"That's crazy!" Remo blurted.
"Liar!" Chiun said.
"Okay, I'm sorry. It just doesn't add up."
"It's diabolical," said Anna. "Where can it be? What can he be doing with it?"
"I think Anna's starting to lose it, Little Father. Listen to her."
"You listen to her. I am disappointed that I have found no one on whom to avenge my honor." And he kicked at a wall until the bricks tore loose from their mortar. After Chiun had a pile, he stamped the bricks with his sandaled feet until a fine powder resulted.
"Feel better now?" asked Remo.
"No," replied the Master of Sinanju.
"I didn't think so," said Remo, offering Anna Chutesov a hand. "Let's all get out of here. There's nothing more to this shell."
They walked out the back and around to the car. Before they got to it, the windshield fell out in pieces and the hood popped up.
"Uh-oh," said Remo. "We're in trouble."
"Sniper," cried Anna, diving for shelter behind the car.
"That too," said Remo, looking around. "But I was thinking of what Smitty is going to say. That's his car." A tire exploded, and one side of the car sprouted a string of neat black holes like notes on a musical scale. On the ground, Anna clung to handfuls of grass and wondered what was keeping Remo and Chiun from joining her in safety.
In the budding top of an oak tree, Earl Armalide emptied an M16 rifle into the car until he knew it was undrivable.
He dropped the weapon, which swung free from a lanyard attached to his belt, and unshipped his AutoMag pistol from its shoulder holster. He decided to take out the tall skinny one first. His head represented the cleanest shot.
Armalide fired one round. He was so sure of his aim that he didn't pause to look. He assumed his target had gone down, and adjusted his sights to the second target, the little Oriental in the Pee Wee Herman suit. A second shot blasted out.
Earl looked for the girl next. She must have sought shelter behind the car. No problem. An AutoMag round could go through an engine block. He brought the pistol back up to his face, but in doing so noticed that there were no bodies on the ground.
Now, where had those two kills gone? They couldn't have dragged themselves behind anything. A .44 slug had the stopping power to nail a kill to the ground, even if death wasn't instant which it usually was. Yet there were no blood tracks or drag marks in the grass.
Earl Armalide had chosen this particular oak tree because it was solid and had a large crown of branches. There wasn't much leafage to the branches this early in the spring, but there were enough green buds to help his camouflaged body blend in. It was also high enough that he could pick off anyone attempting to climb the tree after him.
The tree, all four feet in circumference of it, shook suddenly.
Earl Armalide was sure it was an earthquake until he looked down.
Looking back up at him from the base of the tree were the upturned faces of his two kills. But they weren't dead. They were alive. In fact, the tall one with the dead-looking eyes smiled. It was not a nice smile.
"Ollie, ollie oxen free," the tall one called playfully.
"Eat this, sucker," Earl spat back. And then he fired into that grinning face.
The bullet split a half-buried rock where the man had been standing. The tree shook again. More violently this time. Earl had to clutch at the tree trunk just to hold on. Sap made his fingers sticky and he cursed. That stuff could jam a fine weapon like the AutoMag in no time. He switched hands.
"Why do you not come down?" asked a high squeaky voice.
Earl looked down at the Oriental and shot at his face. The oak shook again. Although the Oriental had not seemed to move, he was suddenly standing in a different spot. Unharmed.
"He must want us to say the magic word before he'll come down," the tall man told the Oriental in a loud voice.
"I wonder what it is?" said the Oriental in a wondering tone.
"Maybe it's 'timber.' " The tall man called up to him, "Hey, buddy, is it 'timber'?"
Earl did not answer. Instead he pulled the pin from a hand grenade and dropped it.
The hand grenade shot back up. It stopped an inch from the tip of Earl Armalide's quivering nose. It seemed to hang in the air as if weightless. Frantically Earl made a grab for it, but the grenade suddenly fell back.
It returned in another millisecond, hanging impossibly. "I can keep doing this until it goes off in your face," the tall man sang cheerily.
Earl grabbed again. In vain. The grenade fell. The next time it came up, Earl was certain the five-second fuse had been exhausted. But the grenade did not stop long enough to eradicate his sweating face. It kept going.
High up, it went off. The concussion shook the tree. Hot pieces of shrapnel rained down. They clipped branches, set bark to smoldering, but miraculously, did not embed themselves in Earl's huddling flesh. A single red-hot piece landed in his lap and he frantically pushed it off before it burned through to the family jewels.
"Are you coming down now?" the Oriental wanted to know. He slapped at the trunk and it vibrated like a sapling.
Earl clung to the tree, hoping it was all a dream. It had to be. No one could toss a grenade into the air so high that the shrapnel lost its killing velocity falling back to earth.
"I guess it's 'timber,' " said the skinny white man. And the mighty oak shook again, and kept on shaking. They were using axes on the tree, Earl knew. The sharp, meaty thunk sound was unmistakable. So was the crack! just before the oak began to sway.
Earl jumped clear as the oak crashed to earth. He landed in a tangle of breaking branches, and lay still, the air knocked out of him.
The white man and the Oriental extracted him from the woodsy mess. Earl Armalide sat catching his breath as the two stood over him.
Dazed, unable to think of anything better to say, he asked, "Where are your axes?"
"What axes?" asked the white man, blowing a wood shaving out from under a fingernail.
Chapter 13
The first thing Dr. Harold W. Smith said when he arrived at the Yuri Gagarin Free Car Wash was, "What happened to my car?"
"He shot it up," Remo said laconically, indicating a man in soiled jungle fatigues.
Smith stood over Earl Armalide, who was crouching on the grass, his hands clamped at the nape of his neck. "I'm not giving you anything but my name, rank, and serial number," said Earl Armalide. His arms ached. His legs tingled from constricted blood flow. He would have moved to relieve the agony, but after the white guy had forced him to assume the humiliating POW position, the Oriental had touched him at the back of the neck, and ever since then Earl Armalide had felt as if he had developed a case of muscle lockjaw.
"Your wallet," Smith said grimly.
"I already checked," Remo said, handing Smith the billfold. "There's no I.D."
Smith took the wallet wordlessly. He riffled through it, found no identification cards, and extracted a thick sheaf of bills. He silently counted out an assortment of tens and twenties. He tossed the wallet at the man's feet and said, "This is for the damage to my car. And estimated towing charges."