Chiun felt real terror. What a fool of an old man was he! His pupil had done this great deed once tonight, and Chiun had exposed him to the madness again! How much of this could one be expected to endure?
“Remo, hear me and return!” Chiun cried as he struck the flailing arms and thrashing head of the moronic copper man. “Remo, the blackness is no place for a Master of Sinanju. It is beyond the Void!”
Jack’s fingers were tense on the joystick as he rocketed just 1,100 feet above Washington, D.C.
“Here’s Jack. Talk to me, Ballboy.”
The computer beeped as if in answer.
“Cool!” Jack Fast exclaimed, and steered on an intercept course.
Chiun felt the pressure waves echoing along the street as if some gigantic bullet was approaching, but it wasn’t coming down. Simultaneously he felt the burst of static electricity that flew out of the metal creature disintegrating under his hands.
“Is this a friend of yours?” Chiun asked, snatching the head off of Clockwork. The eye lenses rolled crazily in their sockets. “Then rejoin him!”
He angrily shot-putted the heavy metallic head into the skies over Washington, D.C., as the approach of the low-flying aircraft became an assault of pressure waves. Chiun’s senses were imperfect at this moment, and the aircraft was coming with extraordinary speed; momentarily, the old Master questioned the accuracy—
The head and the aircraft came together with Chiun-like precision.
The interior of the aircraft became a sound chamber filled with screaming alert signals.
“Holy toledo!” Jack Fast exclaimed, not hearing anything. His attention was riveted on the needle-sharp nose of the EVUDA aircraft. A deformed metallic thing was impaled there, shaped like a flattened basketball. Amazingly, the brass bowler hat had survived almost perfectly intact.
“Clockwork!”
One rolling eye dangled in the slipstream, then was jerked out by the force of the air. It was then that Jack noticed the EVIDA was vibrating uncontrollably.
Clockwork’s skewered head was screwing up his aerodynamics big-time.
Chiun felt the rumbling of the city, then the shock wave of the passing aircraft thundered this filthy corner of Washington, D.C., like an earthquake, cracking the crust on the street filth so that the stench blossomed anew.
Chiun was beyond noticing. He didn’t care that he had bested the enemy, It no longer mattered that the thing of copper was reduced to bits and pieces of metallic waste that might as well have gone through a junkyard shredder.
He took the wide-eyed creature from the filthy pavement and carried it into the streets of the hideous city. His ancient, bony fingers could feel the beating of a powerful human heart inside this body—but what else remained? Did anything else remain?
“Fight it, Remo,” he whispered. “Claw out of the blackness. Do not let the blackness imprison you beyond the Void, where there is nothing.”
Chiun took a taxi to the airport, then boarded the aircraft hired for him by Emperor Smith, although he was not truly aware of doing these things. At one point Chiun heard the flight attendant tell him a car would be waiting for him at the other end. Smith’s machinations coming into play.
Chiun was speaking all the while, quietly, whispering, and sometimes weeping. “Old fool!” he would say occasionally, but usually his words were for Remo.
What frightened Chiun the most was the feeling in his own breast, the dreadful emptiness.
There was a connection between a Master and his Pupil, and when a Master died or a Pupil died, the other knew and felt such an emptiness. It was perhaps one of the myths of Sinanju, based on a wish more than the true nature of the art.
Chiun hoped this was just myth, just a Sinanjii old wives’ tale, because at this moment that place was empty, as if Remo Williams had ceased to be.
“Remo,” whispered the old man.
His words went unheard.
Chapter 39
“Dad, you there? Come on, Pops, talk to me!”
“Jack, I had given you up for dead!”
Jack almost breathed a sigh of relief as he muscled the EVIDA under Mach and felt the click of the wings locking into their fully extended position—but the plane kept shaking.
“Loser IT dropouts!” Fast exploded. “Why can’t the Navy hire some real engineers to design their gear?”
“Jack, say again?” Fastbinder radioed.
“Can’t talk now. I’ll call ya back, Pops.” Jack reduced speed even more and felt the aircraft wobble uncertainly in the direction he steered it. He was out over the Atlantic when his air speed reduced to three hundred miles per hour.
The EVIDA project leaders boasted a stall speed of 125 miles per hour.
“So why is the dam thing stalling?” Fast exclaimed. He pumped more juice into the engines and pushed the EVIDA into a tentative stability that wouldn’t last long. Fast thumbed on the autopilot and grabbed the laptop.
He groped under the passenger seats, which were installed by the brilliant engineers at the Navy who intended for the EVIDA to be hidden in plain sight by pretending to be an officers’ transport plane. Fast yanked out a cushion with a label that said that, in case of a water landing, the cushion could be used as a flotation device.
The EVIDA choked on her fuel as Fast blew off the cockpit entrance. “Good riddance,” he told the 1.6-billion-dollar hunk of junk as he stepped out.
He deployed his stealth chute and drifted away as a pair of fighter planes screeched a few thousand feet overhead. The fighters watched the EVIDA ditch in the Atlantic, but they never saw the young man who ejected.
Fast wasn’t a happy camper. A heck of a lot of work had gone down the drain tonight. His only consolation was that, maybe, if he was lucky, the data dump received from Clockwork, now stored in his laptop, might give him a clue about who it was who had beat him.
Because tossing a robot head onto the nose of a screaming jet took special skill. Fast would need ingenuity and strategy to overcome such skill.
His flight goggles’ nosepiece extended to cover his mouth and nose. His empty cushion covering was a backpack that was filled halfway with steel air cylinders. There was a waterproof pack alongside them that accommodated the computer. Fast zipped it closed as he drifted down to the surface of the Atlantic.
Just before he submerged. Jack took a last look at the lights of the shore.
It was gonna be a heck of a long walk.
General Elvgren “Bad Dog” Rover was reading the paper and pretended not to notice his assistant was on the phone. The captain hung up.
“Sir, the BOIID went into the Atlantic.”
The general’s wolfish grimace came and went, detecting something unsaid. “We shot it down?”
“It was shot down,” the captain said. “By someone. Over D.C.”
“Gang crossfire?”
“Unknown, Sir.”
“If it was over D.C., then it was gang crossfire.”
“Well, the street gangs in D.C. are some of the best-equipped in the world,” the captain said uncertainly. “Still, this aircraft was designed to take antiaircraft rounds—”
“Not so far as we know, officially,” Rover said, rattling his newspaper. “Gang crossfire. You writing the press release?”
‘Yes, Sir.”
“Gang crossfire.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Chapter 40
First came the Emperor.
“We should move him to a hospital bed.”
“That will do him no good. You have done every foolish test your charlatan doctors could think of.”
“It would be better than laying him out on the floor.”
“Be gone, Emperor,” said Chiun.
Next came the prince.
“We know how the proton device functions, anyway. The labs are working on it.”