"There's only two of us. How are we going to be three?"
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Chiun stood up and stepped back into the darkness a few yards. Remo heard a soft wrenching sound as if a grave were giving up its cargo. A moment later, Chiun was back, his arms wrapped around a small eight-foot-high tree. He tossed the tree toward Remo.
"I get it," Remo said. "We use the tree to divert him and make him think it's one of us."
"At last the dawn," Chiun said. "Even after the darkest night."
"You want me to go with the tree?" Remo said. "How about you?"
"You already clomp around with enough noise for two," Chiun said. "You are much more believable imitating a crowd."
"Okay."
Chiun pointed Remo off toward the left side of the hill, and as the old man watched, Remo moved away into the darkness, lugging the tree, as silent as a wisp of air. When he knew that Remo could not see him, Chiun nodded his head approvingly. Some never learned to move. There had even been masters who were lead-footed; but Remo had learned in the earliest days of his training to center his weight, so he could move smoothly in any direction. One of the fairy tales Chiun had been told as a child was the story of a master who could run across a wet field and leave not a crushed blade of grass behind him. When he was growing up in his training, Chiun thought it impossible, a fairy tale, but now he thought that someday Remo might be able to do it. Perhaps even better than Chiun himself.
Chiun listened but heard nothing except the
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sounds of the night. No movement from Remo, not even the hiss of a breath, not even the rustling of a leaf on the small tree the young American carried.
And then Chiun drifted off toward the right side of the hill, above which hung the terrified form of Terri Pomfret.
"Here they come," Wissex said softly.
It was fully dark now and from Terri's point of view, Wissex's face was distorted in the green flickering light of a television monitor built into the table before him. The green light threw long fright shadows up across Wissex's face. Terri wondered how she had ever thought he was handsome.
Wissex looked at the screen and laughed softly at their crude attempt to deceive him. The screen was built into a television but it was the latest form of radar screen, picking up the movement of objects over the size of a child.
Four overlapping cameras that Wissex had mounted on the edges of the tabletop mesa scanned the area around the hill,
Wissex watched the movement of the two men on the screen. First one of them would dart forward, fifteen feet or so, close to the edge of the camera's range. Then the other would move forward, and join with the first. Then the first would move forward again. It was obvious to Wissex that they were trying to find a pocket of space that the cameras didn't cover.
Not a chance, he thought. He reached under the table and opened a small case from which he took a submachine gun. He clicked off its safety and set
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the first round into the chamber, then waited, his eyes watching the screen, as the two figures continued their unusual leapfrog motion toward the base of the hill. Only forty yards more and they would be at the bottom of the cliff.
They would have to climb up. And he would be waiting.
Remo tossed the tree forward fifteen feet and waited until it hit. Then he ran forward himself until he was on a line with the tree, then turned sharply to his right and moved over to the tree. He waited a few seconds, then tossed the tree forward again and repeated the maneuver.
Chiun should be at the base of the hill now, Remo thought.
Terri saw him as the moon came out from behind a cloud for a brief moment. It flashed on the dark purple of the kimono and she saw Chiun's face, looking upward, as he came silently up the stone face of the hill. She had been looking at that wall all day and it had been smooth and seemed impossible to scale, but Chiun was moving upward as rapidly as if he had been climbing a ladder.
She glanced over toward Wissex at the platform in the center of the hill but he had seen nothing. His eyes were still riveted on the television screen.
And Chiun was climbing.
Remo had reached the bottom of the hill. He dropped the tree and looked up at the smooth stone walls. If he went up, Wissex had only to
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look over the edge and he could pick Remo off like a wingless fly clinging to a wall.
He hoped Chiun's scheme was working and the Briton was still focusing his attention on Remo. Maybe ... if he kept that attention.
Remo backed off from the wall and shouted out.
"Wissex, we're here for you. Surrender the girl."
He waited a split second, then got his answer, a deep, rolling laugh that shattered the quiet of the night.
And then Wissex's voice.
"Come on up. I'm waiting for you. You can join the wench."
She saw Chiun put a hand over the top of the cliff and then, like smoke rising, he moved up onto the edge. Wissex had moved to the other side of the hill, from the bottom of which had come Remo's voice. His back was to Chiun but the old man did not move. He had his head cocked as if listening to something far off.
Suddenly, Terri heard it too.
It was a distant rumbling, like the sound of machinery.
Wissex heard it too and spun toward the noise and he saw Chiun. Even as he said, in confusion, "How . . . what are you doing here?" he aimed the spray machine gun in Chiun's direction.
The Korean did not answer.
"There are three of you?" Wissex said.
"Perhaps four or five," Chiun said.
"It doesn't matter," Wissex said. "However many there are, they are all dead."
The sound came from trucks. Terri could rec-
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ognize the noise now. And then the sound lessened, and search lights flamed from out of the darkness toward the hill. Then a voice boomed through the night, powerful amplification making it seem that it came from every direction at once.
"Wissex, I know all," shouted Moombasa. "And now you die, thieving Englishman."
"That damned wog," Wissex said. "I'm getting out of here." He raised the gun toward Chiun. "But first you."
Remo had lingered at the base of the hill but when he heard the first machine gun blast, he leaped upward, grabbed a finger hold and began to move up the face of the smooth rock. It had been the hardest of lessons when he was young in Sinanju, learning to put the pressure of his weight into the face of the wall he was climbing and not down toward the ground. Harder still to learn was to harness the fear of falling that brought tension to the muscles and made the act of climbing impossible.
There was another burst from the machine gun and Remo raced toward the top of the cliff.
Moombasa heard the machine-gun fire too and he ducked down inside the 1948 Studebaker that was the pride of Hamidia's armored corps. He dropped his megaphone on his driver's head.
"That limey is trying to harm my royal person," he said. "Attack," he shouted. "Attack. Reduce that hill to rubble. I don't want a stone left."
His driver moved the Studebaker out of the way of the seven cannons, mounted on the backs of
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flatbed trucks, as uniformed soldiers loaded the big guns and began sighting in on the flat mountain top.
Even though she had seen it, she didn't believe it. Terri had seen Wissex aim the gun at Chiun and press the trigger. The old man hadn't seemed to move and yet somehow the bullets had missed and Chiun was ten feet away from his previous position. Then he circled slowly away from Wissex and Terri realized that he was turning Wissex away from her, to protect her from being hit by a stray shot.
Wissex wheeled toward Chiun. He held the machine gun at waist level and then squeezed the trigger again, this time letting out a spray of bullets in a wide arc. And again, they missed, because when Wissex released the trigger, the old man was still standing, still smiling, and then he moved forward toward Wissex.