Chiun was already on the far side of the gate, the toga gone and replaced by the shimmering yellow of his long robe. The tire tracks from Foxx's Jeep traversed both sides of the gate and led off into the snow-drifted road beyond. There were no other vehicles on the grounds. Foxx, Remo realized, had seen to this eventuality long before.
Foxx's departure couldn't have been more advantageously timed. Five minutes after Remo vaulted over the ironwork gate at Shangri-la, the snow had started to fall; within another twenty minutes the tracks were all but obscured beneath the swirling snowstorm that raged all around them.
The cold was not a factor. Like a lizard, Remo had learned to adapt his body temperature to his environment. In the sixties, America's scientific community was stood on its ear when it was reported that Soviet cosmonauts had begun to learn control of their bodies to the point of lowering the temperature of their big toes at will. Remo could tower the temperature of his big toe in his sleep. Controlling his body temperature was as natural as breathing. He was beginning to achieve the stage in his development where he, like
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Chiun, adapted to hot and cold automatically, with the same unthinking speed as a normal person's heartbeat slows when he's asleep.
So the cold meant nothing to Remo. The visibility was a different matter.
"I think we've had it," Remo said when they approached a fork in the road. Both tines of the fork were drifted knee-deep in fluffy banks of glistening snow. Beneath the starless, pitch-black expanse of sky, there was no such thing as a tire tread mark.
"Jokes, always jokes," Chiun grumbled, veering off to the left at a speed so fast that he barely cracked the surface of the new snow. "And not even good jokes at that. Learn to be funny before you make jokes. Old Korean proverb."
"I'm not joking. Hey, what makes you so sure he went left?" From the traces of Foxx and his jeep that remained, the man might as well have veered upward in a helicopter.
Chiun whirled around to face him, his almond eyes rounded in surprise. "You are asking me seriously how I knew? Do you not have a nose?"
"A nose?"
The old man lifted a handful of freshly fallen snow from the road. In his hand the snowflakes remained as they had been on the road, crystalline and unmelted. "Can you not smell it?"
Remo craned down to sniff at the snow. He hadn't been paying attention to his senses, concentrating instead on his lowered temperature and the extraordinary night vision necessary in the blinding storm. But when he pushed his concentration toward his olfactory membranes, he did smell something. High-octane gasoline, motor oil, rubber, and faint metallic traces from the underside of the vehicle. Altogether they
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existed in such small quantities that even an electron microscope might not have perceived the particles, but they were there, wafting through each new layer of snow.
"Oh, yeah," Remo said with some astonishment. "But I couldn't smell it from here, standing up." He felt ashamed as soon as he said it. His words had smacked of excuses,
He looked sheepishly at Chiun, but the old man only smiled. "That is why I am stili the Master of Sinanju and you the pupil."
He was right, Remo thought as he followed the frail old Oriental through the snow. Chiun might act like a loony, but when it came down to it, he could still smell a droplet of motor oil beneath a foot of snow, standing at full height. He could still skim across the flakes with barely a footprint. And his double-spiral air blow had been pretty good, too.
"You're something, all right, Little Father," he said.
Chiun glanced back at him in surprise. For a moment, his face took on the look of a small child, immensely pleased. But it was the briefest hesitation, and the moment passed.
"Fool," he grumbled.
Foxx's jeep was parked, still steaming, at Graham Airport, a small, blue-lit compound some twelve miles outside of Enwood, consisting of a short airstrip, a cinderblock building, an air sock, and little else. Remo checked the car. The distributor had been dismantled. Foxx wasn't taking any chances with a possible tail.
Inside the cinderblock building the base operator, a fat man with a reedy, wheezing voice that sounded as if it were being squeezed through a concertina, looked surprised to see him. He was wearing a down vest col-
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ored neon orange, baggy brown trousers, and a hunting cap with the flaps down. When he breathed, steam billowed out of him like a chimney. He spent several minutes eyeing Chiun's satin brocade robe and Remo's short-sleeved T-shirt before catching what Remo was saying.
". . . chart or something?"
"What's that, boys?"
"I said, did the guy who just flew out of here leave any kind of a chart?"
The base op heaved himself out of his chair with a visible struggle and lumbered creakily toward a stained formica counter top, where a clipboard anchored by a paper cup full of cold and greasy coffee lay.
"Yeah. Right here," he said, holding the clipboard at arm's length and squinting. "Foxx, that the name?"
"That's him."
"Says here he filed for Deaver. Only Deaver's closed." He slapped the board back on the counter.
"What's a deaver?"
The fat man chuckled. "Guess you're not a flyer," he said. "Deaver's an airport. Near Clayton, South Dakota."
Suddenly Remo remembered the cases of procaine Posie said were being shipped regularly to South Dakota. "Is Deaver in the Black Hills?"
The base op wheezed out a sickly chortle. "That it is," he said, shaking his head. "That's some crazy pilot, flying out in this weather. For the Black Hills, yet. Hear it's near thirty below there. Snow up to your waist. I told him, but these flyboys'll do anything with a lick or two of whiskey in 'em." He shrugged. "It's his plane, I guess."
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"We've got to get over there," Remo said. "Is there a pilot who can take us anywhere near Deaver airport?"
The base op's wheezing chuckle blossomed into a mirthful roar, his belly rolling. "Listen, son. There isn't a pilot in the country'lf fly you out of this. And most of South Dakota's so bad, nothing but a penguin's got a chance out there. I told that Foxx fella Deaver's closed and he'd have to land somewheres in a field or something, most likely, but he gone on ahead anyway. Hate to say it, but I won't be surprised if he don't make it." He touched Remo lightly on the shoulder. "Take my advice, son. Stay inside. Whatever bravery you been drinkin' or smokin' that got you to come out here in that tee-shirt's going to give you a good case of pneumonia 'fore long. Go home." There was compassion in his eyes, kindly eyes that had watched a hundred good pilots flame out in the air and hurtle to their deaths in moments of youthful impulsiveness.
Suddenly Remo remembered the guests at Shangri-la. "Can I use your phone?" he asked. "There are some people stuck in a house near here with no phones and no electricity. I want to call the police."
The base op wheezed. "You city boys're always panicking. Electricity goes out all the time in these parts. And the phones are down all over. The one here ain't working, neither."
"But you've got a radio or something, haven't you?" Remo persisted. "Foxx made his flight plans with somebody."
"The FAA don't take kindly to using the radio for a thing like this. And they ain't no cops, anyway, can get out here tonight. Your friends're going to be just fine, son. Just snowed in a while. Their phones'll be work-
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ing in the morning, same as mine. I'll call the police then, if you want, but they'll probably beat me to it themselves."
"But the lines were cut," Remo explained. "And everybody at Shangri-la was acting like they were going to die. . . ."
The base op huffed disdainfully. "You talking about that fancy place up the road?" He made a rude gesture. "Bunch of spoiled city folks, that's what they are. Used to having everything they want, more'n likely. ! heard they was all dope fiends, anyway."
Maybe the man was right, Remo thought. Maybe the hysterical doomsaying of the guests at the clinic was no more than the whining of a bunch of spoiled brats used to having their every whim satisfied immediately. "Okay," he said to the base op. He gave the address of the house called Shangri-la. "I suppose it can wait till morning."