The old man's face was unchanged. "I do not have to, for you are doing well enough on your own," he said.
At the Korean's words and tone, Anna raised an eyebrow.
"There, you see?" Remo pressed. "So where the hell'd these guys learn their moves?"
Anna started to speak, but something out the window caught her eye.
"Wait," she said.
The helicopter was sweeping up the ravine, lights from the belly illuminating the terrain. They might have missed the bodies if not for the blood. The pilot managed to settle the Kamov in a small adjacent valley. As he cut the engines, Anna was popping the door.
She hurried through the ravine, coming into the encampment in the direction opposite the one Remo and Chiun had first used. The two Masters of Sinanju followed.
The first body was of the man Chiun had eviscerated. Stepping gingerly around the gore, Anna pulled off the man's goggles and mask.
The face beneath was ghostly pale in death. The Russian's hair was dark. That was the extent of her examination. Anna threw down the mask, moving quickly on to the next body.
"You know, someone of a suspicious nature might wonder what you were doing way out here," Remo suggested as she tugged off another mask.
"Since these men are Russians, I was sent by my government to stop what could become an international incident," Anna explained as she worked. "We were flying near the village where the slaughter took place when a radio transmission we intercepted said that two very unusual CIA agents had set off on foot through the snow. They said the men were underdressed and ill-equipped to survive in such a hostile environment." She raised a thin eyebrow beneath her fringe of hood. "However did I know it was the two of you?" she said with dull sarcasm.
Finished with that body, she moved on. Remo shot a glance at the Master of Sinanju. Chiun was playing once more with his hat flaps, supremely uninterested in both Remo and Anna. "You might work up a head of steam on this one, Chiun," Remo said. "It's your village these guys stole from."
"It is our village," Chiun replied. "You have just said so. And nothing of any real value can be stolen from the village. We are Sinanju's greatest resource. Well, l am. But you are a close second. Third or fourth at the most."
There was an odd undertone to the old man's words. As if his apathy were feigned.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Remo droned.
Turning from his teacher, Remo found Anna in the process of pulling off yet another mask. She grunted displeasure at the man's brown hair.
"I can't help noticing you're not patting down pockets," Remo observed. "Care to tell us exactly which Russian you're looking for up here in the Great White North?"
"Great Frontier," Anna corrected tensely, wiping blood from her hands on a white jumpsuit. She used the toe of her boot to roll over the next man. His belly was burned black where he'd landed on the campfire. "The Great White North is Canada," she explained as she pulled off the latest ski mask.
"You sure?" Remo asked. "I thought Great Frontier was space."
"In that case, the Great Frontier is what exists between your ears," the Master of Sinanju offered.
"Ha-ha," Remo said dryly. "Say, Anna," he called, one sly eye on the old Korean, "gimme the name of one of these Russians. I'm in the market for an assassin's helper."
He saw a flash of silk just before a whizzing snowball caught him square in the back of the head. "No? Okay, maybe a Frenchman," Remo muttered as he went to retrieve his hat from a snowbank near Anna.
Anna was at the tenth and final body. It was the man whose mask Remo had earlier removed. She looked down on the face of the corpse, her own expression one of disgust.
"Lavrenty Skachkov," she announced.
Remo was knocking snow from his hat. "God bless you," he said.
She fixed him with a dull eye. "You asked for the name of one of these," she said, waving a hand across the field of Russian dead. "Skachkov is one. The most dangerous of all these. And he is not here."
She spun away, marching past Remo.
"So is this Crotchcough the guy in charge here?" Remo asked, following. Chiun fell in behind.
"Unfortunately, no," Anna admitted as she walked. "Skachkov is a follower, not a leader." She quickly amended her own words. "Or, rather, he is leader to a select few. Whatever is going on here is not his doing."
In the valley at the mouth of the narrow ravine, Anna's pilot saw them approaching. The Kamov's twin rotor stacks spluttered to life.
"All right," Remo said. "So whose doing is it?" Anna stopped dead, turning on the two Masters of Sinanju. Snow thrown up from the helicopter's downdraft whipped the fringe of fur on her parka.
Her ice-blue eyes were deadly serious.
"An utter madman," Anna Chutesov insisted with cold certainty.
Jaw locked in grim determination, she turned, hurrying for the waiting helicopter.
Chapter 17
Crazed. Demented. Mentally unbalanced.
When being kind, that was what they said about him.
Insane. Psychopath. Sociopath.
These terms filled psychological profiles stashed away at intelligence agencies all around the world. But informally, when they were discussing Vladimir Zhirinsky, men and women from all shades of the political spectrum, both at home and abroad, often found themselves agreeing with the private assessment of an American State Department officiaclass="underline" "It is my sincere opinion that Vladimir Zhirinsky is a raving, ranting, slobbering, foaming, nuttier-than-a-fruitcake loon-with a capital L."
For Vladimir Zhirinsky their words had no sting. After all, it was only natural for the weak to attack the strong. And if strength could be judged by the viciousness of verbal attacks, then he was by far the strongest man to stride the face of the planet since Hercules.
Not that he believed in ancient myths of gods. Vladimir Zhirinsky knew with a certainty as deep as the marrow of his Russian-born bones that there were no gods. No heaven. No hell. Eternal judgment was a bedtime story.
There was only man and his environment. Or, as he liked to put it, the Worker and the State.
A truer Communist than Vladimir Zhirinsky had never been born. Even after the Iron Curtain collapsed and communism became as hopelessly out of fashion as last year's bourgeois French fashions, Zhirinsky remained a rabid believer.
The State, he argued to anyone who would listen, was supreme. The Worker existed to benefit the State. And when the State prospered, so did the Worker. Russia, Zhirinsky screamed from atop soapboxes in Moscow's Gorky Park, needed communism. It was dead without it.
The world would never respect a Russia lacking the ideological purity of communism. The Soviet philosophy was the unifying force that had kept the nation strong for seven decades after the October Revolution. Without it, Russia was nothing more than a Third World country. A husk. A pathetic shell of its former glorious self.
In the early 1990s the Russian experiment in democracy was still new. Luckily for Zhirinsky, the changes were frightening to enough old-fashioned zealots. When election time came, his brand of fiery finger-waving and venomous rhetoric gained him a seat in parliament. He attacked both his job and the new Russia with demented glee.
It wasn't unusual for Vladimir Zhirinsky to get into fistfights in the great senate chamber of the Kremlin.
One representative from Belorussia who disagreed with him wound up with a bust of Stalin to the side of the head. A Moldavian senator who accidentally sat in Zhirinsky's chair went home that night to find his apartment broken into and his cat, Buttons, drowned in the toilet.