Unite and Conquer td-102 Read online

  This particular book made Remo think of Vietnam. But his sharp eyes detected no trip wires or tell tale depression in the ground to suggest a buried antipersonnel mine.

  It looked safe, so he knelt and picked up the book. A paperback, it came open in his hands as he regained his feet.

  A slow look of surprise came over his face.

  "Check it out," said Remo. "Who would read these in the jungle?"

  "What is this?" said Chiun, drifting up.

  Not taking his gaze from the title page, Remo lifted the book so the Master of Sinanju could examine the cover. It showed a grim-faced man wearing tigerstripe camouflage paint.

  Eyes frowning, Chiun read the title aloud:

  "Deadly Death?"

  "Guess they ran out of good titles a couple hundred books back," said Remo.

  "I do not understand your infatuation."

  "This is an Extinguisher book. We used to read these by the ton back in Nam."

  "You read this junk?"

  "It wasn't junk! At least, it didn't read like junk back then. I don't know about now. This first paragraph is kinda dull."

  Flipping back, Remo found the copyright page.

  "It's a new one. Boy, I didn't think they still published these."

  "It says it is number #214. Is that the number that are printed?"

  "No, Little Father, that's the number of adventures in the series."

  "You are joking."

  "I guess they're still pretty popular."

  "Throw it away, it will give you bad ideas."

  Remo dropped the book where he found it.

  "Okay, but only because we have work do do. But they used to be pretty exciting. I remember one where Blaize Fury single-handedly-"

  "Who is Blaize Fury?"

  "The Extinguisher's real name. He was a fire fighter whose entire family was burned to death by Mafia arsonists and decided to hunt them down."

  "It has taken him 214 adventures and he had not yet succeeded?"

  "Actually he got the arsonists in the first book, but it wasn't enough. After that he decided to wipe out the entire Mafia. He would go from city to city shooting practically everyone whose name ended in a vowel."

  "No wonder he still struggles. He employs a boom stick and wastes his wrath upon soldiers. Any fool understands if you cut off the head, a snake will quickly die."

  "The Mafia had a lot of snakes heads in those days. Besides, it's only fiction."

  "One man wrote all those books?"

  "I don't know about now, but back then, yeah."

  "What was his name?"

  "Cooper, Carter, or something like that. He was good. But after five or six books, you kinda noticed he was repeating the same three plots over and over again."

  "Just like Gordons," sniffed Chiun.

  "Now that you mention it, yeah, just like Mr. Gordons. All he was programmed to do was survive, but he lacked one essential ingredient. Creativity. Even when he finally got his programming fixed, he was still as naive as a six-year-old. Last time out, we pulled the wool over his eyes pretty easily."

  "What do you mean 'we,' round-eyes?"

  "It was a team effort, okay? Stop busting my chops."

  "I do not like to hear about Gordons."

  "He's out of commission, so what's the problem?"

  "He robbed me of my most precious possession."

  "Oh, here we go again ...." Remo groaned.

  "Yes, scoff. Minimize. You are a minimizer of tragedies."

  "Right now," Remo said, hoisting the trunk up onto his right shoulder, "I'm just a beast of burden."

  "And I am the last pure-blooded Master of Sinanju. It was my responsibility to sire the next in my line. But I am unable to fulfill this sacred duty because of the accursed man-machine Gordons. "

  "Actually he was an android, not a machine."

  "He was a cruel monster. Fashioned by a white lunatic to bring horror to the world just as he brought horror to my formerly serene life."

  "He was created for the space program. To go where human astronauts couldn't. To survive at all costs so that he could send back telemetry of what he found. But I agree with you about the lunatic part. The idiot who built Gordons programmed him to assimilate anything living or not so he could take whatever form maximized his survival."

  "Instead, he maximized my grief by robbing me of my precious seed. An undeniable fact that you persist in minimizing."

  In the jungle darkness Remo rolled his eyes to the interlacing jungle canopy.

  In his mind's eye, Remo remembered a previous encounter with the survival android whose creator had named it Mr. Gordons after her favorite brand of gin. It had been shot into outer space, but had returned to earth orbit and assimilated a Soviet space shuttle. The shuttle carried in its cargo bay a doomsday satellite called the Sword of Damocles. Designed to orbit earth indefinitely, the Sword had to receive an annual radio signal or it would activate, bathing the planet in microwaves designed to sterilize the human race. No one would be killed, but eventually humanity would die out from lack of offspring. Showing more malevolence than foresight, the Kremlin had engineered it as a final revenge in the event the USSR ever fell to a Western nuclear strike.

  They had successfully neutralized Gordons, but Chiun had been subjected to the rays. Ever since, he swore up and down he'd been sterilized.

  The fact that he hadn't attempted to have children throughout the fifty to seventy years before that meant nothing to the Master of Sinanju. It was an injury that cut to the quick of his pride, and whenever the subject came up he wouldn't let Remo hear the end of it.

  "I am childless, barren. Doomed forever to bring forth no sons. Though maidens throw their fecund wombs at my feet, I must spurn them, for they are of no use to me."

  "Yeah, maidens throw themselves at your feet all the time. Refresh my memory, Little Father. Exactly when was the last time that happened?"

  "This they no longer do because they can read the barren emptiness in my eyes. It is written across my features in lines of indescribable pain and sorrow."

  "Well, at least you got your revenge."

  "Gordons deserved to die a thousand times a thousand ignominious deaths."

  "He never really lived, so I don't think it matters much."

  "Now the future of the House has fallen upon shoulders that care not whether they sire a child or not. You hoard your precious seed like a miser."

  "I gave at the office," Remo grumbled.

  "You have squandered your seed. A grown son you did not know exists and a young daughter you never see. It is the end of the pure line of Sinanju. The sun is guttering in the sky, and you fritter away your time on nonsense."

  "I have enough Sinanju blood in me and enough seed that when the time comes, I can make all the grandsons you could ever want."

  "There is no such number. And it is never too soon to begin."

  Noticing Remo shifting shoulders again, the Master of Sinanju asked a pointed question. "Is my precious trunk growing more heavy?"

  "A little," Remo admitted.

  "That is because its contents grow more heavy with each childless step you take."

  "What contents?"

  "Guilt."

  "Oh, give me a break!"

  "I can tell you the truth now. The trunk is empty of all but your burgeoning guilt."

  "What have I got to be guilty about?"

  "That your offspring do not know their father, just as you did not know yours. The cycle repeats itself. They will carry this burden into the generations to come, and the seeds of the House of Sinanju will be scattered to the four quarters like the seeds of the wayward dandelion."

  "I wish a wind would carry this trunk away."

  "If it does," Chiun warned, "be certain that it carries you away with it, else you will face my wrath."

  "Just as long as it carries me to someplace peaceful," sighed Remo.

  Chapter 35

  Assumpta Kaax, aka Lieutenant Balam of the Benito Juarez Nationa
l Liberation Front, slipped along the jungle trail, following the bitter smell of scorched cornfields.

  The air was very bitter this night. The burned-field stink mixed with the strange sulphuric smell coming from the sky.

  She looked up. The clear skies were closing. It was difficult to say if this was from rain clouds or the troubled air rolling down from Mount Popo in the north.

  The air did not smell like rain, but neither did it smell like air. Not the good clean air of the Lacandon jungle, where the falling rains cleansed everything, making it new again.

  In the capital, she understood, the rain fell full of metals and poisons from manufacturing plants and factories that had nothing to do with her life or the lives of her people.

  A snap of a branch made her drop to the spongy jungle floor. Crouching, she waited, dark eyes catching faint starlight.

  Nothing moved in the direction of the snap.

  Careful to remain crouched, she turned her supple body, the better to widen her field of vision.

  Another snap came--this time to her left.

  She squeezed her weapon, as if for reassurance, and she trembled. She had killed before, but only soldiers. She did not wish to kill a Maya by mistake.

  The third snap seemed farther away. It was not the sound of bare feet or the soft Maya sandals. It was the hard sound of heavy boots breaking jungle detritus.

  It might be a soldado, but it might also be the sound of a Juarezista creeping toward a midnight rendezvous.

  The latter possibility was sufficiently important that Assumpta decided the risk of the former was worth taking.

  Slowly she came to her feet and moved toward the sound.

  "YOU HEAR THAT, CHIUN?" said Remo, head swiveling toward the sudden sound.

  The Master of Sinanju's quick, birdlike head movement copied that of his pupil. Their eyes pointed in the same direction.

  "Yes. The snap of a twig under a boot."

  "Okay if I leave the trunk here for a sec?"

  Chiun nodded. "Only because we both know your guilt will follow you whether you carry it or not."

  They slipped toward the sound, two wraiths, silent and nearly impossible to see in the night.

  COLONEL MAURICIO Primitivo crouched behind the sapodilla trees where he could not be seen. In his hands were dry branches he had picked off the ground.

  With his thumb he snapped them one at a time, pausing more than a minute between snaps.

  The Juarezista he had spied from afar would be drawn to the sound, he knew.

  He gave the next branch a clean snap, and in the brief echo that followed he heard a soft footfall. Then another.

  Yes, closer, he thought. Closer, my unsuspecting Juarezista. Come to your doom. For whether you are Subcomandante Verapaz or one of his tools, you will lead me to my heart's desire, I promise you.

  He kept one eye on the ground near where he stood. It was the logical approach path. He had picked this spot for that very reason. The sapodilla tree afforded excellent shelter, thick enough to absorb high-velocity rounds.

  A dull black boot pressed into the earth not three feet from his own waiting boots.

  Dropping the twigs, he brought up his H , "Do not move, Juarezista! Or you will surely leave your bones for the tapirs to gnaw on."

  The Juarezista froze. His training was good.

  "Ah, bueno. You understood even if you cannot see me. Now, slowly step into the light that I may see you, rebel."

  The boot hesitated.

  "I can shoot around this tree more swiftly that you can bring your weapon to bear upon me. You know this. If you turn and run, I will pepper your fleeing back. You know this also."

  There was no response to that. Colonel Primitivo took this as a sign of assent.

  "Good. Now, into the light."

  The second boot inched forward, and Colonel Primitivo's eyes went up to the head. A black ski mask enveloped it.

  "Let me see your eyes," he said.

  The face turned. If the eyes were green, he would obliterate them without hesitation.

  But the eyes, large as a deer's, were mestizo brown.

  Cursing inwardly, Colonel Primitivo snarled, "Now drop your weapon, insurgentista. "

  The weapon remained in the trembling hands.

  "Now!"

  The weapon was dropped. It struck the jungle floor with a flat finality.

  "Now your hands. Raise them that I may search you for concealed weapons."

  The hands were elevated.

  "Now kneel so that you cannot run away."

  Trembling, the Juarezista knelt.

  When that was done, Colonel Primitivo knelt, too. He laid his right lower leg across the lower limbs of his captive, pinioning them.

  Then, holding his own weapon away out of reach with one hand, he employed the other to pat down the rebel.

  He found softness where he expected the hardness of a jungle guerrillero, and when his hand felt around to the front of the khaki uniform blouse, he discovered the soft mounds of a female.

  "What is your name!" he hissed.

  "Lieutenant Balam."

  "Hah! You are no stalking jaguar on this night, eh chica?"

  "I am ready to die if necessary."

  "And I am prepared to kill you. But I will give you a chance. Subcomandante Verapaz is abroad, here in this zone, on this very night. Tell me where he is and your life may be spared."

  "I do not know the answer to your question."

  He brought his lips to her ear and made his voice low. "I think you lie, chica. Do you lie to me?"

  "No."

  "Yes, you lie. Your breasts tremble in your blouse. I know how a woman's breasts tremble when she mouths untruths."

  The Juarezista said nothing. She only trembled more.

  "There is a village near here. Perhaps he hides there."

  "No, he does not!"

  "Hah! You are too quick with your answer."

  And stripping off her ski mask by its pom-pom, he exposed a fear-drained face. Long black hair cascaded down. He took up a fall of it and brought it to his nostrils. Sniffing, he detected the scent of coconut.

  "You smell good for a jungle girl. You use coconut milk for shampoo. It smells enticing."

  With a sudden savage gesture he grabbed up a thick twist of lustrous hair and yanked the girl to her feet even as he came to his.

  Placing the stubby snout of the H small of her back, he ordered her to march toward the village.

  The guerrillera complied, her steps leaden and defeated.

  "Go ahead and cry, chica. I think you will need a head start, because after this sad night, this entire jungle will weep because Colonel Mauricio Primitivo has come to visit the rebels."

  "Cabron," she said thickly.

  "Ah, Subcomandante Verapaz has taught you the proper curses of the city, I see."

  "Chinga to madre!"

  He laughed. "Perhaps later, you and I, we will do what you suggest. Without my mother."

  After that the guerrillera was silent.

  They walked steadily toward the smell of burned corn husks, Colonel Primitivo looking back every once in a while.

  He saw nothing. Thus, he knew he was not being followed.

  He was wrong. He was being followed. But what followed him could not be seen by ordinary eyes or defeated by ordinary arms.

  Chapter 36

  Remo Williams gestured to the Master of Sinanju to keep his distance.

  They were coming up on the village they had smelled earlier. The Mexican colonel was taking his prisoner directly to it.

  "This guy may be doing our work for us."

  "As long as he takes no credit," said Chiun, "I will not mind."

  "Wonder who the girl is."

  "A wench who thinks she is a soldier. What manner of barbarians give a female killing weapons?"

  "Women can do a lot of things men can do, Little Father," Remo said dryly. "Scientists discovered this just recently."

  "That is not what I mean," Chiu
n hissed. "What idiot would place a dangerous boom stick into the hands of a creature whose moods swing with the waxing and waning moon?"

  "You may have a point there, but right now I think the colonel's in no danger."

  They moved on, slipping from tree to tree, becoming one with each bole they attached themselves to. Every time the colonel looked back-which was fairly often-he saw only unmoving trees.

  Finally the colonel was tramping through the burned cornfield, making enough rustling sounds to awaken the village.

  If that was his plan, he succeeded.

  A sleepy head emerged from a shack with a thatched roof.

  The colonel casually sighted across the shoulder of his captive and shot it to pieces.

  A woman screamed inarticulately, and Remo said, "Damn it, Chiun! That guy was unarmed!"

  But the colonel heard them not.

  The shots brought new heads sticking out. Switching to selective fire, the colonel popped them like birds on the wing.

  Sleepy, surprised faces materialized in the gloom, and were as quickly obliterated.

  The colonel raised his voice to a shout. "Verapaz, I am come for you! Show yourself!"

  Remo was moving by then.

  He cleared the space between himself and the colonel in less than five seconds flat, even with having to skirt various exotic trees.

  Even then he was not as fast as the guerrilla, who had dropped to the ground, turned like a dog in the dirt and was kicking out at the colonel with her khakiclad legs.

  "Puta!" he snarled, bringing his submachine gun down to perforate her belly.

  Remo reached him then. One hand drifting out ahead, he broke the weapon in two with a hard downward chop.

  The colonel had been holding his weapon steady with both hands. Now they flew apart, each holding a different end.

  His eyes went wide at the sight of his bifurcated weapon.

  Then Remo was in his face.

  "What the hell kind of soldier are you! Those people were unarmed."

  "Who are jou?"

  Remo relieved him of the weapon parts, tossing them in several directions. The colonel started to grab his combat knife.

  Remo let him. When it lifted, Remo took it away from him, held it in front of his face with one hand and used his free index finger to tap the blade. Three taps, starting just back of the point. With each tap, a section of the blade broke off clean until there was no more blade.