Remo groaned.
"Do you not agree with me that this is where Gordons has come?" Chiun said.
"Yeah, Little Father, I do," Remo said hoarsely. He was thinking of the numbers of people who passed through the gates of Disneyland every day. He could remember reading that more than three million people had visited Disneyland since opening day. That meant thousands each year. And every one of them potential victims of Mr. Gordons' microwave sterilization plan.
Remo walked up to one of the booths. The ticket girl practically hugged him.
"Oh goody, a customer!" she squealed delightedly.
"Why the surprise?" asked Remo. "Don't you get hundreds of people here every day?"
"Look around. Do you see any hundreds of people?" Remo looked around. There were only the other ticket takers, looking at Remo with longing expressions. He looked back at the parking area. Except for Remo's car, it, too, was empty. In the background the famous Disneyland monorail scooted along its raised track, every car vacant.
"Where are all the people?" Remo asked.
"We haven't had any ever since that other place opened up," the ticket girl confided.
"What other place?" asked Remo.
"Don't tell him," the other ticket takers hissed.
"Too late," said Remo. "Tell me."
"Larryland. It's down in Santa Ana. It sprang up practically overnight, and ever since it did, people have been going there instead of here."
"So what? They'll come back when the novelty wears off. "
"Not this novelty. Larryland gives free admission."
"Did you say free?" asked Chiun, who had been looking in vain for Mickey Mouse.
"Yeah. And it's twice the size of this place. That will be thirteen dollars for two adult admissions, please," she added.
Remo ignored her and turned to Chiun. "Little Father, I think you were wrong."
"But not far wrong," Chiun insisted. "I think we should venture to this upstart Larryland. After we have visited Frontierland, that is. I have always wanted to see Frontierland."
"Frontierland was dismantled years ago, Little Father," Remo said gently.
Chiun sucked in his cheeks with disappointment. "No!" he gasped.
"I'm afraid so."
Chiun brushed past Remo and accosted the ticket girl.
"Frontierland. It is no more?"
"Long gone," said the girl.
"Do you have any more of the fur caps with the long tails?"
"Davy Crockett hats are collector's items now. You can't get them anymore."
Chiun turned on Remo. "You should have brought me here sooner," he said, and stormed off to the car.
"This was your idea, remember?" Remo shouted. Then he ran after the Master of Sinanju in case Chiun decided that his only solace after this grievous disappointment would be to get behind the wheel of an automobile.
"Does this mean you're not coming in after all?" the ticket girl called after them.
Colonel Rshat Kirlov had always dreamed of one day visiting the United States of America. He never imagined he would cross the border walking on his hands and knees, leading soldiers who crawled like dogs.
At thirty-seven years of age, Colonel Kirlov was a squat bull of a man whose swarthy skin betrayed a hint of Tatar blood. His black hair was as coarse as horsehair. He would never pass for an American, but he could pass for a Mexican peasant, which was why he had been selected for this mission.
Mexicans would not mistake him for one of their own, however. That was why Colonel Rshat Kirlov kept his distance from the occasional real migrant worker as he led ten handpicked soldiers, mostly enlistees from the Asiatic republics of Uzbekistan and Tashkent, across the desert on their hands and knees. They were dressed in the Mexican peasant clothes which had been provided to them at the embassy in Mexico City, where they had been flown directly from Moscow. They had donned the garments when they got to the dusty border town of Sonoita, to which they had been driven in a rickety bus.
There they had set out on foot for the Arizona border. The embassy had briefed him that the border was not heavily patrolled. Although the American government frowned upon the migrant workers who stole up from Mexico, they also needed them to harvest their fruit crops. Crossing would be comparatively easy, he was assured.
Colonel Kirlov was not a man to take chances. So he had his men drop to their knees and, leading the way, he showed them how to walk on their knees and just the tips of their fingers. The tracks they left would look uncannily like those of a hopping jackrabbit. That was to fool the American border police.
They traveled for three miles in this fashion, with hot desert sand burning their fingertips and windblown sand abrading their faces. Colonel Rshat Kirlov worried that their fingers would be too raw to pull gun triggers when the time came, but inasmuch as he had been forbidden to carry weapons into the United States, it did not seem especially important just then.
When Colonel Kirlov finally gave the order to stand, they were on American soil.
They ambushed a camper van on a lonely road. Kirlov waved his cotton shirt in the face of the oncoming vehicle, and when it slowed, his men leapt from out of the rocks. That they were unarmed made no difference. There was only a middle-aged man and his wife and their dog. They killed all three with bare hands, burying all but the dog by the side of the road. They buried the dog too, but only after they had eaten the meat.
Colonel Kirlov's orders were to reach the town of Vaya Chin, near the Papago Indian Reservation, and wait.
When Anna Chutesov showed up two days later, she took one look at the hijacked camper and said, "Good. You are not as big a fool as I would have expected. We will need this."
Colonel Rshat Kirlov was not used to having a woman talk to him like that. Especially one who was not a KGB officer. He started to raise his voice in protest.
Anna Chutesov slapped him in the face. It was the shock more than the pain that stilled his tongue. Disdainfully the blond woman turned her back on him and addressed his men, who were lined up at attention. "I have brought you all American tourist clothes," she said, tossing bundled packages at their feet. "Go behind those rocks and change while I load your equipment on the vehicle."
When Colonel Kirlov opened his package, he discovered a gaudy Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts. Changing clothes in silence, he felt like a fool. Looking at his men climbing into their new clothes, he knew he looked like one too.
Kirlov sat in the back of the camper during the drive across the desert to the place that Anna Chutesov, breaking a long smoldering silence, told them was California. She kept adjusting a beeping device that sat in her lap. Often she raised it, turning a loop antenna this way or that, and sending the camper in confused circles. Kirlov knew she was homing in on some radio signal. But that was all he knew.
Finally, after many long hours in which the driven blond woman had refused to give any of them a turn at the wheel, they stopped on a great black highway where the traffic was backed up until they could drive no further.
Anna Chutesov stood up.
"We can go no further. The rest of the way we will travel on foot. In twos. You will find your weapons in the overhead compartments."
The men fell on the compartments like thirsty dogs. They had been alone in an enemy land too long without weapons. Weapons would make them feel like men again.
Colonel Kirlov pulled out a stubby Uzi with a folding stock and looked at his men. They, too, had brought forth identical weapons.