Killing Time td-50

by Warren Murphy

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  "Zadnia," Smith said, bewildered. Across from him, the Folcroft Four seemed to be smirking. The last of the machine's parts had been handed over. Now you make it run.

  He would have to call Remo. Maybe Remo had dis­covered somehting during the night that would shed some light on this Zadnia business. He called the Shangri-la number. The line was dead. No ring, noth­ing. He called the operator and asked her to dial the number for him. She told him that the line was out of order, possibly because of some violent snowstorms going on in that part of the country.

  While the operator was talking, the special red phone on his desk, the one with the direct hookup to the president, rang. He immediately hung up on the operator and picked up the red phone on the first ring.

  "Yes, Mr. President," he said. He listened for sev­eral minutes while the president spoke, and during those minutes Smith felt as if he'd aged five years. He could almost feel the flesh of his face sagging with each dreadful word on the other end of the line.

  "Thank you for the information, Mr. President. We're working on it," he said and broke the con­nection.

  Dobbins was dead. The killers had won again.

  There was only one thing to do. Smith checked the special portable phone in his attache case and locked the clasps. Then he memorized the coordinates of Shangri-la, which Remo had given him, pulled on his galoshes and coat, and fixed his brown felt hat on his head. There was no time to wait for snowstorms. If Remo couldn't get out of Shangri-la, Smith would go there himself.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As Harold Smith was closing the catches to his attache case, Remo was sitting in a pine lean-to some­where in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

  He should have known that Chiun would get bored with his new toy before they had gone even forty miles on their skis. But that had put them on a drivable main highway, and a truck driver had barreled them into Chicago.

  Chicago itself, despite the arctic winds off Lake Michigan, was a blessing. O'Hare Airport was used to terrible weather and they managed to catch a flight as far as Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

  Naturally, Chiun insisted on sitting in the seat next to the left wing, which was occupied by a Chinese widow who was nearly as boisterous as Chiun. After twenty minutes of mutual castigation, the rest of the passengers had demanded that both the strange old skinny Chinese guy and his wife be bodily ejected from the aircraft. Chiun made the point that he was neither Chinese nor crazy, which was what any person married to the Chinese lady would have to be in order to tolerate her dog-eating ways. He emphasized the point by knocking out the window above the left wing

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  seat, causing the 727 to fall into a shrieking spin as oxygen masks dropped into the fusilage and several loose articles of clothing got sucked out into the at­mosphere. The temperature inside the plane plum­meted.

  The plane climbed out of the spin only after Remo managed to stop up the open window with someone's red American Tourister weekender, which had hereto­fore not been collapsible. Then he'd had to give all three stewardesses a good sample of the 52 steps to ecstasy before they would agree that the missing window was a quirk of fate.

  At Sioux Falls, Remo stole the first available auto­mobile, a pink 1963 Nash Rambler, which puttered as far as Belvidere in Jackson County before giving up the ghost in a cloud of greasy black smoke. He'd kept the owner's registration card so that whoever usually drove the old fossil could be reimbursed. Smitty was going to love that. In his book, stealing cars was defi­nitely not a desirable function of CURE, and paying for them was even less so.

  They still had twenty miles to hike before even arriv­ing in the right county, then eighty more skimming the 2,000-foot high cliffs of the South Dakota Badlands in the back seat of a souped-up '55 driven by suicidal teen-agers, before reaching Deaver Airport. Which, as the man said, was closed. A wonderful trip.

  Now he sat under the pine lean-to, watching the morning sun blaze in full glory, while he wondered what to do next. The storm had quit about an hour after dawn, and the snow glistened, trackless, on the ground around him. A few feet away, Chiun slept quietly on a mat fashioned from twigs.

  Chiun had led them to this spot in the middle of no­where, based on nothing more than the fact that the

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  area they were in was the least inhabited. Remo tried to argue that Felix Foxx was even less prepared than they were to brave the desolate countryside alone dur­ing a snowstorm, but Chiun had insisted. He heard echoes, he said. And, actually, Remo had heard them, away-faraway, disconnected echoes through the mountains that seemed to have no point of origin. But by that time he was too exhausted to know whether the echoes were anything more than the soughing of the wind in the trees.

  Once they made camp, Chiun had slept immedi­ately. The most Remo could do was to lower his heartrate and will his body into a simulation of basal metabolism. It was fake sleep, with all his senses keenly aware, but he had felt a little better afterward.

  Suddenly Chiun sat up, bolt upright, his head cocked. Remo opened his mouth to speak, but the old man held up a restraining hand. He listened for a few more seconds, then said, "Prepare."

  Remo heard it too. He burst out of the pine lean-to like an explosion.

  There were six of them, very young, armed to the teeth and in uniform. American Army uniforms, Remo thought, although the garments didn't look much like the combat fatigue he remembered from Vietnam in his pre-CURE days. There was something strange about the lot of them, something bizarre yet familiar. It was a feeling. ... No, a smell. A smell that reminded REMO of death and decay and falseness.

  Chiun took out two of the soldiers at once with a twisting kick that sent them splattering against the trunks of two huge trees. REMO caught one of the men, a handsome youth of nineteen or twenty, in the solar plexus. Then he let fly with a right that wedged the fourth soldier's nose inside his brain.

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  It happened in a flash; four men were dead before the other two could even register what was going on. Here were two civilians, one a five-foot-tail Oriental about a hundred years old and the other a lunatic who slept outdoors in twelve-degree weather in a T-shirt, and they were obliterating the Team.

  The Team, Sergeant Randall Riley thought as he saw the old Oriental circling with Davenport. Daven­port was one of the Team. Like the other Team mem­bers, Davenport was unbeatable. Davenport was the best thing with a knife since Geronimo. That was why Foxx had recruited him. Davenport's prowess with a knife was too good for the regular army.

  The army was an organization that told you to go out and kill, and when you killed they gave you medals and called you a hero. Until the war ended . And once it ended, you didn't get any more medals for killing. Oh, no. Suddenly, with the signing of a piece of paper, good knife men like Davenport weren't allowed to kill anymore. Suddenly there were rules that said that if you killed, you got martialed and thrown in the slammer till the worms ate out your eyes.

  That was what the regular army did to Davenport. He'd still be rotting away in prison, his knife-arm used for making wallets, if it hadn't been for Foxx.

  And the Team.

  And now the Team was down by four, and this crazy old chink was taking on Davenport and his Bowie with his bare hands. Riley cocked the safety off his S & W Centennial Airweight and waited. Let Davenport have his fun with the old fool. Then he'd polish off the skinny guy with the Centennial.

  For the Team.

  He watched as Chiun and Davenport circled one an­other, Davenport's Bowie knife swiping the air sav-

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  ageiy. The old man barely seemed to move, and yet each time the knife slashed downward to where the old man's face was, or his chest, or his belly, the old man was somehow gone from the spot.

  Riley blinked. His eyes must not be working right, he decided. And then Davenport was on the gook, right, on top of him, and the knife was singing through the still morning air and shining in the bright m
orning sun, and then. ... It wasn't possible! The knife was sailing over the tops of the trees, traveling like it had been shot out of a cannon, and attached to it was something pale and long with one end red and ragged that spilled a rain of blood. And then Davenport was screaming and his eyes were rolling like the eyes of a shot horse and he was pointing to the bloodied stump that used to be his shoulder and, Christ, it was just like Guadalcanal all over again, with men moaning while their arms and legs rolled like broken toys down the hills around them, oh, Christl

  Riley opened fire. A blur came toward him, and then he screamed as the bullet aimed for the thin man in the T-shirt missed and exploded into Davenport's guts. But by then the Centennial was somehow out of his hand, anyway, and there was nothing to do but run.

  The Team. Got to tell the rest of the Team, Riley told himself, his thoughts blurred with the urine smell of fear that he hadn't known since the first days of World War II. Just running was a victory. He would never have even gotten the chance to run if he hadn't fallen down the twenty-foot cliff. The skinny guy in the T-shirt already had his hands on him after he'd knocked the Centennial out of his hand. Fortunately, the skinny guy only had hold of the cuff of Riley's trousers, and when Riley skidded off the edge and down the snow-

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  covered drop, the fabric had torn. So now half of Rifey's right pantleg was torn off and all that stood be­tween the freezing air and the skin of his calf was a set of woolen BVDs, but he was free. For the Team. For Foxx. Got to tell Foxx.

  "Let him go," Chiun said. "He will not be hard to fol­low." He pointed to the wide indentations Riley's body had made in the snow, during his descent down the steep hill. Beyond, at the base, his footprints clearly etched the way.

  REMO walked back to where the five bodies lay and opened the collar of one. "Something's funny here," he said as he read the man's dogtags. "It says that he was born in 1923. That would make him fifty-nine years old. But he's a kid. And look at this one. . . .

  "They are none of them children," Chiun said.

  Remo looked at the five again. Chiun was right, he saw with amazement. They weren't the same men he remembered killing. The dead men possessed the same features, but all had the grizzled and aged faces of well-conditioned, middle-aged men.

  "But they were young," Remo said, feeling a chill inside his bones. The smell was stronger now. It was the death-smell, but different, more stale, as if the death in these men's bodies had been sealed into a bottle for decades and finally exposed to air.

  Remo bent over the soldier again. He was undenia­bly who the dogtags said he was: a man nearing sixty years of age. How would Remo ever explain to Smith that he had killed a nineteen-year-old boy whose body was replaced by that of a sixty-year-old man in the span of five minutes? There was something else he wanted to see. He tore the man's uniform and long un-

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  derwear up to the armpit, and found it. The man's arms were covered with needle marks.

  The same marks Posie Ponselle wore.

  "Chiun."

  They were all marked, every one of them.

  "Leave them. I hear the sound of an engine." They hurtled at top speed through the snow, following Riley's footsteps. But before they reached the copse of dense pine forest where the footsteps led, the en­gine noise gunned to a roar and then a small Cessna appeared behind the copse. It was a low takeoff, and in the bright morning light Remo could see the pilot's face clearly. Foxx looped around in a wide circle, then buzzed directly over Remo and Chiun. As he started his ascent, he saluted Remo with two fingers and a smirk. He looped wide again and was gone.

  Neither Chiun nor Remo broke the silence for sev­eral minutes. Remo held his eyes to the sky, watching the Cessna's contrails puff into fat clouds and fade away. They'd come so close. So damn close.

  In a clearing in front of the airstrip Foxx had just used, Remo found the remains of an abandoned camp. Oh, sharp, Remo, he said to himself. A camp, soldiers, Foxx, the works. Right here at your finger­tips. And you let them slip away. A fine assassin you are.

  He went from tent to empty tent. Everything was in perfect order. Except that there were no people, any­where. There were no vehicles, no tracks, no foot­prints leading out of the clearing, nothing. It was as if a small army base had just dematerialized.

  "Remo." Chiun's voice came high and clear in the still air. From a distance, the old man looked as if he were dancing, prodding at the earth beside a huge

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  pine, first with one dainty foot, then the other, his face creased in concentration. "This ground is hollow," he said.

  With the heels of his hands, Remo tested the four-by-four-foot-square area Chiun had marked. Sure is," he said, clearing away the foot and a half of snow that covered it. Beneath the snow was a thick carpet of moss.

  "Hah," Chiun shrieked.

  "Hah? It's moss."

  "It is not moss, o dim one," Chiun declared with an­noyance. "This is the south side of that tree." He pointed to the towering pine. "Moss grows on the north side. This is transplanted moss. A camouflage." With one grand sweep, he yanked the patch of moss from the ground. The steel casing and combination lock of a safe lay beneath it.

  Remo's face broke into a grin. "Well, I'll be. Not bad, Little Father."

  "Not good," Chiun said. "Behold."

  The soldiers were in the trees. There were more of them this time, armed with everything from close-range pistols to a flame thrower. The flame thrower at­tacked first, sending a tunnel of fire straight toward Remo.

  He tore the door off the safe and held it up to the orange stream just before it reached them. Bullets pinged off the steel shield. The smell of spent ammu­nition filled the air. "Hold this," he said, handing the safe door to Chiun.

  The safe contained a sheaf of papers-bills of sale, communications with European pharmaceutical com­panies, and charts. They appeared to be medical charts of some kind. At the top of each chart was a man's name, followed by a serial number. The dog-

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  tags, Remo remembered. The charts must be for the soldiers firing at him now, soldiers who had somehow found their way into Foxx's care. They detailed sev­eral years' worth of resting heart rates, stress toler­ances', and a section labeled "Blood Levels" was fol­lowed by a long list of items. The first on the list was procaine. On every single chart, the procaine level of the soldier had risen dramatically during the course of the charting.

  Under the last of the charts rested four manila fold­ers. In the first was a series of photographs and a biog­raphy of General Homer G. Watson, the now-dead Secretary of the Air Force. Clipped to the biographical sheet were scores of notes detailing the general's schedules, standing appointments, and favorite res­taurants. On the upper right corner of the folder was a small black X. The next folder contained information on Admiral Thornton Ives. The Secretary of the Navy's folder had an X on it, too. So did the third, belonging to Clive R. Dobbins.

  "They got the Secretary of the Army," Remo said, disspirited.

  "Read the news some other time," Chiun snapped. "They are boom-shooting at us, fool. Get me out of this place."

  But Remo didn't move. The last dossier belonged to the president of the United States. It didn't have a black X on its cover. Not yet.

  Remo dug back into the safe. Nothing was left in there except a series of glinting objects at the bottom. Remo reached in and pulled one of them out. It was a glass vial, about ten inches long, filled with a clear liq­uid and stoppered at the top by a cork. Foxx's formula, Remo thought, holding the vial up to the light. A burst of machine gun fire smashed the vial to shreds. Noth-

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  ing else happened, except that someone up in the trees started wailing.

  Keening, Remo thought as the high, mournful sound passed over the din of gunfire. It was more than some crazy soldier's war yell. It was a lament, high and terrible.

  And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the firing stopped. "You see?" Chiun said. "You have take
n so long with your library that they ran out of booms."

  "I don't think so," Remo said uncertainly. "But it had something to do with this stuff." He pulled out the case at the bottom of the safe, in which the rest of the vials were stored.

  "Stop!" came the high, keening voice again. "Don't break them."

  Remo set the case on the ground. "What's that?"

  "Don't break them. Please," the soldier shouted, scrambling down from the tree, his Centennial Air-weight waving overhead. Remo recognized him as the soldier who had run away from the ambush at the lean-to. Riley threw down his gun. "Please. Leave the formula alone and we'll all come down unarmed." There was pleading in his voice.

  Remo gaped in astonishment as the soldiers threw their weapons to the ground and scrambled down from the trees, each pair of eyes riveted on the case filled with glass vials.

  Chiun was not surprised. "Obviously they have dis­covered that I was in their presence," he said smugly.

  "You were behind that door," Remo objected. "They didn't even see you."

  "Excuse me, o learned one. O fierce assassin. I am sure it was your excellent reading that struck fear into their hearts."

  "I'll explain everything," Riley said. "Only please

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  . . ." He cast a baleful eye at the glass vials. "The case." He ventured toward it.

  Remo snatched it away. "Uh-uh. Explain first. Then you get the goodies."

  Riley hestitated. "Do you promise?" he asked. "Do you give your solemn word that you won't harm us or the case?"

  Remo looked at him. The man knew where Foxx was. He could also tell a lot about the bizarre military establishment in the frozen Black Hills, where overage soldiers with the faces of kids were bivouacked. But not harming them?. . . . "Will you dump all your weapons?"