He felt himself reeling. His elbows gave out. The girl nudged him gently from behind. "Are you all right?" she asked.
In the utter blackness of the tunnel, Smith recalled the grainy photograph of Zoran Lustbaden, with its cold, translucent eyes and lips twitching in a half-moon smile. He propped himself up again.
He had chased Lustbaden for thirty-six years. He would not allow himself to die now that he was so close to the end of the hunt. Keeping the image of the young doctor in front of him, he pulled himself painfully ahead.
Then, without warning, the ground gave way beneath him, and Smith tumbled with a wrench of his back into what felt like a deep, wide hole. He stood up as quickly as he could and held out his arms for the girl.
"Watch it, Chiun," he whispered when Ana was safely to the ground.
Chiun slapped Smith's outstretched hands away. "Do I not have eyes?" he said irritably.
"Well, I didn't see the drop," Smith said.
Chiun snorted in reply.
The bubble of earth they were standing in led to a curving passage. This one was taller than the narrow tunnel where they had crawled for so long. Smith followed the curve around a long S, then stopped short.
He saw light.
"The Hall," the girl said.
His heart thudding, Smith scrambled to the jagged entrance, keeping close to the wall. From well within the shadows, he took in the great portraits of Hitler and his generals, and below them, the orderly formations of Lustbaden's secret army, the SPIDER corps.
Someone shouted an order. Smith threw himself against the wall, but he had not been spotted. The soldiers marched away from the center of the Hall and stood at attention, waiting for some unseen presence.
Then it appeared. The F-24, majestic and silent, rolled through the Great Hall toward the main exit from the cave as Lustbaden's soldiers acknowledged it with a stiff-armed Nazi salute.
Smith felt himself being dragged back into the past— Warsaw, Dimi, Auschwitz... With one salute, all the buried terrors of a terror-filled war uncovered themselves and hurtled despairingly into the present.
"Good God," he whispered as the plane rolled past. And then one of the soldiers saw him.
The rest happened so fast that Smith saw it only as a disconnected series of events. A sudden rush of uniformed men, the girl's harsh, high scream, bodies flying like pieces of shrapnel as Chiun began his defense against the attackers. Then a cold blade whistled in the air and pressed against Smith's throat so tightly that he gagged. He felt the cut from the small motion of his throat reflexes.
"If you move, old one, your friend is a dead man," came a softly accented voice out of the chaos.
Chiun's arms dropped.
Don't stop, Smith tried to say, but no sound would come. Chiun looked back at Smith as he was led into the electrified mesh prison, where Remo's face was barely visible. The old Oriental's eyes, which usually showed nothing, held a look of deep alarm. With slow recognition, Smith realized that the spreading pool of warmth on his chest, invisible to him below the soldier's knife, was probably his own blood.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a stocky man with white hair walk leisurely past the group of soldiers. The man stopped in front of Smith and faced him. He tapped once on the knife at Smith's throat. "Very sharp," he said, smiling with his half-moon lips.
Thirty-six years.
Lustbaden clasped his hands behind his back and paced for several minutes, his eyes never leaving Smith's face. The doctor frowned, shook his head, chuckled, and then laughed aloud, his belly jiggling with mirth. "Well, well, Smith. We meet at last," he said. "My men spotted you as soon as you reached the shores of our lovely island. We've watched you every step of the way. It's Colonel Smith, isn't it? Or have you been promoted?"
Thirty-six years of a chase that always ended with the quarry's disappearance. Thirty-six years of hunting a ghost. There had been times when Smith himself wondered if Lustbaden were real. But he was real; he was alive; the hunt was ended.
Smith felt a perverse kind of relief in watching Lustbaden crow over his capture. For he had seen the face of his elusive enemy, and even if this was to be the last sight of Smith's lifetime, he was grateful to have it.
He had found the Prince of Hell.
"Oh, you tracked me well. Kept me on my toes, so to speak. Buenos Aires was a close one. And persistent!" Lustbaden threw up his arms in mock frustration. "But you should have given up while you could," he said quietly. "Because in the end, you see, the OSS, the CIA, and even Harold W. Smith himself are no match for SPIDER. Or for me."
"No!" the girl screamed, struggling in the arms of two soldiers who held her. "You won't kill anymore! My people will stop you. We'll kill you first, you and all your trained monsters—"
"Nie wieder!" Lustbaden shouted, and the girl collapsed in pained shrieks and convulsions.
Lustbaden flicked his hand lazily at the girl. The soldiers dragged her away.
"And now, if you'll come with me, please," Zoran said equably to Smith. "I have rather a special welcome in store for you."
From their place in the cave behind the electric mesh, Remo and Chiun watched Smith, covered with blood, being led out of the Great Hall, past the pile of bodies Chiun had left behind. The soldier holding the knife at Smith's throat kicked him in the backs of his ankles to speed him along. Smith stumbled. He never uttered a word.
?Chapter Fourteen
Smith's welcome took place on the operating table of Zoran's laboratory. In The Room.
"Tsk, tsk, a nasty cut," Lustbaden said, probing at the knife wound on Smith's neck. "But superficial. I'll take care of it immediately."
"Don't bother," Smith croaked in a gush of blood.
"Please. I insist." From a drawer he scooped up a handful of sparkling white crystals. Smith felt the steel bands around his wrists and ankles bite into his skin as he tried to move. "Your young friend actually broke these bands," Lustbaden said, smiling. "A very strong fellow. But they've been repaired and reinforced. You'll stay snugly in place. Now hold still. This is the remedy." He brought his cupped hands close to Smith's neck.
"What's that?" Smith asked.
"An old cure for bleeding." He poured it onto the wound and packed it in. It burned like fire. "Salt."
Smith gulped and panted with the pain. Lustbaden's dead-fish eyes took in the sight with sick satisfaction. "This is just the beginning, Harold," he said. "May I call you Harold?" He held a glinting surgical instrument to the light. It was a long, thin cylinder that drew to a sharp point at the end. "I feel we've known each other for such a long time that formalities are unnecessary. Don't you agree?"
"Of course," Smith said. "You know me and I know you. You are human slime. A fungus."
"Now, now, Harold. Don't feel that way about it."
"I feel nothing but contempt for you," he hissed, barely able to move his lips.
Lustbaden waved the silvered instrument in front of Smith. The half-moon smile was forming. "Do you know what this does?" He asked teasingly. "I'll give you a hint. It corrects ear ailments."
"Why don't you just kill me and get it over with?" Smith said.
The half-moon broke into a wide grin. "Ah, but my dear fellow, don't you see? I don't want to get it over with. I have lived in fear of you for nearly four decades. No, I will not kill you for a long, long time, and when I do, you will bless me on your knees for the gift of death."
"You will rot in hell first," Smith said.
"Only after you, Smith."
He poised the instrument near the side of Smith's head, then slowly screwed it into his ear. Smith screamed as his eardrum felt the blinding, searing pain of the knife.