Destroyer - Master's Challenge Part 11

"In the shape you're in, you'd see mermaids. With three t.i.ts." The men snorted and doubled over with laughter.

"Can you direct me to the village of Sinanju?" the Dutchman asked them in perfect Korean. The men looked surprised.

"I think it's over that way," the most coherent of them said, pointing vaguely inland.

"Thank you." The Dutchman did not turn away, but stared instead into the man's eyes: He was growing comfortable with the beast within him. It wanted to play. "That's a nasty burn on your arm."

"Hm? What?" The fisherman glanced down at his arm. "There's nothing wrong with-" He sucked in his breath. Before his eyes, the man's forearm bubbled into red, seeping blisters. "What's happened?"

The others came around to examine the arm. It was swelling to twice its size. The hair on it frizzled and disappeared. The outer skin dried, then blackened.

The man screamed. The others drew back, watching the Dutchman with alarm.

"Take out your eyes," he commanded the man holding the bottle.

With a shudder, the man squatted on the ground and broke the bottle on a rock.

"Yi Sun!" the third man said. But the eyes of the man 113.

with the broken bottleneck in his hands never left the Dutchman. Viciously he struck his own face with the jagged gla.s.s, digging deep into his eye sockets until streams of clear liquid poured out of them and two pulpy ma.s.ses hung down his cheeks.

The third man emitted a wail that was half-whisper, half-sob, and skittered backward.

"You!" the Dutchman called.

The man covered his face and ran. Within ten paces he dropped, the ground red with scattered blood and intestines for a hundred feet in all directions. His belly had exploded.

The Dutchman threw his head back and laughed. The power, coursing through him, filled him with ecstasy. Then, as quickly as the sensation had come, it vanished, leaving him groggy and weak.

He vomited. There was blood in the thin liquid that came out of him. Not long . . . not long now. His body was skeletal, his vision blurry.

Find Chiun. And then, his promise fulfilled, he could seek death in peace. If he accomplished his mission, Nuihc's spirit would allow him some comfort at the end. He had promised him rest.

Chiun was nearby. The caves. There was a force coming from one of them, a power, a music. He had reached his quarry.

"Thank you, Nuihc," he whispered, stumbling forward blindly.

Rest. After a lifetime of torment, he would find rest at last.

The tiny porcelain cup in H'si T'ang's hands dropped to the floor.

"Master?" Chiun asked, moving to the old man's side. "Are you not well?"

"He is here." He gestured with a trembling hand to- 114.

ward the opening of the cave. "The Other ... the Other has come."

Chiun sprang to his feet and waited in the shadows of the cave entrance.

"But something is wrong. His aura is broken, almost disappeared. . . . Now, my son. Now."

Chiun prepared to strike. There was a thud outside, then silence.

"Gone," H'si T'ang said, confused. "The presence is gone."

Chiun peered out. Lying in front of the entranceway was the emaciated form of a man with blond hair, his face in the dirt. He was barely breathing.

"It is a wounded man," Chiun said. He lifted the body gently over his shoulder and carried him inside. "Whoever he is, he will not harm us now." He lowered the man onto the gra.s.s mat.

And gasped.

"What is it, my son?"

"I know this man," Chiun said. "He is the protegee of Nuihc."

"Ah, Nuihc. I might have known." The old man trembled. The story of Nuihc was well known to him. The pupil who had used his knowledge to betray his village to the Chinese army. Who had offered to exploit the teachings of Sinanju to further his own personal power. The gifted student whom Chiun was forced to expel from the village and leave the Master of Sinanju with no heir for the legacy that had been pa.s.sed down for a thousand years.

"He is called the Dutchman," Chiun said. "Remo and I encountered him when he was still a youth. Even though he was not yet fully developed in his training, he showed formidable powers."

He grasped the unconscious man's face and turned it toward his own. The Dutchman's mouth was still smeared 115.

with dried blood. "A boy of great promise, perverted by Nuihc into a monster. 1 thought he had died. I hoped, for his sake, that he had." He put his hands around the thin neck. "He is near death now. I will finish him quickly."

"Hold." H'si T'ang's voice was low and angry. "Has your experience in the outside world made you discard all the laws of your village?"

"But you yourself called him the Other."

"That does not matter. The most ancient law of Sinanju forbids a Master from killing a member of the village. Or have you conveniently forgotten your crime?"

Chiun swallowed. "He is not of the village. He is white."

"Was Nuihc?"

Chiun hung his head.

"I heard of your action in the battle against Nuihc. It shamed me. It shamed the G.o.ds. Now, this man is Nuihc's heir. The G.o.ds have sent him to you as your atonement."

"Teacher, I had no choice in the death of Nuihc. Without my intervention, he would have killed my son, who was too young to defend himself against him."

H'si T'ang was silent. "Your son," he said at last. "Your son Remo must fight this man. Not you."

"But Remo is so far. He will not return for many weeks. And this man is a danger to us."

'He is your penance. The ancient laws are strict. This man has come to replace Nuihc. If you kill him, you will never find peace. In this world or the next."

"But the Dutchman will try to destroy us, Master. I know him."

"Then so be it," the old man said.

Chiun sat staring at his teacher for some time as the Dutchman lay unconscious beside them. He had done what was necessary, but perhaps H'si T'ang was right. For the circle of fate to be complete, he had to be punished. He 116.

would have to face the Dutchman, alive, without killing him.

If only Remo knew what he really was! The Dutchman had been aware since childhood of his own extraordinary nature, but Remo still thought of himself as an ex-policeman. Until Remo understood that he was s.h.i.+va, a being not of this world, there would be no contest between them. The Dutchman, full grown now, developed to the pinnacle of his capabilities, would swat Remo, like a fly, into the Void.

Reluctantly, Chiun took a damp cloth and attended to the Dutchman.

Chapter Twelve.

He called her Mildred and she called him Harry. He told her he would take care of all her calls. She told him some she would rather do herself. He said every moment she wasted doing menial ch.o.r.es, gra.s.s died on this earth. Maybe by the millions of blades.

Mildred Pensoitte thought that was very perceptive, but she still felt more effective doing some things herself. She felt she never wanted to lose her sense of humanity by delegating everything to others. She should never forget, she said, that she was just part of the whole earth. She didn't want to be like those ruining the world. If dear, dear Harry could understand this, her power came from understanding her place on the earth, in the earth and of it. And the minute she lost that sense and realization, they were all lost.

Harold W. Smith nodded and said somberly that he understood. Then he bribed the switchboard operator to let him listen in on all Dr. Pensoitte's calls. He listed in on a call from Leeds, England, her mother mentioning that she had seen Mildred's former husband the other day. A lovely man.

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"Anything else, Mother?" asked Dr. Pensoitte.

"We saw you on the telly."

"Which speech? The one for the new world order or the one on how we are poisoning ourselves?"

"One of them, dear. You were wearing that full blouse again. Do you really think that they do that much for you?"

It all might have been funny, Smith thought, if he hadn't seen a chambermaid with her throat opened to the air. That would be just the first death of many if these people were allowed to grow. Because to save the world from man, they would have to kill men, many of them, and keep killing until everyone left agreed with their vision.

Hitler had had his superior race; these people had their superior morality. Smith had to tell himself this while listening to Mildred talk to her mother, because she was so very beautiful. And she had the sort of elegant charm few women could manifest. It didn't come with smooth little-girl faces or unwrinkled bodies. It had to be tempered with time and will and the force of the person coming through, with the baby-fat of the soul removed.

Later that night, Smith checked his computers and found that the killer group had moved. It had been in Virginia and then North Carolina, and now the computer read: "Suspect penetration, St. Martin's, French Antilles. Hold target until penetration source identified."

The message gave Smith a chill, because it was a message that had been captured from the would-be presidential a.s.sa.s.sins. It showed that they knew their operation was being monitored by computers on St. Martin's. And that was where CURE's backup computers had been placed by Smith.

The killer organization was obviously computer-run to have been able to learn that. And Mildred Pensoitte's organization hadn't even had a computer until he had 119.

introduced one to help make the very wealthy Earth Goodness, Inc. into a little poverty-stricken club. Were the killers using Earth Goodness for a cover?

It didn't matter. As long as they had to deal with CURE'S auxiliary computers on St. Martin's, they would delay the hit on the president. But at least now he had a shot at them. He knew where they would be. And they didn't know he would be there.

"I'll be back in a few days, Mildred," Smith told his new employer the next morning. "Personal matter."

"Will we be all right, Harry?" she asked. "I feel Earth Goodness can't live without you now."

"I'll be back, Mildred," he said. He noticed how brown her eyes were. How white her -neck. How elegant her smile.

The woman in France had been beautiful too, but she had been responsible for fifteen of her countrymen being tortured to death. She would have, if she could have, gotten Smith and his whole OSS group killed that day.

Dr. Mildred Pensoitte gave Smith a polite kiss on the cheek and clenched his hand in friends.h.i.+p.

"1 hope everything works out well for you, Harry," she said.

"I'm sure it will," he answered, reminding himself that he was married to Irma, loved Irma, and was not about to alter a lifetime of rect.i.tude for a beautiful smile.

St. Martin's was hot under the Caribbean sun. Tourists divested themselves of their northern clothes and opened their collars and sighed while waiting on line at the airport.

Harold W. Smith wore a gray three-piece suit and kept his tie perfectly knotted. He did not perspire, and when he reached customs, he showed them his international clearance to be carrying a pistol. He did not perspire in the back seat of the taxi, which drove him past the beach at 120.

Bay Rouge. At least two persons a year died in the apparently harmless surf there, that beautiful long white sand beach with its softly rolling, apparently gentle surf.

But the beach dropped off at a strong enough angle that if someone got caught in the strong Caribbean undertow, with the surf coming in atop them, they could be rolled around senseless, knocked off their feet by the surf rolling back along the angle of of the beach, and made weak and helpless in sight of people on the beach, people who had been known to look at others crying for help and go back to looking for seash.e.l.ls because to walk out into that surf themselves might get them killed.

Smith had long ago stopped wondering what sort of person could live with himself, watching another person drown.

St. Martin's, of course, did not advertise the fact of its dangerous beach because one did not want to frighten tourists. After all, the Bay Rouge beach claimed only two lives a year, and besides, there was an even more dangerous beach on the island. Neither of them had warnings posted.

Like the beach, St. Martin's was deceptive, and it was no accident that the auxiliary computers of CURE had been planted there on the French side of the half-French, half-Dutch island.

The computer site could be defended easily, not only by Remo and Chiun, but by Smith himself. And the local gendarmerie was not concerned at all about what went on along the road to the cul de sac near Mark's Place, the restaurant set off the main road on the way to a gentle little harbor from which tourists set out to Pine Island to snorkel in the Lucite-clear waters.

Off the road in what appeared to be a gravel works was CURE'S duplicate set of computers. Every day trucks hauled gravel in and another crew hauled the same gravel .

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out, and everyone kept quiet about this madness lest the crazy white man who paid for this get wise to the fruitless-ness of the project.

From time to time, bodies had appeared nearby, and the gendarmerie had not been concerned. They were not concerned because of a French government policy that dictated that gendarmes be moved around from island to island periodically so that they would not become native and become relaxed.

But the policy failed to realize that the police regarded the Caribbean as pre-retirement duty, and had as little interest in getting involved or in preventing crime as the average New York City subway rider.

If one was going to be transferred shortly to another island, these gendarmes thought, the one thing not wanted was to get involved in a lengthy police case or court trial on a previous island.

St. Martin's was perfect for the computers, which were deceptively vulnerable. All a person had to do to find them was to look for the extra electrical lines because in the Caribbean computers needed to be constantly air-conditioned to prevent malfunctions. The electrical lines were as easy to follow as a roadmap. From the gravel works, the lines went over the road past the small secondary airport of the island, running above a salt flat now gone to marsh, directly into the side of the mountain.

Also stored nearby were drums of oil to run the backup generators, should the overhead power fail.

And what it all said to anyone who was looking for such a direction was: "Here it is."

Even more convenient was the unlocked gate that looked like a small storage area in the side of the mountain. There weren't even guards at night.

So three men found it easily and waited for night, then took a few pounds of cordite to eliminate whatever looked 122.