Encounter Group td-56

by Warren Murphy

  "Okay, Little Father," Remo said, moving off. "Last one in has to cook tonight."

  * * *

  Pavel Zarnitsa had read in Izvestia that American cars were badly made in comparison to the Russian Volga. After ten minutes of trying to spring the trunk lid lock, he was beginning to wonder. It seemed awfully sturdy. The hinges were strong, too, so he gave up on those, as well.

  It might have been better to stay put, but the American and the Korean were obviously agents for the United States government, who would not treat a compromised KGB agent with the same politeness given to Russian dignitaries found stealing military secrets. It would be prison, not expulsion, for Pavel Zarnitsa.

  So Pavel tried another tack. He tore at the carpeting that separated the trunk space from the back of the rear seat. It came loose. Behind it was a partition, which also came loose and exposed the back seat itself. When this was forced, there was a clear opening into the back seat.

  Pavel crawled out of the trunk and stepped from the car. He was free, but he had no intention of running. There was still the matter of the strange creature from another world who had called him by name. Pavel Zarnitsa intended to solve that mystery.

  * * *

  The white door opened automatically for Remo when he approached it. He could sense the remote cameras watching his every move. He stepped into the blue building, and the door closed after him.

  Remo found himself in a curving corridor, white and smooth and winding to his left. He began to walk. Light came from indirect ceiling panels. There seemed to be no danger. In fact, the curving corridor reminded him a little of walking through a fun house back in Palisades Amusement Park, where his orphanage had once been taken on an outing. He had only gone a few feet when he noticed that the natural curve of the path prevented him from seeing more than a few feet ahead or behind him. More disturbingly, he realized that the path was forcing him to move along a continuous outside line. In Sinanju, there were two forms of attack— the outside attack, which was a circle, and the inside attack, which was a line. Remo realized then that any attack would come from ahead or behind, and from the right outer wall, where an inside attack would be the only defense.

  The first attack came from the right. Three knives rammed out of the wall at knee level to cripple his legs. But Remo caught the preliminary sound of a concealing panel flopping back and reversed himself in time. The knives embedded themselves in the opposite wall.

  Remo walked on.

  The second attack came when Remo began to feel himself favor his left, even though he knew that side was probably safe. He tried to avoid hugging the wall, but the spiral path wouldn't let him. It had started to tilt slightly to the left so Remo had to walk that way, as if one of his legs was shorter than the other.

  Then a ball of flame appeared at his back, forcing Remo forward. He ran, aware that the flame might be more of a prod than a direct threat. And because of that awareness, he did not crash headlong into the almost invisible pane of glass, which, had he struck it, would have shattered into dangerous razorlike shards.

  Remo found the edges of the pane and scored it using one very short but hard fingernail. A kick sent the pane to the ground, where it broke harmlessly on the floor. Chiun would have liked that.

  Remo continued on with more confidence— or perhaps because the spiral shrank as it got closer to the center, he found himself moving faster. He tried to slow down, but when everything in two directions seemed to curve into infinity, judging distance and speed became difficult.

  Remo heard the next obstacle before he saw it. Someone moaned just ahead. Putting his back to the left wall, he inched sideways toward the sound so he'd be less of a target.

  Amanda Bull lay on her back in a pool of blood. Remo knelt beside her, and she opened her eyes.

  Amanda coughed a bubble of blood. "Tricked..." she gasped. "He tricked me. Tricked all of us."

  "Where are the others?" Remo asked.

  "Dead... all... dead..."

  "The warhead— do you know where I can find it?"

  "Tulsa," Amanda said with effort. "In truck. Will go off... three hours. Look— look for plain truck with blotches of paint on sides. Find—"

  "Easy," Remo told her.

  "He— shot— me," Amanda continued, her gray eyes fixed on the ceiling. "I... trusted him and he shot me... I was such a jerk. Believing a man."

  Then she died.

  "That's the biz, sweetheart," Remo said and moved on. "They should have drowned you at birth."

  * * *

  The Master of Sinanju was almost there. The tunnel was damp and cool, and he could feel it in his bones despite his robes. Ahead, chinks of light indicated a door not properly fitted. That light had been the only illumination in the blackness of the tunnel.

  Chiun paused to listen. He heard nothing ahead of him, but after a space, he heard slow footsteps behind him. Not Remo. The Russian. He had escaped and followed the Master of Sinanju.

  Chiun, all but invisible in the darkness, pushed himself against the earthen side of the tunnel and allowed the Russian to pass by him. Let the Russian blunder through the door on his own, if that was his wish. If he was not killed immediately, then Chiun would know that it was safe to proceed.

  * * *

  Seeing the old Korean disappear into the ground several hundred yards from the odd-shaped building, Pavel Zarnitsa naturally assumed that Chiun and Remo had both gone into the tunnel. He waited briefly, then entered the tunnel. The Americans would blaze the trail for him so he could safely follow.

  The tunnel was black as a Politburo limousine, and Pavel was forced to feel his way along the walls, which seemed to go on forever until the vague outline of a door showed ahead. There was no sign of the two Americans. Good. They had already gone in. Now Pavel Zarnitsa would go in, too.

  He put his shoulder to the yielding door.

  The room was circular. Fluorescent lights flickered bluely from the ceiling, which gave the room something of the aspect of a hospital operating room. Or a morgue.

  There was a small control console opposite the place where Pavel found himself. A figure was seated at that console, watching a television screen on which Remo Williams could be seen moving down a winding corridor. The figure was dressed in a long purple garment something like a monk's cassock but without the cowl. Above its collar rose the figure's head, which was a pinkish bulb twice the size of a human's and the color of the inside of someone's eyelid. Pavel could not see the World Master's face, who sat with his back to the Russian, but he did see the twin sets of spindly arms hanging uselessly from the armholes of the purple garment.

  Two other arms— human ones— projected from the front of the garment to manipulate the console buttons.

  Pavel eased forward, trying to make no sound. But he made a sound.

  The World Master turned in his chair, causing his false arms to rattle like kindling. But Pavel wasn't thinking of them, or of the unearthly face that now faced his own. He was thinking of the familiar baritone voice that came from the slit mouth beneath the single fisheye set in the center of the World Master's pink face.

  "Pavel! You fool. You stupid fool— you do not belong here!"

  "Chuzhoi!" Pavel croaked incredulously. "What is this? What—"

  "Idiot," the expressionless face said. "You have stumbled upon a GRU operation. The greatest of all time."

  "No," Pavel said hollowly. "You cannot do this. Exploding a nuclear weapon in the United States is wrong. You—"

  "You will not stop me," the other said, drawing a revolver. "I cannot allow you to interfere."

  Pavel stepped back in shock. "You would shoot me? I am your brother!"

  * * *

  The ceiling changed. It was no longer smooth, Remo saw. Instead, for about six feet, it was perforated with hundreds of tiny holes. Beyond that, just visible around the bend, the ceiling was smooth again.

  Remo became a blur, and thus sped through the danger zone before any of the acid that squirted from a
bove could hit him. He looked back and saw the acid spatter and blacken the floor. Fumes curled up and reached toward him. Before Remo could move on, he saw another perforated section of ceiling revealed just ahead. It, too, began raining acid. And the acid formed puddles, which spilled in the direction of Remo's feet.

  There was barely time for the fact that he was trapped to sink in when Remo heard the sound of gunshots through the walls followed by a trailing scream.

  "Aiiieeeee!"

  Chiun. That scream was Chiun's.

  Remo ran forward three steps, putting him on an outside line, and let it carry him through the sheet metal wall. The wall screeched like the amplified sound of a nail pulled from wood as Remo's hands pierced it and bent it outward.

  He was in the next corridor, really a continuation of the single spiral. Remo got back on the outside line, and tore through the next wall. He stumbled right into a trap. A hand grenade dropped from a ceiling trap by a string, which pulled the pin out.

  Remo grabbed the grenade and threw it down the corridor and threw himself in the opposite direction. The explosion hurt his eardrums even though he'd remembered to open his mouth wide to equalize the pressure that might otherwise have damaged them.

  Picking himself up, Remo went through the last wall as if it were a sheet of foil and found himself in the central chamber.

  The first thing he saw was Chiun, looking horrified, standing with his back against one wall and looking down at two bodies lying on the floor. Chiun saw Remo.

  "I think it is dead," Chiun squeaked. "I may have killed it, but I am not certain. Oh, Remo, isn't it horrible?"

  Remo looked at the still form of the World Master, whose encephalitic head lay at too sharp an angle to his body for his neck not to be broken. A single fisheye stared up sightlessly, and the many arms, both human and not, which splayed from the creature's body made it look like some deformed spider.

  Remo knelt beside the body, while Chiun all but jumped onto the console chair like a caricature of a woman who has seen a mouse.

  "Is it dead, Remo?" Chiun asked.

  Remo touched the pinkish head and felt the slickness of plastic. He pulled the head loose to reveal a human head whose strong features and black hair resembled those of Pavel Zarnitsa's— even in death.

  "Relax, Chiun. It's only a disguise."

  "Are you certain?" Chiun asked doubtfully. "But when he saw the truth, he shook himself and stepped forward confidently. "Why, of course it is a disguise, Remo. How could it not be?"

  Remo ignored that and asked, "What happened here?"

  "This Russian freed himself and followed me, but I tricked him," Chiun said, pointing to Pavel Zarnitsa, who was either dead or very close to it. "I let him pass before me. He surprised this— this insect— and they quarrelled. The insect shot him, and I felled the insect with a single blow to its neck. Then I saw its face..."

  Remo went to Pavel Zarnitsa. The Russian was bleeding to death. He would not live long, but for the moment he did live.

  Pavel opened his eyes. "He... is dead?"

  Remo nodded.

  "Is... my brother," Pavel said. "Chuzhoi... Zarnitsa. Younger brother... with GRU. You know GRU? He— he should have been KGB. Now... is dead. I am... dead, too. No? He called me fool. He is... fool. He would kill... own brother for stupid GRU plan... Listen. You must— must find warhead before—"

  "I know where it is," Remo told him, coming to his feet. "I'm going to have to leave you."

  Pavel closed his eyes. "I will be dead when you return."

  "I know," Remo said. And he and Chiun left through the underground tunnel.

  "The warhead's in Tulsa, Chiun," Remo said as they piled into the car. "We've got maybe two hours before it goes."

  "You learned the snail maze?"

  Remo nodded. "The trick is not to follow the path."

  "Good. You have learned something for a change."

  * * *

  Finding the truck was the easy part. It stood on a side street in downtown Tulsa near the university. Remo recognized it from Amanda Bull's description. A plain truck except for the paint splotches, which hid the black and yellow nuclear emblems on its sides.

  Remo broke the latch and threw open the cargo door. The warhead was inside. It looked small and unimpressive for the damage it could wreak.

  "There it is," Remo said. "I'd better call Smith."

  "There is no time," Chiun said levelly. "I must act quickly."

  "You? Chiun, this calls for an expert. If you make a mistake, you'll blow us up."

  Chiun ignored him. "There is no time to acquire the correct oil, so I must find another way," he said to himself as he felt the cone projection, which was the most distinguishing feature of the warhead.

  "Maybe we should drive it out of the city, where it'll do less damage when it blows," Remo suggested.

  "It will not explode," Chiun said.

  "Since when do you know anything about nuclear weapons?"

  Chiun stopped what he was doing and looked at Remo. "Do you remember the puzzle, Remo?"

  "The Rubik's Cube? Sure. But what does that have to do—"

  "You could not understand how I was able to solve the cube, even with my eyes closed. But I did. This was possible because everything man makes is given a basic form, a unity of self. When this puzzle was built, its unity of form had all of the little colored squares properly arranged. When the squares are disarranged, the internal unity is disturbed. This has nothing to do with the colored squares, Remo, but with the way the puzzle parts fitted together when it was in unity with itself. To solve this cube, I did not even look at the colored squares, I simply manipulated its parts until I felt those parts achieve unity. The colors took care of themselves."

  "You did it by feel, then?"

  "Yes. And one day you, too, will be able to accomplish the same thing. It is the same with this device. At the point of its creation, it was not armed. It is armed now and is therefore in disunity. I will undo that disunity now."

  "Okay, Little Father. It's your show. I just hope you're right."

  Chiun went back to the warhead. It was a complicated mechanism— certainly more complicated than a Rubik's Cube, even if the combinations were fewer. The consequences of even a single error were all the greater, however...

  Remo stood guard outside the truck. It was late morning now, and young college students passed by the truck frequently. They had no idea that they were only a few feet away from a nuclear weapon that could end their studies and their lives in a single white-hot flash of fire. It was an eerie sensation for Remo Williams. He wanted to warn them away, but he knew that no matter how far they ran or drove, they would not escape the nuclear blast. So what was the use? Let them enjoy themselves— while they could.

  Almost an hour dragged past, and Remo stuck his head inside the truck. "How's it coming?" he asked anxiously.

  But the Master of Sinanju, intent upon his work, did not answer him.

  Remo returned to his thoughts. What would Smith do if they all went up? Would he—

  "Run, Remo!" Chiun shouted suddenly, and came out of the truck like a shot.

  "Huh?" Remo said, startled.

  "Run!"

  Remo took off, Chiun at his side. Together, they rounded a corner just as a great explosion echoed behind them. Remo prepared for the flash that would obliterate them both...

  * * *

  "It is all right now," Chiun said, coming to a stop.

  "It exploded. The warhead exploded. Why aren't we dead?"

  "We are not dead thanks to the skill of the Master of Sinanju," Chiun said as he led Remo back to the smoking ruin that was the truck.

  Remo looked at the truck. "I don't get it. Was it a dud?"

  "No," Chiun told him. "It was almost our deaths. The fools who built that device built it so that once armed, its unity could not be reestablished."

  "Probably something to do with the failsafe," Remo suggested.

  "Whatever. When I discovered this, R
emo, I examined the mechanism to see what made it work. Thus I discovered that in order for the atomic part to work, it must be made to work by an ordinary explosion."

  "That's right," Remo said, ignoring the people who had rushed to the scene. "They trigger the nuclear explosion with a regular one. I read that somewhere once."

  "I saw that I could not stop the smaller explosive device without possibly causing the bigger explosion. So I ignored that and rendered the atomic part useless. This caused the small explosion."

  "For a minute I thought you'd blown it," Remo said. "Not a bad job."

  "An excellent job," Chiun corrected. "Next time I will be able to do it with my eyes closed."

  "Remind me to be out sick that day," Remo said.

  ?Chapter Eighteen

  Later that night, they met with Dr. Harold W. Smith at the farm owned by the late Ethel Sump.

  "Whaddya say, Smitty?" Remo said when Smith arrived.

  "Remo. Master of Sinanju," Smith said curtly.

  "Hail, Emperor Smith. What news?"

  "I've managed to tie up most of the loose ends of this matter. The remains of the warhead have been disposed of, and a story planted in the Tulsa papers to cover the explosion. You did an excellent job dealing with the warhead, Master of Sinanju. The president is grateful."

  Chiun bowed. "Perhaps his gratitude will manifest itself in interesting ways," he suggested.

  "Eh?"

  "What Chiun is trying to say, Smitty," Remo put in, "is that he figures he deserves a bonus for saving Tulsa."

  "A modest bonus," Chiun added. "I have learned that there are 432,800 people who live in that place. Perhaps one gold coin per life saved would be appropriate..."

  "We will discuss this later," Smith said, frowning. "I'd like to examine this so-called flying saucer first."

  "Not much left, is there?" Remo said as they stood over the cool slag.

  Smith probed the metallic remains with a penknife. "I ran a check on Chuzhoi Zarnitsa before I left Folcroft. He belonged to the GRU, a Russian intelligence rival of the KGB. We hadn't known he was in this country. As best as I've been able to determine, this Chuzhoi was not acting on direct orders of the Soviet Union. It isn't always possible to know anything for certain in this area, but this plot to destroy our missile defense system was apparently his own. It may have been sanctioned by the GRU, but that's as high as the orders emanated. Zarnitsa had no support personnel in this country— except for his American dupes."