Remo could hear the rapid movement of the pilot inside. Going for a gun, Remo assumed. These guys took their security seriously if they were willing to waste their own men.
"Let's go," Remo said, jerking the attackers across the deck, where the pilot couldn't target them.
Remo took only two steps before he felt something strange, a tiny surge of an electrical current that passed through each attacker's body. Then he sensed the activation of a minute electromechanical switch somewhere on the torso of each man.
Remo moved fast, spinning himself in place and dragging both the attackers with him, then he released them. One of them flew down from the rail, directly into the sea and exploded just as he hit, blasting the Traverser and Remo Williams with a wall of water.
But the second attacker was airborne over the deck of the sailboat when the explosives strapped to his body detonated. Remo had put all his skill and strength into launching his attackers, and there wasn't time to dodge the blast, but he had expelled the air from his lungs and allowed his body to ride out the crushing cushions of air that slammed him from two sides.
It was over in an instant, and Remo inhaled deeply as the sailboat bobbed wildly. The Traverser's deck was cratered where the second attacker had blown up, and the deck was littered with gore and body parts.
The ground-effect craft revved her engines and gathered speed, her hull rising high in the water. Once she was released from the friction of the sea, her speed would increase rapidly.
Remo glanced around and found the twisted rifles, pushed to the aft end of the deck by the explosion. He lifted the awkward, heavy contortion of metal and tested its weight in his hand. The escaping craft skimmed a high wave and lifted free, humming props accelerating her to raceboat speeds.
Remo flung the twisted metal and watched it wobble through the air as he heard Lee Clark emerge. Clark took in the bizarre, morbid scene and followed the long flight of the twisted metal.
The conjoined rifles seemed to hover high above the accelerating ground-effect craft, then floated down, down, inserting themselves into the right prop just about the time the craft reached sixty-five miles per hour. The prop disintegrated, the right side lurched and the wing penetrated the water while the left side kept going forward. The result was a spectacular cartwheel of fiberglass and metal parts and spraying water. The frameless body and wings were designed to withstand extreme forces, but this was way beyond their design limits. The craft separated into two large wing pieces, the passenger compartment and many smaller parts.
"Aw, crap," Remo said, and jumped over the rail into the inflatable landing raft that the attackers had used. The little motor had died once the attackers left it, but it buzzed angrily to life when Remo pushed the button.
Remo had faster ways of reaching to the crash, but not of getting there and bringing back a seriously wounded pilot. He arrived just as the steel cage of the cockpit, floating in a jagged bowl of broken fiberglass, leaned into the Pacific Ocean, filled with water and submerged. Remo leaped from the inflatable and hit the water in a dive so sharp he barely rippled the surface or the floating debris.
He caught up to the pilot cage about twenty-five feet down, reached inside and dragged out the pilot.
The pilot stared at Remo Williams all the way back to the surface, and all the way back to the sailboat. The pilot wasn't going to be answering any questions, but at least he was a corpse that might be identified.
Back on the Traverser, around-the-world sailor Lee Clark was using his mop to swab the gory deck. He liked to run a tight ship.
3
"I wish you would have stopped him," said the man with the gray complexion. He was sitting behind a huge desk with an onyx top. Behind him, out the large picture window, was his seldom-admired view of Long Island Sound.
"Why?" Remo asked.
"We might have identified the body," Harold W. Smith said.
"Believe me, there wasn't anything left to identify. He blew up real good. You want to try a DNA test, go wring some samples from Lee Clark's mop."
"Use your manners!" said the little old man in the chair next to Remo.
"That's precisely what the Chileans did," said Smith, looking sour. But then, he always looked sour. And he always looked gray. Smith had been gray all his life, since childhood, but old age made him appear even less healthy.
"The poor guy was about to lose his marbles," Remo explained, "and it seemed like cleaning up the blood and guts was his way of working through it."
"It was a murder investigation," Smith insisted.
"Clark was one of the victims, Smitty, and he was the only victim not beyond help, so I helped him by not stopping him from helping himself. Under the circumstances it was the decent thing to do."
"It was not what you should have done," Smith insisted.
The old man in the next chair was regarding Remo with the distaste of a haughty parent who has just caught his prep-school son picking his nose. "He is always doing what he should not do, Emperor," said the old man in a high, lamenting voice. He was dressed in a long kimono of orange silk, decorated with a riot of hand-embroidered birds and animals in a rainbow of colors. The man was Korean, his features prominent despite his mask of wrinkles. He was Chiun, and he was very, very old.
Remo didn't respond to either Smith or Chiun.
"They were able to find several tissue samples on the boat," Mark Howard said. The younger man was sitting on the old couch, papers spread across his lap. "No match from the tests so far."
"See?" Remo said to Smith. "No problem."
"With more of the body we might have been able to make that identification," Smith said. "There might have been a finger capable of giving us a print."
"There wasn't. I was there, remember? Most of him went into the ocean when he exploded anyway. Plus, I got you a whole, unexploded body. Where's my thanks for that?"
"More impertinence! I can only apologize for him," Chiun said.
Smith gave Remo Williams the sourest of looks, the expression of a man who had just bitten into a wedge of orange only to realize too late that it was a lemon. Remo had been on the receiving end of such glares more times than he could guess. He didn't even notice them anymore.
"Can we go home now?" Remo asked.
"On to other things," Smith announced.
"I didn't know there were other things," Remo said.
"Do you think I made the arduous journey from our faraway home for no reason?" Chiun asked scornfully.
"What? And carried your own trunks?" Remo queried. "You shouldn't exert yourself, Little Father. What if you broke a hip?"
"The other thing," Smith declared forcefully, "is quite serious."
"The pirates of the Drake Passage were not serious?" Remo said. "Not by your standards."
"Better than the pirates of the Caribbean," Chiun observed.
"I'm not going back to the Caribbean," Remo insisted. "I don't care if it's to save the President of the U.S. of A."
"This problem seems hot to involve the Caribbean, but it could very well involve a threat to the President,"
Smith intoned. "May I he allowed to explain?"
Remo knew sarcasm when he heard it. "Go ahead."
Smith nodded to Mark Howard.
"This was the victim that brought the problem to our attention," Mark said, handing Remo a color eight-by- ten glossy photograph of a statue.
"It's a statue," Remo said. "Of a fat guy."
"Not a statue at all, but a genuine fat guy," Howard explained. Mark was Harold Smith's assistant, in both public and clandestine activities. The public affairs included the administration of Folcroft Sanitarium, a private hospital in Rye, New York, which served as a cover for CURE. CURE was the supersecret agency Harold Smith and Mark Howard administered. Remo Williams, with his mentor Chiun, served as its enforcement arm.