Remo The Adventure Begins (26 page)

Command center registered the perfect hit. They also registered something else, something one of the officers said had to be impossible, but it had to be reported to General Wason anyhow.

“Target hit, sir, and target resumes locomotion, sir. Target proceeding to red four. Red four, sir.”

Watson, Grove, and Wilson were quiet. Grove inhaled deeply. Wilson cleaned an imaginary speck off his perfect lapel. The devastator had hit and somehow missed. The target was still moving.

Remo brushed the dirt off him as he ran on the surface. The strange thing about the earth was how incredibly fresh it smelled underneath, as though it was rich with air when, of course, there wasn’t enough air to breathe.

He did not know he was in target area red four or that this time an entire pattern was going to be used on him, and the pattern was in his last hiding place. He was running through a minefield and he discovered it as the charges started to go off, turning trees into shards of rockets, burning the grass, making pebbles into bullets whizzing by his head.

The earth had been turned against him but Remo ran ahead of it, and from it, right to the edge of a gully and into space. Where and how he would land he would figure out when he got there.

He fell. He did not judge the fall by height, but it was too high. The landing was hard, even in the trees. He went down, snapping branches, until the last one creaked and caught him. He felt his bones. All there. But there was blood on his hands. He had been cut.

And the tree was moving. It was moving upward. It wasn’t a tree, it was a log. Other logs were moving upward. They were all moving under a long cable, over a deeper gorge.

Remo looked up. Behind him there were logs bobbing and dancing along this metal line. It was an eagle cable. He had read about them once when he was a youngster. They were used for clearing whole forests, a movable assembly line that took trees from where they were cut and ran them to where they could be finished.

Unfortunately they were not designed for passengers. Remo struggled up the breaking branches, trying to get to the top of the log.

He saw a good place to jump but that good place vanished as the logs moved downward. And beneath him was a deep canyon. Heights again.

Grove, Wilson and Watson heard the army track the target. It had escaped again.

“What is the matter? I am not asking you to commit genocide. Kill one man, for heaven’s sake,” said Grove.

“He’s heading for the lake,” said General Watson. “He’s outside the compound in a logging operation. He’s riding a log. We’re near there.”

“Then let’s go. This should not be that hard, Scott,” said Grove. He looked to Wilson, shaking his head. “The man is on a log. Logs are not the fastest, most elusive target in the world, General.”

“Right,” said General Watson. He nodded to his driver to step on it. The car pulled away with such speed that the armed soldier next to the driver almost fell out.

They arrived at the line of logs with plenty of time for the armed soldier to steady his rifle and aim, then wait for the right log to come down. The one with the man clinging to it.

It was like a shooting gallery, with one exception. When the soldier saw the man clinging to the log, he thought it seemed more like murder than target practice. He hesitated.

The important manufacturer grabbed the rifle himself, commenting acidly about the quality of the modern American soldier. He fired as the log went by, and missed the man who kept himself on its opposite side, much the same way American Plains Indians rode with their bodies hidden by the horse itself.

But Grove knew men, and Wilson had smelled the final blood. Wilson himself got behind the wheel of the car, and Grove joined him, cradling the rifle in his lap. General Watson, as he had been all along, was just along for the ride, going where Grove and Wilson decided to take him. They were going to finish what General Watson had failed to do.

They arrived where the cable let go of the logs, almost getting hit themselves. One log dropped. Then another. And another. Finally Grove saw him. He unloaded an entire clip into the log, watching chips fly, watching the man crawl like a bug, then he unloaded another clip.

General Watson warned him about the falling logs.

Grove continued to fire. Kill the bug, he thought. Kill the bug.

He thought he had him when the first log crashed into the command car. Remo heard the last bullet whistle by his head, and then looked down. It was safe to jump.

He heard the car crash above him on the mountain, heard the logs roll into steel siding. They were there. The man who had been firing at him was George Grove. Remo moved toward the car. Bodies had been thrown out. A general and a well-dressed civilian lay in that putty-strange way of dead bodies. Grove might be already dead.

And then Remo made a mistake. He had allowed his mind to think too much, and he had shut off his senses. They came back only when he heard the voice.

“Okay, that’s far enough.”

Remo looked above him. There was George Grove with a service revolver.

“I used to be interested in who you worked for. Now I don’t give a shit.”

Grove stepped closer. He felt the strong blood joy of death. And then, of course, the irony of it all.

“You know, they are going to give me a medal for killing you. I am saving America from a saboteur.”

And for the sheer pleasure of it, he decided to shoot off the testicles first.

He fired twice. The man jerked twice. But the man was still there. More important, the two bullets hadn’t even unzipped his fly.

And the man was closing on him. George Grove was a marksman. He didn’t miss. He aimed two more bullets right into the man’s chest, only to penetrate the trees behind the chest.

He fired again, and the man came closer. And then the target had the gun and was casually dispensing the last bullet harmlessly on the ground.

“Who are you?”

Remo would have answered George Grove, but he was busy. There was work to do. George Grove felt himself lifted to the overturned command car. He could have sworn this man was whistling a tune from a children’s movie. A pleasant joyful little tune that had been sung by the dwarfs in
Snow White.
It was “Whistle While You Work.”

The man held George Grove like a basket of goodies. Grove could not move. He felt the man bend down. He saw the man gather two twigs in one hand. He saw the twigs turn in that hand, turn so fast they began to smoke, and then, with a puff, there was a flame.

Remo put George Grove into the back seat of the command car, broke his kneecaps with two quick taps of a finger and then touched the burning twigs to the gasoline that had spilled from the tank.

George Grove went up like a marshmallow.

It was not, of course, an accidental death. But it would look like an accident. It would be good enough for Smith.

Rayner Fleming was waiting at lakeside, but Chiun was not there.

“He went to look for you, Remo,” she said.

“I didn’t need him. I did it. I didn’t need him,” said Remo. He jumped into a speedboat tied to the dock. “Now I have to look for him. I didn’t need him at all and now he’s gone.”

Then they saw Chiun, saw him almost at the same time as they saw the soldiers, truckloads of them, disgorging onto the jetty, coming between them and Chiun.

“He blew it, not me,” said Remo. The soldiers aimed their rifles, and then they all saw it. No one missed it, especially not Remo, whose mouth fell open for a moment.

Chiun, Master of Sinanju, raised up his chin and, with delicate precision, ran, his sandals moving with the lightness of eagle down, across the shortest distance from shore to jetty, not even making a single splash on the waves.

The soldiers kept their aim, but the fingers froze on the triggers. A man was running across the water.

No one fired at Chiun, and then the frail figure was in the speedboat, and the two of them took off in a plume of white spray.

Major Rayner Fleming signaled all riflemen to stand down.

“Who the hell are they?” asked an officer running up to the end of the jetty.

“Would you believe, the good guys,” said Major Fleming.

Chiun, delighted to see Remo successful and whole, examined his pupil. Remo was satisfied with himself.

“Correct?” he asked Chiun.

“The great assassins never appeared to try that hard,” Chiun said. “And you are cut.”

“The target is dead and I am alive,” said Remo. “It is correct. There is no almost correct.”

“Well,” said Chiun, “if showing that you could almost be killed is good enough for you . . .” His voice trailed off, his shoulders moved in a questioning shrug, and his long fingernails fluttered briefly like a dove alighting comfortably on a branch.

“Correct is enough for me, little father,” said Remo. He was angry. He never thought he would ever meet anyone who could take the bloom off getting out alive.

About the Authors

W
ARREN
M
URPHY
has written eighty books in the last twelve years. His novel
Trace
was nominated for the best book of the year by The Mystery Writers of America and twice for best book by The Private Eye Writers of America.
Grand Master,
cowritten with his wife Molly Cochran, won the 1984 Edgar Award. He is a native and resident of New Jersey.

R
ICHARD
S
APIR
is a novelist with several book club selections. He is a graduate of Columbia University and lives with his wife in New Hampshire.

C
HRISTOPHER
W
OOD
is a novelist with over fifty books in print, and has written two James Bond screenplays in addition to the screenplay for Remo. He was born and raised in London.