High Priestess td-95

by Warren Murphy

  After that it was a simple task to insert a fingernail against each shiny exposed bolt and push it outward. The falling bolts squeaked, then made rude clickings on the stone floor. In short order the door was no longer secured on its hinges. The Master of Sinanju simply pushed it outward, the lock tongue coming out of its socket like an old tooth.

  Out in the dark corridor, illuminated only by an unshaded twenty-five-watt light bulb, the Master of Sinanju spoke up. "Who here yearns for freedom?"

  "I do," a man hissed.

  "And I!" said a second.

  "We all yearn for freedom," insisted a third.

  "Who will fight for his freedom if released?" Chiun demanded.

  Silence.

  "Fighting is not our way," the second man said dully.

  The Master of Sinanju shook his blackened head. "Buddhists," he said under his breath, and padded for the corridor. He would have to find another way.

  Chapter 27

  There were exactly thirteen PLA cadres, and two of them died with Remo's hard index fingers plunging in and out of the backs of their skulls before any of the other eleven became aware of the white-and-black blur suddenly in their midst.

  The sound of faces falling into the dirt went unheard over the screaming of Tibetans who feared Chinese bullets. Remo planned it that way. The more cadres he took out before they knew he was there, the quicker he could get this over with. And the more lives he could save.

  But one of the dead soldiers had his finger tight on his rifle trigger. Going down, a reflex caused it to tighten.

  The AK-47 burped bullets and percussive sound. Dust and earth kicked up in nervous gouts.

  That was enough to bring every head turning in Remo's direction, including that of the PLA commander with the knifeslit eyes.

  Ignoring the swinging muzzles, Remo moved in on him. It was sloppy tactics, but he had succumbed to anger. Twenty years of training, and he was being driven by fury like some rank amateur.

  The commander snapped up his Tokarev. Remo weaved past his first wild shot. Remo let him have that shot. It wasn't worth dodging, but his body, reacting automatically to the concussive shock of the bullet coming out of the barrel as it rode a wave of exploding gunpowder, swerved wide of its own accord. Even anger couldn't suppress that aspect of his training.

  Toes digging in with every step, Remo swept back in line. One fist came up. He popped his first two fingers.

  They entered the commander's skull via his wide-with-shock eyeballs, and when Remo snapped his hand back, there were two black grottos under the dead man's suborbital ridge that issued thick black cranial blood.

  Rounds began snapping about Remo. Twisting, he started to dance. It looked like a dance-a wild jerky dance the human body makes when hammered by bullets from all directions.

  The Tibetan girl cried out in anguish. She thought the bullets were knocking Remo, not dead but mortally wounded, around in a mad circle.

  The Chinese thought so, too. They were shooting directly at Remo as he flung his arms and legs about with wild abandon, certain their bullets were breaking off chips of human bone from his unprotected limbs.

  Their eyes didn't see that the bullets were passing harmlessly through the web Remo was creating with his blurry limbs. They couldn't read bullets in flight. And not having eyes trained to track a bullet the way Remo's eyes could, they didn't see Remo's fingers and toes as they lashed back.

  Stuttering rifles cartwheeled out of clutching hands. Kneecaps exploded under the impact of hard toes that were capable of denting steel I-beams. The flat of a white hand swept toward two soldiers who stood shoulder to shoulder, concentrating their fire, and when it passed through their necks, the soldiers simply stopped firing.

  They stood rigid for a moment. Then their arms dropped. Their rifles fell from nerveless fingers, and their knees buckled.

  Only as they began tipping over did their perfectly severed heads tumble off the spurting stumps of their necks.

  It happened in less than the span of a minute. In that time the frightened Tibetan nomads who had turned their faces from the slaughter of the white man they knew as Gonpo Jigme were drinking in the stupefying spectacle of Gonpo Jigme destroying a dozen of Beijing's most ruthless soldiers.

  "The god rides him!" the Tibetan girl shouted in English. "Lha gyalo!" she added in Tibetan.

  Remo allowed three PLA soldiers to track him with their rifles, absolutely without fear for himself. He knew that a rifle was only a longer, slightly more modern version of the medieval contraption called a pistol. Rifles held no terrors for him.

  The minute the tracking muzzles followed Remo to a place where no one else stood exposed to the line of fire, Remo stopped, reversed and pivoted on one foot.

  His other foot, lifting high, relieved the pair of their weapons with such sudden irresistible force that their arms came out of their sockets with meaty sucking sounds mixed with the snapping of tendons.

  Remo crushed their skulls the instant they were down on the ground, howling in their pain and confusion.

  That left three. They had exhausted their ammo clips and were yanking the empties out.

  It was too easy to take them out then. But Remo did it anyway. He stepped up and said, "Let me show you how to play pong. "

  Remo's hands were suddenly up and on either side of one soldier's head. They came together as if he were clapping once sharply.

  Pong!

  The man fell with his head suddenly more vertical than horizontal.

  Remo caught a second man the same way.

  Pong!

  That PLA man's head erupted like a volcano when the pressure separated the fused bone plates at the top of his skull and a blood-and-brains gruel squirted skyward.

  Remo broke the last man's heart with the heel of his palm. It struck the protecting rib cage, and the splintering ribs compressed the heart muscle until it burst like a red balloon.

  When the last of the dead lay in the dirt, boots jittering, throats gurgling and brains dying, Remo surveyed the scene.

  No Tibetans had died. It was a bonus. He had figured on some unavoidable friendly casualties. The erupting of the first PLA cadre's assault rifle had worked in his favor, not against it.

  Remo knelt before the slumped form of Bumba Fun. He touched the old man's neck, found the carotid artery. It was flat. The man was dead. There was no bringing him back.

  Behind him the familiar voice of the Tibetan girl whose name he still didn't know reached Remo's ringing ears.

  "You are truly Gonpo Jigme," she breathed.

  Remo turned. "He told them he stole the jeep, didn't he?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  Hands flat on her apron, the girl looked puzzled. "It was his job. He is Bumba Fun."

  "I needed to talk to him," Remo said angrily.

  "You may speak with the Bumba Fun in Lhasa."

  "How do I know he'll be the right one?"

  "Bumba Fun is Chushi Gangdruk depung. That mean general. All Chushi Gangdruk generals call themselves Bumba Fun to fool stupid Chinese. They capture Chushi Gangdruk depung, and do tortures. And he always tell them his general is called Bumba Fun. Chinese go kill first Bumba Fun they find, think they have killed Chushi Gangdruk leader. This way Bumba Fun never die. Bumba Fun immortal. Chushi Gangdruk fight on."

  The girl looked toward the slumped corpse of Bumba Fun. Her chin began trembling. Tears started in her eyes. She fought them back. In the end she won. No tears came.

  "He didn't have to die," Remo said bitterly. "I could have handled it."

  The girl lifted her chin proudly. "It was his duty to die. He was Bumba Fun."

  Remo looked around. The nomads were staring at him with strange expressions on their windburned faces. They were edging closer, as if afraid to approach without permission but too fascinated not to try. They ignored the fallen Chinese weapons.

  "The Chinese are going to miss this unit," he said. "You'd better pack up your tents and move on."

&
nbsp; The girl shook her head stubbornly. "If we pack up tents, Chinese will not know who to punish. Punish others. We stay. If punishment come, we will be prepared. "

  "Are you crazy?" Remo exploded. "You'll all be slaughtered."

  "And we will come back in another life to resist the Chinese, to die again and again if our karma decrees it necessary."

  "What good will that do?"

  She lifted her chin defiantly. "Perhaps if enough Tibetan die, the world will begin to care about Tibetans."

  Remo had no answer to that. "Look, I need a guide to Lhasa. How about you come along?"

  "I cannot. Must stay."

  "And die when the PLA catch up to you?"

  "It is my duty. You see, that man was my father. I must take his place now."

  "Have it your way," said Remo. He went over to the jeeps and trucks and disabled them with quick strokes that unerringly found fatigue spots in metal and vulnerable points elsewhere. He gathered up the rifles, snapping barrels like bread sticks with his bare hands.

  When he was done, there wasn't a usable Chinese weapon or vehicle in the camp.

  Remo climbed back into his jeep and started the engine. He remembered something.

  "What did you mean when you said, 'The god rides him'?" he asked the Tibetan girl.

  "You are Gonpo Jigme. Do you not know what is meant?"

  "No," Remo admitted.

  The girl lowered her eyelashes demurely. "Then the god no longer rides you. When Gonpo Jigme returns, you will know."

  Remo sent the jeep around in a circle, pointed it toward the mountain that stood between-him and Lhasa. He sat, engine idling, and looked at the girl for a long moment.

  "Hey, kid. I don't know your real name."

  "Bumba Fun," said the Tibetan girl, waving him away.

  Remo put the camp behind him, his face hard. He drove arrow straight toward the purple shadow at the base of the mountain the girl had called Nagbopori. It seemed to call him. But the faster he drove, the farther away it seemed to get. It was like a big granite mirage, always receding.

  Remo finally reached it by nightfall. By then the purple shadow had turned black, and he barreled into it. It proved to be a needle-thin cut through one side of the mountain.

  From somewhere above, he heard the huffing of a helicopter gunship and pulled into the lee of the declivity until the gunship had passed overhead.

  Not long after, he heard the whuff and thoom of air-to-ground rockets thudding into the earth not many miles to the south.

  "Damn!" he breathed.

  Remo pulled over and went up a cliff side like a spider.

  Reaching the flat top, he could spot flashes of light in the general direction of the nomads' camp. The night seemed to quake with each impact. When it finally stopped, there was only the faraway whirring of the main rotor.

  When the gunship returned, it was a fat silhouette against a low smoldering fire on the pastureland.

  "You bastards," he said in a too-soft voice. "They were only herdsmen."

  Remo picked up a rock and stepped into view. He waved his arms.

  The gunship pilot spotted him. Curious, he sent the ungainly craft sweeping in Remo's direction.

  Remo dropped his arms and pitched the rock with a deceptively casual throw. The rock left his fingers moving at nearly seventy-five miles per hour.

  It struck the gunship pilot in the face doing one-fifty, after punching a perfectly round hole in the Plexiglas windscreen.

  The gunship shuddered as the hands and feet at the controls clutched up in death. It began to whirl in place like a confused Christmas ornament on a string.

  The surviving crew scrambled to haul the dead pilot off his seat and regain control of the ship.

  They had about as much luck doing that as they had in surviving the fiery impact that followed, when the spinning tail rotor struck a rocky escarpment and the big craft disintegrated in a boiling ball of flame.

  Which was to say, none.

  Remo climbed back down to his jeep and bored through the endless Tibetan night, wondering who Gonpo Jigme was supposed to be. He knew one thing for certain. He was no more Gonpo Jigme than Squirrelly Chicane was the Bunji Lama.

  Chapter 28

  For a day the forty-seventh Bunji Lama, incarnation of the Buddha to Come, endured the want and privation of Drapchi Prison stoically. She meditated in her cell. She sought higher consciousness. But none was forthcoming. Despite the pain she was forced to endure, she never gave up hope.

  "Low," Squirrelly Chicane was hollering through her cell door, "if you won't let me make my call, give me back my stash."

  Her voice reverberated down the dank corridor. If ears heard her plaintive plea, no voice responded.

  "How about that roach? It's almost used-up anyway."

  Silence followed her echoes.

  "I'll settle for one of those hallucinogenic toads that you have to lick," Squirrelly said hopefully.

  When the last echoes died away, so did all hope. Squirrelly sat herself down on the pile of sand that was her bed, moaning, "I can't believe this. I came all this way and I'm reduced to begging for a lick of a toad."

  Clapping hands to her saffron shag, she added, "Won't this headache ever go away!"

  "Embrace the pain," Lobsang Drom droned. "Transcend the pain."

  "You try transcending this pounder!"

  "Her Holiness must set an example for the other prisoners," Lobsang reminded her. "By suffering, you work to relieve the sorrows of the world."

  "My Bunji butt! I want out of this hellhole. The storyline is dead in the water. I can see the audience going out for popcorn right now. And not coming back. The critics will murder me."

  "The Bunji Lama is above all earthly criticism," Lobsang intoned.

  "Tell that to Siskel and Ebert! I can just hear the fat one now. 'Squirrelly Chicane should have stuck with the kind of films her audience is used to seeing her in. Blah blah blahs Like he knows his buns from a bagel!"

  Suddenly the lock began to rasp and grate.

  "Who's there?" Squirrelly hissed. "Am I being let out?"

  "It is I, O Bunji," said a squeaky voice.

  "I who?"

  "The Master of Sinanju has come to liberate you," the squeaky voice said.

  Squirrelly lifted up on her supple toes and tried to look out the tiny cell-door window. She saw nothing but dank corridor.

  "I don't see anyone," she complained.

  "Who are you talking to, Bunji?" asked Kula worriedly.

  "It's that little guy. Sinatra."

  "The Master of Sinanju has come to liberate us!" Kula exclaimed.

  The key in the lock continued to grate.

  "Forget it," Squirrelly said. "It took two of them to lock it, and they left the key in because it'll probably take six of them to unlock it."

  The lock squealed with a metallic complaint.

  And to Squirrelly Chicane's utter astonishment, the cell door creaked open.

  Standing there was the wispy Korean. He wore black. The top of his formerly bald head was black, as well.

  "Did you grow hair?" Squirrelly asked.

  "It is a disguise," said Chiun dismissively. "Come. We must free the others."

  The keys had not been left in the other locks. Chiun knew that the sound of the stubborn locks might have carried. Delay could be dangerous. First he went to Kula's door and examined the hinge pins. They were as thick as rifle barrels. Strong. But also large. Sometimes a large obstacle was more easily defeated.

  Kneeling, he struck the lower pins with the edge of his hand. A short, sharp blow. The hinges came apart like a log split by an ax. The top pin surrendered in like fashion.

  Impatient, Kula pushed the door outward and set it aside.

  The other door hinges were no less resistant to the skills of the Master of Sinanju.

  After Lobsang Drom had emerged, Squirrelly Chicane threw her maroon lama's cap into the air.

  "This is great! This is great. This is the reel I'v
e been waiting for!" Squirrelly bent and kissed Chiun on the top of his head, saying, "I wish you were tall, dark and handsome, but hey, by the time they cast the part, maybe you will be."

  "What is this woman railing about?" the Master of Sinanju asked Kula. The big Mongol shrugged, a resigned who-can-fathom-the-mind-of-a-white-lama shrug.

  Squirrelly noticed a strange taste on her lips. She wiped them, and there was a smear of black on her saffron sleeve. "What is this stuff?"

  Chiun ignored her. "There is no time to dawdle. We must get past the Chinese guards"

  "Just get me to a telephone. I'll have the Marines here in no time."

  THERE was only one telephone in all of Drapchi Prison. It was a desk model in the office of Colonel Fang Lin of the ministry of state security, in charge of Drapchi Prison.

  Right now he was using it to talk to Beijing.

  He was having a hard time getting through to Beijing. More specifically, getting through to the minister of state security. It had been on the minister's orders that he had thrown the internationally recognized Squirrelly Chicane into a cell and denied her any contact with America. Now he wanted further instructions.

  If only the minister of state security would take his call.

  He had been trying all night. He had left messages. None had been returned. Colonel Fang was beginning to get the message: Squirrelly Chicane was a tiger he would have to ride without further instruction. His original orders were simple. Imprison the would-be Bunji Lama until further notice. No food. No water. No contact with the outside world.

  The orders were fixed. He could not deviate from them without bringing great reprimands down on his own head.

  No food, no water, no contact. In time, if those orders were not countermanded, Squirrelly Chicane would perish of starvation. Blame would be attached to Colonel Fang for not exercising initiative and common sense and preserving her life.

  As Colonel Fang hung up the still-ringing telephone receiver, he shook a slim cigarette out of his last box of Pandas. The supply plane was late again. No doubt there would be no contact with Beijing until the Bunji Lama had expired.

  As he smoked, Colonel Fang tried to fathom the Byzantine reasons for the security minister not returning his messages. He could only guess at them, but he had been with the PLA for twenty years. He understood how things worked, even if the why was often elusive.