The lucky grunt fell dead. Gerhard’s back had been sliced open, and both shoulder blades were fractured. Despite all that, he couldn’t help but wonder where had these naked dirtballs learned a trick like that?
“Get in close and shoot those fuckers!” he exploded, and staggered at the mouth of the corridor, pushing his rifle around the stone shields and unleashing a burst that ended prematurely when the gun was yanked out of his hands.
The shale shields crashed into Gerhard’s face, shattering his night-vision goggles. He lived for another minute or so in darkness punctuated by an occasional muzzle blast.
He swung his arms at the attackers, but they swarmed him and bored him to the ground, their savage fingers stripping him bare of his clothes and gear.
The gunfire died soon, then the last of the scuffles ended with the crack of somebody’s skull against a rock floor. There was a lot of eager snuffling, and the sound of activity moving back to the open cavern.
“Grunts?”
“Here, Ger,” said a muffled voice. It was Yeep!
“They pinned me, then they left with all my stuff.”’ That was Lay!
“Are you people the Marines?” asked a stranger’s voice, far back in the utter blackness.
“Who are you?” Gerhard demanded.
“One of the prisoners. I’m supposed to translate their orders. The cavemen don’t talk very well.”
“Fuck their orders,” Lay groaned.
“Are any of you bleeding?”
The two grunts said they were only bruised. “My back ripped wide open,” Gerhard said. “You got a kit?”
“Stay where you are. You other men come with me right now.”
“Hey, buddy, we don’t take orders from anybody but Ger. Not from you, and sure as shittin’ not from them cavemen.”
“Do it for your own good,” the faceless man pleaded.
“Go to hell!” Yeep growled. “We’re staying with Ger.”
Gerhard heard the hasty clatter of their soldier gear getting dumped in the cavern, and he knew what was next. The cavemen wouldn’t want a wounded prisoner slowing them down. “Grunts, go with him,” he said, struggling to get to his feet. His shoulders had frozen up, and he couldn’t even turn onto his stomach.
“No way we’re leaving you, Ger.”
“Go now and that’s an order!”
Gerhard knew the cavemen would kill him. Very soon. That was okay. He was resigned to death. They gathered around him, snuffling. The rock would bash his brains out any second now.
What he felt next wasn’t a rock at all. It was teeth.
Gerhard was lunch.
The CO heard the gunshots.
“Coming from a half klick upstream,” the shellshocked communications operator blurted. “There’s a shotgun mike on the retransmitter there.”
“So we’ll hear them when they retreat!” the lieutenant colonel cried optimistically.
“I suppose so.”
The special forces commander was reporting to one of the many officers who were demanding an explanation. “When they start the retreat we’ll be able to hear them, General, even if all their radios are inoperable.”
The CO listened and his voice grew pale. He covered the mouthpiece. “Can you patch the audio feed into the phone line for the general?” he asked the communications operator.
“Give me an hour,” the operator said over his shoulder disdainfully.
“It will take some time, General,” the CO said. He. was at his smarmiest. Smarminess was what got him the high-profile special forces assignment.
“Hold the phone up to the speaker if he really wants to hear it,” the frantic operator said with a sneer.
“I have an idea! I’ll hold the phone up to the speaker. Okay. Here you go, General. We should hear the grunts any second now.”
He was correct. Almost as soon as the phone was against the speaker, it vibrated with the sound of Gerhard himself, screaming. And screaming.
Chapter 28
The billboards were still there:
YOU’RE GETTING CLOSE TO TOTAL AMAZEMENT
YOU’RE ONLY A MILE FROM THE MARVELS—AND ICE COLD REFRESHMENTS
PULL OFF NOW TO SEE THE MOST INCREDIBLE ATTRACTION ON ROUTE 66!
Somebody with a can of red spray paint had defaced the last billboard with the message, CLOSED 4 GOOD.
The sign out front was still there and was mounted with a harsh security floodlight, making Fastbinder’s Museum of Mechanical Marvels look even more desolate.
Remo pulled into the gravel parking lot, where a few scrubby weeds had already grown up to give the place a deserted look. The yellow crime-scene tape had turned to tatters in the weeks since the buildings were gutted. The investigation by local and state police was at a standstill. The eyewitness accounts of the vandalism weren’t reliable. The former manager of the museum claimed it was two men who caused all the damage, without tools, and one of them was at least eighty years old. Yeah, right.
The local cops would have forgotten the crime, too, if they could, but there was the matter of the missing millionaire. Obviously he’d been murdered, and the prime suspects were the directors of the company Fast- binder’s grandfather founded—the company that was warring with Jacob Fastbinder III until the day he disappeared.
“You’d think somebody would clean up this place,” Remo said as they strolled among the shadowy piles of wreckage. Once the museum was a showcase for unique mechanical antiques, lovingly restored by Fastbinder himself. Some of the first commercially produced radios were there, and mechanical calculators from the early 1800s. There was a huge restored cotton gin, one of the original machines responsible for the industrial revolution. A shelf of typewriters displayed a Remington Model No. 2 from 1876 and a 2003 AlphaSmart electronic—both of which retailed in their time for less than two hundred dollars.
And there had been robots, large and small, some pointless, some actually useful. The most versatile robots had not been put on display, though. Fastbinder used them instead to steal secrets from the U.S. Military.
None of the mechanical marvels remained after Remo and Chiun worked them over, and the scraps that were left could never be salvaged and rebuilt. The museum would have to be cleaned with shovels.
They left the museum and headed for the house. Fastbinder had made a home out of an old distribution facility, large but low ceilinged. The cinder-block walls were covered to the eaves with sand drifts.
The lazy breeze stalled and reversed course just long enough to carry to them the smell of rotting human flesh. The smell was stronger when they stepped inside.
“Three weeks, maximum,” Remo declared. “Whoever it is, they died after our visit.”
Chiun nodded and picked his way through the remnants of Jacob Fastbinder’s home and workshop. If anything, he and Remo had been even more thorough in their destruction of the machines here, including an army of robots that ineffectively fought against them to buy Fastbinder escape time.
Chiun descended into the crater that was left when Fastbinder’s earth drill tunnel collapsed. That’s where the smell was.
A bizarre picture materialized in Remo’s head: Jacob Fastbinder surviving, somehow, for weeks and weeks, and digging his way up from the dead earth drill, only to succumb and die after all these weeks— and within a few feet of the surface.
“Naw. Couldn’t be him. Could it?”
“No.” Chiun declared, waving his hand at the ground at super speed to fan away an accumulation of dust blown in through the shattered windows.
Remo felt better when he saw a shallow oblong impression appear in the surface. “Somebody dug down, not up.”
“Of course. Now you dig down, too.”
“Your turn. I dug up Jesus in the desert, remember?”