She had been lost in thought, obviously thinking of the amount of gold she had lost.
"What?" she asked, perturbed. She handed the stools off to a waiting skinhead. "What are you talking about?"
Her answer exploded from across the small river. The first gunshot ripped through the torpid silence of the ancient forest.
The bullet caught the skinhead beside them square in the chest. The young man wheeled around, flinging the three stools into the air as he did so. They flew through the air, landing in a tangle of bushes near the heap of displaced mud.
The dead skinhead fell to the forest floor as the next bullet tore from the tangle of low plants across the river.
Kluge threw himself to the ground. His elbow slammed against a flat rock. He ignored the shooting pain in his arm as he half crawled, half pushed himself along the damp forest surface to the protection of a cluster of thick pine trees.
All around him, Kluge's mud-soaked neo-Nazi followers had drawn weapons. Ducking for cover themselves, they had begun to shoot blindly at their concealed attackers.
Gunfire erupted all around.
The men who had ambushed them were in no hurry to advance. They stayed at a distance, firing with care into the cluster of neo-Nazis. From his vantage point behind the trees, Kluge could see that the first man he had noticed wore the uniform of the German Federal Border Police. He skulked on the other side of the small tributary, popping into view every few seconds with a blast of automatic-weapon fire.
A volley of bullets ripped into the soft trunk of the tree above him, sending splinters of pulpy wood down onto Kluge's sandy hair.
Kluge glanced frantically the other way. Through the overgrown forest, he could barely glimpse his parked convoy of trucks. As he watched, the lead car began rolling off down the road. It was joined a moment later by several of the trucks. The Numbers were fleeing.
He was so shocked that he began to climb to his feet. A fresh hail of bullets made him reconsider. Dropping back to his belly, Adolf Kluge began crawling slowly through the tangle of bushes toward the road.
He got only a few feet before his injured elbow fell atop the toe of a boot. Kluge had no weapon. He rolled over onto his back, hands held up in surrender.
A group of men dressed in the drab uniforms of the Federal Border Police fanned around him. They grabbed Adolf Kluge by the arms, pulling him to his feet.
As the firefight continued to rage over near the river, the men spirited Kluge to the waiting line of trucks.
THE DETACHMENT of Federal Border Police had split up at the river, hoping to ensnare the entire band of neo-Nazis within their widely cast net.
Remo was on the other side of the river when he heard the first gunshot. It was followed almost immediately by a sustained firefight. He turned to Colonel Friedrich Heine.
"Who told them to start shooting?" Remo demanded.
"They are not authorized," Colonel Heine said angrily.
Remo didn't wait for more of an explanation. He began running through the woods toward the sound of the guns.
He broke into a small clearing on the side of the river opposite the neo-Nazis. He saw the deep mud hole beside the small man-made hill of displaced earth. Tiny puffs of dust rose from within the pit.
Colonel Heine came running up behind Remo, desperately short of breath. The firefight was blazing, with swarms of angry lead projectiles whizzing around his head as Heine slammed up against the thick trunk of a bullet-riddled tree. He pulled out his side arm.
"You," he demanded, pointing at one of his men crouching in the nearby bushes. "Who gave the order to fire?"
The man shrugged. "It simply happened, sir," he said.
Heine shook his head to Remo, fiercely apologetic. "Not all of these men are pro-Nazi," he explained. "Some are like me. Although I was hoping for a peaceful resolution."
"That's shot to hell right about now," Remo snarled.
The skinheads were entrenched on the other side of the river. The border police had only managed to pick off a few of them early on. The rest were dug in behind trees and boulders, preserving ammunition by firing in short, directed bursts at their attackers.
The border police had lost the element of surprise. They were hunkered down across the river, unable to advance on the skinheads. The other half of Heine's men appeared to have vanished.
It was an equally matched standoff.
Remo didn't seek cover like the others. He stood in the open near the river, dodging the occasional bullet that flew his way. He frowned as he looked across the river. He didn't see the Master of Sinanju anywhere. Nor Kluge or Heidi, for that matter.
"Get down!" Heine insisted. He was amazed that Remo had not yet been shot.
Remo didn't appear to hear the colonel. He sighed even as he sidestepped a violent burst from a skinhead's Uzi. "Leave it to the only American here to have to clean up this mess," he grumbled. Leaving Heine to splutter that he was committing suicide, Remo hopped onto a moss-slick stone that jutted up a foot out from the river's edge.
It wasn't far across. Though the water raced fast, it was more of an overgrown stream than a real river. Hopping from damp stone to damp stone, Remo bounded over to the other side in a few short leaps. He landed in a clump of brown weeds.
Remo hadn't taken more than two steps up the bank before a wild-eyed skinhead came screaming at him from out of a heavy thicket. The man wielded a large hunting knife before him. The scream was apparently meant to distract his victim as he plunged the knife home.
Without even missing a single step, Remo snatched the skinhead by the wrist. With a quick, fluid motion, he redirected the knife back and around. The young man's hand traced an elaborate circle in the air as the blade whirred back toward the attacker. It buried itself up to the hilt in the startled skinhead's unmuscled abdomen.
Striding forward, Remo flung the doubled-over body into his wake. The skinhead toppled into the weeds and then rolled over, splashing into the racing water. He floated only a few feet downstream before his body snagged on a rock. The river splashed over and around his lifeless form.
Remo continued onward, his expression grave. He had yet to see Chiun anywhere.
Judging from the gunfire, there weren't as many men in the woods around him as had left the inn during the wee hours of the morning. Some must have escaped when the shooting began. Realizing he might have been too hasty killing his first attacker, Remo sought out another skinhead.
He found one crouching amid a tangle of bushes. The man was firing shots from his assault rifle in random bursts at the police across the river. The slender barrel of his West German Gewehr jutted out from a tangle of laurel.
Coming up from the man's blind side, Remo wrapped his fingers around the gun barrel and yanked hard. The startled skinhead popped out from the bushes, still hanging on to the other end of his weapon. He seemed shocked to find someone else attached to his gun barrel.
"Okay, pfeffernusse," Remo began, unmindful of the young man's surprised expression. "Do you-?"
A loud series of gunshots sounded across the river. A cluster of crimson stains erupted across the skinhead's chest and stomach. His eyes rolled back in their sockets as his head lolled to one side. The man fell back to the bushes, propped up by the thick branches. He didn't move again.
"Hey, watch it!" Remo shouted to the border police. Their response was even more gunfire. So far, none of it was directed at him.
Dropping the man's weapon angrily, Remo went off in search of another skinhead.
His yelling alerted those close by of his presence. As Remo walked in the direction of the mountain of mud, a pair of skinheads who had been waiting in ambush leaped out of the bushes before and behind him.
This time Remo was unable to get out a single word before the men were mowed down by the police.
"Dammit," Remo snapped as the pair of bodies fell.
This was obviously not going to work the way he planned. Taking a different tack, Remo dived into the bushes where his keen senses told him a cluster of neo-Nazis was hiding.
There were six of them.