The Arms of Kali td-59 Read online

  It was time. He reached for the white capsule in his vest pocket, the pill that promised a death fragrant with almonds. He rolled over onto his stomach and popped the pill into his mouth, just as the rumal tightened around his neck.

  Then there was a scream. Just one. Before Smith could register the fact that the beating on his body had suddenly stopped, he was being jerked to his feet. He choked, and the poison capsule lodged in his throat. Then he felt himself sailing in free flight. He landed belly-first in an empty lot and spat out the cyanide capsule whole. He lay there staring at the white plastic cylinder for a moment, until his senses awakened again and he turned to see what had happened to his attackers.

  There were bodies strewn all over the street, and while a dozen still stood, something seemed to be whirling in their midst, something turquoise that moved so fast there did not appear to be any substance behind the movement.

  One by one the young killers dropped, until only one was left, a woman, and she fled. There, on the street, surrounded by bodies, stood Chiun. He folded his hands inside his turquoise brocade robe and walked slowly toward Smith.

  "Chiun," acknowledged Smith.

  "I am really disappointed in you, Emperor," Chiun said. His voice sounded like bacon sizzling.

  "Why?" Smith asked in honest puzzlement.

  Chiun raised his heel and ground the cyanide capsule under his foot. "Do you think I will have it said of me by future generations that an emperor under my protection was forced to take poison? Oh, the shame of it."

  "Sorry," said Smith. It was the only thing he could think of to say. He tried to rise, but his legs were wobbly under him, and then he felt himself being lifted into Chiun's arms as if he were a baby.

  At the Seagull Motel, Chiun told the clerk, "We do not wish to be disturbed."

  "Just a minute, there. You got to register like everybody else," the clerk said.

  Holding Smith in one hand, Chiun used his other hand to rip the stairway railing from the banister. He tossed it onto the desk of the clerk.

  "On the other hand," the clerk said, "you can register in the morning."

  Inside the room, Chiun placed Smith on the bed and then began probing his body with his long-nailed fingers. After several minutes, he stood and nodded.

  "There is no serious injury, Emperor," he said. "With rest, your body will return to the same despicable condition which is its normal state."

  Chiun looked around the room, distaste evident on his parchment-like face, and suddenly Smith realized that Chiun did not know about Remo. How could he tell him? He reached deep down into his reserves of rock-hard New England character and said, "Master of Sinanju, Remo is dead."

  For a moment Chiun did not move. Then he turned to face Smith. His hazel eyes flashed in the glare from the bare overhead light. "How did this happen?" the old Oriental said slowly.

  "In a plane crash. Someone at the ashram over there . . ." He tried to point across the street but was unable to move his arm because of the pain. " . . . over there told me," he said.

  Chiun went to the window and looked out. "That slum is a temple?" he said calmly.

  "Yes," Smith said. "Kali, I think."

  "Is the statue there?" Chiun asked.

  "It was a half-hour ago," Smith answered.

  "Then Remo is not dead," Chiun said.

  "But I was told ... The crash . . ."

  Chiun shook his head slowly from side to side. "Remo must yet face death," he said. "That is why I went to my village."

  "Why?" Smith said. "I don't understand."

  "I went for this." Chiun reached into the sleeves of his robe and pulled forth a tarnished silver ring.

  "For that?" Smith said.

  "For this."

  Smith reddened. It had cost untold thousands of dollars and threatened all kinds of security to send Chiun to North Korea, and he had gone there to bring back a silver ring worth twenty dollars at a generous pawnbroker's.

  "For just a ring?" he said.

  "Not just a ring, Emperor. The last time it was worn, it gave a man like Remo the strength to do something he had not the courage to do before. Remo needs that courage because he faces that same adversary."

  "A. H. Baynes?" Smith asked.

  "No. Kali," Chiun said.

  "Chiun, why do you think that Remo's alive?"

  "I know he is alive, Emperor."

  "How do you know?"

  "You do not believe the legends of Sinanju, Emperor. No matter how many times you have seen them come true, you believe only in those ugly metal cabinets you have in your office. I could tell you, but you would not understand."

  "Try me, Chiun. Please," Smith said.

  "Very well. Remo came to me a dead man after you brought him into the organization. Did you ever wonder why I deigned to train a white when it is well-known that whites are incapable of learning anything important?"

  "No," Smith said. "Actually, it never occurred to me to wonder about that."

  Chiun disregarded the answer. "I did it because Remo fulfilled one of the oldest prophecies of Sinanju. That someday there would be a dead man that would be brought back to life. He would be trained and would become the greatest Master of Sinanju, and someday it would be said of him that he was not just a man, but the rebirth of Shiva, the Destroyer god."

  "And that is Remo?" Smith said.

  "Such is the legend," Chiun said.

  "If Remo is this Shiva god, why doesn't he just armwrestle with Kali and beat her?"

  "You scoff," Chiun snapped, "because you choose not to understand, but I will answer anyway. Remo is still just a child in the way of Sinanju. The power of Kali now is greater than his power. That is why I brought this ring. I believe it will make him strong, strong enough to win and to live. And someday he will be Sinanju's greatest Master. Until that day, I continue to teach him."

  "Because of that, you know he's not dead?" Smith said.

  There was utter disgust on Chiun's face, the countenance of someone trying to teach calculus to a stone. "Because of that," he said simply, and turned away. It was too much for Smith. Sadly, he felt that Chiun was deluding himself, holding on to the slim hope of some legend because he refused to face the hard fact that his disciple, Remo, was dead. But all things die. Didn't the old man know that?

  "I have to call the police," Smith said. "I have to get them to round up everybody at that ashram."

  "No," Chiun said.

  Smith walked to the telephone, but Chiun took his arm and led him back to the bed.

  "We will wait for Remo," Chiun said coldly. "This battle belongs to him, not to the police."

  Harold Smith decided to wait.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Remo held Ivory's hand as they drove from the airport back toward downtown New Orleans. For him, the miracle was not that he had survived the explosion on the plane, but that he had found Ivory after it was all over.

  During the panic-stricken seconds right after the blast, the scene in the Air Asia plane was a horrible vision. Remo had felt his seat belt come undone and his body being tossed into a group of hysterical passengers who were trying, illogically, to undo their seat belts to free themselves.

  Remo had scurried to the big yawning hole where the cockpit had once been, and stationed himself there to stop people from tumbling out into the nighttime sky.

  The lake below was racing up toward them. Those who survived the impact had a chance to live if they all kept calm. Every nerve, every muscle fiber in Remo's body was pulled violin-string-tight. He had no time for horror and none for rage, even though he knew this had not been an accident.

  The muffled thunder he had heard had come from the belly of the plane, not its engine. As soon as he had heard it, he knew it was a bomb. Some lunatic had somehow managed to plant an explosive inside the plane.

  Some lunatic, he thought, as a piece of the plane hurtled down the last few dozen feet toward the lake. Why hadn't he thought of it before? It had been set up so simply. Someone had want
ed him dead, someone careless enough about human life to be willing to sacrifice a hundred innocents just to kill him.

  Who else but A. H. Baynes? He caught an old woman who was sliding down the aisle toward the ripped-open front of the craft and held her in his arms. He glanced behind him. Twelve feet. Six. Impact.

  The plane hit with the flat slap of an egg dropped onto a tilted kitchen floor. As soon as he felt the first pressure of contact under his feet, he put the old lady into a seat and unstrapped a stewardess who was still buckled in.

  "Are you all right?" he asked her.

  She looked at him, in shock, as if unable to comprehend what had happened. Remo reached behind her head and pressed a hard index finger into a cluster of nerves at the back of her neck.

  Suddenly her eyes cleared and she nodded decisively. In the rest of the plane, people were screaming, breaking from their seat belts, starting to claw their way to the front of the plane to get out.

  "All right," Remo said. "You help these people. Make sure they've got floats or whatever they need. Get all the uninjured ones off. Give me room to work." She got to her feet.

  "We're going to die. We're going to die. We're drowning." Voices came down the aisle of the plane. Remo's voice barked above all the others. "Shut up and listen. You're not going to die and you're not going to drown. One by one, you're going to leave this plane and get away from it before it sinks. Just do what this lady says."

  "What are you going to do?" the stewardess asked. "I've got to see if anybody's alive in the forward section. If I can find it."

  Remo turned and dived out into the cold black water of the lake. As he surfaced, he heard the stewardess's calm voice behind him, telling the passengers to remove their seat cushions and use them as floats and then slide out into the water.

  Through the darkness, he saw a faint bump in the water fifty yards away and moved to it, not slapping his way through the water like a high-speed competition swimmer, but sliding through it like a fish, in movements so smooth that someone might look at the lake and see, not a human swimmer, but just one ripple among many.

  When he was closer, he saw that the small bump he had seen was the hump atop the cockpit. The front half of the plane was settling, sinking down into the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Another minute or so and it would be totally submerged.

  He dived down under the water and into the forward section of the plane, past the twisted ripped metal that showed where the bomb had exploded.

  The pilot and copilot were still in their seats. Peering like a fish under the inky water, Remo could see that their eyes and mouths were open. They were beyond help, and he only hoped that their deaths had been swift. They hadn't deserved this.

  He felt the rage he had been controlling starting to rise in his throat. The plane had been snapped apart just slightly behind the pilot's cabin. All the passengers were in the section that Remo had left behind, and he swam through the forward section of the plane for a few moments, but there were no other bodies. He felt the pressure as the plane began to slip under the water, and he swam out and surfaced.

  On the shoreline of the lake, he could see the revolving lights of emergency vehicles, and his ears picked up the onrushing whirring of a helicopter.

  Good. Help was coming. He looked quickly around him, but he saw no bodies floating, no one who needed help.

  As he swam back to the other section of the plane, he was able to see the stewardess moving people out in a rapid line, one after another, into the water.

  But the section of the plane had begun to tilt forward, and soon it would knife its way under the lake.

  Remo slipped back to it and pulled himself into the cabin section.

  "How we doing?" he asked the stewardess.

  "I lost one," she said. Tears streamed down her face. "A little boy. He dropped his float and then went out. And I couldn't reach him. He went under." She was sobbing even as she was continuing to help people into the water.

  "We'll see what we can do," Remo said. He let the air from his body and dropped like a stone under the waters of the lake. As he dropped, he rotated his body in the Sinanju spiral so that he commanded a full 360-degree view. The Sinanju spiral, he thought. This is how it should be used. For people's good. The last time he had used it, it was to kill a pigeon.

  He saw a dark shape floating aimlessly in the water a dozen feet away. It was the young boy, and Remo wrapped him in his arms and shot back to the surface like a bubble.

  He hoisted the boy's body into the cabin and put him on a seat.

  "Oh. You got him. Oh . . ." The stewardess could barely talk. The plane had now been emptied except for six people who lolled unconscious in their seats. The others bobbed like cork chips in the water, away from the plane.

  "Will he be all right?" she asked.

  "Get yourself a float and get out of here," Remo said as he pressed his fingers into the boy's solar plexus. He had stopped breathing, but it had only been a minute or so. There was still time. With his fingertips, Remo grasped a small clump of tissue and twisted it.

  "He's dead, isn't he?" the stewardess said. "He's dead."

  The boy's mouth opened and then a flood of water and bile came pouring out. The boy gasped and sucked up a huge mouthful of air.

  "Not anymore," Remo answered her. "He'll be all right. Take him with you."

  He handed the boy to the stewardess, who wrapped her arms about him, then took a seat-cushion between her hands and slid out smoothly into the water.

  She was a good one, Remo thought, moving toward the back of the plane. She deserved a medal.

  The water now was above his waist and he knew that in only a few minutes this section of the fuselage would go under the lake waters.

  The six people still in their seats were unconscious, and a mere glance told Remo that their injuries were more serious than he was able to deal with.

  He couldn't let them drown.

  He remembered the emergency kits he often saw in the rear of plane compartments, and he went under the water to the very tail of the plane, where he found a large metal container. It was closed and locked, but he ripped off the metal top and felt vinyl under his hands. As he brought it closer to his face, he could see that it was an inflatable raft.

  He surfaced again.

  The water in the cabin had risen another foot.

  He pulled the control on the raft and it began to hiss and expand. Remo moved it toward the jagged opening of the fuselage and pushed it out into the waters of the lake. Then one at a time he came back for the passengers and carried them out and placed them in the raft. He had just gotten the last one on the bright yellow float when he turned and saw the silver section of the plane tip once, as if making a final bow, and then slide down under the water.

  He heard the sound of boat motors racing across the water toward them. Fifty feet away he saw the stewardess, still clinging grimly to her life preserver and to the young boy, and he pushed the raft over to her.

  When he tried to take the boy from her, she tightened her grip around his body until Remo said, "It's me. It's all right." She recognized him and released the boy, and Remo put him in the raft.

  "You're a helluva lady," Remo said, and then he let himself slide under the water and propelled himself toward the shoreline. He didn't want to be "rescued," and he didn't want to be interviewed, and he didn't want to be seen. Perhaps it would serve his purposes best if A. H. Baynes was allowed to think that Remo had died as planned.

  He swam away from the large cluster of people standing on the shore, manning emergency lights and playing them on the faces of the survivors a few hundred yards out into the lake. When he was sure that no one could see him and he was out of the ring of lights, he walked slowly onto dry ground.

  And couldn't believe his eyes.

  There stood Ivory. Her white suit was rumpled and her face looked tense and anxious. "Oh, Remo," she said, and ran into his arms. "Somehow I knew," she said.

  He kissed her and immediat
ely felt a rush of triumph flood over him. This is why I'm alive, he thought. And all the guilt and self-recriminations about the people who had died because of him retreated to a remote area of his mind. He was alive and Ivory had come back for him. "How did you know?" he asked.

  "I didn't. I just hoped, and then there was the crash and I came running here and somehow I knew that this would be the spot."

  "That's one plane I'm glad you missed," Remo said, holding her close to him. "Come on, let's get out of here before the crowds arrive."

  "You're wringing wet," she said. "You'll freeze."

  "Don't worry about it," he said.

  He took the first car he found in the parking lot. The driver had left the keys under the front seat, and as he drove from the airport, slowly, past the police emergency lines that had been set up to control sightseer traffic, he turned to her and said, "I have to tell you something about the statue."

  "Statue?" Her expression was bewildered.

  "The statue you were looking for in New Orleans. I know where it is."

  "What? Why didn't ... ?"

  "Too long a story for now," he said. "But I'm going back there, and when I'm done, well, then you can have the statue."

  "Doesn't the owner have something to say about this?"

  Remo wanted to tell her that no one could own Kali, but he stopped himself. Ivory had a hard enough time believing that he had somehow survived the plane crash. Anything more might drive her away in fright. Instead, he just reached over and touched her knee.