“Now I am an infant cat?” Chiun asked, trying to sound indignant, but his heart wasn’t in it.
“You see what I mean.” Remo insisted.
“I see,” Chiun admitted.
Chapter 24
The airfield was dark except for the tiny jet waiting for them. Remo thought the thing looked like a steel mosquito, but it got them into Alamogordo in a big hurry. Another rental car took them to a BP truck stop near the missile test range, and from there they went on foot. Almost exactly twenty-four hours after the earth drill left the scene, Remo and Chiun arrived at the place. They bypassed the five-point guard perimeter. The final protective barrier was a web of pressure-sensitive wires buried to form an electronic moat almost twenty feet wide. The wires would trigger an alarm if any creature heavier than a desert hare crossed it, so Remo and Chiun thought like desert hares and skimmed over the sand. The alarm never noticed them.
They found the place littered with fluorescent yellow tape and tags. The Air Force forensic team had found out nothing from their investigation of the site, but they sure were making a good show of it.
“I didn’t know you actually wrote your own blogs, Chiun.”
“I do not, and now seems an odd time to bring it up.”
“I thought you were sending a message before. Just before we parked the car.”
“I was just reading the latest entry from a lascivious woman in Montana.”
“Oh.” Remo sniffed. “Smith was right about a body. Let’s see if it’s anybody we know.”
Sarah Slate woke up early and was surprised to find a blog appearing on the laptop Mark had provided her. It had been directed to her from Chiun, but she had never known him to record his own entries, only to read others’. Then she realized it had secure status— it was for her eyes only.
She smiled. Maybe a love poem?
But there was just one word, meaningless, but somehow it disturbed her.
The entry was simply “Song.”
“I don’t know him. Do you know him?” Remo asked.
“Of course not,” Chiun said nasally. They had both ceased to breathe near the stench of the corpse, that of a middle-aged, underfed man with a dark complexion. His head and one reaching arm were all that had survived mutilation.
“You know this guy, Junior?” Remo asked. He was holding a phone with a built-in camera, which he had reluctantly agreed to carry to the scene.
“Yeah, he’s this guy I work with,” Mark Howard replied sarcastically. “Look at the display.”
Remo glanced at the three-inch screen and found his own face on it.
“This thing’s broken, Junior.”
“Is it possible you were simply pointing the wrong part?”
Remo had to admit it was possible. He turned over the phone and clicked the green button until the face of the dead man showed up on the screen.
“How’s that?”
“Great, Remo.”
“What’s wrong now?”
“Nothing. I wasn’t being sarcastic. It’s a perfect image.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve already got an ID. Jesus Merienez. He’s got a INS record twelve feet long. He’s an alien smuggler, dope smuggler, you name it. He’s made a career of illegally entering the U.S. from Mexico.”
“So he’s camping here to stay off 1-10 and gets squished by the earth drill?”
“Looks like it. We’ll get better results after a more thorough search, but so far he’s strictly minor-league compared to Fastbinder.”
They combed the site, looking for clues the Air Force team might have missed, but found nothing until they approached the crater of loose earth where the earth drill submerged. The crater was surrounded with yellow plastic tape, and there were no footprints on the sands. Remo walked away from it over the path the earth drill might have taken. At twenty paces he stamped his foot hard and felt the vibrations. He walked another twenty paces and stamped again. It felt different.
“Only the entrance to the tunnel was sealed off,” Remo observed. “There’s still hollow space down there.”
“What did you just do?” Mark Howard demanded on the telephone.
Remo knew he shouldn’t have agreed to bring the camera. He hated being micromanaged, but his curiosity was piqued. “I dunno. What did I do?”
“The security on the site was just triggered by the seismographic monitors. Did you push over something big?”
Remo explained his foot stamping. “If you want us to go exploring down there, you had better acquisition a bunch of convicts with shovels. I guarantee you Chiun won’t help dig out a hundred feet of loose dirt.”’
“Remo, forget it and get out of there. The Air Force guard detail is moving in on you.”
They slipped past the converging guards, who saw nothing and no one until they crossed the perimeter of the dig site and found the swollen corpse of Jesus Merienez. It was quite obvious that the dead man had exhumed himself. What other possible explanation was there?
Chapter 25
If you’re visiting Topeka and have a craving for sauerbraten, you’re in luck. Alten Haus on Piedmont Avenue is world-famous for serving the best sauerbraten outside of Germany, and the chef responsible is— was—Heinrich von Essen, who began learning to cook when he was just tall enough to reach his mother’s plump knees. When he emigrated to the United States he brought her recipes with him and became the famous Sultan of Sauerbraten. He was credited with single-handedly jump-starting the first American sauerbraten craze of the twenty-first century.
Von Essen’s salary climbed with every new restaurant he defected to, until he found himself in the unlikely metropolis of Topeka, where a wealthy restaurateur was determined to establish the premier German eatery in Kansas. He succeeded.
Alten Haus was booked months in advance. Heinrich von Essen was getting a salary plus a percentage, and he never dreamed he could be so rich. He was on top of the world.
But not for long.
The rear doors flew open and slammed into a garbage can and the cleanup staff started shouting. A sleepy Heinrich von Essen looked up from the legal pad, on which he was jotting down needed supplies. Another five minutes and he would have been on his way home to bed.
His desk was in a private end of the kitchen, and he couldn’t see the cause of the commotion, but he could hear the terror in the voices of his staffers. Then, to his horror, he saw blood splatter across the far end of the kitchen.
Somebody had just been murdered.
Von Essen got to his feet and ran, but someone stomped after him. He didn’t get halfway through the dining room before a tremendous blow cracked the back of his head. He was semiconscious when he saw his attacker.
The deathly pale creature had no eyes. Its face was smeared with blood, which came from the joint of flesh it was feeding on. The joint was a human shin and foot, with a bloody black sock still on it. It was one of von Essen’s kitchen staff.
He thankfully passed out before he saw any more.
When he awoke, he was being dragged across wet grass by his collar. There were hordes of pale humans converging and bringing other captives. Von Essen saw a sign for Paradise Caverns, which rang a bell as a local tourist attraction.
None of it made sense. What was happening?
The blind captors dragged von Essen and the other prisoners through the shattered doors of the ticket building and entrance to the caverns. They crowded into the cave entrance, at the back of the building, and von Essen glimpsed the starry sky one last time through the distant doors before the earth swallowed him up.
They plodded along the paved tour walkways and reached a splashing waterfall. The dim security lights showed von Essen his horrible fate. One after another the blind men plunged into the water, dragging their prisoners behind them. Von Essen didn’t have the strength to struggle.