“Please. Come back. We can talk.” Wools could still be heard pleading with them when they reached the elevator’s upper platform and switched to the next lift.
“What a drag it is just getting in and out of here,” Remo complained on the fourth elevator. “Little Father, you don’t have any desire to live in a cave, do you?”
“Of course not. I desire to live in a splendid vintage caravan.”
“Oh. Still on that kick, huh?”
“It is not a ‘kick.’”
“’Course not.”
Chiun pulled his iBlogger out of his sleeve.
“Holy crap, you’ve been carrying that thing all this time? It can’t get a signal down here, can it?”
“Alas, it does not,” Chiun admitted, fiddling with the thing briefly. “I had hoped, however.”
Chiun tried the device repeatedly as they came closer to the surface, but he didn’t get reception until they were aboveground and inside the metal building. He gave a cry of delight and let Remo handle the security staff that was waiting for them. Wools had phoned ahead.
Remo thought it was just as well that Chiun was preoccupied. These guys were just hired muscle and didn’t necessarily deserve death because they worked for the wrong company and got in the way of the wrong elderly Korean. Remo simply snatched the rifles from the three men, bent the barrels into horseshoes and handed the weapons back to their owners.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
A pair of state troopers loitered around their rental Hyundai in the parking lot. “Is there an Embassy Suites in the area?” Remo asked.
“You’re not going anywhere, son, until you have a talk with our friend Mr. Wools,” the veteran trooper said, withdrawing his handgun from its holster. “Assume the position.”
“Jeez, Dad, that’s a tempting offer, but no thanks.” He stepped up close and put the barrel of the gun into the trooper’s mouth, then forced the man’s finger onto the trigger.
“Back off, scumbag!” shouted the second trooper, a rookie who was fumbling for his own weapon. Chiun, never taking his eyes off his iBlogger, elbowed the rookie, who was destined to spend the next fifteen minutes writhing on the gravel, hacking up breakfast and holding on to his bruised abdomen.
“You shareholders in Mr. Wools’s little projects?” Remo asked the trooper who gagged on his own handgun. The trooper nodded, teeth clacking against the barrel.
“Now, I asked you another question…” He extracted the gun.
“No Embassy Suites for a hundred miles,” the trooper blurted.
“Hmm. Courtyards? Hiltons? Sheratons? Hyatts? You got a Holiday Inn around here, even?”
“There’s a Motel 6, nine miles up the road.”
Remo tossed the handgun over his shoulder. The trooper watched, dismayed, as his weapon became a tiny black speck that plunged out of sight on the far side of the metal mine building.
“When we have the caravan, finding a hotel will no longer be a problem,” Chiun lectured as they drove off in the Hyundai.
‘We’ll have to find campgrounds instead.”
‘We’ll need only a Wal-Mart, the store that allows campers to park overnight on their lots free of charge.”
“That’ll be convenient if you run low on kimonos.”
“Remo, thank goodness. Where have you been for the past twenty-six hours?” Smith’s voice was extra lemony this afternoon.
“Don’t even start, Smitty. We were spelunking with albino cannibals. Chiun will back me up on that. Won’t you, Little Father?”
Chiun waved over his shoulder dismissively. He was sitting on the floor in front of the television— which was dark. The Korean master was intently poring over the latest entries on his iBlogger.
Mark Howard was also on the line and it was he who provided the obligatory echo. “Albino cannibals?”
“Yes.”
“Any sign of Fastbinder?” Smith asked.
“No. You were right about him.”
“I was wrong. Fastbinder almost certainly has something to do with the attacks at the waste site.”
“What? He survived?”
“Fastbinder or one of his comrades.” Smith briefed Remo on the activities of the earth drill at the White Sands test range.
“I guess the odds of somebody totally unrelated to Fastbinder showing up with an earth drill a few weeks later is pretty slim,” Remo said. “You sure it was a new earth drill?”
“Absolutely,” Mark Howard said. “Totally different profile. It used some sort of electrical discharge to tunnel into the earth. The earth drill you saw operated mechanically.”
Remo was relieved. When he broke something, he liked it to stay broken. It was a self-confidence thing. “So where’d they come from?”
“Unknown,” Smith said. “We can assume they were based outside the Fastbinder home adjacent to his Museum of Mechanical Marvels, or were simply absent when you and Chiun paid your call.”
“Coleslaw’s behind it,” Remo declared.
Smith made a sour
“CURE
