"The fourth girl began to cry when Remo removed her gag. "Thank God," she said. "Thank God for somebody."
"Who are you?" Remo asked.
Through her tears and sobbing, she said, "I'm Hillary Butler. They kidnapped me. I've been here two days."
"Kinda rough, kid, huh?"
"Please," she said. Remo began to free her.
Behind him, he heard the sergeant start to speak. "I have nothing to do with it, man," but his words were cut off as he oomphed, Chiun putting a hard hand into his back.
"Who are these others?" Remo asked, as he tore the knots from Hillary Butler's ropes.
"I don't know," she said. "Americans too, the sergeant said. But there's nothing much left of them. They're on heroin."
"You too?" Remo asked.
"Just twice," the girl said. "Last night was the first time, and then this morning."
"You may be all right then," Remo said. "It doesn't work that way."
"I know." The girl stood up and then suddenly put her bare arms around Remo and began to sob heavily. "I know," she blubbered. "I've been praying. And I knew when I stopped praying that it would be all over. I'd be just like them."
"It's okay now," Remo said. "We got here in time. At least for you." He led her to a closet where robes hung and covered her uncut naked body with one. "Can you walk?" he asked.
"Just bruised but unbroken," she said.
Remo's voice grew hard and cold. "Chiun, take Miss Butler downstairs and wait for me. You," he said to the sergeant. Get in here."
Reluctantly, the sergeant entered the room. Remo closed the door behind him, after watching Chiun lead Hillary Butler down the hallway.
"How long have these girls been here?" Remo asked.
"Different times," the sergeant said. "Three months. Seven months."
"You give them the narcotics?"
The sergeant looked toward the closed door. He looked toward the window where the sky was brightening with the pre-dawn sun rays.
"Answer me," Remo said.
"Yes, boss. I give them. They die now without them."
"There was a man named Lippincott who came here. Where is he?"
"Dead. He killed one of the girls. She recognized him, probably. So he got killed too."
"Why all the soldiers here tonight?"
"General Obode put the guard here. He expected someone to break in, must have meant you. Look, I got some money. If you let me go, it's yours."
Remo shook his head.
The sergeant's eyes brightened. "You like the girls, mister? They take good care of you. I housebreak them well. Anything you want, they do." His voice came faster now. It pleaded even though the words themselves were not a plea. Not yet.
Remo shook his head.
"You going to kill me, man?"
"Yes."
The sergeant lunged at Remo. Remo waited; he let the sergeant grab his arm; he allowed the sergeant to hit him with a punch. He wanted to put meaning into what he was about to do, and the best way was to remind himself that this was a man. Let him touch, let him feel, let him understand what was coming.
Remo waited, then jammed his left fingertips forward into the sergeant's separated right shoulder. The sergeant stopped as if suddenly simonized in place.
Remo hit again in the same spot with his left fingertips, then with his right, then with his left again, hammering shot after shot into precisely the same place. The sergeant swooned and fell to the floor. Remo kneeled down over him, grabbed a handful of neck and twisted. The sergeant came awake, his eyes staring at Remo in horror and fright, glinting, Remo realized suddenly, like the eyes from the beds, watching the tableau.
"Awake now?" Remo said. "Good."
He lunged forward again into the injured shoulder. Beneath his fingertips he could feel the once strong and stringy muscles and fibres turning into soft mush. Still his fingertips pounded. The softer the target became, the harder Remo struck. The sergeant was unconscious now, long past reviving. Remo wished he could think of something more painful. The cloth around the sergeant's shoulder was ripped now and pummelled into powder. Remo kept hitting. Blood and ooze and chips of bone came out under his fingertips. The skin had long since given way.
Remo reared back and came forward one last time. His right fingertips went through where once there had been cloth and skin and muscle and flesh and bone. The fingertips came to rest on the wooden floor.
His anger spent, Remo stood. He kicked the sergeant's right arm away. It rolled awkwardly like an imperfect log, finally coming to rest under the bed Hillary Butler had vacated. Then Remo came down on the sergeant's face with both feet, feeling the crunch and crack beneath him. He stood, looking down at the sergeant, realizing that he had taken out of him a payment in advance for what Remo still must do. The three women, still tied in their beds, looked at Remo wordlessly.
He moved to them one after another, sitting on the edges of their beds. To each one he whispered, "Dream happy dreams," and then as gently and painlessly as he could, he did what he had to do.
Finally he was done. He untied the hands and feet of the three dead girls and covered their bodies with robes from the closet. Then he walked out into the hallway and closed the door behind him.
The instructions from Smith had been to keep Obode alive. Well, Smith could take his instructions and shove them. If Obode got anywhere in Remo's way, if he got within his line of vision, if he came anywhere within reach, Obode would know pain such as he had never even guessed existed. When Remo was done with him, he would consider the sergeant in the girls' room blessed.
Chiun waited at the foot of the steps with Hillary Butler. She looked at Remo. "The others?" she said.
Remo shook his head with finality. "Let's go," he said evenly.
Already, Smith would go berserk because Remo had not freed the other three girls. But Smith had not been there, had not seen them. Remo had freed them, the only way they could be freed. It had been his decision and he had made it. Smith had nothing to say about it, just as he no longer had anything to say about what Remo would do to Obode if the chance presented itself.
Only two soldiers guarded the back of the building through which Chiun and Remo exited. "I'll take them," Remo said.
"No, my son," Chiun answered. "Your anger breeds danger for you. Protect the child."
The sun was almost rising. Remo saw Chiun and then in a flash, saw him no longer as the little man in the black costume of the Ninja night devils slid away into what was left of the darkness.
From his position inside the back doorway of the house, Remo could see the soldiers clearly, twenty-five feet away at the base of a tree. But he never saw Chiun. , Then he saw the two soldiers, still there, but suddenly their bodies were twisted, useless. Two corpses, Remo strained his eyes. Still no sign of Chiun. Then, Chiun was in front of him. "We go."
Two blocks from the house, an Army jeep was parked at the curb with a soldier behind the wheel. Remo came up behind him. "Taxi," he said. "This is no taxi," the soldier said, wheeling and staring angrily at Remo.
Remo extended his bloodied hands toward the soldier.
"Too bad, Charley, cause that was your only chance," Remo left the soldier's body lying in the street and helped Hillary Butler into the back where Chiun sat alongside her.
Remo started the motor and peeled rubber, burning off down the pockholed dirt street, heading for the hills over which the sun was now rising in its daily ritual of the affirmation of life.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"How many are dead?" Obode's question was an elephantine trumpet.
"Thirteen," General William Forsythe Butler said.
"You said there were only two men coming."
"That's all there were."
"They must be very special men," Obode said.