“Fuck off!” Jack swung his fist behind his back, connecting hard with Fastbinder’s head. The old man slumped against the cold stone, more stunned by his son’s harsh words than by the blow.
“Attack and kill those men,” Jack shouted, and the city-wide public-address system blasted his orders throughout the cavern.
The assassins allowed themselves to drift out of the river mouth with the water flow, then stroked with uncanny speed into the shallows and erupted onto the shore, befuddling the blind albinos who attempted to track them by smell.
“They’re on the bank,” Jack bellowed throughout the cavern.
The younger one looked right at him, from a quarter mile away, and gave him a deadly smile.
“Hiya, Jack!” the man shouted, as loud as Jack’s amplifiers.
The albinos moved in for the kill. Jack suddenly felt a profound lack of confidence in his Albinoids. But there were a hundred of them—the assassins didn’t stand a chance!
The assassins solved the problem of the Albinoids easily. They stepped up on top of them and stepped lightly from head to head, leaving the attackers behind in a state of confusion.
Jack swallowed his chagrin and turned to go, only to find he was alone. No Pops. Pops’s personal computer workstation, the one he never used but insisted on installing, was now moved aside to reveal a tunnel no bigger than a sewer hole.
Pops had to have had it carved out when Jack was on his mission to Texas. But why? Pops would never double-cross his own son, would he?
Jack knew the answer. He rushed to the secret tunnel and was about to crawl in when he saw the brilliant sparkle of lightning from far below. Pops’s secret tunnel went right to Jack’s Earth Drill—and Pops was escaping in JED without Jack!
“You don’t leave
The sparkle of the earth drill was already getting faint. Pops was on his way topside, and Jack had no way to follow him.
Jack ran back to his window and caught a glimpse of the assassins, who had somehow scurried atop a rock protrusion that was being carved with sleeping niches. They leaped off the boulder, surely to fall to their deaths—only to land ten feet away on a partially completed defensive wall of stone rubble.
They were coming fast.
“Hey, sonny, is your dad at home?” the younger one called.
Jack Fast stumbled through the door and dropped through the small shaft into the emergency escape pod.
“Just in case the cave dudes go ballistic, Pops,” Jack had explained weeks ago when he unveiled it.
“You’ll never catch me resorting to that contraption, Jack,” Fastbinder had said at the time.
“Rot in hell. Pops,” Jack grunted now as he slid into the safety harness, slammed the support cage shut and slapped the glowing emergency escape button.
The escape charges fired. The force of the ejection blast turned everything black for teenage genius Jack Fast.
Remo felt the pressure waves and slipped over the wall just as the base of the cliff building shattered. An orange burst of fire split part of the wall and revealed something metal behind it.
“What now?” he demanded of Chiun as they waited out the explosion, then he scrambled atop the wall in time to see the EEP reach the river. It was a metal cage that rocketed over the stony surface with a spray of sparks and slammed into the river beyond the dam.
“Mother of Murgatroyd!” Remo flew from the wall and sped after the pod. “I am so damn sick of your gizmos and gadgets and robots and supersecret pen decoders and whatever the hell this thing is.”
Whatever it was, it was a better machine than the river pods the albinos had used, constructed of a dully gleaming alloy. It compressed and sprang back when it glanced hard off a sharp rock ridge. It swayed in the current, creaked in protest against the shrunken orifice at the far end of the cavern, then deformed itself to slither inside the narrow slot that channeled away the combined water flow from all three rivers.
Remo came to a halt at the bank, too late. “He got away.”
Chiun came up behind him. “That river continues its descent. It will carry him deep into the earth.” Remo stared at the opening, thinking dark thoughts, fighting the urge to pursue Jack Fast. “Who knows what sort of gadgets he equipped himself with?”
“He had no earth drill, and this tunnel is unlike the others, Remo. It is a steep shaft. I think he’ll not walk out this way.”
Remo nodded tightly. “Not this way. But some way.” Chiun was standing calmly in the blazing overhead floodlights as his kimono emitted slivers of steam. His eyebrows moved together.
“What?” Remo asked.
Chiun was looking at the jumble of boulders that formed a narrow, long drainage gap for the heavy river flow. They were, the old Master noticed, of a nearly uniform size and shape. Could they possibly have been carved and placed by human hands?
He touched one of the corners. If man worked the block into this shape, then he did so long centuries ago, for the corner was smoothed by time.
