Walking Wounded td-74 Page 2

  Phong averted his eyes. They were his countrymen, Vietnamese boat people who, even a decade after the war had ended, were risking their lives to escape. And he was helpless.

  Phong knew then that he had no hope of floating to Malaysia. He almost jumped overboard, but there was blood in the water now. And blood would bring sharks.

  Phong paddled with his hands. He hoped his sense of direction was true.

  And the screams continued, growing more distant. "Khoung! Khoung!" For hours Phong prayed quietly to his ancestors.

  The headland was green and looked cool in the setting sun. The tide brought him closer with agonizing slowness.

  Phong would have swum for it, but he remembered what the salt water would do to his back, and so, even though he feared being sighted by coast watchers, he stayed in the boat until at last it bumped shore.

  Phong sank the boat with stones and disappeared inland. The ground cooled his bare feet. He had no way of knowing where he was. Thailand, Cambodia-even back in Vietnam.

  He'd begun to despair of ever reaching safety. But because it was night, he kept walking, driven less by the will to live than by the memory of his American friends who had been in captivity so long that they had even ceased to hope. Phong was their last hope now. He would not let them down.

  He heard the dog bark and he froze. A dog! The bark was distant. Perhaps a kilometer. He listened again, his heart thudding. But the dog did not bark again. Perhaps it had been a hallucination, a trick of the ear.

  Phong followed the jungle path. In his mind he sang the old lovers' song of the homeland, "Dark Is the Jungle Path to My True Love's Hut," and he wept with bitter nostalgia for the old Vietnam.

  There was a village. And the dog barked again. Once. He had to see if the dog was free, or on a chain. He crawled on elbows and stomach to the village's edge. The dog barked again. It was a happy bark. And then he saw it, yellow and lean and running loose.

  A man threw the dog a chunk of meat. Meat! The man was Phong's age, over thirty.

  Phong stood up and walked into the village, his hands open and empty. He was safe. There could be no doubt. This was not Cambodia-the Khmer Rouge had virtually eliminated all Cambodian adult men of fighting age. And it was not Vietnam either. No Vietnamese village could afford the luxury of a pet dog. Not with meat in such short supply and dog so tasty.

  He was in Thailand.

  "I am Vietnamese!" he cried as the villagers circled around him in curiosity. "I am Vietnamese. Take me to refugee camp. I have proof of American MIA. Understand? Proof of MIA!"

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and he watched as the two men started throwing rocks at each other.

  It was a drug deal gone sour. Remo had been sent here to Brownsville, Texas, to take care of Fester Doggins. Fester was a drug smuggler, the man responsible for the shift of cocaine trafficking from Florida to the Texas coast. The DEA had been so successful in their Florida intercepts that the Colombian drug traffickers had to open up a second front in the drug war. Fester Doggins was their American contact. He was moving heavy weight, so Remo had been ordered to terminate his operation and terminate Fester too.

  Remo had been waiting at the remote inlet his employer, Dr. Harold W. Smith, had told him Fester regularly used. Remo sat high on an outcropping of rocks, his legs dangling over into space. It gave him a commanding view of the inlet.

  Fester had arrived in a chrome-festooned pickup truck with two men. Everyone had guns and wore ostrichskin cowboy boots and Stetsons pulled low over sunsquint eyes.

  The boat came later. It was a yacht, very big and very expensive.

  A man in white ducks stepped onto the teak deck of the boat and began speaking to Fester Doggins in Spanish. He was brown-skinned, probably Colombian. Remo didn't understand Spanish, so he waited patiently for the men to conduct their business. His job was to get everyone and make sure the coke shipment never got into circulation. Remo figured that would be easier if they loaded the stuff onto the pickup first. Remo didn't feel like exerting himself today.

  But because Remo did not speak Spanish, he had no idea that the rapid-fire exchange between the two businessmen was escalating into an argument. The Colombian snapped his fingers and two men popped up from forward hatches and leveled high-powered rifles at the men on the shore.

  Fester's two assistants dived for shelter. One of them made it. The other was chopped down by one of the crewmen.

  That was when what Remo considered the rock throwing began.

  Bullets flew, ricocheted off rocks, and sprang into the air.

  Remo watched unconcernedly. There had been a time in his life when the sound of gunfire made the adrenaline rush through his body. When the sounds of automatic weapons firing meant that random death was in the air. No more. Remo was beyond that irrational fear. He had been trained to think of a firefight as a half-step above a rock fight.

  As his trainer in Sinanju had once said:

  "A rock is a rock. A big rock thrown by hand is slow. You can see it coming. You can step aside. But a big rock, being big, has a better chance to hit you. Not so a little rock. Like this."

  And Chiun, the eighty-year-old Master of Sinanju, held up a small object in one hand and a large stone in the other.

  "That's not a rock. That's a bullet." Remo had pointed out.

  "It is a rock," Chiun insisted. "It is made of the same material as this other rock. It is smaller. And because it is smaller it has less chance of hitting a target than this large rock."

  "Bullets are different, Little Father," Remo had replied. "They travel faster. So they hit harder. They're deadly."

  "Are you more dead being killed by a little rock than a big rock?"

  Remo had to think about that a minute. "No," he told Chiun. It was long ago. They had been in the gymnasium of Folcroft Sanitarium, where Remo had done his early training. The word "dead" still made him wince in those days. He had been dead in so many ways. Officially dead and dead of mind and body. But through the discipline of Sinanju-the legendary sun source of the martial arts-Chiun had awoken him to his full potential in mind and body. But he was still dead as far as the world knew.

  "Good. Now that you understand that dead is dead, I will teach you not to cringe from the little rock just because you imagine it is more fearsome." And Chiun had thrown the large rock at him.

  Remo dodged it. Not quite well enough. It struck one elbow right on the funny bone. Remo jumped and howled and clutched his elbow.

  And while he was preoccupied with his pain, Chiun picked up a single-shot starter's pistol from a butcherblock table, calmly inserted the bullet, and offered the weapon to Remo, grip first.

  "Now you," he said.

  Remo took it. "What do I shoot at?"

  The old Korean smiled benignly. "Why me, of course."

  "I know you. You'll skip out of the way," said Remo, putting the pistol down. "You did that to me the first time we met."

  Chiun shrugged. "Fine. Then I will shoot at you." And he picked up the weapon, stepped backward several paces, and drew on Remo.

  Remo hit the floor and clamped his hands over his head.

  Chiun's smooth brow had wrinkled. "What are you doing? I have not yet pulled the trigger."

  "Are you going to?" Remo asked.

  "Of course. You surrendered your turn. Now it is mine. "

  Remo rolled off to one side and curled into a ball so the bullet, if it struck him, wouldn't penetrate to a vital organ.

  "You are doing it wrong," Chiun said petulantly. But his hazel eyes held an amused light.

  "That is what I was taught in Vietnam."

  "You were taught wrong. You do not react until you see the bullet coming at you."

  Remo squeezed himself tighter. "By then it will be too late. "

  "You have seen me dodge these little rocks before."

  "Yeah."

  "Now you will learn. Stand up."

  And because he knew that being shot would be infinitelv less painful th
an disobeying the Master of Sinanju, Remo stood up. His knees felt like water balloons about to break.

  "Wait for the bullet," said Chiun, sighting on his stomach.

  Remo's hands shot up. "One question first."

  Chiun cocked his head to one side like a terrier seeing his first cat.

  "Is Smith still going to pay you if I die?"

  "Naturally. If you die, the failure will be yours, not mine."

  "That's not the answer I was hoping for."

  "Hope for nothing," Chiun said. "Expect the worst." And he fired.

  Remo hit the floor, the explosive sound of the discharge piercing his ears. He slid along the floor on his stomach, hoping he hadn't been gut-shot.

  "Am I hurt?" Remo had asked after a long silence.

  "Not unless you are frightened by loud noises."

  "How's that?" Remo asked.

  "I used a dummy."

  Remo's head came up. "Say again."

  "Also known as a blank."

  Remo climbed to his feet unsteadily. His face was not pleasant.

  "You showed me the bullet," Remo said tightly. "That was no blank."

  "True," said Chiun, reloading the pistol. "The bullet I showed you is this bullet. It is real. Are you ready?"

  "Isn't it my turn again?"

  "I have lost track," said Chiun, and fired.

  This time Remo's sidewise leap was instinctive. He heard, before the sound of the bullet firing, a cracking noise like a bullwhip lashing out. It was the sound of the bullet passing. Passing! A punching bag behind him exploded in a shower of sawdust.

  "I did it!" Remo shouted. "I dodged the bullet."

  "I fired wide," Chiun said blandly, reloading the pistol.

  Remo's grin squeezed into a lime-rickey pucker. "Not again."

  "This time you will look into the barrel of the gun. Look for the bullet."

  "I can't. My nerves are shot."

  "Nonsense. I have just helped you tune them. You are now truly ready to dodge the harmless little rock." Remo knew he had no choice. He focused on the black blot of the pistol bore. He tensed. Chiun held his fire. Then Remo remembered his training. An assassin did not tense before danger. He relaxed. He let his muscles loosen, and Chiun nodded with satisfaction. Then he fired.

  Remo saw the muzzle quiver. He saw the black maw turn gray as the bullet filled it. Then he moved. The bullet passed wide and struck a chinning bar with a hollow sound.

  Remo grabbed his elbow again, hopping and howling. "Ouch! Yeoow! What happened? I dodged the bullet. I think."

  "True," said Chiun, blowing smoke from the muzzle the way he had seen American cowboys do on TV. "But you did not dodge the ricochet."

  "You did that on purpose," Remo growled.

  Chiun smiled, wrinkling his wise countenance. "You dance funny."

  "On purpose," Remo repeated.

  "An enemy would have aimed his ricochet at your heart, not at your funny bone," said Chiun as he replaced the pistol on the table.

  Remo looked at his arm. There was no blood. Just a red crease where the bullet had grazed him.

  "My turn," said Remo, reaching for the pistol.

  "Your turn, yes," agreed Chiun. "But also we are out of bullets."

  "Well, at least I proved I can dodge bullets now."

  "From a single-shot weapon, yes," said Chiun. "Tomorrow we will try it with a timmy gun."

  "Tommy gun. And there's no way I'm going to let you open up on me with a machine gun."

  But he had. Not the next day, but three days later, after Chiun had shot at him with a Winchester repeating rifle, a .357 Magnum revolver, and finally a vintage drum-loaded tommy gun. Remo had learned to see the bullets coming, to dodge even the ricochets, until he reached the stage where a man coming at him with a loaded gun no longer tweaked his adrenals but made Remo smile condescendingly. He had learned that a gun was only a clumsy device for throwing rocks. Puny little rocks at that.

  And so he watched Fester Doggins and the Colombian throw rocks at one another. Sometimes one of the rocks zipped up toward him. Remo shifted to one side to let the speeding pebble slide past him. He was far beyond the bullet-dodging stage now. His eyes had learned to read the path of a bullet in flight, like a pool hustler calculating where the eight ball would drop. He didn't know how he did it, any more than a runner completely understood the complex relationship between brain impulses and leg-muscle responses that combined to make running happen. He just did it.

  When the gunfire died down, there was only the Colombian huddled in the wheelhouse of his yacht and Fester Doggins hunkered down behind his pickup truck. Everyone else was dead. Remo waited. If one killed the other, that would leave only one for Remo to dispose of personally. It would be nice if they polished each other off, but Remo knew that was too much to ask.

  While the two men caught their breath and reloaded, Fester Doggins happened to look up. He saw Remo. Remo gave him a friendly little wave.

  "Hey!" Fester Doggins called up to him. "Who the Sam Hill are you?"

  "Sam Hill," Remo replied. "In the flesh."

  "DEA?"

  "Nope. Free agent."

  "Good. Whose side do you want to be on?"

  "Mine," said Remo.

  The Colombian, hearing Remo's voice, raised his rifle and drew a bead on Remo's head. Remo knew he was a target when he felt a dull pressure in the middle of his forehead. He looked down at the yacht. He shook his head and waved a finger at the Colombian. "Naughty, naughty!" he admonished.

  The Colombian fired once. Remo jerked his head to one side and the bullet shattered the rock face behind him.

  Remo picked up a stone not much larger than a quarter and flicked it back at the Colombian. It struck the rifle just ahead of the breech. The rifle broke in two and the Colombian sat down on the deck, hugging his bone-shocked arms and sucking air in through whistling, clenched teeth.

  "Where were we?" Remo asked Fester.

  "I got a proposition for you," Fester Doggins called up.

  "Shoot," Remo said.

  "Take care of the Colombian and I'll cut you in on my score."

  "How much?"

  "One-quarter. We're talking fifty kilos here. It streets at twenty thousand dollars a kilo. What do you say?"

  "Who unloads the boat?"

  "We do."

  "No sale," said Remo. "I don't do heavy lifting. Tell you what you off load and it's a deal."

  "We're talking a quarter of a million dollars your end. All you gotta do is whack that brown bastard."

  "I got a bad back," Remo replied unconcernedly. The Columbian was struggling with an Uzi submachine gun, trying to make his numb fingers release the safety. Fester noticed this, realized the Colombian had a better shot at him than he had at the Colombian, and yelled his answer.

  "Deal! Now, let's go!"

  Remo slid off the rock like a spider.

  The Colombian stood up suddenly, the Uzi clenched in both hands. He opened up just as Remo's feet touched shore.

  Remo wove through the storm of lead as if it were a light rain. Bullets kicked up rock dust, shredded weeds, and hit everything in sight. Except Remo Williams. Remo stepped lightly onto the boat. The Colombian stood there, his mouth slack and his gun smoking and empty.

  "Habla espanol?" the Colombian asked.

  "No. Speak Korean?"

  "No, senor."

  "Too bad," said Remo, and ignoring the Colombian, he dragged the heavy anchor chain up from the water.

  "What are you doing?" Fester Doggins called from behind the pickup. "Stop screwing around. Whack him. "

  "Hold your horses," Remo said, examining the stubborn anchor. It was one of those that couldn't be raised onto the deck because the chain went through a brassringed hole in the bow. The flukes had hung up on the ring. Remo chopped at the fine wood of the gunwale and twisted the brass fittings away. The anchor came loose. It was very heavy and had two flukes. Remo carried it back to the wheelhouse, dragging the chain behind him like the Ghost of Chris
tmas Past.

  The Colombian regarded the man approaching him stupidly. He saw a skinny young man with brown hair and deep-set brown eyes carrying an anchor that should have bent him double. And the man carried it in one hand.

  Suddenly the skinny man wrapped the flukes around the Colombian's neck and swiftly wound the heavy, slimy chain around the rest of his body.

  "Que pasa?"

  "You," Remo said. "You passa. Good-bye." And Remo threw the man overboard. Fester Doggins joined Remo on deck.

  "Too bad," Fester said as they watched the bubbles blurp to the surface and eventually stop. "He was my best connection."

  "You know what they say," Remo told him. "The thrill can kill." Then he added, "You'd better get started. You have a lot of white stuff to lug."

  "No chance," said Fester Doggins, shoving a double-barreled shotgun into Remo's stomach.

  "Let me guess," Remo said. "It was you double-crossing the other guy?"

  "Yup. "

  "And now you're double-crossing me."

  "Yup," said Fester Doggins. "And at point-blank range there's no way you're gonna skip out of the way of double-O buckshot."

  "Rocks," corrected Remo. "They're just rocks."

  "And you're about to eat a bellyful without having to use your mouth," Fester Doggins said as he cocked both barrels.

  "One of us is," said Remo, taking the twin barrels in one hand so fast that Fester Doggins could not react. Remo squeezed. The sound was like a tailpipe being run over. Fester looked down.

  There was a hitch in both barrels. If he fired now, the blowback would rip his own belly open.

  Fester looked at Remo's rail-thin arm, which was bare to the bicep.

  "You don't look that strong," he said dully.

  "And you don't look that dumb," replied Remo, tossing the useless shotgun into the sea. "Now, load." Fester Doggins was out of shape. It took him three hours to drag the cocaine onto shore and into the back of the pickup. When he was done, he sat down on the ground and concentrated on his breathing.

  Remo got up from his seat in the cabin, where he had been drinking a tall glass of mineral water from the Colombian's well-stocked bar. He jumped onto shore and casually gave the yacht a shove. The yacht slid off and out to sea.