Unite and Conquer td-102 Read online

  Remo handed the colonel back the useless hilt.

  To show his gratitude, the colonel tried to shoot Remo in the face with a hastily pulled side arm.

  Remo clapped his hands once, abruptly. They came together with the tightly gripped weapon between them.

  The colonel felt the sting of the converging hands on his gun hand, flinched and told his brain to tell his trigger finger to squeeze the trigger.

  His finger refused. Then the pistol began falling apart in his hands as if every screw had melted.

  When he was left with only the cartridge-packed handle, but no breech or barrel, his gun hand began turning red as if sunburned. He stared at it with wideeyed disbelief.

  "Can you say 'vascular disintegration'?" asked Remo.

  "I do not know those words."

  "Think of the veins on your hand turning to mush and letting all the blood seep into your tissues."

  The colonel suddenly screamed. Not from the realization of his maiming but from the pain signals that finally caught up with his brain.

  Reaching for his neck, Remo squeezed a nerve that cut off the pain. He wasn't in a hurry; he let some pain seep through.

  "I'm looking for Verapaz."

  Through gritted teeth, the colonel said, "As am I! We are on the same side, yes?"

  "We are on the same side, absolutely not, " Remo shot back. "I don't kill noncombatants."

  "You are obviously American. CIA?'

  "UNICEF."

  "The children's fund?"

  "That's right. We're looking after the welfare of children everywhere. We also take donations. Dollars, not pesos."

  "You are loco."

  "If loco means I'm mad enough to break your neck, I have no quarrel with loco. "

  "Jou might have your wish, for I believe Verapaz to be in this very village." He gave the prostrate guerrilla a nudge with a black-booted toe. "This Naca, she knows."

  Reaching down, Remo brought the guerrilla to her feet.

  "Where's Verapaz?"

  "I know not."

  "She is obviously lying," said Chiun, who had materialized at their side.

  "I have said this," Primitivo said.

  "You stay out of this," Remo said.

  The Master of Sinanju drifted up to the girl, making his voice sympathetic. "Poor child. They give you the tools of death when you should be the bearer of life."

  "I do not need your advice, even if you saved my life," she spit.

  Remo said, "Look, we have no problem with you. We just want Verapaz."

  "I would sooner die than surrender him to you. Go ahead. Shoot me if you must."

  Turning away in disgust, Chiun said, "Go ahead, Remo. Shoot her. Her milk has been soured by war. She is spoiled for motherhood."

  "I'm shooting nobody." Remo faced her. "There's an easy way and a hard way. Which do you want?"

  "The third way. The way out of this nightmare. How dare you come into my land to seek my Lord Verapaz? This is no affair of gringos. "

  "That's another story. Look, we have a job to do and then we're out of here. I don't want to hurt you."

  "I am not afraid of you."

  "Damn," said Remo. Turning to Chiun, he said, "Your turn, Little Father."

  "I am no harmer of females. That is your job."

  Sighing, Remo told the girl, "This is going to hurt me as much as it hurts you."

  "Hurt her as much as you wish," said Colonel Primitivo, dark eyes flashing with anticipation.

  Remo took her left earlobe, where a sensitive nerve was located, and pinched it. The guerrilla seemed to surge up out of her boots and squeezed her tearing eyes shut even as she gnashed her lower lip to a crimson rag.

  "I do not know!" she wailed.

  "She lies," spat the colonel.

  "She's telling the truth," said Remo, releasing the girl's earlobe.

  Gasping for air, she shrank back into her uniform, saying, "Kill me now if you must."

  "The next person who touches her," a cold voice said from the jungle thickness, "eats angry subsonic rounds!"

  Chapter 37

  The commanding crack of a voice came from the west.

  Remo's gaze veered toward the sound.

  The ranks of trees were clustered tightly, and clotting darkness held sway between them. The gathering clouds above had almost swallowed the last fading starlight before the approach of dawn.

  But there was enough starlight for Remo's eyes to capture and magnify.

  Deep in the murk, a figure in black resolved itself out of the shadows. The head was muffled except for a slash surrounding the eyes, which were darkened with burned cork.

  Remo saw the eyes. Blue.

  "Bingo!" he said. "There's our man, Chiun."

  "The eyes should be green."

  "Blue-green. They're close enough for government work."

  "Come out, come out, wherever you are," Chiun called.

  "Step away from the girl!" the crack of a voice said.

  "Make us," taunted Chiun.

  "I'll wax you all."

  "You wax us and the girl dies, too," Remo pointed out.

  "That's a chance I'll take."

  The guerrilla stiffened and held her breath. Otherwise, she didn't look very worried.

  Remo lifted his voice again. "Sorry. No sale. She doesn't think you'll do it, and neither do we."

  "You are finished, Verapaz," the Mexican colonel called out.

  "Shut up, tostada face. I'm not Verapaz."

  "Then who are you?" Chiun demanded.

  "Ask your colonel."

  Remo eyed the colonel.

  Primitivo shrugged. "He claims to be El Extinguirador. "

  "Who?"

  "You might know him as Blaize Fury."

  "Yeah, I know who Blaize Fury is. How come you do, too?"

  "Because I have read many of his pulse-pounding adventures in my carefree jouth. "

  "Same here."

  Primitivo showed smiling teeth. "Then we are allies."

  "Blaize Fury wouldn't shoot unarmed civilians in the face and neither would I. Sorry. Consider your fan-club membership permanently revoked."

  To Remo's surprise the colonel looked completely crestfallen.

  The commanding voice sounded again, a distinct whiplash of a sound. "The Extinguisher doesn't say things twice."

  "The Extinguisher is a sissy," Chiun called out.

  "Who are you calling a sissy?"

  "The Extinguisher. The sissy who extinguishes."

  Remo called out. "Look, we're not backing down, so you better come out so we can straighten this out."

  A long silence developed. Remo had his eye on the shape in the forest murk. Abruptly it moved to one side.

  The Extinguisher thought he was being stealthy, but Remo tracked him easily. He saw that Chiun had him fixed in his sights, too.

  At a nod from Remo, the Master of Sinanju faded back into the jungle, his emerald-and-ocher kimono blending in with the vegetation.

  After that, Remo folded his arms and waited.

  The Extinguisher moved in a semicircle, keeping them in sight at all times. When he reached a tree, he unhooked a small folding grapnel from his web belt and affixed it to a black nylon line. Swinging it up, he snared an overhanging branch. Then like a nimble black spider, he went up, hand over hand.

  His grip was not what it should have been. He slid down twice.

  Floating across the space came a soft curse or two.

  Finally he reached the branch and started to grab for it.

  Perched directly above, the Master of Sinanju calmly reached down and sawed the nylon line with one swift fingernail swipe.

  The man in black landed in the dirt like a sack of sausage.

  Remo was on top of him seconds later. Reaching down, he pulled off his gear and threw it every which way.

  "You can't do this to the Extinguisher!"

  "Watch me," said Remo, flinging away the web belt and reaching for the black leather shoulder sling supporting a mach
ine pistol.

  It broke under the strength of his hard yank, and Remo prepared to toss it away, too, when he noticed amid all the projecting clips a Lucite ammo drum.

  "What the hell is this?"

  "My Hellfire pistol. It's the only one of its kind."

  Remo's eyes looked strange. Dropping the weapon, holster and all, he took hold of the ski mask and yanked it straight up.

  The last of the starlight disappeared then. But Remo didn't need it.

  The exposed face was young and angular, the short hair dirty blond. And to Remo's eyes it looked very familiar.

  "Chiun, I think we have a problem."

  "It is not my problem," Chiun said from the branch above. "For he is not my son, but yours."

  Chapter 38

  Remo dragged the man who called himself the Extinguisher to his feet.

  The Master of Sinanju dropped from his branch, as light as a green parachute descending, to land beside them.

  "This idiot isn't my son," Remo said in a disgusted voice.

  "Hey, I resent that!"

  "No son of mine would parade around tricked out like a walking Swiss army knife. Or pretend to be some phoney dime-novel superhero."

  "The Extinguisher is a legend. How do you know he isn't real?"

  "Because I have a working brain. Your name is Winston Smith. Until last year you were with the Navy. Now you're AWOL."

  "No. Wait. Think about it. Everybody knows the Extinguisher's name. It might be a cover to con the bad guys thinking that they have nothing to be afraid of."

  "They do not," Chiun retorted. "For we spied your clumsy clanking and clunking and ambushed you before you could unleash your ridiculous toy gun upon us."

  "Hey, I have an excuse. I have the trots."

  "What is this witless one talking about?" Chiun asked Remo.

  Winston Smith lowered his voice. "The screaming shits to you."

  Chiun sniffed the air delicately. "Is it you who has befouled the jungle?" he asked.

  "Not my fault. I drank some bad water."

  "This is Mexico," Remo said. "All the water is bad."

  "Yeah, well, now I know. That doesn't change who I am."

  "Kid, I was reading Blaize Fury when I was in Nam and your highest ambition was to crawl up a fallopian tube."

  "You were in 'Nam? Cool! What was it like?"

  "It was hell."

  "You're lucky. I missed out on 'Nam."

  "You missed out on common sense too. What are you doing down here?"

  "He is a Juarezista," the girl inserted.

  "That true?"

  The Extinguisher looked away. "Let me talk to you in private, okay?"

  Remo took him by the arm and into the jungle. In a thick part of the woods, he spun him around.

  "Let's have it."

  "I'm only pretending to be a Juarezista. "

  "Like you're pretending to be the Extinguisher?"

  "No, I'm really him. I mean I took on the nom de guerre to further my work."

  "What work?"

  Smith whispered, "I'm gonna wax Subcomandante Verapaz."

  Remo looked at him. In the darkness Smith waited expectantly, his grimy face shining with an inner pride.

  "Why?" Remo asked.

  "What do you mean-why? It's what the Extinguisher does."

  "If you don't stop referring to yourself in the third person, I'm going to shake you so hard your nuts are going to drop out your nostrils. Now, answer my question."

  "I'm on assignment," Smith said grudgingly.

  "Working for who?"

  "That's classified."

  Remo gave Smith's bicep a hard squeeze. Smith gritted his teeth, and sweat popped from his forehead. But he fought back his pain with such grim determination that Remo relented slightly.

  "No. Really, I can't say who sent me. It's the first rule of black ops."

  "The first rule of survival is to tell the truth when a bigger dog has you by the hind legs. Meet the bigger dog. Me."

  "Okay, I'm with the UN."

  "Nice try. No sale. Try again."

  "It's true. I'm working for the UN. It's quasiofficial right now. If I dust Verapaz, I'll have a solid gig."

  "Well, you can dust off your resume. Verapaz belongs to us."

  "Us! what do you mean us? Who are you guys?"

  "That is classified," Remo snapped.

  "You're kidding, aren't you? I mean, my Uncle Harold sent you down to haul my sorry butt back to Folcroft, didn't he?"

  Remo shook his head. "He's not your Uncle Harold, and we're here after Verapaz. Never mind why."

  "Look, we'll team up. How's that?"

  "I need a partner like you need an imagination. Forget it."

  Smith turned. "Okay. Fine. Let me go and may the best man win."

  Remo arrested him by the collar. "Look, you were a SEAL, right?"

  "Yeah. What's it to you?"

  "You should know the score. You're a foreigner in a war zone loaded down with enough gear to get you stood up in front of a firing squad."

  Winston Smith cracked a lopsided grin. "Yeah. That chicken-shit Mexican colonel tried that already. I still live."

  "That girl save you?"

  "She's not just a girl. She's guerrilla. There's no shame in being saved at the last minute by an ally."

  "She saved your sorry butt and you conned her into taking you to Verapaz, am I right?"

  "Right."

  "And in the middle of making formal introductions, you're going to whip out that overgrown Pez dispenser of yours and blow them both away, right?"

  "No. Just Verapaz."

  "Then what?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You heard me. After you blow Verapaz away, what are you going to do about the girl?"

  Winston looked at his boots. His voice lost its bluster. "I haven't thought that part all the way through yet," he admitted.

  "What if she pulls out her weapon and nails you?"

  "She wouldn't do that! Would she?"

  "You ask me, she's half in love with you."

  Smith brightened. "You really think so?"

  "Can the high school stuff. You shoot Verapaz, and she'll either nail you or make you shoot her. Is that what you want?"

  "I don't know yet. This is only my second mission."

  "Okay. Listen up. From now on, you follow my lead. Understand?"

  "What're you planning?"

  "Just follow my lead and stay out from underfoot."

  Pushing the boy ahead of him, Remo rejoined the others.

  The villagers were hanging back in fear. The dead were being pulled out of the shacks, and a fresh-blood smell hung in the air like a jungle miasma.

  Remo lifted his voice for Assumpta's benefit. "Looks like we're joining the Juarezistas, Little Father."

  And keeping his face away from the others, the Master of Sinanju, whose sharp ears had heard every word, winked broadly.

  "I have always desired to defend the downpressed."

  "It's oppressed, " Winston said dispiritedly.

  "Jou are friends of El Extinguirador?" Assumpta asked.

  "He thinks he's my father," Winston said.

  "He is," Chiun said.

  "Is he?" asked Assumpta.

  Remo and Winston looked at one another.

  "No way," both said in unison.

  Turning to Assumpta, Remo asked, "Can you lead us to Verapaz?"

  "If you are truly friends of Senor Blaize Fury, I will do this, for I trust him with all of my heart."

  Remo shot Winston a glance. Winston looked everywhere but back.

  "Okay," Remo said. "One last loose end and we're out of here."

  "What is that?" asked Colonel Mauricio Primitivo.

  "You."

  The colonel squared his shoulder boards. "I am no loose end. I am a colonel in the Mexican federal army."

  "No, you're a war criminal in a civil war." And Remo whistled for some of the lurking villagers to come padding up.

  "Jou cannot d
o this. It is uncivilized."

  "It is justice," Assumpta spat out the words.

  A knot of Maya surrounded Colonel Primitivo. Assumpta spoke to them in a musical tongue that was not Spanish by the quizzical look on the Master of Sinanju's parchment face.

  Someone dropped a rock on the colonel's head, knocking him out cold. Others grabbed his ankles and pulled him back into the village.

  "What's going to happen to him?" Winston asked as they started off.

  Assumpta shrugged. "He may be flayed while living, or burned with the old corn."

  "Kinda drastic."

  "It is what happens to all who oppose the righteous justice of the Juarezistas. "

  Winston Smith looked uncomfortable.

  Chapter 39

  Oaxaca in the valley was all but empty of men when the flowing train of Coatlicue lumbered in.

  The federal government had ceded the capital of the entire state. The immaculate city in the valley was virtually deserted.

  Dust still hung in the air from the departed vehicles.

  They stood in the center of the broad, tree-ringed Zocalo, the plaza that all Mexican towns and cities possess. This one was not as great as that of Mexico City, but to the eyes of High Priest Rodrigo Lujan, it was holy. Because it belonged to him.

  Towering above him under a sky dark with sinister clouds was Coatlicue, in whose name he had taken the city built over sacred Zapotec soil. Her skin resembled that of an armadillo now, covered in steely plates absorbed from the army tanks that she crushed and absorbed. No conquistador was ever so formidable, Lujan thought proudly.

  "We are victorious!" he sang out.

  "We are not alone," Coatlicue said, her voice ringing hollowly, her eyes peering from armored slits.

  " What!"

  "I detect the body heat of meat machines in the surrounding structures. A high probability of a trap is indicated."

  "But no trap can possibly harm you, Coatlicue," said Rodrigo, stepping into the shelter of the living idol he worshiped above all.

  "You must investigate this situation."

  "You promised to protect me."

  "Very well," said Lujan, adjusting his feathered cloak. He had acquired more festive garments along the way. Others had, too. Nearby stood a knot of Aztecs in the brine-stiffened uniforms of the Jaguar Company. Eagle Knights were nearby, bedecked in feathers both real and artificial. They carried weapons ranging from the obsidian-bladed spears to heavy hardwood clubs capable of dashing a man's brains from his skull.