Mark Howard was trying to piece this all together and was niggled by something else. As he fiddled with the image he said, “Okay, but this is obviously a more advanced earth drill. We might assume this young man was out driving it around at the time Remo and Chiun buried Fastbinder. Why couldn’t this kid have saved Fastbinder?”
Smith frowned. For some reason that hadn’t occurred to him. “Of course he could have. Therefore, we must assume that is exactly what happened.”
Mark Howard nodded and scanned the image along the length of the oddly shaped mass that enclosed the bulk of several odd-size bundles. Smith explained how the high-altitude spy plane showed a huge triangular black patch that maneuvered through the desert. The stealth ship had set off no security alerts at White Sands, which was another pointer to Fastbinder, who had developed a vast inventory of stolen stealth technology in his military laboratory raids. The airship had been deflated or somehow shrunken around the salvaged ordnance.
“You must admit it’s ingenious,” Mark said. “It’s a very efficient way to take all the irregular shapes under tow. It cushions the ordnance from damage while transporting them belowground. Whatever material the airship was made of, it has to be extremely strong. It just might contain a blast if one of those bombs goes off.”
“Ingenious,” Smith agreed sourly.
“How many pieces of abandoned ordnance were you tracking, Dr. Smith?”
“Six,” Smith said rely. “He salvaged all of them.”
“But the thief took a lot more than six pieces—”
“I’m aware of that.”
Mark Howard nodded and began shifting the image again. “What’s this? Who’s this?”
“Who is where?” Smith tapped in to the image Mark Howard was manipulating, and for a moment he experienced grave concern. Had Smith missed seeing another person in the image? That would have been a substantial lapse.
“Do you see it? Here.” Howard zoomed in on the earth under the earth drill, before it had started to move.
“Fingers?” Mark posed.
“Perhaps,” Smith said, sounding doubtful. They looked like a couple of exposed roots to him. But when Mark advanced the image and rotated it, the thing protruding from the ground was undoubtedly a human hand.
“Maybe that’s Fastbinder,” Mark suggested.
“Maybe,” Smith said, shaking his head. “There are a lot of unanswered questions here, Mark. Let’s see what we can dig up.”
“At least Remo and Chiun are already on the job.”
Smith nodded. The irony of the situation hadn’t escaped him. He hadn’t believed Fastbinder could have been responsible for the killings in the depths of the nuclear waste dump, but now it seemed likely that he or his protégés were.
“Whiteslaw,” Smith declared grimly. “He may be the one calling the shots if Fastbinder is out of the picture.”
“I guess Remo was right. We should have been dedicating more CURE resources to tracking him down.” Smith chewed on that, and he didn’t like the taste of it He chewed on a few antacids, which didn’t make the taste any better, and then told his assistant that Remo and Chiun had not yet returned from the depths of the Pit.
Sarah Slate asked no questions. When the phone rang in the deep of the night and Mark Howard told her he needed to get to work, she helped him dress and wheeled him to the end of their hallway. Then she returned to Mark’s room and tried to go back to sleep, distracted by the empty place beside her.
What was she getting herself into?
She was a very young woman, with more money than she knew what to do with. The world was wide open to her, and yet she had holed up miserably in the family home, living without purpose, weighed down by her family history. It took the intrusion of not one but two Masters of Sinanju, and Mark Howard, to shake off some of the dust.
Ironic, wasn’t it? She would never have known about the Sinanju if it had not been for the reckless adventuring of her family, which was exactly the irresponsible behavior she despised. If an ancestor had not once befriended a Master, and written about it in his diaries, she would never have allowed them to enter her home, expose her to danger and introduce her to Mark Howard. Even more ironic was that the danger had been of her family’s construction. It had been Ironhand, the miracle of engineering created by family patriarch Archibald Slate a hundred years earlier, that had come to the Slate home just a few weeks ago to shake her down for more, of Archibald’s engineering developments.
So, if she had been a woman born to a normal family, she never would have been in that danger—and she never would have needed saving.
Funny thing. While the Masters had defeated Ironhand, it was Mark Howard who had sacrificed himself to protect Sarah Slate.
Was he in love with her? She didn’t know. Maybe he simply had Florence Nightingale syndrome, falling in love with the woman who nursed him back to health.
