave the cleanest shot.

  He felt his weapon kick against his shoulder. He didn't feel it discharge. Nor did he feel the butt of the rifle, pushed by Remo's open palm, tear his shoulder muscles loose. The nerves had been severed and no pain signals were transmitted. The rifle clattered to the floor, and the gunman clutched his limp arm stupidly.

  Remo took him out with a short chop to the neck and turned on another soldier, who was swinging his rifle around.

  Remo stopped, folded his arms across his chest, and said, "Tell you what, pal. I'll give you one freebie shot."

  The soldier fired. The bullet went where it was supposed to go, but strangely, his target did not fall or even grab at his solar plexus. The soldier brought his weapon up to his shoulder again, but by then it was too late.

  Remo scolded, "I said one shot. You're out." He jellied the man's face.

  Remo stepped over the falling body to reach Chiun, but the Master of Sinanju needed no help. He stood over the twisting form of a soldier whose legs no longer worked. Two others had Chiun between them. They kept trying to bring their rifle muzzles to bear on the Master of Sinanju, but each time they lifted their weapons, Chiun swatted them down like a child fighting off broom handles.

  "I'd give it up if I were you," Remo told them. "You're only going to prolong the agony."

  "Silence. Remo," said the Master of Sinanju, suddenly making the barrels fly up instead of down. "Wheee!"

  The two soldiers refused to give up. One shot was all they needed, but they couldn't keep their rifles trained on whe
re a bullet would do the most good long enough to pull the trigger. One started to blubber uncontrollably.

  When the Master of Sinanju grew tired of his sport, he grasped the rifle muzzles. The action was brief, but firm, and the soldiers never knew that Chiun had squeezed the muzzles shut.

  "I am tired of this," announced Chiun, and he walked away with taunting unconcern.

  The soldiers couldn't believe their good fortune. Sighting down their weapons, they fired in unison. The blowback shattered the receiving mechanisms and sent metal and wood shrapnel into the faces of the guards. They dropped, still clutching their useless weapons, like toy soldiers. Which is what they really were.

  "That was excellent shooting practice," said Chiun. "How many did you get?"

  "Two," Remo said.

  "Three," said Chiun. "I win."

  "No, I think we both lose. They're onto us."

  "So much for blending in."

  Chapter 23

  They had taken Ferris D'Orr from the van still huddled in the cot. Soldiers did that. Soldiers in brown uniforms with the red Nazi armbands.

  Ferris had peeked as they carried him into the big main building. It was dark. He was in some kind of compound, surrounded by guards and a high fence. There were many soldiers, and many buildings. Nazi flags flew from every roof. It looked like the photos of those places his mother used to harp about places like Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen-places he knew couldn't possibly exist on American soil.

  "Oh, my God," Ferris said under his breath. "I'm in an extermination camp."

  They took him into a homey dining room, and the blond, Ilsa, stripped the blanket back and offered her hand.

  "We're here," she called.

  Ferris refused to get up. He wouldn't let go of the blanket either. He clutched one corner of it in his hand.

  "Come on," Ilsa said sweetly, "Get up."

  "Perhaps Mr. D'Orr would like to freshen up," said the guttural voice of Ferris' nightmares. "A shower, perhaps?"

  "No way!" screamed Ferris D'Orr. "I know what you people mean by showers."

  "He is frightened after his long journey," said Konrad Blutsturz. "Let me speak with him, You start the oven."

  "I'm not Jewish!" Ferris said, jumping to his feet.

  The old man laughed. "You already told us that. Ilsa is merely going to start dinner. Do you have a preference?"