Smith had called in an Air Force helicopter to transport the Masters of Sinanju to the nearest of the incursions from below. It was a measure of his concern that he had allocated military resources even as the U.S. Military secretly mobilized itself to carry out the largest domestic defense operation in the history of the country. To further speed up their deployment, Smith had Remo and Chiun take a chartered jet from the Rye airstrip. That was far too close for security in Smith’s eyes. The jet put them in Wichita, then the helicopter took them at top speed over the suburbs. They would be at the entrance site in minutes, and Remo still wasn’t telling Chiun what he had up his sleeve.
Green County State Forest passed by under the chopper. The overnight campers who survived the attack were gone, and the park rangers had been escorted firmly away. Now it was a staging ground for military operations, with vehicles and troops swarming around the entrance to a rocky hole in the ground.
Their Air Force pilot, as ordered, landed long enough to have his priority shipment of supplies offloaded and he kept his eyes facing forward at all times.
He didn’t know who his passengers were and he didn’t care. All he knew was that when he was on his way back to Wichita and he glanced in the back, the passengers were gone.
The cordon around the cave entrance was fifty men strong. Somehow, they never saw the two new arrivals. The heat sensors missed them. The motion detectors decided the readings it got were far too fast to be animal, too slow to be airborne munitions.
“Why have they not come inside?” Chiun demanded after he and Remo had entered the small cave. “They wait outside like frightened villagers sitting in ambush around a wolverine den.”
“They don’t know how to come inside,” Remo said. “Junior says they’ve never simulated this kind of military operation on this scale. They’re waiting for the official plans, I guess.”
“Plans made by men who weren’t forward thinking enough to anticipate this? They are doomed.”
“You got that right. No matter how many men they send in, they’ll be able to attack two or three at a time at best. Those poor schmucks try coming down here and they’ll be dead ducks.”
Remo felt the weight of his responsibility on his shoulders and increased his pace, coming to the freshly chopped gap in the rocks where the Green Cavern had once dead-ended. Beyond it was an endless variation of rocky rooms, halls and pits. The narrowest passages had been widened with hammers. By the light of a glow stick, Remo and Chiun descended with the speed and smooth motion of slippery cave salamanders.
The trail was unmistakable. There was blood and worse on the cave floor. There was discarded clothing and wallets and keys. There were bodies, some with big mouthfuls of flesh missing.
They found one of the bodies alive, and she lived long enough to babble about a forced march, about being chained like a beast of burden to help haul the invaders’ booty. “I wasn’t fast enough. They had a bus to catch.” She had been abandoned—but not before a few of them chewed open her stomach. A quick snack before they moved on. “They wanted to keep eating.” She chuckled, blood coming from her mouth.
Remo inspected the wound and inventoried her missing entrails. Nothing could save the woman. He ended her suffering with a touch to the neck.
“A bus to catch?” Chiun asked.
“Transportation, back to wherever King Fastbinder has his court. I bet it’s the new earth drill.”
They ran on, bounding over boulders, dancing through jagged, water-carved canyons and slipping down endless jumbles of rock. They were on their third three-hour glow stick when the clink of metal and the cry of human voices came from far below them.
Without a word Remo shot ahead, and Chiun raced to keep up. Faster than any man could move on the earth above, Chiun moved among the rocks and runnels of the earth below, and still it wasn’t fast enough. Remo flowed like quicksilver, with all the skills and speed of a Master of Sinanju.
Chiun heard the sound of running water soon enough.
Remo felt the space open up in front of him as he homed in on the river, and came to a sudden stop at the end of the tunnel. He had an instant to take in the river that moved fast and deep close by, and along the riverbank was a collection of transport watercraft. They consisted of long, tapered frames of steel bars, and inside each was a mass of polystyrene foam. People and the stolen booty were chained inside hollows chopped out of the foam. The rear of each watercraft was cross-braced with steel rods that were latched in place, and a braided steel winch line connected all the watercraft together in a train. The fourth pod carried no prisoners and no gear, only a small army of albinos, using chains as seat belts inside the contraption.
