Remo, his bag packed, opened the door of his suite to a raised female fist. His hand instinctively shot up, and he just as quickly countermanded his instinct and brought it down.
Avital blinked. “Do you always answer the door ready for a fight?” she asked.
“We have a lot of Jehovah’s Witnesses in my neighborhood,” he said. “Look, I was just getting ready to go out, so I can’t stay and chat.”
“Go out?” she asked, glancing at his duffel. “Looks like you’re on more than just an errand.”
“Actually, it is just an errand,” Remo said. “A few errands.” She shook her head. “Okay, they’re not exactly local errands.”
“I’m still packed, and I’m coming with you,” she said, pushing past him.
“Really, I don’t have time for you to run back to your room and get your things.”
She picked up a small valise sitting in the corner of the room. “Ready to go,” she said. She gave him a coy smile. “Actually, I was coming down to retrieve this anyway. I left it here earlier.”
Remo was about to argue when the phone chirped.
“Your transport is ready,” Harold Smith informed him through the phone.
“Aunt Mildred,” Remo replied. “Now’s not really a good time.”
“She’s there?” Smith asked. “Does she know about the bombs?”
“No, no, Aunt Mildred, nothing like that.”
“Large family you have there,” Avital whispered.
“Remo, I need not remind you that anyone who learns about Walker’s plan…”
“Yes, I understand, Aunt Mildred,” Remo said. “Uncle Fred’s drinking won’t be a problem, I’m sure. You take care. My love to Aunt Brunhilde.”
Avital raised an eyebrow, and Remo shrugged. He tucked the phone back into his pants pocket.
“Okay,” he said. “If you’re coming with me, then we have to scoot.” He ushered her out the door and allowed himself one brief glimpse at Chiun’s hospital bed, and listened until he’d heard three steady beeps from the heart monitor. They were coming further apart. “Be back soon, Little Father,” he whispered.
· · ·
It didn’t feel so long ago that a mission into Russia would have involved a C-141 Starlifter, a B-1 stealth plane, and a HALO jump. But these were more civilized times. Now, a flight into Russia was just a matter of buying a ticket. His first class ticket was waiting for him, and by the time they arrived at the airport, one would be waiting for Avital as well.
“I don’t know what you’re following me for,” Remo said quite innocently on the taxi ride to the airport after Avital had hung up with some whiny fellow named Ephraim. “You’ve already recovered…equipment,” he said.
“But we don’t know who manufactured the…equipment,” she said, cutting her eyes at the taxi driver and maintaining Remo’s subtlety of conversation. “And I’m willing to bet that you do know.”
“Me?” Remo replied. “I’m just out for a much needed change of scenery.”
“Of course you are,” Avital said. She leaned back against the back seat of the cab. “As am I. And we both know how beautiful northern Russia is in the wintertime.” She snuggled up next to Remo as though already feeling the cold. “I’ve always wanted to experience an American Christmas.”
“I thought you were Jewish?”
“Presents are presents,” she said with a girlish smile. “One can never get too many of those, regardless of the reason.”
“What happened to ‘better to give than to receive?’”
“Spoken like someone who has never received,” she said confidently. Remo smiled. She so reminded him of Chiun at times. No wonder he liked her.
“I’m not completely without charity,” she said with a pout, before turning serious. “I just don’t know where to send my money.” She sighed. “I want to help the earthquake victims, but…” She held her arms out. “But which ones? They’re everywhere it seems. Something really, really strange is going on, and if I wasn’t so focused on ya Homaar…” Her voice trailed off. For the first time, she looked meek and helpless.
Remo knew exactly how she felt, but moreso, because he knew exactly what was causing the earthquakes, and it ate at his gut. He looked out the window at the passing traffic. By his reckoning, sometime in the last five minutes another bomb had gone off somewhere in the world, and at least five more would have detonated before he would make it all the way to Vanavara, at which point he was going to have to come up with a method of shaking Avital off his tail. But for now, he kept his arm around her and pulled her close. With Chiun’s life hanging by a thread, and the world literally in the balance, he allowed himself the luxury of human contact for the duration of the trip.
· · ·
One taxi, one plane ride, and one helicopter lift later, and the remote outpost town of Vanavara had two more people walking its desolate streets. Remo helped Avital down from the chopper, then quietly tipped the pilot five hundred American dollars and whispered something to him. The pilot pocketed the five bills and nodded before taking off.
“Doesn’t he need to refuel or something?” Avital shouted over the roar of the rotors.
Remo shrugged. “I’m not the pilot.”
Avital looked around. “So, we’re here,” she said, pulling her down coat tightly around her to brace against the whipping wind. She had no idea how Remo could stand it in just a long sleeved white turtleneck and matching chinos. “Final destination, you said. So, which of these guys is our bomb builder?”
“Patience, grasshopper,” Remo said, guiding her by the elbow away from the landing pad and toward a row of shops. “Vanavara is actually something of a tourist stop—albeit for a rather crazy breed of tourist. Let’s catch our breath and then we’ll lay out a plan.”
In the first shop they entered, Remo found what he was looking for. Vodka. He had a feeling he could find the same bottle in any of the half-dozen shops in town.
“Really?” she asked, as he pocketed the bottle and walked down the main (and apparently only) street into the heart of Vanavara.
“All part of the plan,” he said. “We need to blend in and look like we belong.” As they got further down the street, he pulled the bottle back out and unscrewed the cap. “Here, you need to take a swig.” To demonstrate, he tilted the bottle back and drained some into his mouth.
Avital was unsure of what Remo’s plan was, but she knew two things for certain. One, he was the craziest American she’d ever encountered. Two, he was always right. She took the bottle and took one hesitant swallow of the burning liquid, as she felt Remo’s hand on her shoulder steadying her. Then her knees went out from under her and everything went dark.
As Avital crumpled, Remo caught her with one arm. He then proceeded to spray out the vodka he’d been holding in his cheek, spitting it all over the street. He poured a little bit more vodka over the front of Avital’s coat and tossed the remainder of the bottle into a corner trash can.
He kept one arm under Avital, and held one of her arms around his shoulders. To anyone looking on, it would appear as if he were helping an incredibly drunk girlfriend home. And when Remo was certain that nobody was looking, he deposited Avital’s unconscious form on a bench outside a building marked ‘POLITSIYA’ and quickly strolled away. Within moments he knew an officer would find her and take her in for public drunkenness. And if the officer did anything more than put her in a holding cell overnight, he’d deal with that when he returned.
If he returned.
He could hear the approach of the helicopter as he neared their original landing site, and when it touched down he lightly hopped up into the front seat beside the pilot.
“Don’t you need to refuel or something?” Remo asked loudly over the roar of the blades. The pilot grinned and shrugged, and Remo decided he was better off not knowing.
· · ·
The copter flew north north-east, over miles of snow covered desolation. There was no human life out here, none that had any sense anyway. Remo had instructed the pilot to let him down about five miles to the south of his destination—the Tunguska archeological site, which now lay largely abandoned. Remo hadn’t been lying when he told Avital that Vanavara was a tourist site; it was where anyone wanting to tour the big hole in the ground that was Tunguska would set off with a tour guide, and then spend the next nine days over rough terrain before taking selfies with a bunch of nothing behind them.
The tours did not run in the winter, which was the bulk of the year, because the terrain was impassable with deep snow.
A few miles short of the drop point, the copter banked to the left.
“Hey,” Remo shouted. Then louder, “Hey!” He pointed to the ground. “We’re not there yet,” he shouted over the roar of the blades.
The pilot shrugged and grinned sheepishly. To emphasize his point, he tapped on the glass cover of the fuel gauge. “Refuel,” he said in a thick Russian accent. “Turn now.”
Remo rolled his eyes. “Hey, look! Is that the Abominable Snowman?” He pointed past the pilot to his left. As the pilot’s gaze followed, Remo undid his harness and let himself fall backward from the copter. It was only a few hundred feet—granted, he was expecting the copter to go in lower, or at least get near snow level when he was ready to disembark, but it was a workable exit. What pissed him off the most as he picked his landing spot and went into guided freefall was that he was going to have to hike about three more miles than he had expected over snow. It wouldn’t affect him so much, but it was the extra time—time he and the planet didn’t have to spare.
He straightened his body and neatly dove at an angle into a snowdrift several feet deep, swimming through the stuff like the water that it was and emerging several yards away.
“There goes your tip,” Remo muttered at the vanishing copter, then turned away from it and oriented his body in the direction of the facility. “Could have at least dropped me off on the other side of those hills,” he groused as he began running. With each step, his footfalls climbed higher into the snow, until within the space of a football field he was skimming along the top of it.
He was about halfway up the hill when the tremor struck. Remo had about two seconds of warning, for all the good it gave him, as he felt the advancing P-waves send a wave of nausea through his intestines.
The hill felt it, too, and sent a wave of something else—a cascading tsunami of snow that crashed into him, sweeping him downward and burying him under so many feet of whiteness that all became black.
· · ·
The first thing Remo noticed was that he was breathing rapidly and shallowly. Most people would feel panic in such a scenario, but curiously Remo’s first emotion was embarrassment. Sinanju was breathing, and if he couldn’t even do that correctly, he didn’t deserve to breathe at all. He would fail the planet, but worse than that, he would fail Chiun.
Getting control of his breathing, however, proved to be more difficult than he expected. There was very little in the way of air around his body, and he had no way of knowing which way was up.
“Breathe.”
“Easy for you to say, Little Father,” Remo said to the voice in his head. “You’ve got hoses feeding you all the oxygen you can handle.”
“Breathe!”
Remo strove for a deep breath, and aspirated a mouthful of ice crystals. He coughed. “There’s not enough air,” he muttered weakly.
“Complaints,” the voice in his head chided him. “Always you complain. ‘The ground is too hard.’ ‘I want a hamburger.’ Why I was left to train such a weak, pale piece of a pig’s ear, the gods only know.”
“Shut the hell up and let me die in peace,” Remo grumbled.
“What is snow?” Chiun’s voice intoned. “What is snow but water? What is water? What is water but oxygen and less than oxygen? All around you, there is oxygen. Breathe!”
Bringing his hands up to his face in the darkness, Remo cupped them over his mouth. Then he opened them, and let his palms fill with snow, scraping it from the wall pressing in on him. His hands filled, he rubbed his palms together, melting the snow into water, then evaporating the water into steam. He took a breath and did this again, then again.
When he had hollowed out sufficient space, he took a pinch of snow in one hand and held his other hand beside it. He let it go. The snow went sideways, hitting him in the face. Up was straight ahead of him.
Burrowing, taking few breaks to melt more snow into a breath of air, Remo made his way arduously toward what had to be the surface. The blackness gradually turned into gray, then white, and he broke through into sweet, thin air, filling his lungs. Centering himself, he found he was once again at the foot of the hills.
Remo shook himself. “Once more unto the breach,” he said aloud. He began marching up the side of the snow-covered hills, this time letting his legs sink into the snow, happy to be alive, and ready to deliver death.