"Yes, I will. But I do not understand. This phone came highly recommended."
"That's the biz," Remo said airly.
Chapter 31
Colonel Hannibal Intifadah watched the work from a safe distance.
The 135-ton Kolomna locomotive had been halted well away from the underground-complex entrance. The tubular boiler had been laid open and workers partitioned it so that the steam combustion chamber lay in two sections. They were sealing it now.
Then, donning protective masks and garments, they pumped in the nerve-gas components through hastily installed valves on top. One agent into the forward section, the other in the rear, making the entire locomotive a binary nerve-gas projectile on wheels. They were harmless now. But when the massive locomotive crashed, the boiler would rupture, the agents would combine, and death would billow up for miles around.
Hamid Al-Mudir came up to report.
"It is done. But, Brother Colonel, we still cannot open the third container. It defies every tool."
"Malesh," Colonel Intifadah said. "No matter. Bring it below. Phase one is completed. Let us go to phase two." They loaded the container onto the jeep and Colonel Intifadah drove into the bunker, down the sloping tunnel, careful to avoid the ruler-straight rail tracks, and into the launch-preparation area.
There, his workers were carefully readying another engine.
Pyotr Koldunov woke up slowly. He could not move his arms. They felt numb. When his vision focused, he understood why.
He was strung up like a plucked chicken. Wire hawsers kept his arms raised above his head. He was on his knees.
The floor felt cold. And in front of him a black hatch lay open to a deeper blackness. It was surrounded by a maze of pipes and gauges and dials.
"What?" he groaned.
"Surely you recognize it," Colonel Intifadah's voice asked. Pyotr Koldunov turned his stiff neck around.
Colonel Intifadah was looking up at him, resplendent in a pea-green uniform.
"Look again, comrade," he suggested.
Pyotr Koldunov looked. And understood. He was staring at the open firebox of a boiler. His arms hung from the maze of pipes overhead. He was in the cab of a vintage steam engine.
"Oh, no. No, Brother Colonel."
"I do not need you, Koldunov," Colonel Intifada said. "But it will please you to know that you will do me a great service in your last hours."
"No, please."
"We have just filled a locomotive with nerve gas. Fully loaded, it weighs the same as this engine-plus one hundred and fifty pounds."
"I do not understand."
"I will make it clear to you, Russian," said Colonel Intifadah. "You know better than I that the weight of one of these brutes affects where it will land. I need to know where this locomotive will impact before I send its brother aloft. Just in case this one goes into the ocean, where it will kill only fishes. If so, then I will correct the launcher's aim. But I need that additional one hundred and fifty pounds of ballast. And I do not need you."
Colonel Intifadah threw his head back and laughed like a hyena.
Pyotr Koldunov hung his head. He did not plead for his life. The Colonel's crazed laugh told him it was useless to do so. Instead, he closed his eyes and heard the sounds as Colonel Intifadah exhorted his men to load the engine into the breech.
The great machine lumbered into the breech. The burnt-metal stink awakened bitter memories in Pyotr Koldunov's mind. He had built this thing. It had stunk like this since the first test firing.
The light seeping through his eyelids shut off. The breech hatch had hummed shut. There was no escape now. But there had never been any escape for Pyotr Koldunov. Not since that day he had left Mother Russia with the Accelerator's crated components.
The silence lasted several minutes. And then the humming began. The hairs on Pyotr Koldunov's arms and legs and head shot up as the primary electric charge filled the tinny air.
And then there was a burst of blue-white light so intense it burned through Pyotr Koldunovs's closed eyelids and he seemed to see the black muzzle of the EM Accelerator hurtle at him at incredible speed. And his head was snapped back so quickly, his neck broke.
Pyotr Koldunov was dead before the steam engine cleared the desert sands. The wire hawsers on his wrists held under the terrific stress of hypervelocity acceleration. Unfortunately his wrists did not.
Long before the engine raced over the Atlantic Ocean, he was a rag doll tumbling to the desert sand below. He fell with his arms pointed earthward, as if to break his fall. But he had no hands at the ends of his wrists.
Pyotr Koldunov hit the ground in a puff of sand. The sand settled over him like a shroud. Soon the sand-laden ghibli wind would cause the shifting dunes to cover him up. The cool of the evening and the dry heat of the day would eventually mummify his tissues. And there he would rest until the year 2853, when an archaeological graduate student from Harvard University would dig him up and make him the subject of his doctoral dissertation.
Chapter 32
The Master of Sinanju was not going to change his mind. "Look," Remo pleaded. "All of America is at risk here. Please."
"No!"
"Who's going to see you? It's all desert down there."
"One Peeping Tom bedouin would be too much," said Chiun. He folded his arms across his simple black kimono. Remo was also in black. It was night over Lobynia. The Air Force jet had come in over Algeria. The Lobynian air defenses had probably already picked them up. But there was no danger. They were probably heading for cover, fearing another bombing run.
Remo finished buckling on his parachute.
"You beat everything, you know that? I thought you'd have problems with the jump."
"That too. But it is my modesty that comes first."
"What's the problem?" asked the Air Force liaison assigned to oversee their jump into Lobynian territory. Remo threw up his hands.
"He doesn't want to jump."
"I don't blame him. Who in his right mind would talk a little old guy like him into a night drop into unfriendly territory?"
"Who are you calling little?" Chiun demanded, lifting on tiptoe to stare up at the officer's startled face.
The Air Force colonel discovered that his stomach hurt. He looked down. The old Oriental's index fingernail was the cause. It looked as if it had speared him like a fish.
"Leave him alone, will you?" Remo shouted. "He's on our side."
"He insulted me."
"No, he did not," said Remo, pulling the colonel onto a seat. The colonel hugged his stomach and experimented with his breathing.