Failing Marks, page 20
He stiffened. Made an effort not to stare.
Kluge tried not to let the man know he had spotted him as he casually began to scan the surrounding flora.
There was another. And another.
Creeping forward, they were attempting to stay hidden in the winter woods. The men were all armed.
In the pit behind him, the Master of Sinanju continued to pound away at the diminishing chunks of rock. Dust and pebbles flew up out of the hole as if from some insane sculptor’s underground studio. The tiny Korean’s screams had grown less fierce with every passing second.
Kluge hardly noticed Chiun’s tantrum any longer. Keeping his arms close to his sides and his movements subdued, he walked with forced casualness over to Heidi.
She was in the process of gathering up Kluge’s three collapsible stools from where they had been propped on the forest floor. They were draped over her forearm as Kluge stepped up to her.
“We are being watched,” he said in a measured tone.
She had been lost in thought, obviously thinking of the amount of gold she had lost.
“What?” she asked, perturbed. She handed the stools off to a waiting skinhead. “What are you talking about?”
Her answer exploded from across the small river. The first gunshot ripped through the torpid silence of the ancient forest.
The bullet caught the skinhead beside them square in the chest. The young man wheeled around, flinging the three stools into the air as he did so. They flew through the air, landing in a tangle of bushes near the heap of displaced mud.
The dead skinhead fell to the forest floor as the next bullet tore from the tangle of low plants across the river.
Kluge threw himself to the ground. His elbow slammed against a flat rock. He ignored the shooting pain in his arm as he half crawled, half pushed himself along the damp forest surface to the protection of a cluster of thick pine trees.
All around him, Kluge’s mud-soaked neo-Nazi followers had drawn weapons. Ducking for cover themselves, they had begun to shoot blindly at their concealed attackers.
Gunfire erupted all around.
The men who had ambushed them were in no hurry to advance. They stayed at a distance, firing with care into the cluster of neo-Nazis. From his vantage point behind the trees, Kluge could see that the first man he had noticed wore the uniform of the German Federal Border Police. He skulked on the other side of the small tributary, popping into view every few seconds with a blast of automatic-weapon fire.
A volley of bullets ripped into the soft trunk of the tree above him, sending splinters of pulpy wood down onto Kluge’s sandy hair.
Kluge glanced frantically the other way. Through the overgrown forest, he could barely glimpse his parked convoy of trucks. As he watched, the lead car began rolling off down the road. It was joined a moment later by several of the trucks. The Numbers were fleeing.
He was so shocked that he began to climb to his feet. A fresh hail of bullets made him reconsider. Dropping back to his belly, Adolf Kluge began crawling slowly through the tangle of bushes toward the road.
He got only a few feet before his injured elbow fell atop the toe of a boot. Kluge had no weapon. He rolled over onto his back, hands held up in surrender.
A group of men dressed in the drab uniforms of the Federal Border Police fanned around him. They grabbed Adolf Kluge by the arms, pulling him to his feet.
As the firefight continued to rage over near the river, the men spirited Kluge to the waiting line of trucks.
. . .
The detachment of Federal Border Police had split up at the river, hoping to ensnare the entire band of neo-Nazis within their widely cast net.
Remo was on the other side of the river when he heard the first gunshot. It was followed almost immediately by a sustained firefight. He turned to Colonel Friedrich Heine.
“Who told them to start shooting?” Remo demanded.
“They are not authorized,” Colonel Heine said angrily.
Remo didn’t wait for more of an explanation. He began running through the woods toward the sound of the guns.
He broke into a small clearing on the side of the river opposite the neo-Nazis. He saw the deep mud hole beside the small man-made hill of displaced earth. Tiny puffs of dust rose from within the pit.
Colonel Heine came running up behind Remo, desperately short of breath. The firefight was blazing, with swarms of angry lead projectiles whizzing around his head as Heine slammed up against the thick trunk of a bullet-riddled tree. He pulled out his side arm.
“You,” he demanded, pointing at one of his men crouching in the nearby bushes. “Who gave the order to fire?”
The man shrugged. “It simply happened, sir,” he said.
Heine shook his head to Remo, fiercely apologetic. “Not all of these men are pro-Nazi,” he explained. “Some are like me. Although I was hoping for a peaceful resolution.”
“That’s shot to hell right about now,” Remo snarled.
The skinheads were entrenched on the other side of the river. The border police had only managed to pick off a few of them early on. The rest were dug in behind trees and boulders, preserving ammunition by firing in short, directed bursts at their attackers.
The border police had lost the element of surprise. They were hunkered down across the river, unable to advance on the skinheads. The other half of Heine’s men appeared to have vanished.
It was an equally matched standoff.
Remo didn’t seek cover like the others. He stood in the open near the river, dodging the occasional bullet that flew his way. He frowned as he looked across the river. He didn’t see the Master of Sinanju anywhere. Nor Kluge or Heidi, for that matter.
“Get down!” Heine insisted. He was amazed that Remo had not yet been shot.
Remo didn’t appear to hear the colonel. He sighed even as he sidestepped a violent burst from a skinhead’s Uzi. “Leave it to the only American here to have to clean up this mess,” he grumbled.
Leaving Heine to splutter that he was committing suicide, Remo hopped onto a moss-slick stone that jutted up a foot out from the river’s edge.
It wasn’t far across. Though the water raced fast, it was more of an overgrown stream than a real river. Hopping from damp stone to damp stone, Remo bounded over to the other side in a few short leaps.
He landed in a clump of brown weeds.
Remo hadn’t taken more than two steps up the bank before a wild-eyed skinhead came screaming at him from out of a heavy thicket. The man wielded a large hunting knife before him. The scream was apparently meant to distract his victim as he plunged the knife home.
Without even missing a single step, Remo snatched the skinhead by the wrist. With a quick, fluid motion, he redirected the knife back and around. The young man’s hand traced an elaborate circle in the air as the blade whirred back toward the attacker. It buried itself up to the hilt in the startled skinhead’s unmuscled abdomen.
Striding forward, Remo flung the doubled-over body into his wake. The skinhead toppled into the weeds and then rolled over, splashing into the racing water. He floated only a few feet downstream before his body snagged on a rock. The river splashed over and around his lifeless form.
Remo continued onward, his expression grave. He had yet to see Chiun anywhere.
Judging from the gunfire, there weren’t as many men in the woods around him as had left the inn during the wee hours of the morning. Some must have escaped when the shooting began. Realizing he might have been too hasty killing his first attacker, Remo sought out another skinhead.
He found one crouching amid a tangle of bushes. The man was firing shots from his assault rifle in random bursts at the police across the river. The slender barrel of his West German Gewehr jutted out from a tangle of laurel.
Coming up from the man’s blind side, Remo wrapped his fingers around the gun barrel and yanked hard. The startled skinhead popped out from the bushes, still hanging on to the other end of his weapon. He seemed shocked to find someone else attached to his gun barrel.
“Okay, pfeffernusse,” Remo began, unmindful of the young man’s surprised expression. “Do you—?”
A loud series of gunshots sounded across the river. A cluster of crimson stains erupted across the skinhead’s chest and stomach. His eyes rolled back in their sockets as his head lolled to one side. The man fell back to the bushes, propped up by the thick branches. He didn’t move again.
“Hey, watch it!” Remo shouted to the border police. Their response was even more gunfire. So far, none of it was directed at him.
Dropping the man’s weapon angrily, Remo went off in search of another skinhead.
His yelling alerted those close by of his presence. As Remo walked in the direction of the mountain of mud, a pair of skinheads who had been waiting in ambush leaped out of the bushes before and behind him.
This time Remo was unable to get out a single word before the men were mowed down by the police.
“Dammit,” Remo snapped as the pair of bodies fell.
This was obviously not going to work the way he planned. Taking a different tack, Remo dived into the bushes where his keen senses told him a cluster of neo-Nazis was hiding.
There were six of them.
Unfortunately they had witnessed the horrible deaths of the other men Remo had so far encountered. Not wanting to end up like their comrades, the men fled into the open as soon as Remo appeared before them. They were instantly fired upon by the border police and were slaughtered to a man.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” Remo griped.
He heard a scuffling somewhere before and above him. A single, rapid heartbeat filtered down through the thick pine branches. Boots scraped along rough bark.
Remo took a few steps forward. He found a lone skinhead hiding in a tree above the spot where the six men had been hunkered down. The man was attempting to hold on to the tree trunk while at the same time angling his rifle down at the top of Remo’s head.
Before the man could fire, Remo reached up and grabbed him by his loose shoelace. He pulled.
The skinhead came crashing out of the tree like a clumsy fat bird, collapsing to the forest floor amid a pile of broken branches. Pine needles continued to rain down on him as he shook his head in groggy confusion.
The flurry of activity around the tree started a new wave of gunfire from across the river. Luckily for Remo, they were behind the broad tree trunk, safe from the bullets of the Federal Border Police.
“Speaky the English?” Remo asked the skinhead.
“Yes,” the man answered fearfully. He shook some of the needles out of his hair. Though his eyes stayed locked with Remo’s, his hand searched for his dropped gun.
“The old Korean who was with Kluge. Where is he?”
“There,” the man said, nodding out toward the hole.
Remo looked out at the mound of earth. He raised a skeptical eyebrow.
Even as he did so, the skinhead was grabbing up his gun from the ground. Still seated, he spun around with the weapon, aiming it at Remo’s exposed belly.
In a move so swift that it was almost blinding, Remo used one hand to pull the gun away from the man. As he was tossing the weapon away, he used his free hand to pull the skinhead to his feet.
“I’ll check, but you better not be lying,” he warned. With that, Remo tossed the man out into the clearing. There was the expected burst of gunfire, followed by the sound of the dead skinhead dropping to the ground.
Remo hardly noticed the noise as he strode out into the wide opening. Both sides began to fire wildly—the skinheads at the closeness of the intruder, the border police in anticipation of more assured kills. Remo had to twist and turn spastically to dodge the lead volleys as he made his way across the clearing to the edge of the hole.
At the muddy rim, amid the hail of bullets, he looked down in surprise on a familiar tiny shape standing among the ruins of the unearthed stone marker.
“I gotta hand it to you. Money hasn’t changed you one bit,” Remo said from the edge of the pit. Bullets zinged like pesky flies around his head.
The Master of Sinanju looked up, his face cross. He stood ankle deep in a pile of chipped stone.
“The gold was not here,” he snapped.
“I gathered as much.”
“The scoundrel Siegfried left a carved note in runic berating thieves who would attempt to locate the Hoard without a proper map.”
“I thought you had the whole map,” Remo said.
Chiun tipped his head. “As did I,” he said. He had been so intent on venting his anger and frustration against the stone marker that he had lost all reason. As he stood there now, however-coated with mud in the remnants of his own destructive rage-a thought seemed to pass visibly across his aged features. He looked up at Remo, head tipped in sudden confusion. “Is it possible that my partners have betrayed me?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Remo replied sarcastically. “One was a Nazi who broke into your house and tried to have us killed about a zillion times. The other was a woman we knew pretty much nothing about except that she lied to us and tried to break into your house. Sounds like a decent enough bunch to me.”
“Descendants of dastards,” Chiun hissed.
“Look,” Remo called down. He jumped to avoid a fresh batch of autofire, “the thing is, I’m kind of getting shot at up here. So if you’re done working this vein, I’d suggest the two of us skedaddle.”
Chiun nodded. Remo didn’t see his legs tense beneath the hem of his mud-splattered kimono, but the Master of Sinanju was suddenly airborne. He appeared to float gracefully up from the bottom of the ten-foot-deep pit—the reverse film of a feather sinking to the ground. He landed on the muddy lip beside Remo. Bullets zipped relentlessly around them from every direction.
The instant he had landed, they were both running. Remo and Chiun took off for the protective cover of the forest.
“What have you started up here?” Chiun demanded as they ran through the driving storm of lead. His nose crinkled unhappily as he eyed the half-hidden skinheads.
“Don’t blame me. This was your party, remember?”
“It was peaceful before your arrival,” Chiun said.
They made it safely to the trees on the side of the clearing opposite the river. Once they were beyond the firing line, Chiun began glancing around the woods.
“Where is the thief and the harlot?” he demanded.
“I haven’t seen them.” Remo shrugged.
The look of pain that passed over the aged features of the Master of Sinanju was so great it was as if someone had reached into his body and plucked out his very soul.
His eyes held a look of horror Remo had never before seen. When he spoke, his voice was faraway.
“My money,” Chiun croaked.
Chapter Twenty-four
The rented car bounced crazily through the rough terrain beside the mighty Danube River.
The vehicle hadn’t been built for this type of driving. Heidi knew this to be true even as she steered down into a broad gully in the middle of the unused road. The rear wheels caught briefly in a pool of muddy water before grabbing on to the sandy clay beneath.
The car lurched suddenly forward, clamoring madly up the far side of the shallow indentation. It bounced wildly as it flew back up onto the road. Heidi had to cling to the steering wheel for dear life.
Her head slammed against the roof of the car even as the vehicle settled back down onto its straining shock absorbers.
The stretch of road ahead of her seemed positively level compared to the area she had just passed through. Used only for access in the warmer months, the road was lucky to see a single government truck every few weeks. She aimed the car down the rugged straightaway, unmindful of the rocks and potholes that littered the path before her.
She had to be sure first. After that, everything would fall into line.
She couldn’t believe how easy it had been. Kluge and the Master of Sinanju were so blinded by greed that they didn’t notice her deception.
Indeed, how could they? They had taken her word that the quarter of the map she had drawn in the dirt had been real. They had never expected her to lie.
Chiun with his blind avarice. Kluge, just as greedy, yet masking his money lust in a blasé veneer.
It had been too easy.
Of course, the piece she and the men from Sinanju had retrieved from her family castle in the Harz Mountains was a forgery. It had been commissioned by one of her ancestors in the century after Siegfried’s death. Her family had the bogus segment carved as a decoy for thieves.
She had destroyed the original copy months ago. Heidi had memorized the genuine quarter long before she had gone back to her family castle with the two Masters of Sinanju.
It was all a show. She had to make it look as if she didn’t intend to cheat them. It had worked.
The speeding car struck a deep rut. The front right wheel grabbed at the road for a moment and the car began to slide to one side.
Heidi cut the wheel into the turn, stomping down harder on the accelerator. The car popped free of the pothole. Skidding in the dirt, she righted the car expertly.
Without a change in speed, she continued racing down the bumpy road.
. . .
“That is not him!” Chiun screamed as the border police brought forward the tenth skinhead body. He swatted at the corpse with his long talons.
The police officer holding the body dragged it away. The others nearby were herding captured neo-Nazis into the backs of awaiting Federal Border Police trucks.
“I’m afraid it looks like he’s gone, Little Father,” Remo said. “Along with Heidi and a bunch of their men.”
“And some of my men, it seems,” Colonel Heine admitted.
“Woe is me,” Chiun moaned to himself. He was staring over at the empty mud hole.
Remo ignored him. “What happened here?” he asked the colonel. He indicated the carnage around the small clearing with a nod.
“I am afraid my men were divided in their loyalties,” Colonel Heine said, shamefaced. “Somehow word of our mission leaked to them before we even left our headquarters. They had been discussing the entire way here how they would proceed once we met up with our intended targets. Some apparently decided to throw in with the neo-Nazis.”
