Air Raid td-126

by Warren Murphy

  "Your point being?" Remo asked.

  "The tanks were built into the side of a mountain. This is the side of a mountain. And this used to be Dr. Carlin's house when he was at the CCS." Remo stopped dead.

  "Oh," Amanda said when she saw the look on his face. "You think it might be something? I only remember because it was right after that prediction he made during the Gulf War. When he said those oil well fires would burn for months and change the environment of the entire Gulf region for years to come." She grew more worried when she saw Remo's expression grow even darker. "They didn't," she added hopefully.

  "We should leave," Chiun said evenly.

  Remo was thinking of the pressure waves from the surveillance equipment they'd both sensed coming from Lake Geneva. He suddenly felt like a mouse just before the steel bar snapped shut.

  "Right behind you, Little Father," he said. Shepherding a suddenly very worried Amanda Lifton before them, the two Masters of Sinanju began to cautiously retrace their steps back out to the main cellar.

  REMARKABLE!

  Hahn watched the infrared monitor image through excited, unblinking eyes.

  They were heading back up the basement hallway. Could it be? Could it possibly be that they had guessed what was in store?

  The three green blobs were back in front of the open door that led to the furnace. They were coming back out.

  Maybe they had seen the modified furnace. Hahn had rigged it for Sage Carlin years ago. Activated it just this afternoon. Could they know?

  He wished he could have asked them, but of course that was impossible. It was time for them to die. The silver antenna was already up on the remote transmitter. It was aimed across the deck of Hahn's boat at the magnificent chalet nestled among the lower Alps.

  A cold wind blew across the lake, swirling through the open cabin door, cutting Herr Hahn to the bone. Eyes on the chalet, Herr Hahn flicked the toggle switch.

  The monitor flashed bright, consumed from corner to corner and top to bottom by a wash of brilliant green.

  And in the rocks above Lake Geneva, an orange fireball vomiting up from the very bowels of Hell itself erupted from the smoking crater where Hubert St. Clair's house had been.

  Chapter 10

  The click saved their lives.

  They heard it as they passed the open door to the furnace room. It was a soft thing that became inaudible in the ensuing roar.

  A brilliant orange flash burst from the black mouth of the dark room. A wall of searing flame and heat whooshed forward, erupting into the hall.

  When the click sounded, Remo and Chiun went from a walk to a sprint. They tore down the slender passage a heartbeat ahead of the blast.

  Chiun had scooped up Amanda. In his arms the world around her seemed to slow, then freeze.

  Not enough time to make it out into the main cellar. Frozen flames, locked in time, rocketing in at impossible speed.

  Amanda suddenly airborne. Remo's arms encircling her waist. Chiun, flames licking at the hem of his kimono, launching himself up at one of the dirty basement windows.

  The glass shattering. Then flying at Amanda. No way to avoid it. She was a deadly human spear, fired at speeds greater than the explosion or the flames, faster even than conscious thought.

  Out! In the cold mountain air, with bony hands grabbing her once more.

  Running.

  Time tripping back to normal speed.

  The house exploded. Windows burst, scattering diamond fragments across the Swiss hillside. The wood splintered apart and spread like burning matchsticks as the ball of orange flame burst from Earth's ruptured molten core.

  The intense heat chased them down the driveway and out into the street. Still Chiun ran, Amanda thrown over one shoulder. Even when he stopped, he danced through falling fragments of Hubert St. Clair's chalet.

  Chiun set Amanda to the street. She reeled in place as she tried to get her bearings.

  It all seemed to have happened in an instant. In a fiery blur she'd gone from standing in the cellar to dodging flaming house chunks out beyond Dr. St. Clair's twisted front gate.

  The heat from the oil-fed fire pushed them back. Acrid smoke poured out of the jagged hole where the upper story had been. The roof had been blown off completely.

  Amanda fought the fire for oxygen, panting to catch her breath. For a moment, her Lifton pretensions burned away. The money, the cars, the hotelsnone of it seemed to matter as much as her life. She looked gratefully at the two men who had saved her.

  She saw only Chiun. Worry formed deep in the lines of his weathered face as he watched the fire. "Where's Remo?" Amanda asked.

  She glanced back at the chalet. The bottom-floor walls were starting to collapse into the central crater. Flames of orange crackled and danced.

  "He did get out, didn't he?" she asked, her voice growing very small.

  Chiun didn't reply. His expression carved in stone, he watched impassively as perdition claimed the sunny Swiss mountainside.

  HERR HAHN KEPT his eyes off the thermal-imaging unit from the moment he pressed the toggle switch. With that much heat exploding into light, if he'd seen it he would have been blinking away stars for the rest of the week.

  He watched out the boat's cabin window as a thick curl of angry black smoke rose from the hills above the cold waves of Lake Geneva.

  Thanks to all that oil buried in the underground tanks, the fire would burn for hours.

  An oil-well fire in the Alps.

  As the hired killer of the Congress of Concerned Scientists, Hahn had found the notion intriguing. It gave him the opportunity to test his engineering and technical skills. Of course it was an extravagant way to demolish the chalet, but the CCS wasn't lacking for donations. And this method had one side benefit, unknown when the tanks were first installed. The two men who had survived the CCS greenhouse could not possibly have made it out alive.

  They along with the pesky girl-who was his true target-were cinders by now.

  Savoring the victory over the only interesting targets he had ever encountered, Hahn gathered up his binoculars from the table in his boat cabin. There was a plate of pfeffernuesse next to them. Hahn blew powdered sugar from the lenses before aiming the binoculars at the hillside.

  The sound of emergency vehicles already rose in the distance. Sirens howled over the cold wind. What was left of the wooden house was engulfed in flames. As Hahn watched, the burning walls fell into themselves.

  It would be days before fire officials learned about the oil tanks, days before they realized why the fire had taken so long to put out. By the time it was extinguished, there wouldn't be so much as a tooth or scrap of bone left of Herr Hahn's latest victims.

  Herr Hahn was about to lower the binoculars when he caught a brief flash of movement near the driveway of St. Clair's chalet.

  Fire and police officials wouldn't be there already. Probably gawking neighbors.

  Hahn shifted his great bulk in his creaking chair, backtracking with the glasses.

  When he found the source of movement, Herr Hahn shot to his feet as if someone had wired his chair. The pfeffernuesse plate tumbled to the floor along with a stein of thick German beer. The plate shattered, and little cookie balls rolled across the cabin floor.

  It couldn't be.

  The old Asian stood at the mouth of the driveway. Along with him was the Lifton woman. As Hahn watched in shock, the Asian ran back up the driveway.

  The old man rounded the ruins of the house. The heat from the fire should have been unbearable. Yet he seemed unmindful as he ran.

  Hahn's brain could not reconcile this with the world he knew.

  He couldn't have gotten out. Hahn had tracked them with the thermal sensors to the last possible instant. They were trapped in the basement. He had detonated the explosive cap attached to the furnace when they were standing in front of the door. In Herr Hahn's world, men did not outrun explosions.

  Maybe there were two old men. Another woman who resembled Amanda Lifton.
He didn't see the younger man. Maybe he didn't have a twin. Maybe the sole young one had been properly killed in the blast that had obliterated the twins of the old Asian and Amanda Lifton.

  This ludicrous speculation flitted through Herr Hahn's brain in a shocked instant. All such conjecture ended the moment Hahn saw a new figure race out from behind the wall of flame.

  It looked as if the fire was holding on to him, but Herr Hahn soon realized that the young one's shirt was ablaze. He stopped, did a little pirouette, and the flames winked out. It was as if that simple move had created a vacuum, extinguishing the fire.

  The old Asian raced up to the young American. Sharp hands slapped furiously at the back of the young one's shirt.

  They appeared to argue for a moment, the young one pushing away the old one's slapping hands. But then the attention of both seemed to be drawn in another direction. Like two heads controlled by a single mind, the two men turned their eyes down the hill.

  They didn't search the waters of Lake Geneva. There was no uncertainty. No hesitation at all. It was as if they were possessed with an ability to focus in like laser beams on something that was breaking into their conscious sphere.

  They found the boat.

  They found the man on the deck of the boat. Together, they stared down the binoculars of Herr Hahn.

  And then they began loping down the hill toward him.

  "YOU DIDN'T HAVE to slap me like that," Remo complained as they bounded down the steep hill toward the distant lake.

  "True," Chiun replied. He leaped over a boulder, landing at a sprint. "I could have left you to cook like a pig on a spit."

  A broad black rock surface appeared suddenly on the hill before them. Remo's legs split like a hurdler's as he soared over an angled crevice in the rock face. Chiun bounded down after him. They continued on. "I was already out," Remo snarled.

  "I thought I saw an ember."

  "Ember shmember. You were ticked because you thought I'd got myself blowed up real good. If Amanda had slowed me down a second more, I might have."

  "Do not blame the woman," Chiun said, leaping down over a knot of pines that was growing up from a sheer rock face on the mountainside. "And if I am upset with anything, it is your new habit of causing every dwelling we enter to spontaneously combust. Really, Remo, how do you expect me to get home insurance for any future Castle Sinanju if you persist in playing with matches?"

  Remo ignored him.

  The mountain angled flat. Remo vaulted a hedge, landing in someone's backyard. Chiun floated in after him.

  They flew past another chalet set into the hill and exploded out onto a narrow road. The lake was closer than it had been, but it was still too far away. More rooftops peeked from pine trees below. Beyond, the boat still sat in the cold waters of Lake Geneva. The man with the binoculars was no longer on the deck. Both boat and lake vanished as they raced into another grove of trees.

  "That wasn't St. Clair," Remo said. "If he's the one at the greenhouse, too, I can't wait to get my hands on him."

  "We may not get the chance," the Master of Sinanju pointed out.

  In spite of an area of over two hundred square miles, Remo's keen ears isolated the same, lone sound Chiun had detected over all the other lake noise.

  It was the sound of a boat engine misfiring. Remo's face grew grim. Feet flying over treacherous rock, the two men continued racing down the steep slope.

  "START, DAMN YOU, start!" Herr Hahn snapped.

  As a rule, he rarely spoke. But with no one around to hear him, it didn't matter. And right now, maintaining his habitual silence was the least of his troubles.

  A choking splutter sounded at the rear of the boat. He stabbed the ignition switch. Nothing. No time to check the engine. The last he had seen, they were halfway down the hill. The two men were still three-quarters of a mile up on rough terrain, darting in and out of tree cover and between tidy Swiss homes. But the speed at which they were descending was inhuman.

  In the boat cabin, Hahn's round face glistened with sweat. His armpits were moons of freezing perspiration.

  "Start, start, start..."

  The boat engine coughed and spluttered but wouldn't turn over. Herr Hahn didn't believe in prayer, but at that moment he said a silent entreaty to every thief, pirate and murderer who had come before him to deliver him from the two men who were running at him with death in their eyes.

  Holding his breath, Hahn struck the button again. The engine coughed once and roared to life.

  Hands shaking, he grabbed frantically at the steering column and the throttle stick. Shoving the throttle to the max, he sent the boat bobbing and zooming across the frothy waves of Lake Geneva.

  BY THE TIME Remo and Chiun crossed the last lawn and broke through the tree cover at the shore, the boat was already halfway across the section of lake that separated the new and old cities of Geneva.

  Remo was heading for the water, but Chiun touched his arm.

  "He is too far gone," the Master of Sinanju said. Remo stopped, squeezing his hands in impotent frustration at the rocky shore. The boat weaved through shuttle traffic and sped toward the big white shape of the cruise liner.

  "Damn," Remo said. "Judging by the whiff in the air, that's definitely the guy who was in St. Clair's house. If he'd used binoculars instead of some electronic whatsit in the first place, we could have had him."

  Chiun nodded tight agreement. He watched the distant boat through narrowed eyes before finally turning away.

  "Come, Remo," the old man said. A long nail flicked at the holes burned in the back of Remo's shirt. "Even the Swiss must have laws against exhibitionism."

  Remo looked up the near-vertical hill they'd just descended. A cloud of black smoke belched high into the clear blue sky. He sighed bitterly.

  Together, the two Masters of Sinanju began the long climb back up to the burning chalet.

  Chapter 11

  Young Chim'bor feared the Sky Forest.

  It wasn't the same as the other fears he had lived with all his life. Those were old and familiar.

  As a member of the Rsual tribe, which lived in small encampments in the dense jungles where the Jamunda River met the mighty Amazon, Chim'bor had spent much of his adolescence identifying fears-both real and imagined.

  Where Chim'bor grew up, there were fish so small that they could swim up a man while he bathed in the waters of the Amazon and kill him from the inside. There were mosquitoes that carried diseases that poisoned the mind and snakes with darting fangs and a taste for flesh.

  These were real fears.

  There were also fears of a supernatural nature. Animals that inhaled the life's breath from tribesmen, gods that punished with torrential rain or blistering sun, shadowed ghosts armed with spears that stalked those who were alone.

  These fears were imagined.

  Some fears were a combination of both. The pulp of certain trees was stuffed with larvae that were a feast for the tribe. Others caused death the instant they touched the tongue. Legend had it that the succulent larvae had been mixed with the poisonous by tricky gods to test the Rsual men. It was a life test to see who could choose wisely.

  Another fear in a world of fears. All known. Everything-from the great white rapids in the north to the mossy valley in the south-was known to the Rsual. It was only a span of a few miles, but it was the entire Rsual world. Everything to fear within that small area had been identified and classified by tribal elders generations ago.

  To know one's fears made one master of them. That was what made this new fear so terrifying to Chim'bor.

  The Sky Forest.

  To the Rsual, it was alien. Like one day discovering a river or rock that had not been there the day before.

  It had been brought to the land of the Rsual by whites.

  Chim'bor was fourteen when the invaders first arrived five years ago. A man by the standards of his tribe. He would never forget that first frightening day.

  Chim'bor and his brother Sor'acha had been
searching for gualla near the valley far from the main village. This juicy fruit was difficult to harvest. Since it grew so far up the trunks of the trees, it took two natives to collect it.

  They were using the network of vines they'd installed when they were children. Chim'bor climbed while Sor'acha waited on the ground to catch the dropped fruit. When Chim'bor grew weary later in the day, the two brothers would switch places.

  Early in the morning Sor'acha was watching as Chim'bor stretched from tree to tree far above. Taking hold of one of the upper branches in his small hand, Chim'bor shook it violently. Green fronds rattled an angry protest, and three of the fat yellow fruit plopped to the ground.

  When Chim'bor looked down, he found that Sor'acha wasn't there to catch them. His brother no longer stood amid the great gnarled roots at the base of the tree.

  He found Sor'acha standing a few yards away, an ear cocked to the jungle. Strange noises rumbled from the thick undergrowth of the valley.

  On callused hands and feet, Chim'bor scampered down the tree trunk. He hurried over to his brother. "What is wrong?" Chim'bor asked.

  Sor'acha silenced him with a raised hand. "The ghost faces have returned," he whispered. He was peering intently through a gap in the brush.

  Bright sunlight flooded the region beyond. Strange for a land where sun rarely reached past the thick treetops.

  The vast valley beyond had been largely cleared over the previous season. There had been many days of toil for the whites and their earthmoving machines. The jungle canopy had been hacked down for miles within the valley. What had been dense jungle was transformed to desert.

  "You should not look there," Chim'bor warned. Like most of the Rsual, he avoided the valley since the arrival of the whites.

  "I am the older brother," Sor'acha replied. "You do not command me. Besides, do you not wish to know why they are here?"

  Although Chim'bor didn't, Sor'acha was determined.

  At nightfall, they crept out of the jungle and entered the barren valley. The moon hung bright and big in the sky as they slipped across the barren ground. A man-made hill rose in the center of the valley, its top flat.