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"Does your word hold such importance to you?" Chiun asked, disgusted.
After a moment Remo answered, "Yes. I suppose it does."
They walked through the snow in silence. Remo knew he might have made the biggest mistake of his life. If he didn't get Foxx now, the president of the United States was going to pay for that mistake.
Chapter Sixteen
Harold Smith arrived at Shangri-la in a Grumann Air Force helicopter that touched down just outside the building. Its huge engine idled as Smith went inside.
The smell hit him as soon as he walked in the door. He gagged and blinked back the automatic tears that sprang into his eyes. Holding a handkerchief over his nose and mouth, he propped open the door, then made his way through the darkened mansion.
The place was perfectly still, silent except for the hum of the helicopter outside. The rooms were empty, their draperies drawn closed. Probably to conserve heat, he thought, eyeing the piles of ashes in each of the fireplaces. His breath came out in white plumes. But even with the cold, the stink of the place was overpowering, and growing stronger as he neared the heart of the house.
At least it wasn't summer, he thought. The last time he'd known this smell was in Korea, in a village where the North Koreans had slaughtered every man, woman, child, and article of livestock within five miles in order to "save" it from the devil Yanks. Smith was with the CIA then, and traveling with a platoon of regular army toward Pyongyang to rescue a handful of
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stranded agents with vital reports that couldn't be transmitted through normal channels. By the time the Americans reached the Korean village, the dead had been festering in the August sun for three days or more. The reek of death pointed the way to the village more accurately than any road sign.
In the middle of the village stood a squat mud hut. It was the only building among the strewn rubble and straw that was still standing. When Smith kicked open its woven reed and bamboo door, he was greeted by the sight of two dozen bodies, their eye sockets filled with maggots, their tongues lolling black out of their bloated faces as flies swarmed like living flesh over them.
The stink of Shangri-la brought back the image of the inside of that mud hut with a vividness that caused Smith's hands to shake. Was Remo in there? Was Chiun?
"Do your job," he muttered aloud as he hesitated a few feet in front of the arched doorway leading to the banquet hall. This was it, he knew; the smell was coming from here. He prepared himself, but as he walked inside, he knew that nothing could have prepared him for the sight in front of him.
It looked like a mausoleum. The remains of thirty people of incredible age lounged on the elegant pieces of furniture like party guests at some macabre celebration of the dead. They were dressed in finery from a dozen different eras: A flapper from the twenties, her face now a mask of withered leather beneath her bright cloche hat, sat demurely beside a World War I army major in full dress uniform, his nose a triangular hole like a jack-o-lantern's in his skeleton's face. A man in tails stared up through eyes puckered like raisins from a copy of The New Yorker on his lap, his
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bone-fingers clasped around a fresh glass of green Chartreuse. Near him, the last embers of a fire smoldered in the fireplace.
A crypt, Smith thought, taking in the rest of the room. A repository for the long dead. Except for the terrible odor of death that spewed from every crack, there was nothing to indicate that these people hadn't died decades ago. It was as if every person in the room had ceased to live long before death had actually come to claim their bodies.
in the corner, slumped over the keys of a highly polished grand piano, was a woman dressed in a shimmering white satin evening gown. An ermine stole was draped over her shoulders, and her blonde hair cascaded over the gleaming wood. Her fingers were still resting on the piano's keys.
She looks so young, Smith thought, going over to her. Maybe there was a survivor. If this one girl could remember. . . .
He lifted her by her shoulders. With a brittle snap of her neck, her head lolled back to reveal the papery, veiled face of a mummy.
With a gasp, Smith let her go. Her hand dropped again to the keyboard with a little ping of music that seemed to echo forever.
Rattled, Smith picked up his attach^ case and bolted into the next room. It was empty. The kitchen was empty, too, as were the upstairs bedrooms. He was grateful. The shock in the ballroom had been enough.
He set the case on an eyelet-covered bed and used his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration off his clammy palms. When the phone inside the case rang, the handkerchief flew into the air. His stomach felt as if it had turned a complete revolution inside his body
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as he wiped the dried spittle from his lips and fumbled with the catches on the case.
"Yes," he said, hearing the hoarseness in his own voice.
"It's Remo. I'm at a ranch somewhere near the South Dakota Badlands." He capsulized Sergeant Riley's story, leaving out the fact that he'd released all the members of the Team. Smith would never have understood that part. "Foxx'll be in Zadnia by tonight. I've got to get over there. Now."
"Can you get me the exact coordinates of your location?" Smith asked.
"I've got them." he rattled off the coordinates.
"Hold your position," Smith said. "I'll have a plane pick you up."
"Make it a fast one," Remo said. "While you've been at home snoozing, I've been freezing my butt off in the mountains."
"I'm at Shangri-la," Smith said.
"Oh?" There was a deliberate casualness in Remo's voice. "How are the folks there?"
After a pause Smith said, "They're dead."
There was silence on the line. "All of them?" Rerno said quietly. "The blonde?. . ."
"All." Smith swallowed. "We'll talk about it later. Hold your position." He hung up. His next call was to the president. Then he made an anonymous call to the local county morgue, alerting them to the presence of thirty bodies in the mansion near Enwood.
Outside, he scrambled into the helicopter and signalled the pilot to lift off. The pilot had been given instructions to follow the lemony-faced man's orders to the letter. He was a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base who had flown every experimental aircraft
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brought into the base and dealt with every manner of off-the-wall order handed down by the brass, so he didn't so much as blink when he was given emergency top-security clearance to fly the Grumann to a destination known only to his civilian passenger. And he exhibited no surprise when the passenger told him to reroute the helicopter to the nearest airbase housing supersonic jets. Nor did he offer up any questions when he arrived at the base and was immediately handed a new set of top-security clearance papers to land a massive F-16 on a stretch of barren ground somewhere in western South Dakota and pick up two other civilian passengers who would direct him to his next destination. The pilot took one look at the amount of liquid oxygen and hydrogen peroxide fuel being pumped, boiling and steaming, into the F-16, and knew it was going to be a long flight, wherever he was going.
But it was all in a day's work. The pilot didn't much care who gave the orders, as long as they didn't try to fly the plane. He sat back in the flight lounge and poured himself a cup of coffee as the lemony-faced man called a taxi to take him to the nearest airport. He was probably some bureaucrat, sent to check out the efficiency of emergency operations, or some kind of nonsense like that. The two guys in South Dakota were probably doing the same thing.
The F-16 was going to be a ride and a half for them. Well, what the hell, the pilot thought. Let them have their thrill. It'll probably be the high point of their entire boring, ordinary lives.