Chapter 13

“It’s a war zone,” said the SEAL after talking to the pilots. “You sure you want to debark here?”

“Yes, thanks.” Remo shook his head at the proffered backpack. “No thanks to that.”

“You have to jump. You’re not getting a touchdown. We don’t know what’s going on around here.” The SEAL was adamant. “You jump and we’ll take your friend to the base.”

“We’ll jump together,” Remo said. “No parachutes for either of us.”

The SEAL leader and the pilots argued for a full five minutes as they scanned the terrain for a jump-off point. They closed in on a hilltop in what looked like a peaceful countryside sheep pasture.

“Here’s the deal,” the SEAL team leader said. “We’re 3.3 miles from the place you want to be and he’ll take you down to the hilltop. Skids no closer than five feet to the ground. That’s the pilot talking, not me. You’ll be totally exposed.”

“That’ll do just fine.”

“If this helicopter doesn’t get blasted out of the air while we’re dropping you off,” the SEAL added, “you’ll probably get shot dead when we leave.”

“We’ll manage. He’s scrappy.” Remo nodded at Chiun, who showed his disdain. “Or was it Grumpy?”

“Your funeral,” the SEAL said with a shrug.

There was no one within sight when they stepped out of the helicopter onto the treetop. The SEAL saluted them grimly. Remo gave him the Vulcan V-sign. As the Sea Hawk was vanishing on the horizon, they were in a world as peaceful as a travel brochure. There wasn’t a soul in sight as they glided swiftly over the fields to Loch Tweed Castle.

The castle grounds were well-kept, but the castle’s glory was faded. The loch was narrow and looked cold, the color of gunmetal. The red blood spills were hard to miss.

There were just a few corpses outside. Remo and Chiun could hear the clamor of battle waging inside—deep inside.

There were more bodies inside. In the large dining hall was an armored, motorized false wall that was still trying to close, even with a few bodies in the way. The motor must have been a good one, because it had managed to soften up the corpses considerably.

“Another hour and it’ll fulfill its function,” Remo observed, then shouldered the armored wall gently. The movement drove it off its tracks and the motor screeched in protest before locking up. They followed the long subterranean corridor and found the battle aftermath.

The Cottingsharm villagers had finished with their deadly foe, whoever they were, and were now taking out their aggressions on a stainless-steel cube. There were several such cubes, ranging from the size of a British roadster to a Ford SUV. They were thick-walled. The Cottingsharm attackers were only making pockmarks in the surface.

“Who are you?” shouted one of them, charging at the new arrivals with a blunted pickax. “You British? You Tweeds?”

“Neither,” Remo said. “What are you, a florist or something?”

“What?”

“Your occupation. Your calling.”

“I’m a Scot. Sheep farmer.”

“You ever paint or write poems?”

The man blushed and toed the stainless-steel floor. “I do make up some pretty rhymes.”

“I’m a singer,” volunteered the brute who was using a sledgehammer on the steel cube. “Listen to this.” He sang in falsetto about suicidal young lovers as he raised the hammer and brought it down.

“I asked you to stop,” Remo said, now holding the hammer. The singer looked at his empty hands and his voice died with a perplexed sound. “See, Chiun, just a bunch of those ‘sensitive’ types you were talking about.”

“I never doubted this. What is the point?” Chiun asked.

“The point is, we don’t need to go wiping them out just because they’ve got Sa Mangsang in their heads.”

“Shush!” Chiun barked. “Have I asked you to refrain from speaking the name?”

“He’s who we should be going after. Not these guys. They’re victims.”

Before either of them could answer, they heard the distant song of metal striking metal.

“I shall dispose of this,” Chiun said, and he streaked into a tight back corridor at the end of the steel room, speeding into the earth faster than most humans would drive. He emerged into another smaller laboratory a quarter mile from the first. There was one man there with a hammer, pounding at a metal cube that was brushed aluminum rather than steel. The softer metal yielded to the attack.

“Beautiful!” the attacker said as Chiun stopped several paces short of him. The man was watching his arms become engulfed in sparkling, viscous fluid—like mounds of gemstone fragments swimming in clear glue. “The Cottingsharm family treasure,” he explained joyfully. “I never knew it even existed.”

“It never did, or I would have known of it.” Chiun’s announcement didn’t seem to reach the old Scot. The man began to sing a different tune.

“It hurts! It’s eating me.”

“It is hungry,” Chiun said with a shrug. “Do not ask me to explain it.”

“Make it stop!” The man took a step toward the old Asian, his body now alive with shimmering rainbow colors that became scarlet as the tiny machines ate through the dermal layer and exposed the Scot’s lifeblood. The man collapsed.

Chiun glided away, avoiding the splattering fragments of bloody fluid. He didn’t understand what this substance was, but he knew enough to stay away from it. Even the skills of a Sinanju Master were insufficient to do hand-to-hand combat with enemies the size of mites. The ancient Master snatched up the fallen hammer and scraped it rapidly on the skin of the aluminum cube. The friction became tremendous, and soon enough the steel was orange-hot and smoking.

The Cottingsharm villager was silent, his skinless corpse slumped lifeless in a spreading puddle of blood that glowed scarlet in the surgical lights. A moving mass of rainbow colors trickled and pushed through the puddle, distending the blood spill toward the old Korean. It was reaching for Chiun. It knew he was there.

Chiun waited until it was inches from his sandals before he placed the orange hammer head into the thick fluid. The heat boiled the liquid in the center, and waves of opaque whiteness grew larger as the tiny machines were cooked.

Tiny droplets of substance separated themselves from the main mass ahead of the killing heat and moved away in all directions, making their escape.

Chiun exercised patience. The mass of sparkling stuff turned into frosted crystal floating on boiled black blood, but only when the transformation was complete did he remove the hammer. The heat in its head was still enough to soften the steel. The leather handle was smoking, and Chiun’s fingers danced over it like the rising and falling legs of a millipede—never resting long enough on the hot surface to burn his own skin.

He placed the hot hammer head into the small patches of liquid, sizzling them.

“I tire of ill-tempered machines,” he announced. The final splatter of fluid had now become a starlight cluster of droplets, all fleeing in opposite directions. “I despise killing machines whose only use can be dishonorable. You are no better than a flagon of poison.”

Chiun didn’t know if the things could hear him or understand him. Common sense said they shouldn’t exist at all.

“And exist you shall not,” he concluded as he heated up the hammerhead again on the rim of the aluminum cube. The droplets traveled at snail speeds. One of them was heading toward a crack in the rock.

“I think not,” Chiun announced, and placed the hot steel gently atop the droplet, boiling it instantly. He touched the other droplets one after another, careful not to splash them. Soon all were cooked.

Chiun examined the rock, searching for microscopic escaping droplets. It was a ridiculous exercise, and yet he understood the need for it. His eyes were magnificently sharp, but would they spot an individual germ-sized machine making a run for freedom? Even Chiun had his limits. Still, it looked to him as if the tiny machines were in the process of breaking off into smaller and smaller batches—halving themselves. If that was the case, then Chiun had stopped them while they were still grouped in colonies of thousands of individuals.

“Fah!” he said in disgust, coming off the floor into a dignified stance.

He left the small laboratory.

Then he came back.

He stared at the aluminum box, now scorched black, where he had heated his hammer.

He closed his eyes and stood with his hands in his sleeves. His wrinkled face became loose with relaxation, yet he stood like a mountain. His power was immense and subtle. The buzz of the lightbulbs was like the engines of large jets until he put the noise aside in his thoughts. The sounds from far behind him were like the racket of a house being hammered apart until he dismissed them. Then there were the smaller sounds, the infinitesimal bits of information that came at him from the movement of the air.

Finally, he put that aside, too—and this all in a matter of a few heartbeats. Here in the earth, where the bombardment of information was reduced, he could feel what he might never have felt …

The thing that pricked his skin was so tiny it was like something from a dream, and yet Chiun stiffened and opened his eyes at once. He controlled his revulsion, willing away the prickling of crawling flesh that had come to him. This sensation was unlike anything he had known before—and he had communed with devils.

This was so small as to be alien. All the more repulsive was that it was made by man.

He stood before the blackened aluminum box and peered into the open hatch, from whence Cottingsharm had extracted the mass of tiny machines. One or more of them remained within. One of them was looking at him; Chiun felt it. He stroked the threads of his beard, then began to work again with the hammer. He rubbed the head around the openings, superheating them, making the exit impassable, then feverishly heated the entire exterior of the aluminum. The hammerhead became hot but the aluminum remained gray. The superheated air hissing through the cracks indicated when the entire interior had reached oven temperatures.

Chiun dropped the hammer and watched the aluminum box for a moment; he could never know for certain that he had succeeded in killing it.

Not kill. It was not alive. It was a machine. He wasn’t killing it, but simply dismantling it. Why was the greatest assassin of the modern age doing the work of a junkyard dog?

That’s what Remo was for.