"They died," Remo said unconcernedly. He was looking for more Russians. He saw two more, standing like Hawaiian versions of Mafia bodyguards before the Moon Walk pavilion. "Excuse me while I go kill some more."
"Nice meeting you," said Larry Lepper, grateful that he would not have to deal with the armed men.
"Give Smokey my best," Remo called back.
The sound of the exploding Uzis had gone unnoticed in the carnival sounds of Larryland, so the next pair of Russians had no idea that there had been trouble. They stood at attention, oblivious of the crowds swirling around them.
Remo slipped up from behind and took an elbow in each hand. The men felt a sudden irresistible urge to drop their weapons. They did.
Remo scooped up the Uzis and removed the clips. "There," he said. "Now that they're empty, I've got some questions for the two of you." He pointed the weapons at them.
"Excuse me," said one of the Russians. "But you are mistaken."
"I am?" asked Remo. He frowned. "Yes. Those weapons are not empty."
"Nonsense," Remo said. "You saw me take out the clips."
"There is always a round in the chamber. Be so good as to remove those before you wave them like that."
"I think you're thinking of some other weapon," Remo said.
"I am sure I am correct," the Russian said with studied politeness. "I am a soldier."
"Really?" said Remo. And because he resented the presence of Soviet soldiers in an American theme park, he did something he had not done since learning Sinanju. He pressed the trigger.
The complaining Russian folded like a broken board. "What do you know?" Remo said. "He was right, after all. I guess that means there's another round in this gun too." He pointed it at the second Russian's face.
"What do you wish to know?" the Russian asked unhappily.
"For starters, I'd like to know where Anna Chutesov is."
The Russian jerked a thumb at the Moon Walk pavilion, which glittered directly behind him.
"She is there, looking for something. We know not what."
"You just answered my second question," Remo said.
"Is that good?"
"For me, yes. For you, uh-uh," Remo told him, shaking his head sadly.
"You are going to shoot me here?"
"No, I hate guns. Firing that one made me remember why. It's noisy and sloppy, and why should I shoot you when I can do this?" And Remo flipped the gun at the Russian. It struck him square over the heart, stopping it.
"Much better," Remo said, looking around for more Russians.
The Master of Sinanju found himself walking through a long, square tunnel whose walls might have been carved from black obsidian. Starlike lights twinkled behind the smoky glass, giving the illusion of walking through a tunnel of stars. When he emerged at last, he found himself in a spherical white room.
The room was turning like the inside of a basketball rolling down a hill. It was filled with children and adults, laughing and giggling as they tumbled about the slick inner walls.
When the room stopped revolving, an opening appeared on the opposite side, leading deeper into the Moon Walk attraction. The children started for the opening first.
The Master of Sinanju cleared space in a gazellelike leap. He landed, blocking the entrance, his spindly arms raised menacingly.
"Begone!" he said wrathfully.
The children giggled, thinking the Master of Sinanju was part of the attraction.
"Are you a moon man?" one of them asked.
"This place is closed. Begone," Chiun repeated. And when one of the children reached out to touch the brocade of his robe, he slapped him once. Not hard, but sharply enough to get the attention of the others.
"How dare you strike my child!" a woman cried, shoving her way toward the Master of Sinanju. Chiun smacked her too, and spinning her around, sent her off with a firm sandal on the seat of her pants.
"I have closed this place," he said loudly. "Go now, and tell the others that no one may enter henceforth, otherwise they will face the wrath of the Master of Sinanju."
"And you'll face the wrath of my lawyer," the woman shot back. But she led the crying child back toward the entrance. The others followed.
Satisfied that he had prevented a terrible fate from befalling the group, the Master of Sinanju turned to face the next room and pressed on. His face was set.
Anna Chutesov felt the eyes upon her.
She had walked through the Star Tunnel and the Satellite Spin and floated through the Orbit Room to find herself in a great room called the Sargasso of Lost Spaceships. The floor was a web of nylon mesh. Great rusty hulks of derelict spaceships lay all about her. They protruded up from the bouncing mesh flooring, stuck out of the walls, and floated under the ceiling. She brushed at a tiny asteroid that hung before her face, but her hand went through it. She realized it was a three-dimensional image.
The room was burnished with an eerie blue glow. In the semilit portholes of the spaceships, there were dummies of astronauts and aliens, supposedly dead and marooned in space. Their eyes stared, open and seemingly alive.
Anna walked past a dummy in an astronaut suit, picking her way carefully because the web flooring gave with each step like a trampoline, making it seem as if she were actually walking in space. She thought she heard the crinkling sound of a spacesuit flexing.
Anna stopped to listen, but the floor continued to shake.
Anna Chutesov wheeled suddenly, her pistol coming up.
The dummy in the spacesuit clambered to its feet and faced her. Its unblinking blue eyes regarded her blankly.
"Hello is all right," said the voice. The same voice that had called to her from the booth of the Yuri Gagarin Free Car Wash.
"I prefer good-bye," spat Anna Chutesov, and she emptied the clip into the figure's chest.
Chapter 19
Remo Williams had lost count.
There had been ten Russians altogether. He was pretty sure of that number. He had counted them before he had gone to work on them. The trouble was, he had not bothered to count them as he dispatched them.
Remo thought he had gotten all ten. But he wasn't sure. He sat down on a grassy knoll where the legend "Larryland" was spelled out in daisies and cornflowers, and counted them off on his fingers. There had been the first three, whose guns exploded. Then the next two, one of whom he had shot. A bad move. He would never do that again. Remo recalled stuffing one Russian into a trash receptacle. That made five so far. Then there had been the one who had picked up a little boy and tried to use him as a shield when Remo had cornered him. Remo had rescued the boy and fed the Russian to the big gears of the Squirrel Girl ride. That had been a mistake too, because the man had screamed in Russian as the machinery ground up his legs. And that had brought the others running.
That was where it turned complicated.
Did three Russians try to jump him-or was it four? If Remo could remember for certain, it might account for all of them.
Remo had had to run into the crowd, and the Russians followed him, so Remo had to play it carefully. He sneaked up on the first one, crouching low, working the crowd so that the first target noticed nothing. The other Russians saw their comrade suddenly drop from sight. Remo had pulled him to the ground and collapsed his windpipe.
The second Russian disappeared beneath a sea of people in exactly the same way, and Remo, because it had seemed fitting, had made the "duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh" sound that was the theme from jaws as he bore down, unseen, on the third and possibly last guard.
Remo tapped that man's spine, and carried him off to the pile he had made of the others, out of sight behind a cluster of palms.
So was it three or four? Remo couldn't remember. He thought it was four, but he wasn't positive. He wished he had counted. Probably it was four, because he didn't find any more Russians. Maybe the last one had run away.