The extra three hundred lights showed Fastbinder the activity at the mouth of the river entrance that his son called Stinx. A ceiling-mounted boom was lowering a welded metal rectangle over the entrance as a knot of albinos and slave topsiders steered it into place. The lower half of the frame disappeared into the water. Brackets, bolted into the stone, accepted the frame readily and it was obvious that it covered the entire opening. Topsiders balanced precariously on both banks to spin giant nuts into place to secure the frame.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“It will assassinate the assassins.”
“How? What will it do?”
There was a shout of alarm at that moment from a topsider on a ladder. While he was turning one of the top bolts, the rock crumbled under one foot of the ladder. He fell toward the water as it flowed out of the opening. Part of his body was inside the frame, and his flesh vanished, When he bobbed to the surface. Fastbinder briefly saw two-thirds of a man with his head and shoulder sliced cleanly off.
“Wire,” Jack droned. “Really, really small gauge. High tensile.”
“I see.”
“I diverted the Flix River into the Stinx. I’m gonna wash those jerks right through the wire, Pops. They’ll be shaved thinner than roast beef from the deli.”
Fastbinder got it now. Yes—the force of the combined water flow would be inescapable. The assassins would be hurtled through the mouth of the tunnel. If the wires held long enough…
“It just might work.”
Jack turned on him, eyes blazing. “It will work, old man.”
At that moment Jacob Fastbinder III, the king of the Underworld, became afraid of what he saw in the eyes of his own beloved son.
“Water,” Remo said as the boom of the explosion died into a new rush of distant sound.
Chiun raised one hand from the river and waved his soaked kimono sleeve magnanimously. “I am humbled by your powers of observation.”
“Come on, Chiun, that brat’s sicced the Mississippi River overflow on us. We gotta get out of here.”
They both saw something pass over the entrance then, and as it settled into position the lights behind it brought into contrast the skeins strung tightly across it.
“The fool would attempt to net us or electrocute us?” Chiun said. But the glittering fineness of the strands revealed its purpose.
“I don’t want to be grated,” Remo griped. “Let’s find somewhere to ride it out.” He searched quickly but saw only walls worn smooth by aeons of water flow. The approaching tidal wave made a discordant moan, and the pressure of the air being shoved ahead of it was getting powerful itself.
Remo sprang from the water and chopped into the stone wall with a flat hand, then used the gash as a handhold as he reached to the ceiling of the cavern and tapped the rock with his knuckle. The rock felt solid. He was looking for a weakness in the strata. There was always a weakness. The gale-force wind couldn’t mask the thunder of the water wall that was chugging. Chiun raised his eyebrows in impatience.
Remo found the sweet spot he was looking for and gave it the perfect-one-hand bash. It would have cold-cocked a large sea mammal, and it caused an almost perfect disruption in the structure of the stone ceiling. A chunk of rock separated and thudded into the river, just as wall of water swept through the tunnel with the force of an avalanche.
The albinos were fleeing. The topsider slaves were wrestling with their manacles as the wind blast grew. Some of them toppled into the water, others flattened on the banks, and then the surge came. A shaft of foamy water blasted out the mouth of the tunnel, sprayed the interior and washed out a hundred human beings.
The pressure equalized and a minute later the surge became only a strong flow of water. The scattered slaves and albinos began collecting themselves and collecting the dead, which included most of the slaves.
“See? It’s still there. Pops,” Jack Fast announced disdainfully.
“But what of zee assassins? How will we know if they went through it and were sliced to little bits?”
Jack nodded to the rear of the city, where a fresh crew of topside slaves appeared with dozens of skim nets. They trooped to the banks and began scooping detritus from the deep pool at the base of the river mouth, while others waded over the rocky dam to search for remains caught in the shallows.
“The wire mesh is spaced with six-inch gaps. If they went through, there will be pieces big enough to find.”
Fastbinder touched his son on the shoulder. “Time for us to leave here, Jack.”
Jack Fast turned on his father abruptly, saw the man’s look of fear and spun back to the city view. Something was moving in the tunnel, behind the wire mesh. There was a man waving his hands.
No, two men, and where the men waved their hands the wire mesh parted like a stick going through spider webs.
“Jack, we will go now.” Fastbinder squeezed his son’s shoulder insistently.
