The Last Dragon td-92

by Warren Murphy

  "Remo! I am so happy to see you!" he squeaked.

  "Great," said Remo, quickening his pace. It was true what they said. Absence does make the heart grow fonder.

  "For now I have someone to carry my trunks," Chiun added.

  Remo's face fell. He struggled to keep his voice light. "How many'd you bring this time?"

  "All."

  Remo's eye went wide.

  "All fourteen!"

  Chiun brought a yellow hand like an eagle's claw to the wisp of beard that straggled down from his chin. "Of course. For it is moving day. No more will I have to bear them hither and yon, like a vagabond."

  "Vagabonds usually settle for a change of clothes, knotted in a ball and hanging off a stick. Not fourteen freaking trunks."

  And before the Master of Sinanju could reply to that, the trunks began bumping through the hanging leather straps.

  The first was a gray lacquer monstrosity in which scarlet dragons vied with golden phoenixes for hegemony.

  Chiun gestured with a hand whose long fingernails were like pale blades, and said, "Remo."

  Unhappily, Remo took hold of the trunk and lifted it free of the conveyor belt. He set it to the floor, and at once the Master of Sinanju drifted up and began examining the lacquer and brass trim for nicks and other blemishes.

  "It has survived unscathed," he announced sagely. The overhead lights shone on the amber eggshell that was his skull. Tiny puffs of cloudy white hair enveloped the tops of his ears.

  "Only thirteen more to go," Remo muttered.

  Then next trunk was mostly mother-of-pearl. It had collected no scratches.

  And the others began coming, in a colorful sequence like a toy train.

  One by one, Remo hefted them off the belt to join the growing pile. In a corner, Harold Smith buried his long nose in his newspaper and gave off a studied "I'm not with them" air.

  "Smith tell you anything about this castle?" Remo asked Chiun.

  "Only that it is in an exclusive area in an historical town. "

  "It would have to be if there's a castle involved."

  "This is a good area, Remo," Chiun whispered.

  "Since when?"

  "It is one of the older provinces in this young country. It is very British."

  "Since when are we Anglophiles?"

  "The House has worked for Great Britain," Chiun pointed out.

  "And sometimes against them."

  "But more for them," said Chiun, dismissing the unimportant detour in historical truth.

  The thirteenth trunk was green and gold, and after Remo set it down, the conveyor belt came to a dead stop.

  "Hey? Is that all of them?" he asked.

  Chiun's wrinkled features stiffened. "No. There is one missing."

  Remo snagged a skycap.

  "My friend here is missing a piece of luggage," he explained.

  The skycap looked at the preposterous pile of trunks and commented, "How can you tell?"

  "Because we can count. Why did the belt stop?"

  "Because they finished unloading all the luggage."

  "You're not saying it's lost," Remo said in as low a voice as possible.

  "I'm not saying anything, but you better file a lost luggage claim before you leave the airport otherwise its your tough luck."

  "Lost!" Chiun squeaked, flouncing up. "My precious trunk cannot be lost!"

  "I didn't say lost," the skycap repeated.

  "He didn't say lost," Remo said quickly. "It's probably misplaced."

  "The lackey who misplaced my trunk would do better to misplace his head," Chiun said in a stentorian voice.

  "He talks that way sometimes," Remo told the skycap. "Let me handle this."

  "Remo, I will not countenence this," Chiun warned.

  "And you won't have to."

  "And if my trunk is truly lost?"

  "We'll get it back. Come on, let's find a way into the luggage loading area."

  "Follow me," Chiun said, and stepped into the dead conveyor belt. He passed through the fall of leather straps and as Harold Smith called his name in a frightened voice, Remo ducked in after the Master of Sinanju.

  The other side was a maze of chutes, tunnels, and self-propelled luggage trucks.

  Chiun looked around, his clear hazel eyes cold.

  "Uh-oh," Remo said. For one man was driving one of the trucks away from the area. A glossy blue trunk sat in back. Unmistakably Chiun's.

  "Thief!" Chiun called. And flashed after the truck in a flurry of scarlet silk.

  "We don't know that," Remo said, hurrying after him.

  But they knew it for the truth a moment later. The man stopped the truck beside an open van. Two other luggage handlers were shoving stuff into the back of the van. Shoulder bags. Cameras. Videocams. Even a boxed VCR.

  The man with Chiun's trunk got off and motioned for the others to give him a hand.

  They noticed Chiun at that point.

  "Hey!" one shouted. "This is a restricted area. Get out of here!"

  "Thief!" Chiun cried. "To touch that trunk is to die!"

  "And he means every word," Remo called.

  The Master of Sinanju looked like a harmless wisp attired in his silk robes. His age could have been anything from eighty to a hundred and twenty, but in fact he had passed the century mark some time back.

  The three luggage pilferers ranged from perhaps twenty-five to thirty-eight years. They were tall, and muscular from hoisting heavy luggage forty hours a week.

  But the Master of Sinanju fell among them like a crimson typhoon hitting a palm oasis.

  The man who had frozen with his hands on the trunk suddenly took his hands into his mouth. Not by choice. Choice had nothing to do with it.

  From his personal perspective. his own hands had acquired a life of their own. Like frightened pink tarantulas they leapt into his own mouth for protection against the crimson typhoon.

  The man had a big mouth. But his hands were bigger. Still, they went down his gullet as if the bones had melted-where they clogged his windpipe so completely that his last ninety seconds of life consisted of hopping about in circles trying to yank his hands out of his mouth and trying to breathe through nostrils that no longer functioned.

  In a way, he was lucky. He lived longer than the others, who made the mistake of drawing personal weapons.

  Remo and Chiun gave them no time to use them.

  "In for a penny, in for a pound," Remo muttered and took the nearest man by his head. Remo simply grasped and began shaking the man's head as if it were a milkshake container. He got about the same result. The man's brain, having the natural consistency of yogurt, was pureed in the receptacle of his skull.

  He dropped his box cutter, never having gotten the blade extended.

  It was quick, silent, and actually painless to the victim. Remo dropped the limp-boned man to the oil-stained concrete and caught the last few seconds of the third man's death throes.

  The man had producted a switchblade. He used it with great skill. The blade darted toward the Master of Sinanju-and abruptly changed direction to carve out a flowing script on the wielder's own forehead.

  Then it split his nose clear to the brain pan.

  The man was on his back, dead, before the word THIEF began oozing blood off his forehead.

  "Now you did it," Remo said, looking around at the carnage.

  Chiun's hands clasped his wrists. Interlocked, they retreated into the joined sleeves of his kimono. "I did nothing. It was their fault. These carrion started it."

  "Smith is gonna to have a shit fit."

  "I will reason with Smith. Come."

  And the Master of Sinanju floated away.

  Grumbling, Remo brought the trunk up on his shoulder and hurried after him.

  "This whole trip had better be worth it," he muttered.

  When Remo emerged from the baggage area, Harold Smith's complexion looked as gray as a battleship. And as lifeless. His eyes were staring.

  "All is well, Empero
r Smith," Chiun said in a loud voice, and went on to recount the other thirteen piled trunks.

  "We gotta move fast, Smitty," Remo said, adding the blue trunk to the stack.

  "What happened?"

  "Luggage thieves."

  "They're not-"

  "Alive? No. Definitely not."

  "Oh, God."

  "Just hold your water. We gotta get outta here before anything breaks. Where's the rental car?"

  "I had planned on taking the subway into town."

  "With fourteen freaking trunks!" Remo shouted.

  Smith adjusted his tie. "Actually, I had not expected this."

  "Okay, I'll rustle us up some transportation."

  There was a rental agency that provided vans, and Remo soon had one parked in front of the terminal.

  After Remo had got the last of the trunks into the back of the van, he slipped behind the wheel and tried fighting his way out of the stubborn traffic congestion.

  "Maybe the subway wasn't so bad an idea, after all," he muttered darkly.

  He took the Callahan Tunnel and emerged near the North End, Boston's Italian district.

  "I know this place," Chiun muttered.

  "We were here about a year ago. That Mafia thing, remember?"

  "Pah!"

  "Where to, Smitty?"

  "South. To Quincy."

  "We were there, too. That was where the Mafia don had his headquarters. Come to think of it, weren't you interested in a condo there, Little Father?"

  "I will settle for nothing less than a castle, as befits my station as the royal assassin in residence," Chiun sniffed.

  Remo took the Southeast Expressway to the Quincy exit, where they pulled three G's holding a curved ramp that took them up over a bridge.

  "Go straight," said Smith. Remo ignored the left-hand fork of the bridge.

  They passed condos, office buildings, and a pagodalike structure that made Remo grip the wheel with sudden queasiness, but to this relief it turned out to be only a Chinese restaurant, and continued on.

  At an intersection dominated by a high school, Smith said, "Take this left."

  Remo drove left.

  "Stop," said Smith, just as the high school fell behind.

  "Where?"

  "There!" said Chiun.

  Remo stopped and looked out the window. And he saw it.

  "You've gotta be kidding," Remo said.

  "It is magnificent!" Chiun said rapturously.

  Chapter 5

  The plan was simple, as Nancy Derringer explained it.

  "We block all the jungle trails except the one we hacked out of the Kanda Tract. Are you with me so far?"

  Everyone said yes.

  "We know the reptile eats fronds and creepers. Probably he prefers so-called jungle chocolate. We'll harvest some and leave a trail."

  "Ha!" King scoffed. "What happens when he gets his fill?"

  "It takes a lot of jungle chocolate to fill a belly the size of a cement truck," Nancy told him coolly.

  The Bantus smiled among themselves to see the mzungu woman who was smarter than the mzungu man.

  "But to keep him moving we will intersperse toadstools whenever he seems to be losing interest."

  "What makes you think he eats toadstools?" King wanted to know.

  "A deep knowledge of sauropod dietary habits and a brain I'm not afraid to use."

  Even taciturn Ralph Thorpe laughed out loud at that one.

  They got to work. The Bantus, who had earlier been easygoing if not torpid when Skip King had been giving the orders, now found their enthusiasm.

  They hacked down trees all along the jungle paths, blocking them so that even a ten-ton dinosaur would find them daunting.

  The Kanda Tract was full of the wild mangos known as jungle chocolate. Much of it was untouched because the forest had been too thick for the Apatosaur to do much more than snake his long neck between the trees to bite off pieces of the scrumptious melon.

  They harvested only as much as would stay fresh for a four-hour interval. And placed them in quickly woven baskets.

  Every hand was needed to make baskets, because they had to carry as many toadstools as they would need.

  "I'm not weaving baskets," King snarled when the subject was broached. "That's woman's work."

  The Bantus all looked as him with their smiles on automatic pilot and their soft eyes steady as buttons on a coat.

  King failed to notice. "I didn't go to Wharton to weave baskets, and that's final."

  "Fine," Nancy told him thinly. "Then you may go toadstooling."

  The Bantus formed a circle around him, leaving a space in the direction of the escarpment.

  Angrily, King nested stacks of baskets together and went off to fill them.

  It was approaching sundown when the great Apatosaurus began to stir.

  Its leathery, black-rimmed nostrils twitched and blew out a snort. Slowly, the orange eyelids picked themselves up.

  Lifting its long banded neck, it craned its masked head about in a semicircle as if seeking an explanation.

  The goatlike eyes fell upon a fallen melon.

  It made a sound. Harruunukk. It was a questioning sound.

  Then on great round legs, it waded toward the morsel. Logs were bumped out of the way. Waves crashed and slopped on the shore of the great pool.

  And the head came down, seized the melon, and gobbled it up after biting through it once with a pulpy sound.

  It stood calmly as the neck muscles worked the fragments down into its stomach.

  Then, it spied a second mango a little further inland.

  From a leafy point high on the escarpment, Nancy watched through field glasses she held in crossed fingers.

  "Please, please, see it," she murmured.

  The beast seemed to hesitate. It made its curious sound again. Then slowly it stirred out of the pool, coming up onto the mucky ground and sinking its great padded feet deep with squishing-sucking noises.

  The head came down and quickly gobbled up the second melon.

  In the bush, Ralph Thorpe triggered his flashlight. It spotlighted the third melon.

  Through the green gloom, the reptile saw it. He strode forward. And now the high ground shook with each lumbering step.

  The Kanda Tract shook for the remainder of the night and far into the dawn of the next day.

  They stayed out of sight of it. The natives were especially careful. They told stories of how N'yamala loved to upset river dugouts with his mighty tail.

  "Has he ever eaten anyone?" King asked nervously.

  "No."

  "Good."

  "He has never eaten a black man. We do not know if he might enjoy a white man."

  And the Bantus smiled their fixed smiles.

  The first trouble came just before dawn.

  After lumbering along, pausing to snatch up melons and the occasional pile of sodden fronds, the Apatosaur suddenly stopped. It looked around. Its eyes grew rounder.

  "What is the blighter up to, Dr. Derringer?" Thorpe asked.

  "I don't know," Nancy said slowly. They were crouching in the bush, flat on their stomachs.

  A hruuu sound filtered through the stationary predawn air.

  "Beggar sounds forlorn."

  "It may miss its family. Poor thing."

  Slowly, the reptile began to back up. It tried to turn around. But the jungle path was too narrow. Its great tail lifted, swept about, and with a terrible sound, a stand of cedar was reduced to kindling.

  The forlorn cry came again.

  "It's trying to turn back!" King howled, horror in his voice.

  "I'm not letting that happen," Nancy said grimly and disappeared into the bush.

  Moments later she was creeping up the trail toward the reptile, a basket of orange toadstools balanced on her head, native fashion.

  She dumped them onto the trail, not a dozen yards ahead of the creature. Stamping her foot into them to release their musty fungal scent, she retreated into the bush.


  The scent did the trick.

  The paint-splatter snout swept back, nostrils quivering.

  Then it lurched forward. It fell on the piled toadstools with relish, snatching them up and ingesting them with up and down chewing motions. The pile quickly disappeared.

  And up around the next bend in the trail, Nancy upended a smaller pile, stamped hard, and vanished into the bush.

  After three basketfuls, they switched back to melons. And the melons got them to the first light and their next crisis. The outer edge of the Kanda Tract.

  "Now comes the hard part," Nancy was saying in a hastily convened roadside conference. Thorpe, King, and Tyrone had joined her. The others were working through the bush, out of sight and sowing enticements along the trail.

  "The beast will be prone to meander once he gets out into open savanna," Thorpe said. "Might even turn back, if he doesn't take to open spaces."

  "Will the grass burn?" King asked.

  "We are not igniting the savanna," Nancy fumed. "Even if it is dry enough to take flame, it would burn too quickly. We'd only end up with roast Apatosaurus."

  "You have an answer for everything, don't you?"

  "Everything except how you ever got beyond the 'Do you want fries with that?' phase of your career."

  Skip King did a slow burn and said nothing.

  Nancy turned to Thorpe.

  Thorpe shrugged. "Nothing for it but to let old Jack run."

  Nancy blinked. "Old Jack?"

  "Reminds one of a bloody jack-o'-lantern, doesn't it?"

  "You can't call him Jack," King burst out.

  "And why bloody not?"

  "I wanted to call him Skip."

  "Skip?"

  "King Skip, actually."

  They looked at him.

  "You know, like King Kong."

  "Jack it is," Nancy said flatly. She looked to Thorpe. "You think he'll follow our trail of goodies through open savanna?"

  "Haven't the foggiest," Thorpe admitted. "But it's either let Jack run or give up."

  "I'm in no mood to give up. Get the men deployed."

  "Righto." Thorpe crashed off.

  "What about me?" King asked.

  "It's morning," Nancy said, turning away. "Make yourself useful and brew up some coffee."

  "You wouldn't talk to me that way if this weren't Africa!"

  The Apatosaur emerged from the Kanda Tract like the final collapse of the burning house. The splintering of brush and nettles was tremendous. Then as if it had lost all substance, it padded serenely into open grassland.