"Submarine inspector. Anybody home?"
A hatch popped atop the sail. Remo looked up. At his back another hatch popped. It fell down with a clang.
One eye on the sail, Remo glanced over his shoulder.
Two men in white sailor suits were climbing up from the hatch. They carried Uzis. With their faces painted white, they looked like mimes. The white blankness of their expressions was broken by a dark, flowery tattoo in the middle.
Remo recognized the symbol instantly. It was the Boy Scout crest. No, that was gold. This was blue. It still looked familiar.
"You clowns have caused me a lot of trouble," Remo said casually.
The two creeping closer failed to answer. Remo couldn't read their faces, but their weapons were pointed at him with professional intent.
"I surrender. Don't shoot me," he said, hoping they stepped right up to him. But they approached carefully. They weren't fools.
Remo raised his hands to encourage them. That worked. They moved up on quick sneakered feet.
A man appeared up on the sail and pointed a rifle down at Remo, complicating things. But only a little.
Remo offered a weak smile as the two seamen took positions on either side of him. They looked up. Remo looked up, too.
The man on the sail had a white face, too. He gave a hand signal while keeping the rifle trained on Remo.
The two on the deck took comfort in that, and one holstered his Uzi while the other stood back and trained his weapon on Remo with businesslike intent. His eyes were two dark squints.
Remo realized he was about to be frisked for weapons and decided he really didn't want to be frisked.
When one sailor put his hands to Remo's sides, Remo broke both forearms with his elbows. He dug them into his sides. Crunch. Bones splintered. The seaman let out a high, frightened howl.
Pivoting, Remo spun the screaming sailor in a half circle and let go. The flying body slammed into the other sailor, and they went tumbling down the steep side of the sub.
Remo backpedaled in place ahead of the rifle bullet that punched a hole in the deck where he had stood a second before.
Arcing into the water, he made almost no sound, his lean body cleaving the water like an eel. Feet kicking, he used the slimy, cold skin of the hull to guide him to the bow and over to the other side.
Through the water Remo should have been able to hear the sailors shouting at one another. But they weren't shouting. Even the howling sailor had gotten a grip on himself.
Surfacing on the other side of the sub, Remo reached up and found the ankles of the two still struggling to hold on to the deck. They came into the water screaming.
"Fun's over," said Remo, grabbing them by the scruffs of their necks. "Time to confess to Father Remo."
One threw a punch that Remo avoided with a quick bob of his head. The sailor tried twice more, with the same frustrating result.
"Give up?" Remo asked.
They said nothing. If clown faces could look sullen, these two managed a respectable impersonation.
"Last chance to talk freely," Remo warned.
They offered frowns, and their shoulders slumped dejectedly.
So Remo dunked their heads under the surface. Their hands groped and splashed wildly. When he lifted them, they gasped like frightened flounders.
"Okay, who are you guys?"
They gasped some more, so Remo dunked them again. Longer this time.
When he finally brought them up, they were jabbering some doggerel Remo didn't understand at all.
"You two just flunked Usefulness 101," he said, and brought their faces together so fast and hard they fused.
Like Siamese twins joined at the nose, they sank as one. They didn't even struggle. For them the light had gone out forever.
Remo stepped back onto the deck and found the ladder that led up the side of the great black sail. He started climbing.
The seaman on the sail was sweeping the seas with a small gimbal-mounted searchlight now. He missed Remo entirely every time. That was Remo's doing, not the seaman's fault.
Remo pointed out his error by slipping up to the top of the sail and tapping on his shoulder.
Startled, the seaman spun around.
The expression on his pale face was not so much surprise as it was a cartoon. The blue symbol spread outward like a flower coming to life. A black hole formed in the bottom of the gleaming white face. The black hole had blue lips and white teeth, with prominent incisors. Remo flicked the front teeth with a finger, and they flew back into the sailor's mouth.
The seaman grabbed his throat, eyes bugging out in shock.
"That's only a sample of what I can do if I don't get some answers from you," Remo warned.
The seaman doubled over, coughing.
"Uh-oh," said Remo, who then spun the man around and, jamming his fists into his stomach, Heimliched him.
With a grunt the seaman expelled the teeth lodged in his throat, then collapsed on the sail, gasping.
"Speak English?" asked Remo.
The sailor started to gurgle. Then he vomited up his last meal. It looked like potatoes, except they were bluish.
Reaching down, Remo picked him up by the collar and belt and deposited him down the sail's hatch.
He went down, limbs and other bodily projections banging off the spiral staircase. When he reached bottom, Remo started down after him.
It was a big sub. There had to be plenty more sailors to interrogate. And that one had unforgivably splashed vomit on Remo's shoes.
The stink of the interior of the sub was a mixture of oil, cooking odors and stale human sweat. Remo absorbed all these scents as he slipped down the spiral stairs. Fear-sweat was predominant. The air reeked of it.
That meant an ambush down below.
Remo processed the assorted scents. He got a whiff of inert, unburned gunpowder. Sailors with guns. He wasn't in a great position to dodge wild shooting. On the other hand, only idiots would shoot inside a sub on the high seas.
On the other other hand, Remo remembered, these guys were wearing clown faces. No telling what they would do.
He decided to smoke them out. He was coming down on silent feet, and deliberately he stumbled. The stairs rang like a tuning fork.
And up from the shadows they poured, silent except for their drumming boots. No shouting. No war cries.
"Are these guys all mute?" Remo wondered aloud.
The steps vibrated with their mad rushing as they circled up and around.
Remo reached out and took hold of the spiral rail corkscrewing around the stairs. Stepping out, he let his legs dangle and slid down on both hands.
The sailors saw him going past as they were going up. They collided, bunched up, and started to reverse course.
By the time they got themselves organized, Remo had reached bottom and ducked through a hatch. He dogged it shut. That let him in and kept them out.
Moving down the cramped corridor, Remo came upon a sailor with a white-and-blue face.
"Speak English?" he asked casually.
The sailor was unarmed. He ran. Remo grabbed him by the shoulder and began to squeeze his hard rotator cup.
"Habla espanol?" he asked.
The man screamed. No words. Just high, mindless screaming.
"Parlez-vous Francais?''
More screaming.
"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"
He apparently didn't speak German. So Remo tried Korean. "Hanguk-mal hae?"
The man's rolling eyes turned white. They matched his face. It created an interesting effect. While his mouth was open, Remo checked to see if he had a tongue. He did. A pink one.
Having exhausted his stock of languages, Remo put the screaming sailor out his misery with a hard tap to the temple. The man collapsed in the corridor, and Remo stepped over him.
Back the way Remo came, the trapped sailors began pounding on the dogged hatch. That was all they did. Pound. They said nothing. They might have been completely mute. Or what they seemed to bemimes.