He looked up at the old man.
"No hope, Little Father?" he asked.
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Chiun shook his head.
The whistling stopped, and Brack began to whimper like a hurt child. Chiun knelt on the other side of the man and, with his fingers, pressed into different spots on the big man's body, deadening nerve endings that had been damaged by his injuries and his burns into never-ending sources of pain, pulsating pain.
Brack leaned his head back and took a big sip of ah*. "Traitor, traitor," he said. Then he slumped forward again.
Chiun kept working his body with his fingers. The man's head lifted again and his eyes opened. He looked toward Remo, than at Chiun.
"I don't know what that is, old man," he groaned. "But don't stop." . "You're going to be all right," Remo said.
"No, I'm not. I'm dying. Brack dying."
"What happened here?" Remo said. "Did you start the fire?"
Brack shook his head, angrily, from side to side, even though it was apparent that each movement caused him more pain.
"No. Trying to save Joey. Always try to save Joey." He paused and seemed to drift. "Joey," he called softly. ,"He was a traitor. No good for us."
"Who was a traitor?" Remo said.
"Danny. Danny a traitor."
Remo thought for a moment before he remembered that Danny had been Joey Webb's fiancé, the man killed in the earful of crazed snakes.
"Danny took money to betray project. To kill copaibas," Brack said.
"From who?" Remo asked.
Brack shook his head. "The Association. Then he
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was worried . . . somebody found out ... he was going to quit . . . then they killed him."
"Who killed him?" Remo pressed. He looked at Chiun. The old man was shaking his head. Brack had little time left.
"They came tonight," Brack said. "To talk. They knew I found out. Got me with knife. I got them too. Ran away to cabin. They found me there. Thought I was dead. Heard them talk about blowing up cabin. Came back for Joey/'
"There was another man killed. A lumberjack," Remo said. "Was he one of them?"
"No," Brack grunted painfully. "He stumbled in. They killed him. I tried . . . get back . . . save Joey."
Remo shook his head. He could see the wounded Oscar Brack dragging his injured broken body for miles through the snow trying to warn Joey Webb. He must have reached the A-frame just too late, just as it exploded, and he was blown back into this stand of trees.
Remo watched as Chiun touched Brack in places that should have helped him, that could have kept him alive. But the old man had no desire to live.
"Who were the men?" Remo asked. "Who were the men from the Association?"
Brack smiled a smile that was much too wide. His upper gums showed; they had turned blue. He whistled a breezy version of "Danny Boy," then began to gasp.
Remo reached out to him. It was too late.
When Remo stood up, he saw Roger Stacy and Pierre LaRue standing behind him. They had been watching, listening.
"Any of that make any sense to you?" Remo asked them. Both men just shook their heads.
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Chiun and Remo walked back to the clearing where Joey Webb leaned against a tree, watching her A-frame headquarters settle down into smoldering embers and ash.
As they walked, Chiun said, "This is very bad."
"It really is," Remo agreed.
"Then why don't you do something about it?"
Something in Chiun's voice made Remo ask, "What are you talking about?"
"That friend of yours who has been yelling your name all night. Now he is whistling."
Remo did not understand at first. Then he listened. In the growingly silent night there was a faint whistle from behind where the A-frame had stood—from the area where someone had been calling his name earlier.
Remo nodded and ran past'the building, across the hundred yards of snow. He found the spot where he had been standing, where the sound had seemed the loudest. Now there was only a faint whistle coming from below his feet somewhere.
Remo reached down into a snowdrift and found it— a battery-operated cassette tape player, whistling now with the signal that it had reached the end of the tape.
Remo pressed a button ön the wet machine to run the tape back a few feet. Then he pressed the play button and the hissing, whispering voice sounded over again.
"Remo . . . Remo . . . Remo . . ."
He turned off the machine angrily. Someone had planted this out here to get Remo out of the A-frame, so that it could be blown up without his interference, and an anger overwhelmed him that he had been used as a pawn, a,dupe by someone.
Whoever that someone was would pay.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
There was nothing left in the A-frame to salvage, so Pierre LaRue had brought in a bulldozer to level the wreckage of the building and then bury it in snow.
Roger Stacy had told Joey to move into Oscar Brack's log cabin and had helped wipe it clean of its more odious bloodstains.