Remo inspected the wound and inventoried her missing entrails. Nothing could save the woman. He ended her suffering with a touch to the neck.
“A bus to catch?” Chiun asked.
“Transportation, back to wherever King Fastbinder has his court. I bet it’s the new earth drill.”
They ran on, bounding over boulders, dancing through jagged, water-carved canyons and slipping down endless jumbles of rock. They were on their third three-hour glow stick when the clink of metal and the cry of human voices came from far below them.
Without a word Remo shot ahead, and Chiun raced to keep up. Faster than any man could move on the earth above, Chiun moved among the rocks and runnels of the earth below, and still it wasn’t fast enough. Remo flowed like quicksilver, with all the skills and speed of a Master of Sinanju.
Chiun heard the sound of running water soon enough.
Remo felt the space open up in front of him as he homed in on the river, and came to a sudden stop at the end of the tunnel. He had an instant to take in the river that moved fast and deep close by, and along the riverbank was a collection of transport watercraft. They consisted of long, tapered frames of steel bars, and inside each was a mass of polystyrene foam. People and the stolen booty were chained inside hollows chopped out of the foam. The rear of each watercraft was cross-braced with steel rods that were latched in place, and a braided steel winch line connected all the watercraft together in a train. The fourth pod carried no prisoners and no gear, only a small army of albinos, using chains as seat belts inside the contraption.
The last detail to catch his attention was the series of steel rungs driven into the rock on the shore, and the long steel chain that was slithering out of the rungs. The albinos had just cast off, and the powerful current was already muscling the transport pods away from the shore.
“Not without me you don’t.” Remo called for Chiun over his shoulder, then slipped into the water in a dive that didn’t ripple the surface.
The river was a monster, and its gigantic muscles propelled Remo out of the cavern and into the tight tunnel beyond close behind the pod train. All the river’s speed wasn’t enough to suit him, though, and he stroked powerfully, doubling his speed until he heard the metallic protestations of the rearmost pod getting close. He grabbed it and held on as the pod tossed wildly in a sudden twist in the tunnel. The fingers of the metal frame screeched when they slammed into the rock, but they distorted and bounced back into shape afterward.
Remo could hear Chiun approaching, but his body also felt the vibrations of the agitated water coming from ahead of them. The ride was going to get a lot worse very soon. The first of the pods let out a loud screech of impact and then was muted abruptly, and Remo knew the watercraft was completely submerged. He held on with one hand and reached out with the other, snatched Chiun’s wrist in his grip and held on as the pod train lurched ahead.
The albino’s pod shuddered, crunched into the wall of rock in its turn and was dragged down underwater. The train was in a black passage where there was no air, only chaos.
Chapter 39
Remo could feel people dying. He could hear their terror in the churning water. He watched their last precious bubbles of air seep away from the pod train.
He and Chiun clung to the back of the last pod, each with an arm looped in the steel braces of the frames. They had instinctively filled their lungs, and now they allowed the carbon dioxide to leak from their lips in tiny blips. They could survive underwater for some time— but the captives on the other pods, even the albinos in the last pod, would be clawing at their throats by now.
Remo couldn’t just let them die.
He looked around the back end of the pod and drew his head back in again as a rock wall slammed into the steel framework. Nobody was steering the pods. The river drove the pod train along and pushed it where it wanted. The water was made into a maelstrom by rock falls too numerous to count. When the pod train wasn’t being hurled into boulders it was floating to the top and being dragged, scraping and squealing, along the rocky roof, where shimmering pockets of air slipped by just out of reach.
Remo heaved himself around the end of the pod, only to be manhandled into place again by an insistent, unbreakable clamp on his ankle. Chiun’s quick grab kept Remo from putting himself in the way of the dislodged stalactite that loomed up, as big as a redwood. trunk. It crunched into the pod with such force the springy metal couldn’t bounce back.
Remo turned on Chiun, ferociously pushing the old man’s hand away from him.
“They’re all dying!” Remo shouted, loud enough for Chiun to understand him under the water.
“What would you do?” Chiun barked.
Remo felt the truth wilt him—there was nothing he could do, even if he did manage to climb into the pods without being torn off. He allowed himself to dangle from, the rear of the pod as the subterranean voyage continued endlessly.
Another impact spun the pod train to the side, and Remo found their pod rolling along the ceiling for seconds before the train came to a teeth-jarring halt. The pod train had become draped around a rock column.
The glow stick, hung on his neck, was bright enough to watch the cataclysm that followed. The pod strained on its lead, and out of the chaos of black water another pod swung into them, fast, heavy and unstoppable. Remo felt the weight of the disaster even before it struck him physically—the pods had to get free now or there would be no hope of any survivors.
Remo turned, his eyes meeting Chiun’s in the near blackness, and they pushed away just before the stunning collision fused the two pods into a single ruined mass.
“Help them!” he shouted underwater. Chiun nodded in understanding. The old man found a new handhold on the tangled metal.
Remo’s internal clock told him that the pods had been underwater for only minutes, but it felt like an eternity. It felt like the endlessness of existence beyond the Void.
He was angry at Jacob Fastbinder, and he was angry at Jack Fast. This was one of the most inhumane things he had ever witnessed, and somebody was gonna pay for it. Remo’s fingernails penetrated the steel framework of the pod. His swift crawling made a mockery of the gigantic impetus of the river’s flow. When he reached the front of the pod he made out the barrel-thick rock column formed by the fusion of a stalactite and a stalagmite. What was it doing here in the river flow?
He slashed the braided steel cable with his fingernails, and the pod chain leaped ahead. Remo was snapped like a whip. His hand didn’t release its grip on the rear of the pod, but the rear of the pod couldn’t stand the opposing forces. It separated with a series of overlapping metal snaps, and Remo found himself floating along with a section of the jagged cage. The foam interior of the pod disintegrated and scattered its cargo of albinos.
Remo swam hard, trying to outrace the current again, heartened by the changing vibration of the water that told him the current was slowing and widening ahead of him. He shot to the surface in a wide cavern and slipped toward the gleam of green. Chiun had activated his own glow stick and was dragging the pod chain to an eroded rock landing.
Somebody was coughing. At least one of the captives had survived the ordeal.
Chapter 40
Whiteslaw had been waiting for days in a sleazy Oklahoma hotel, doing nothing. It was driving him batty. No phone calls. He couldn’t even go to the bar for fear of being recognized. He had nothing to do but watch television, where the best thing on was a T & A soap opera from south of the border called Excito Totalamente! Whiteslaw didn’t understand a word of it, but he enjoyed watching the big-busted Latino women bickering and embracing in their skimpy halter tops.