Fool's Gold Read online

She saw Wissex looking at her and she asked again, "What are you going to do with me?" He had not answered her all day when she had asked that question.

  Wissex smiled at her. "Do you know that that imbecile Moombasa still believes there is a mountain of gold?" he asked.

  "And there isn't," she said.

  "Of course not," Wissex said.

  "Why did you put up all those plaques? It was you, wasn't it?"

  "Of course m'dear. It was my plan. There is, you know, this idiotic Hamidian legend about a mountain of gold. It was my idea that if I got Moombasa to believe the United States was looking for it, then he would spend any amount of money to find it. So far, he has been good for twenty million dollars."

  "He's not going to be happy when he finds out there's no mountain," Terri said.

  "He thinks there is one. He thinks you'll tell him where it is."

  "It doesn't exist," Terri said. "I'll tell him that. And that it was all your idea."

  Wissex chuckled. "I know that and you know that. But I'm afraid you won't get a chance to tell him. Unfortunately, m'dear, you're going to have an accident. A fatal accident."

  "But why the plaques?" she asked again.

  "That was to lend authenticity to the scheme," he said. "You should realize that true genius involves painstaking attention to detail. I wanted everything to look correct. It had to be good enough not only to fool Moombasa— I could fool him with a map drawn in the sand with a stick— but also to fool you and the United States until I extracted enough money from that idiot. He is not a trusting sort. Did you know that he has had one of his would-be spies traipsing around, trying to keep an eye on you and your bodyguards?"

  "That fat man at the airport?" Terri said.

  "Yes. I made sure to tell him where we were going. I have no doubt that your friends have, by now, extracted that information from him."

  Terri felt her heart add a little extra happy beat. "But why?" she asked him and because she guessed it would feed his macho sense of himself, she added, "I don't understand. Why would you want them to know where we went?"

  "Because I am going to kill them. Those two have spoiled my calculations long enough and they have been a shadow over the House of Wissex for far too many years. When they come for you, all three of you will die."

  He spoke with an unemotional flatness as if he were discussing the score of last year's semifinal soccer game.

  "They'll get you, you know," Terri said, the anger spilling out of her, fueled by his smugness. "They're better than you are."

  "Don't you believe it, girl. Don't you believe it. And now I wish you would please be still. I have some cogitation to do to prepare my welcome for the House of Sinanju."

  "Still? I won't be still. I'll shout and scream and let the world know I'm here." Terri opened her mouth to scream, but it changed to a shriek of pain as Wissex pressed a button on the panel in front of him and the boom yanked her upwards, almost dislocating her arms from her shoulders. She bit her lip and hung there in silence, looking across at him, at the helicopter parked on the hilltop behind him. Wissex must have set a trap for Remo and Chiun— but what could it be? She would not let them die, not if she could help it. When she saw them, she would shout and scream and let them know it was a trap. And if she died, then maybe she deserved it for being stupid, but at least she would have evened the score with this English monster.

  But while the night grew darker, her resolve and her courage weakened, as the night sounds surrounding the hilltop grew in intensity. She tried to spin on her ropes, to look around her in a full 360-degree circle, to see if she could see a light that might be Remo and Chiun, but even as she made the effort, she heard Wissex' mocking voice.

  "Don't trouble yourself. When they arrive, I will let you know. Nothing can move out there without being detected by my sensors. That is why we came to this godforsaken lump of dirt. It is the only high ground in this entire country and I will know they are coming long before they get here. So just hang there and rest." He laughed again and Terri felt her heart sink.

  There was just no hope, no chance for survival, no way to save Remo and Chiun from this evil madman.

  "Oh, that's awful," Remo said. He was looking up at Terri, perilously extended from the boom out over the edge of the hill. "That bastard."

  He dropped back to the ground alongside Chiun.

  "Do you feel it?" Remo hissed.

  "Of course," Chiun said softly.

  "It's some kind of force field," Remo said. "Probably a detection device to tell him we're here."

  "I know what it is, you untrained monkey," Chiun said.

  "How do we avoid it? That's the problem."

  "There was once a Master Yung Suk," Chiun started but Remo interrupted.

  "Now you're going to give me a history lesson? Now?"

  "There are no new answers; only new questions," Chiun said.

  "What's that supposed to mean?" asked Remo.

  "It means that there was once a Master Yung Suk," Chiun said.

  "Can we keep this one short before Terri dies hanging up there?"

  "And Yung Suk was supposed to storm the castle of an evil prince. This was in Mongolia. Don't worry about the girl; I noticed she has very strong arms. And the evil prince knew an attack was coming and he had all his best soldiers atop his castle, along the walls, looking off in all four directions. And the prince had his spies about too and the spies found that the attack would come from Yung Suk and four of the best men of the village. So when five men came out of the woods surrounding the castle, a great cry and shout went up from the soldiers and they attacked and overwhelmed the five men and killed them."

  "That's some freaking cheery wonderful story," Remo said.

  "It is not over."

  "What else?" Remo asked.

  "And while the soldiers were laying waste these five, Master Yung Suk entered the castle from the other side and killed the evil prince and got paid and everything ended happily."

  "What's the moral?" asked Remo.

  "The moral is that armies and Englishmen see only what they have been warned that they might see. This Wissex upstart up there is expecting two. We will give him two and he will concentrate on two and then there will be a third and that will do the trick," Chiun said.

  "There's only two of us. How are we going to be three?"

  Chiun stood up and stepped back into the darkness a few yards. Remo heard a soft wrenching sound as if a grave were giving up its cargo. A moment later, Chiun was back, his arms wrapped around a small eight-foot-high tree. He tossed the tree toward Remo.

  "I get it," Remo said. "We use the tree to divert him and make him think it's one of us."

  "At last the dawn," Chiun said. "Even after the darkest night."

  "You want me to go with the tree?" Remo said. "How about you?"

  "You already clomp around with enough noise for two," Chiun said. "You are much more believable imitating a crowd."

  "Okay."

  Chiun pointed Remo off toward the left side of the hill, and as the old man watched, Remo moved away into the darkness, lugging the tree, as silent as a wisp of air. When he knew that Remo could not see him, Chiun nodded his head approvingly. Some never learned to move. There had even been masters who were lead-footed; but Remo had learned in the earliest days of his training to center his weight, so he could move smoothly in any direction. One of the fairy tales Chiun had been told as a child was the story of a master who could run across a wet field and leave not a crushed blade of grass behind him. When he was growing up in his training, Chiun thought it impossible, a fairy tale, but now he thought that someday Remo might be able to do it. Perhaps even better than Chiun himself.

  Chiun listened but heard nothing except the sounds of the night. No movement from Remo, not even the hiss of a breath, not even the rustling of a leaf on the small tree the young American carried.

  And then Chiun drifted off toward the right side of the hill, above which hung the terrified form of Terri Pomfre
t.

  "Here they come," Wissex said softly.

  It was fully dark now and from Terri's point of view, Wissex's face was distorted in the green flickering light of a television monitor built into the table before him. The green light threw long fright shadows up across Wissex's face. Terri wondered how she had ever thought he was handsome.

  Wissex looked at the screen and laughed softly at their crude attempt to deceive him. The screen was built into a television but it was the latest form of radar screen, picking up the movement of objects over the size of a child.

  Four overlapping cameras that Wissex had mounted on the edges of the tabletop mesa scanned the area around the hill.

  Wissex watched the movement of the two men on the screen. First one of them would dart forward, fifteen feet or so, close to the edge of the camera's range. Then the other would move forward, and join with the first. Then the first would move forward again. It was obvious to Wissex that they were trying to find a pocket of space that the cameras didn't cover.

  Not a chance, he thought. He reached under the table and opened a small case from which he took a submachine gun. He clicked off its safety and set the first round into the chamber, then waited, his eyes watching the screen, as the two figures continued their unusual leapfrog motion toward the base of the hill. Only forty yards more and they would be at the bottom of the cliff.

  They would have to climb up. And he would be waiting.

  Remo tossed the tree forward fifteen feet and waited until it hit. Then he ran forward himself until he was on a line with the tree, then turned sharply to his right and moved over to the tree. He waited a few seconds, then tossed the tree forward again and repeated the maneuver.

  Chiun should be at the base of the hill now, Remo thought.

  Terri saw him as the moon came out from behind a cloud for a brief moment. It flashed on the dark purple of the kimono and she saw Chiun's face, looking upward, as he came silently up the stone face of the hill. She had been looking at that wall all day and it had been smooth and seemed impossible to scale, but Chiun was moving upward as rapidly as if he had been climbing a ladder.

  She glanced over toward Wissex at the platform in the center of the hill but he had seen nothing. His eyes were still riveted on the television screen.

  And Chiun was climbing.

  Remo had reached the bottom of the hill. He dropped the tree and looked up at the smooth stone walls. If he went up, Wissex had only to look over the edge and he could pick Remo off like a wingless fly clinging to a wall.

  He hoped Chiun's scheme was working and the Briton was still focusing his attention on Remo. Maybe... if he kept that attention.

  Remo backed off from the wall and shouted out.

  "Wissex, we're here for you. Surrender the girl."

  He waited a split second, then got his answer, a deep, rolling laugh that shattered the quiet of the night.

  And then Wissex's voice.

  "Come on up. I'm waiting for you. You can join the wench."

  She saw Chiun put a hand over the top of the cliff and then, like smoke rising, he moved up onto the edge. Wissex had moved to the other side of the hill, from the bottom of which had come Remo's voice. His back was to Chiun but the old man did not move. He had his head cocked as if listening to something far off.

  Suddenly, Terri heard it too.

  It was a distant rumbling, like the sound of machinery.

  Wissex heard it too and spun toward the noise and he saw Chiun. Even as he said, in confusion, "How... what are you doing here?" he aimed the spray machine gun in Chiun's direction.

  The Korean did not answer.

  "There are three of you?" Wissex said.

  "Perhaps four or five," Chiun said.

  "It doesn't matter," Wissex said. "However many there are, they are all dead."

  The sound came from trucks. Terri could recognize the noise now. And then the sound lessened, and search lights flamed from out of the darkness toward the hill. Then a voice boomed through the night, powerful amplification making it seem that it came from every direction at once.

  "Wissex, I know all," shouted Moombasa. "And now you die, thieving Englishman."

  "That damned wog," Wissex said. "I'm getting out of here." He raised the gun toward Chiun. "But first you."

  Remo had lingered at the base of the hill but when he heard the first machine gun blast, he leaped upward, grabbed a finger hold and began to move up the face of the smooth rock. It had been the hardest of lessons when he was young in Sinanju, learning to put the pressure of his weight into the face of the wall he was climbing and not down toward the ground. Harder still to learn was to harness the fear of falling that brought tension to the muscles and made the act of climbing impossible.

  There was another burst from the machine gun and Remo raced toward the top of the cliff.

  Moombasa heard the machine-gun fire too and he ducked down inside the 1948 Studebaker that was the pride of Hamidia's armored corps. He dropped his megaphone on his driver's head.

  "That limey is trying to harm my royal person," he said. "Attack," he shouted. "Attack. Reduce that hill to rubble. I don't want a stone left."

  His driver moved the Studebaker out of the way of the seven cannons, mounted on the backs of flatbed trucks, as uniformed soldiers loaded the big guns and began sighting in on the flat mountain top.

  Even though she had seen it, she didn't believe it. Terri had seen Wissex aim the gun at Chiun and press the trigger. The old man hadn't seemed to move and yet somehow the bullets had missed and Chiun was ten feet away from his previous position. Then he circled slowly away from Wissex and Terri realized that he was turning Wissex away from her, to protect her from being hit by a stray shot.

  Wissex wheeled toward Chiun. He held the machine gun at waist level and then squeezed the trigger again, this time letting out a spray of bullets in a wide arc. And again, they missed, because when Wissex released the trigger, the old man was still standing, still smiling, and then he moved forward toward Wissex.

  "My ancestor let yours live," Chiun intoned. "You will not be so lucky. This is the last time you pretenders attack the House of Sinanju."

  Wissex looked at Chiun and the gun, then threw the gun on the ground and bolted toward the helicopter on the far side of the mesa.

  He got only two steps before being hauled up short. Terri saw him. It was Remo, moving out of the night, wearing his regular black chinos and black t-shirt, and he had his hand on Wissex's shoulder.

  Wissex wheeled to face him.

  "No, no, no," he cried. "My challenge was not to you, American. It was to Sinanju."

  "And I am the next Master of Sinanju," Remo said.

  Terri saw Wissex' face pale. Then he pulled away from Remo and tried to run but again Remo stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  Terri saw Remo flick a finger toward Wissex' neck. Wissex reached up to touch his throat.

  "What was that?" he asked. "I hardly felt it."

  "Don't turn your head," Remo said.

  "Why not?" asked Wissex.

  He turned his head.

  And as Terri looked on, his head fell off.

  Remo looked down at the body and said, "That's the biz, sweetheart."

  He ran over toward Terri. "You all right?"

  "Just arm weary," she said. "Get me down from here."

  "Coming right up," Remo said.

  He scampered up onto the long boom and walked out along it to where Terri was hanging. She looked up between her hands and saw him break the ropes between his fingers, and then take her hands in his. Easily, he lifted her and walked back along the boom until they were both over the safe rock of the hilltop. Then he set her down carefully.

  Chiun came over to look at the girls' wrists in the illumination from the floodlights on the trucks below. He began to massage them gently.

  "Too much thumb," he said to Remo.

  "What?"

  Chiun nodded toward Wissex' body. "With him," he said. "Too much th
umb on that stroke."

  "It needed thumb," Remo said.

  "You are a disrespectful galoot," Chiun said. This was a new word he had learned only a few weeks before watching a cowboy movie and he was practicing using it on Remo. "Yes," he said. "Heh, heh. Just a galoot."

  Suddenly, they heard the whistle of an approaching shell, and then felt a shudder as the shell hit and exploded near the mountain's base. Then they heard Moombasa's voice, shouting out over the loudspeaker.

  "Fire. Destroy the British devil. Level that mountain. Not a stone left."

  "We'd better get out of here before they get the range," Terri said.

  "That probably gives us till next month," Remo said.

  Chiun pointed toward the helicopter. "There is that whirly thing. Can you fly it?"

  "If it's got wings, I can fly it," Remo said.

  "Actually, it does not have wings," Chiun said.

  "Actually, I can't fly it," said Remo.

  "I can," Terri said.

  "Thank God for liberated women," Remo said.

  The shell bombardment was slowly getting closer and as the three clambered into the helicopter, a shell exploded only 20 yards from them on the hilltop.

  Quickly and competently, Terri started the helicopter's motor and turned on the craft's lights. She looked outside at the hill, then jumped from the pilot's seat and ran back onto the hilltop.

  "Remo, Chiun. Come quick," she called.

  When they got to her, she was kneeling over the shell hole. At the bottom of the hole, the ground was glittering. Chiun reached in and pulled out a small pellet.

  "Gold," he said.

  "It's the mountain! The gold mountain. This is it. Yahooooo," Terri yelled.

  They heard the whistle of another shell. It hit only 25 feet away and the concussion of the explosion pitched Terri onto her back.

  She scrambled to her feet and shook her fist in Moombasa's direction.

  "It's the gold mountain, you imbecile!"

  From his vantage point below, Moombasa saw only a figure on the edge of the hill shaking a fist at him.

  He picked up his loudspeaker and bellowed, "Taunt me, Englishman? We will destroy you. Fire. Fire. Fire. Bury that hill in the dirt."