Failing Marks, page 19
Twas as much as twelve huge wagons in four whole nights and days,
Could travel from the mountain down to the salt sea bay,
Though to and fro each wagon thrice journeyed every day.
“The Nibelungenlied,” Heidi said, nodding. The look of flushed exuberance had not left her face since morning.
Beside her in the front seat, Adolf Kluge was silent. The farther into this primitive portion of Germany they had traveled, the more convinced he had become of the authenticity of the legends. As he watched the mountains rise up through the desolate clearing, he felt a flutter of excitement in the pit of his stomach.
“If that is so,” Kluge said thoughtfully, “we do not have as many vehicles as we will need.”
“The wagons used were as the poem describes,” Chiun said knowingly. “I will be surprised if the conveyances with which this expedition is equipped are able to hold even a third of what Siegfried’s carts transported.”
Heidi was thinking aloud. “So it was three trips a day for twelve wagons?”
“That is correct,” Chiun said.
“For four days,” Kluge added. “That would be 144 wagonloads.”
“And if Chiun is right, we will have three times as many loads as that.”
Kluge nodded. “Which makes 432,” he said.
Heidi’s cheeks grew more flushed as her mind attempted to encompass that much treasure. Try as she might, she couldn’t begin to imagine so much wealth in a single place.
“That is a lot of gold,” she said breathlessly.
They continued on for a few miles more before the Master of Sinanju ordered Kluge to halt.
The lead car slowed to a stop. Behind it, the trucks of the expedition stopped, as well. Their engines idled briefly before growing silent.
Chiun, Kluge and Heidi climbed from the rental car. The surviving Numbers from the IV village along with the handful of skinheads got down from their trucks.
“Tell your pinhead army to remain where they are,” the Master of Sinanju commanded.
Kluge did as he was told.
The skinheads and the rest stayed back by the trucks. They were stretching their arms high in the air and twisting their spines, trying to relieve some of the muscle strain the long ride had inflicted on them. Only the identical blond-haired men seemed interested in what was going on up by the lead car. They stayed back where they were told, sullenly staring at Kluge and Heidi.
“I find those genetic freaks unnerving,” Kluge complained as he tore his eyes away from the unflinching gaze of the Numbers.
Heidi, who had been eyeing the Aryan men with a look bordering on sympathy, shot a nasty glare at Kluge. Whatever her dark thoughts, she kept them to herself.
“Why have we stopped?” she asked, turning to Chiun.
“It is no secret to any of us,” he said. “We all know that we are close now to the Sinanju Hoard.”
“The Nibelungen Hoard,” Kluge corrected flatly.
“Do not quibble, thief,” Chiun cautioned. He marched over to a nearby copse of trees.
The Master of Sinanju used the sharpened edge of one long fingernail to sheer a slender branch from a small tree. With a flurry of fingers, he stripped any small sticks or nubbins from the black bark. Coming back over to Heidi and Kluge, Chiun used the heel of his sandal to kick up a sandbox-size area of dirt in the frozen mud at the shoulder of the road. With the thin end of the three-foot-long stick, he drew out a perfect square, cutting it into four large sections. He began sketching in one of the quarters.
“I act now in good faith,” Chiun said as he drew. “Behold, the segment of the map discovered by my ancestor Bal-Mung beneath the body of the slain Nibelung king.”
Heidi was the only one there seeing the Sinanju section of the map for the first time. As Kluge looked on, bored, she appeared to be studying every detail of the map as Chiun formed it in the powdery earth.
“There!” Chiun said, finishing with a flourish. He had sketched in a portion of a long river. “I give you the Sinanju legacy of a long-dead king.”
There was a pause from those assembled, as if they were uncertain how to respond to such histrionics. The mood was broken by a dull, lifeless clapping of hands. Heidi and Chiun looked at Kluge.
“I am sorry,” he said, sarcastically. He stopped his flat applause. “Is not that what we were meant to do?” His smile was all condescension. “That is not as impressive as you would like it to seem,” Kluge said, nodding to the etching in the dirt. “After all, I have already seen it.”
Chiun was indignant. “Only due to your act of thievery, Hun,” he sniffed.
Heidi didn’t wish for this posturing to go any further. She injected herself between Chiun and Kluge.
“I will go next,” she offered.
Heidi took the stick from Chiun and quickly began filling in one of the three empty squares. Some of the lines met up with those of the Master of Sinanju. Chiun watched with interest while she worked. When she finished, she handed the stick over to Kluge.
“Here,” she said.
Holding the stick lightly in his hand, Kluge looked down upon the half of the map that was sketched out in the cold dirt of the Black Forest.
“Very nice,” he said, nodding. He indicated a corner of Heidi’s section with the end of the stick. “That portion was not visible in my photograph.”
“What do you mean?” Heidi asked blandly.
“This is not your family portion of the map,” he explained. “It is the Hagan piece, which I kept for years on my mantel at the Four village. Presumably you stole it when you stormed the fortress.” He smiled.
“Enough, brigand ancestor of a deceitful king!” Chiun snapped. His eyes were fire.
Kluge considered only for a second. With an outward dispassion that belied his inner fear of the wrath of the Master of Sinanju, he squatted down next to the nearest empty grid. He hastily sketched out his family portion of the map.
When he was finished, Kluge—still on his haunches—handed the stick up to Heidi.
“It is your turn. Again.” He smiled tightly.
Heidi didn’t hesitate. She pulled the stick away from Kluge. In the final quarter of the larger square, she drew for them the last piece of the Siegfried map.
Chiun examined the section she had drawn, making certain that its lines matched the ones in the piece they had retrieved from Heidi’s ancestral home. They did.
In the dirt before them, staring back at them from across the ages, was the entire map to the Nibelungen Hoard. Incomplete for more than fifteen hundred years, its assembled pieces now gave them clear directions to the great treasure.
“I have maps of the area,” Kluge said, excitedly, pushing himself to a standing position. “We can use them to find the location.”
The IV leader began striding to the car, but Chiun stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
“That will not be necessary,” the Master of Sinanju said. “My ancestor compiled many maps in his years of feckless wandering in these woods.” Chiun nodded to the map they had all drawn. His voice was filled with a grand solemnity. “This place is known to me.”
. . .
Remo was peeved. He made this clear to Colonel Heine.
“I don’t know why I’m even going,” he complained. “I mean, it’s got nothing to do with me.”
“Perhaps—” Heine began meekly.
Remo interrupted. “It’s just another dippy million-year-old legend he’s somehow gotten me dragged into,” he griped as he steered the border police jeep down the long forest road. “I tell him I’ll help him find his block of wood and his gold coins. Fine. Everything should be hunky-dory afterwards, right? Wrong. No sooner do we find them, along with the guy we’ve been looking for for the last three months, than he goes running off with the bastard on some half-assed treasure hunt. And he gets mad at me.” Remo’s voice approached a level of incredulity that left Colonel Heine nodding in nervous, sympathetic confusion.
“I have found only recently that loyalties are not what they should be,” Heine said through clenched teeth. He was holding on to the seat with both hands as Remo’s foot stayed clamped heavily to the accelerator. The forest whizzed by.
“Tell me about it,” Remo continued. “You’ve got a heck of a bunch back there,” he commented, nodding to the trailing line of trucks. “If I were you, I’d sleep with one eye open and a frigging howitzer under my pillow.”
“There is a danger that they might join the enemy,” Heine admitted. “If that happens and we fail, the army will be called in. Although I would not trust that the army will not join them, as well.”
Remo shook his head. He wondered again whether or not he should let Chiun go this one alone. After all, the Master of Sinanju had only the neo-Nazis, the border police and possibly the German army to contend with. It’d serve him right to work up a sweat over this one.
They came tearing around a corner near a pile of toppled boulders. A fork suddenly appeared in the road ahead of them. Remo barely lifted one foot off the gas pedal as the other one was stomping down on the brake.
The jeep spun out on the shoulder, completing two full circles on the dusty road. At the nadir of the first screeching circle, Colonel Heine saw the rapidly approaching shape of the nearest trailing truck. It, too, had slammed on its brakes. Plumes of dust poured up from beneath its locked wheels.
Heine closed his eyes and waited for the truck to plow into them. As he did so, he was vaguely aware of the driver’s-side door opening and closing. He felt the jeep grow lighter.
When a few tense seconds had passed without the sound of a crushing impact, Heine opened one eye. The jeep was rocking to a gentle stop near an old-fashioned wooden signpost. Colorful characters and black German words marked the three destinations beyond them.
Remo was crouching at the fork.
With a sigh of relief, Heine opened his second eye. He climbed out of the jeep on wobbly legs, walking up to join Remo. Looking back once, he saw the troop truck had stopped a hair away from the parked jeep.
“They took the left fork,” Remo said. He nodded as if to some obvious marks in the road. Heine saw nothing but a few grooves in the sandy shoulder.
“Can you get some helicopters in here?” Remo asked, standing. “With a few eyes in the sky, we could get this thing over with in less than an hour.”
Heine shook his head. “The chancellor does not wish to alert them,” he said, panting. His mind still reeled from his brush with death a minute before.
“I wish we were closer to Berlin,” Remo complained. “One visit ’d get the air force out here like a shot. Heck, kidnap the presidential pastry chef and you could probably get that pork hog to surrender to France.” He spun from Heine. “Let’s go.”
“Do you wish me to drive?” Colonel Heine said with weak hopefulness.
“Naw,” Remo said. “We’ve screwed around enough. I think we’re going to have to start picking up the pace.”
He headed back to the jeep. Heine followed reluctantly.
Chapter Twenty-three
In spite of the cold weather, they found the digging easy. The nearness of the small stream kept the ground where they worked much damper than the rest of the forest floor.
The skinheads were caked with slippery brown mud. They grumbled among themselves with each shovelful of rich, cold earth they overturned.
The pile of displaced slimy sod had grown large over the past two hours. The Master of Sinanju remained at a cautious distance, ever aware of even the slightest dollop of mud that might fly his way. Whenever a skinhead would overshoot the pile and send a speck of dirt near Chiun’s brilliant yellow kimono, the Master of Sinanju would let out a horrified shriek.
Once, when a clod of dirt came perilously close to his brocade robe, Chiun had stomped over to the diggers and wrenched the shovel from the perpetrator’s hands, clanging the young man over the head with the flat end of the metal spade. After that, both the skinhead and his companions had made an extra effort to keep the mud within the designated area.
Kluge had brought three small folding stools from the rental car, one for each of them. Chiun had refused the seat, preferring instead to stand as close as possible to the deepening hole. Heidi paced back and forth between the line of stools and Chiun. Only Adolf Kluge opted to sit.
Kluge was sitting there now, hands folded patiently across his precisely crossed knees. The only outward hint of any inner agitation the IV leader might have felt was at his mouth. Kluge’s tongue darted forward with unswerving regularity, dampening his lower lip. It was a nervous habit he had picked up years before.
“Pah!” Chiun complained, spinning from the massive mound of jiggling mud. “It is too deep.”
“That is the correct spot according to the map,” Heidi said nodding. Arms crossed, she chewed one thumbnail anxiously as she watched lumps of mud fly up from the hole.
“Fifteen hundred years is a long time,” Kluge suggested. He pointed at the marks in the surrounding uneven forest floor. “It appears as though the river ran directly through this area at one time. Surely sediment would have collected, covering it more deeply.”
“But if the river was here, how did they build it to begin with?” Heidi asked.
“That which you call engineering was not invented for the convenience of this century,” Chiun said impatiently. “Such a feat would not have been impossible. It would also explain the difficulty my ancestor had in finding the Hoard.”
“I hope we have better luck than him,” Heidi said. She continued to stare into the wide hole at the muddy riverbank.
The men dug for another half hour. Kluge was about to suggest that they should redraw the map, this time with more care, when a sharp clang emanated from the deep hole. It was followed by another.
Kluge got to his feet.
“There is something here!” one of the skinheads called from within the deep pit.
Kluge and Heidi looked at each other, neither of them certain what to do next. Heidi seemed genuinely surprised.
The Master of Sinanju was first to react. He flounced to the edge of the hole, looking in his jaundiced kimono like a huge yellow bird that had just spied a particularly succulent worm. He stopped at the muddy edge of the pit.
Only five skinheads could fit in the hole at one time. The area they had excavated was more than ten feet deep. The men inside were looking up from the bottom, their bodies coated with thick black mud.
“See?” one of the skinheads said.
He handed his shovel to one of the others and got to his soiled knees. With the palms of his filthy hands, he wiped away a pile of thick, gloppy mud, revealing a flat surface underneath. The men were standing atop what appeared to be a buried strip of sidewalk.
Kluge and Heidi came up behind Chiun.
“Clear off the rest!” the Master of Sinanju boomed. His eyes sparkled brightly.
The men did as they were told. More shovelfuls of mud had to be removed to clear the stone to its edges. It was found to be rectangular in shape.
Some of the blond-haired men brought buckets from one of the trucks. As the last of the dirt was hauled out, water was brought from the nearby stream. Lowering the pails into the hole, they washed the surface of the chiseled granite.
“I cannot read it,” Kluge said. He strained to look down at the ancient letters. They appeared to be nothing more than a series of indecipherable slashes. He glanced at the Master of Sinanju for help.
Chiun’s eyes had narrowed to narrow slits, swallowing up any small spark of hope in his hazel orbs. His mouth was a thin, furious line.
“Accursed fiend,” Chiun hissed. There was far more menace in the softness of his tone than in a thousand screaming voices. “He dares mock the House of Sinanju from across the ages.” His rage suddenly boiled over. “Villain! Cur! Fraud! Lying Hun thief!”
Like a crazed Olympic diver, Chiun flew down into the hole. A swirling, frenzied yellow tempest, he swatted vicious, angry hands at the skinheads still gathered below. The slime-coated men scurried up the muddy banks in fear.
Mindless of the grime, Chiun dropped to his knees atop the stone. It was as large as a big door. He pried slender fingers around its smooth edge.
“What does it say?” Kluge asked in wonder as he watched the aged Korean tear at the stone.
“I believe those are runic characters,” Heidi said. Her eyes narrowed as she attempted to read what was visible around Chiun. They looked like random cat scratches. “I am not entirely unfamiliar with this. Those are bitter runes. They are intended to bring down evils upon enemies.”
Kluge glanced from the scampering form of Chiun to Heidi. “This is not the storing place of the Nibelungen Hoard?” he asked. He could not mask his disappointment.
Heidi smiled tightly. “I am afraid not,” she said.
In the pit, the Master of Sinanju had pried up the massive flat stone, heaving it to one side. There was nothing beneath but a pile of mud-swamped rocks.
“Aiieee!” Chiun screamed.
His hand flew toward one of the short sides of the stone. There was a sound like a thunderclap. As Kluge watched, the flat rock split in two long halves. Before the pieces had even fallen to the bottom of the pit, Chiun’s pipestem legs shot out in two quick jabs. The halves split in half again, falling into smaller pieces. Chiun fired his tiny fists forward into the quarters, cracking the chunks of stone into ever smaller fragments. All the while, he screamed his anger and frustration at the mud walls of the deep, slick pit.
Kluge backed slowly away from the hole. Witnessing the awesome sight of the wizened Asian shattering a two-ton slab of rock as if it were made of glass, Kluge felt almost a little grateful that he hadn’t been able to follow through on his plan to kill the Master of Sinanju. This lasted only as long as it took him to realize that the wealth he so coveted was not there. Without that money, there would be no reestablishing IV. The fifty-year-old ultrasecret Nazi organization was finished.
And along with it, Adolf Kluge.
This realization was only just beginning to sink in when Kluge spied the first figure creeping through the underbrush on the other side of the river.
Could travel from the mountain down to the salt sea bay,
Though to and fro each wagon thrice journeyed every day.
“The Nibelungenlied,” Heidi said, nodding. The look of flushed exuberance had not left her face since morning.
Beside her in the front seat, Adolf Kluge was silent. The farther into this primitive portion of Germany they had traveled, the more convinced he had become of the authenticity of the legends. As he watched the mountains rise up through the desolate clearing, he felt a flutter of excitement in the pit of his stomach.
“If that is so,” Kluge said thoughtfully, “we do not have as many vehicles as we will need.”
“The wagons used were as the poem describes,” Chiun said knowingly. “I will be surprised if the conveyances with which this expedition is equipped are able to hold even a third of what Siegfried’s carts transported.”
Heidi was thinking aloud. “So it was three trips a day for twelve wagons?”
“That is correct,” Chiun said.
“For four days,” Kluge added. “That would be 144 wagonloads.”
“And if Chiun is right, we will have three times as many loads as that.”
Kluge nodded. “Which makes 432,” he said.
Heidi’s cheeks grew more flushed as her mind attempted to encompass that much treasure. Try as she might, she couldn’t begin to imagine so much wealth in a single place.
“That is a lot of gold,” she said breathlessly.
They continued on for a few miles more before the Master of Sinanju ordered Kluge to halt.
The lead car slowed to a stop. Behind it, the trucks of the expedition stopped, as well. Their engines idled briefly before growing silent.
Chiun, Kluge and Heidi climbed from the rental car. The surviving Numbers from the IV village along with the handful of skinheads got down from their trucks.
“Tell your pinhead army to remain where they are,” the Master of Sinanju commanded.
Kluge did as he was told.
The skinheads and the rest stayed back by the trucks. They were stretching their arms high in the air and twisting their spines, trying to relieve some of the muscle strain the long ride had inflicted on them. Only the identical blond-haired men seemed interested in what was going on up by the lead car. They stayed back where they were told, sullenly staring at Kluge and Heidi.
“I find those genetic freaks unnerving,” Kluge complained as he tore his eyes away from the unflinching gaze of the Numbers.
Heidi, who had been eyeing the Aryan men with a look bordering on sympathy, shot a nasty glare at Kluge. Whatever her dark thoughts, she kept them to herself.
“Why have we stopped?” she asked, turning to Chiun.
“It is no secret to any of us,” he said. “We all know that we are close now to the Sinanju Hoard.”
“The Nibelungen Hoard,” Kluge corrected flatly.
“Do not quibble, thief,” Chiun cautioned. He marched over to a nearby copse of trees.
The Master of Sinanju used the sharpened edge of one long fingernail to sheer a slender branch from a small tree. With a flurry of fingers, he stripped any small sticks or nubbins from the black bark. Coming back over to Heidi and Kluge, Chiun used the heel of his sandal to kick up a sandbox-size area of dirt in the frozen mud at the shoulder of the road. With the thin end of the three-foot-long stick, he drew out a perfect square, cutting it into four large sections. He began sketching in one of the quarters.
“I act now in good faith,” Chiun said as he drew. “Behold, the segment of the map discovered by my ancestor Bal-Mung beneath the body of the slain Nibelung king.”
Heidi was the only one there seeing the Sinanju section of the map for the first time. As Kluge looked on, bored, she appeared to be studying every detail of the map as Chiun formed it in the powdery earth.
“There!” Chiun said, finishing with a flourish. He had sketched in a portion of a long river. “I give you the Sinanju legacy of a long-dead king.”
There was a pause from those assembled, as if they were uncertain how to respond to such histrionics. The mood was broken by a dull, lifeless clapping of hands. Heidi and Chiun looked at Kluge.
“I am sorry,” he said, sarcastically. He stopped his flat applause. “Is not that what we were meant to do?” His smile was all condescension. “That is not as impressive as you would like it to seem,” Kluge said, nodding to the etching in the dirt. “After all, I have already seen it.”
Chiun was indignant. “Only due to your act of thievery, Hun,” he sniffed.
Heidi didn’t wish for this posturing to go any further. She injected herself between Chiun and Kluge.
“I will go next,” she offered.
Heidi took the stick from Chiun and quickly began filling in one of the three empty squares. Some of the lines met up with those of the Master of Sinanju. Chiun watched with interest while she worked. When she finished, she handed the stick over to Kluge.
“Here,” she said.
Holding the stick lightly in his hand, Kluge looked down upon the half of the map that was sketched out in the cold dirt of the Black Forest.
“Very nice,” he said, nodding. He indicated a corner of Heidi’s section with the end of the stick. “That portion was not visible in my photograph.”
“What do you mean?” Heidi asked blandly.
“This is not your family portion of the map,” he explained. “It is the Hagan piece, which I kept for years on my mantel at the Four village. Presumably you stole it when you stormed the fortress.” He smiled.
“Enough, brigand ancestor of a deceitful king!” Chiun snapped. His eyes were fire.
Kluge considered only for a second. With an outward dispassion that belied his inner fear of the wrath of the Master of Sinanju, he squatted down next to the nearest empty grid. He hastily sketched out his family portion of the map.
When he was finished, Kluge—still on his haunches—handed the stick up to Heidi.
“It is your turn. Again.” He smiled tightly.
Heidi didn’t hesitate. She pulled the stick away from Kluge. In the final quarter of the larger square, she drew for them the last piece of the Siegfried map.
Chiun examined the section she had drawn, making certain that its lines matched the ones in the piece they had retrieved from Heidi’s ancestral home. They did.
In the dirt before them, staring back at them from across the ages, was the entire map to the Nibelungen Hoard. Incomplete for more than fifteen hundred years, its assembled pieces now gave them clear directions to the great treasure.
“I have maps of the area,” Kluge said, excitedly, pushing himself to a standing position. “We can use them to find the location.”
The IV leader began striding to the car, but Chiun stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
“That will not be necessary,” the Master of Sinanju said. “My ancestor compiled many maps in his years of feckless wandering in these woods.” Chiun nodded to the map they had all drawn. His voice was filled with a grand solemnity. “This place is known to me.”
. . .
Remo was peeved. He made this clear to Colonel Heine.
“I don’t know why I’m even going,” he complained. “I mean, it’s got nothing to do with me.”
“Perhaps—” Heine began meekly.
Remo interrupted. “It’s just another dippy million-year-old legend he’s somehow gotten me dragged into,” he griped as he steered the border police jeep down the long forest road. “I tell him I’ll help him find his block of wood and his gold coins. Fine. Everything should be hunky-dory afterwards, right? Wrong. No sooner do we find them, along with the guy we’ve been looking for for the last three months, than he goes running off with the bastard on some half-assed treasure hunt. And he gets mad at me.” Remo’s voice approached a level of incredulity that left Colonel Heine nodding in nervous, sympathetic confusion.
“I have found only recently that loyalties are not what they should be,” Heine said through clenched teeth. He was holding on to the seat with both hands as Remo’s foot stayed clamped heavily to the accelerator. The forest whizzed by.
“Tell me about it,” Remo continued. “You’ve got a heck of a bunch back there,” he commented, nodding to the trailing line of trucks. “If I were you, I’d sleep with one eye open and a frigging howitzer under my pillow.”
“There is a danger that they might join the enemy,” Heine admitted. “If that happens and we fail, the army will be called in. Although I would not trust that the army will not join them, as well.”
Remo shook his head. He wondered again whether or not he should let Chiun go this one alone. After all, the Master of Sinanju had only the neo-Nazis, the border police and possibly the German army to contend with. It’d serve him right to work up a sweat over this one.
They came tearing around a corner near a pile of toppled boulders. A fork suddenly appeared in the road ahead of them. Remo barely lifted one foot off the gas pedal as the other one was stomping down on the brake.
The jeep spun out on the shoulder, completing two full circles on the dusty road. At the nadir of the first screeching circle, Colonel Heine saw the rapidly approaching shape of the nearest trailing truck. It, too, had slammed on its brakes. Plumes of dust poured up from beneath its locked wheels.
Heine closed his eyes and waited for the truck to plow into them. As he did so, he was vaguely aware of the driver’s-side door opening and closing. He felt the jeep grow lighter.
When a few tense seconds had passed without the sound of a crushing impact, Heine opened one eye. The jeep was rocking to a gentle stop near an old-fashioned wooden signpost. Colorful characters and black German words marked the three destinations beyond them.
Remo was crouching at the fork.
With a sigh of relief, Heine opened his second eye. He climbed out of the jeep on wobbly legs, walking up to join Remo. Looking back once, he saw the troop truck had stopped a hair away from the parked jeep.
“They took the left fork,” Remo said. He nodded as if to some obvious marks in the road. Heine saw nothing but a few grooves in the sandy shoulder.
“Can you get some helicopters in here?” Remo asked, standing. “With a few eyes in the sky, we could get this thing over with in less than an hour.”
Heine shook his head. “The chancellor does not wish to alert them,” he said, panting. His mind still reeled from his brush with death a minute before.
“I wish we were closer to Berlin,” Remo complained. “One visit ’d get the air force out here like a shot. Heck, kidnap the presidential pastry chef and you could probably get that pork hog to surrender to France.” He spun from Heine. “Let’s go.”
“Do you wish me to drive?” Colonel Heine said with weak hopefulness.
“Naw,” Remo said. “We’ve screwed around enough. I think we’re going to have to start picking up the pace.”
He headed back to the jeep. Heine followed reluctantly.
Chapter Twenty-three
In spite of the cold weather, they found the digging easy. The nearness of the small stream kept the ground where they worked much damper than the rest of the forest floor.
The skinheads were caked with slippery brown mud. They grumbled among themselves with each shovelful of rich, cold earth they overturned.
The pile of displaced slimy sod had grown large over the past two hours. The Master of Sinanju remained at a cautious distance, ever aware of even the slightest dollop of mud that might fly his way. Whenever a skinhead would overshoot the pile and send a speck of dirt near Chiun’s brilliant yellow kimono, the Master of Sinanju would let out a horrified shriek.
Once, when a clod of dirt came perilously close to his brocade robe, Chiun had stomped over to the diggers and wrenched the shovel from the perpetrator’s hands, clanging the young man over the head with the flat end of the metal spade. After that, both the skinhead and his companions had made an extra effort to keep the mud within the designated area.
Kluge had brought three small folding stools from the rental car, one for each of them. Chiun had refused the seat, preferring instead to stand as close as possible to the deepening hole. Heidi paced back and forth between the line of stools and Chiun. Only Adolf Kluge opted to sit.
Kluge was sitting there now, hands folded patiently across his precisely crossed knees. The only outward hint of any inner agitation the IV leader might have felt was at his mouth. Kluge’s tongue darted forward with unswerving regularity, dampening his lower lip. It was a nervous habit he had picked up years before.
“Pah!” Chiun complained, spinning from the massive mound of jiggling mud. “It is too deep.”
“That is the correct spot according to the map,” Heidi said nodding. Arms crossed, she chewed one thumbnail anxiously as she watched lumps of mud fly up from the hole.
“Fifteen hundred years is a long time,” Kluge suggested. He pointed at the marks in the surrounding uneven forest floor. “It appears as though the river ran directly through this area at one time. Surely sediment would have collected, covering it more deeply.”
“But if the river was here, how did they build it to begin with?” Heidi asked.
“That which you call engineering was not invented for the convenience of this century,” Chiun said impatiently. “Such a feat would not have been impossible. It would also explain the difficulty my ancestor had in finding the Hoard.”
“I hope we have better luck than him,” Heidi said. She continued to stare into the wide hole at the muddy riverbank.
The men dug for another half hour. Kluge was about to suggest that they should redraw the map, this time with more care, when a sharp clang emanated from the deep hole. It was followed by another.
Kluge got to his feet.
“There is something here!” one of the skinheads called from within the deep pit.
Kluge and Heidi looked at each other, neither of them certain what to do next. Heidi seemed genuinely surprised.
The Master of Sinanju was first to react. He flounced to the edge of the hole, looking in his jaundiced kimono like a huge yellow bird that had just spied a particularly succulent worm. He stopped at the muddy edge of the pit.
Only five skinheads could fit in the hole at one time. The area they had excavated was more than ten feet deep. The men inside were looking up from the bottom, their bodies coated with thick black mud.
“See?” one of the skinheads said.
He handed his shovel to one of the others and got to his soiled knees. With the palms of his filthy hands, he wiped away a pile of thick, gloppy mud, revealing a flat surface underneath. The men were standing atop what appeared to be a buried strip of sidewalk.
Kluge and Heidi came up behind Chiun.
“Clear off the rest!” the Master of Sinanju boomed. His eyes sparkled brightly.
The men did as they were told. More shovelfuls of mud had to be removed to clear the stone to its edges. It was found to be rectangular in shape.
Some of the blond-haired men brought buckets from one of the trucks. As the last of the dirt was hauled out, water was brought from the nearby stream. Lowering the pails into the hole, they washed the surface of the chiseled granite.
“I cannot read it,” Kluge said. He strained to look down at the ancient letters. They appeared to be nothing more than a series of indecipherable slashes. He glanced at the Master of Sinanju for help.
Chiun’s eyes had narrowed to narrow slits, swallowing up any small spark of hope in his hazel orbs. His mouth was a thin, furious line.
“Accursed fiend,” Chiun hissed. There was far more menace in the softness of his tone than in a thousand screaming voices. “He dares mock the House of Sinanju from across the ages.” His rage suddenly boiled over. “Villain! Cur! Fraud! Lying Hun thief!”
Like a crazed Olympic diver, Chiun flew down into the hole. A swirling, frenzied yellow tempest, he swatted vicious, angry hands at the skinheads still gathered below. The slime-coated men scurried up the muddy banks in fear.
Mindless of the grime, Chiun dropped to his knees atop the stone. It was as large as a big door. He pried slender fingers around its smooth edge.
“What does it say?” Kluge asked in wonder as he watched the aged Korean tear at the stone.
“I believe those are runic characters,” Heidi said. Her eyes narrowed as she attempted to read what was visible around Chiun. They looked like random cat scratches. “I am not entirely unfamiliar with this. Those are bitter runes. They are intended to bring down evils upon enemies.”
Kluge glanced from the scampering form of Chiun to Heidi. “This is not the storing place of the Nibelungen Hoard?” he asked. He could not mask his disappointment.
Heidi smiled tightly. “I am afraid not,” she said.
In the pit, the Master of Sinanju had pried up the massive flat stone, heaving it to one side. There was nothing beneath but a pile of mud-swamped rocks.
“Aiieee!” Chiun screamed.
His hand flew toward one of the short sides of the stone. There was a sound like a thunderclap. As Kluge watched, the flat rock split in two long halves. Before the pieces had even fallen to the bottom of the pit, Chiun’s pipestem legs shot out in two quick jabs. The halves split in half again, falling into smaller pieces. Chiun fired his tiny fists forward into the quarters, cracking the chunks of stone into ever smaller fragments. All the while, he screamed his anger and frustration at the mud walls of the deep, slick pit.
Kluge backed slowly away from the hole. Witnessing the awesome sight of the wizened Asian shattering a two-ton slab of rock as if it were made of glass, Kluge felt almost a little grateful that he hadn’t been able to follow through on his plan to kill the Master of Sinanju. This lasted only as long as it took him to realize that the wealth he so coveted was not there. Without that money, there would be no reestablishing IV. The fifty-year-old ultrasecret Nazi organization was finished.
And along with it, Adolf Kluge.
This realization was only just beginning to sink in when Kluge spied the first figure creeping through the underbrush on the other side of the river.
