Remo looked at the five again. Chiun was right, he saw with amazement. They weren't the same men he remembered killing. The dead men possessed the same features, but all had the grizzled and aged faces of well-conditioned, middle-aged men.
"But they were young," Remo said, feeling a chill inside his bones. The smell was stronger now. It was the death-smell, but different, more stale, as if the death in these men's bodies had been sealed into a bottle for decades and finally exposed to air.
Remo bent over the soldier again. He was undeniably who the dogtags said he was: a man nearing sixty years of age. How would Remo ever explain to Smith that he had killed a nineteen-year-old boy whose body was replaced by that of a sixty-year-old man in the span of five minutes? There was something else he wanted to see. He tore the man's uniform and long un-
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derwear up to the armpit, and found it. The man's arms were covered with needle marks.
The same marks Posie Ponselle wore.
"Chiun."
They were all marked, every one of them.
"Leave them. I hear the sound of an engine." They hurtled at top speed through the snow, following Riley's footsteps. But before they reached the copse of dense pine forest where the footsteps led, the engine noise gunned to a roar and then a small Cessna appeared behind the copse. It was a low takeoff, and in the bright morning light Remo could see the pilot's face clearly. Foxx looped around in a wide circle, then buzzed directly over Remo and Chiun. As he started his ascent, he saluted Remo with two fingers and a smirk. He looped wide again and was gone.
Neither Chiun nor Remo broke the silence for several minutes. Remo held his eyes to the sky, watching the Cessna's contrails puff into fat clouds and fade away. They'd come so close. So damn close.
In a clearing in front of the airstrip Foxx had just used, Remo found the remains of an abandoned camp. Oh, sharp, Remo, he said to himself. A camp, soldiers, Foxx, the works. Right here at your fingertips. And you let them slip away. A fine assassin you are.
He went from tent to empty tent. Everything was in perfect order. Except that there were no people, anywhere. There were no vehicles, no tracks, no footprints leading out of the clearing, nothing. It was as if a small army base had just dematerialized.
"Remo." Chiun's voice came high and clear in the still air. From a distance, the old man looked as if he were dancing, prodding at the earth beside a huge
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pine, first with one dainty foot, then the other, his face creased in concentration. "This ground is hollow," he said.
With the heels of his hands, Remo tested the four-by-four-foot-square area Chiun had marked. Sure is," he said, clearing away the foot and a half of snow that covered it. Beneath the snow was a thick carpet of moss.
"Hah," Chiun shrieked.
"Hah? It's moss."
"It is not moss, o dim one," Chiun declared with annoyance. "This is the south side of that tree." He pointed to the towering pine. "Moss grows on the north side. This is transplanted moss. A camouflage." With one grand sweep, he yanked the patch of moss from the ground. The steel casing and combination lock of a safe lay beneath it.
Remo's face broke into a grin. "Well, I'll be. Not bad, Little Father."
"Not good," Chiun said. "Behold."
The soldiers were in the trees. There were more of them this time, armed with everything from close-range pistols to a flame thrower. The flame thrower attacked first, sending a tunnel of fire straight toward Remo.
He tore the door off the safe and held it up to the orange stream just before it reached them. Bullets pinged off the steel shield. The smell of spent ammunition filled the air. "Hold this," he said, handing the safe door to Chiun.
The safe contained a sheaf of papers-bills of sale, communications with European pharmaceutical companies, and charts. They appeared to be medical charts of some kind. At the top of each chart was a man's name, followed by a serial number. The dog-
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tags, Remo remembered. The charts must be for the soldiers firing at him now, soldiers who had somehow found their way into Foxx's care. They detailed several years' worth of resting heart rates, stress tolerances', and a section labeled "Blood Levels" was followed by a long list of items. The first on the list was procaine. On every single chart, the procaine level of the soldier had risen dramatically during the course of the charting.
Under the last of the charts rested four manila folders. In the first was a series of photographs and a biography of General Homer G. Watson, the now-dead Secretary of the Air Force. Clipped to the biographical sheet were scores of notes detailing the general's schedules, standing appointments, and favorite restaurants. On the upper right corner of the folder was a small black X. The next folder contained information on Admiral Thornton Ives. The Secretary of the Navy's folder had an X on it, too. So did the third, belonging to Clive R. Dobbins.
"They got the Secretary of the Army," Remo said, disspirited.
"Read the news some other time," Chiun snapped. "They are boom-shooting at us, fool. Get me out of this place."
But Remo didn't move. The last dossier belonged to the president of the United States. It didn't have a black X on its cover. Not yet.
Remo dug back into the safe. Nothing was left in there except a series of glinting objects at the bottom. Remo reached in and pulled one of them out. It was a glass vial, about ten inches long, filled with a clear liquid and stoppered at the top by a cork. Foxx's formula, Remo thought, holding the vial up to the light. A burst of machine gun fire smashed the vial to shreds. Noth-
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ing else happened, except that someone up in the trees started wailing.
Keening, Remo thought as the high, mournful sound passed over the din of gunfire. It was more than some crazy soldier's war yell. It was a lament, high and terrible.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the firing stopped. "You see?" Chiun said. "You have taken so long with your library that they ran out of booms."
"I don't think so," Remo said uncertainly. "But it had something to do with this stuff." He pulled out the case at the bottom of the safe, in which the rest of the vials were stored.
"Stop!" came the high, keening voice again. "Don't break them."
Remo set the case on the ground. "What's that?"
"Don't break them. Please," the soldier shouted, scrambling down from the tree, his Centennial Air-weight waving overhead. Remo recognized him as the soldier who had run away from the ambush at the lean-to. Riley threw down his gun. "Please. Leave the formula alone and we'll all come down unarmed." There was pleading in his voice.
Remo gaped in astonishment as the soldiers threw their weapons to the ground and scrambled down from the trees, each pair of eyes riveted on the case filled with glass vials.
Chiun was not surprised. "Obviously they have discovered that I was in their presence," he said smugly.
"You were behind that door," Remo objected. "They didn't even see you."
"Excuse me, o learned one. O fierce assassin. I am sure it was your excellent reading that struck fear into their hearts."
"I'll explain everything," Riley said. "Only please
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. . ." He cast a baleful eye at the glass vials. "The case." He ventured toward it.
Remo snatched it away. "Uh-uh. Explain first. Then you get the goodies."
Riley hestitated. "Do you promise?" he asked. "Do you give your solemn word that you won't harm us or the case?"
Remo looked at him. The man knew where Foxx was. He could also tell a lot about the bizarre military establishment in the frozen Black Hills, where overage soldiers with the faces of kids were bivouacked. But not harming them?. . . . "Will you dump all your weapons?"