Warren Murphy: Timber Line

She talked for a half-hour, seemingly without a breath or a pause, then stopped abruptly and said, "That's me. Now you."

Remo thought for a moment of telling her something, anything that might ease her opinion of Smith, the head of CURE and his boss, but decided against it. Smith deserved the grief he got in life.

"Let's just say that maybe somebody you know knows somebody who knows somebody who might have sent somebody like me here to help."

Joey nodded. "I wouldn't be surprised. I used to get the idea that Dr. Smith was an important man."

"Slow down. I never said anything about Harold Smith," Remo said.

"And I never told you that his name was Harold," she said. "So thanks. And thank him, too."

The sound was very quiet, so soft that even as Remo sat there looking at Joey Webb, he wasn't sure he had heard it.

He had almost reached out and touched the girl, almost taken her into his arms out of a sense of personal desire rather than as a matter of duty, when he heard the call and stopped.

"What is it, Remo?"

"Someone's calling my name," he said.

She listened for a moment.

"I don't hear anything," she said. "It must be just the wind. Sometimes it plays tricks on you up here."

Remo listened again. This time the calling was louder. Still below the threshold of hearing of non-Sinanju ears, but louder nevertheless.

"I've got to see what it it," he said, getting up from the couch.

"Don't go out there," she said.

"Why?"

"I've got a feeling," she said.

"I'll be right back," Remo said.

Outside the A-frame, the wind swirled the sound around, through the air, until it seemed to Remo as if it came from everywhere and nowhere.

He started off, over the snow, putting twenty-five yards of distance between himself and the cabin. Then he stopped to listen. The sound was softer than it had been. Wrong direction.

He tried moving toward the right side of the A-frame. Same result.

It was only when he got behind the cabin and took a position twenty-five yards behind it that the swirling, eerie sound seemed to grow a little louder.

"Remo," it hissed. "Remo. Remo. Remo." Over and over, like the soundtrack from a nightmare of horror and death.

He knew the direction the sound came from now, but the gusting, whistling winds still made it difficult to pin down the source.

It was slow work. Five yards forward. Was the sound louder? No? Then back five yards, and move off five yards in another direction. Slowly, he saw that the sound was taking him farther and farther from the A-frame. And still the same single name being called out, over and over: "Remo. Remo. Remo." He was getting close now, close enough to know that the voice was the practiced, whispering hiss of someone, probably a man, trying not to let his voice be recognized.

He looked through the darkness of the night but saw no one. He heard no movement, no unusual sound except his name, muffled, being called again and again.

It was getting much louder now. He knew he should be almost on top of the caller. But still he saw nothing. The sound seemed almost to come from below his feet.

He looked down but before he could inspect the snow he stood on, there was another sound, a strong whooshing sound. He looked up, back across the hundred yards, toward the back of the A-frame.

In horror, he saw flames burst from the rear windows of the A-frame. He started to run, but he had taken only three steps when the cabin lodge exploded before his eyes.

And Joey and Chiun were inside.

The air was filled with flying, flaming bits of wood. They peppered Remo's face and body as he ran across the snow back toward the A-frame. Both sloping side walls had been blown open. Flames poured up through the opening where the peak of the building had been. The soft smell of pine that permeated the night air had surrendered to the pungent aroma of burning wood.

As Remo neared the building, he could see that even the interior walls that had marked the bedrooms had been blown out. As he reached the back wall of the building, he dove without hesitation through a blown-out opening in the wood, spun, and landed on his feet inside what was left of the A-frame.

Joey's bedroom had been to his right. The walls were gone and he could see only her bed. The bedding was aflame, and fire licked from around Remo's feet up around his face. But there was no darkened lump of body lying in the bed. He ran into that area, keeping flames away from his face with the movements of his arms in front of his body, and carefully looked around the flaming wreckage of the bed for her body. But there was no body, not alongside the bed or under the bed, or anywhere on the floor.

He ran to the other side of the A-frame, where his bedroom had been and where Chiun had been sleeping on the floor. The bed there too was aflame.

But no Chiun. No sign of the old man's body. Remo could not even find a trace of the fiber sleeping mat that the old man had carefully unrolled on the floor.

His stomach sank. The blast might have been so powerful that their bodies were literally blown out of the building.

He heard a creaking sound and looked up just as another section of the splintered side wall broke loose and crashed down toward him. Remo dodged the wall, took one last look around, then bolted for the front of the building, where the framing for the original front door still stood, the door long since blown away, but the framing standing as if it were an invitation to safety. As he ran, more and more of the sloping walls broke loose and peppered him with flame. The floor was burning also, and he could feel the heat of it under his shoes.

He burst through the opening of the building out into the clearing in front of the A-frame. He breathed deep to rid his lungs of smoke. And then he stopped.

Sitting under a tree, his legs folded tightly, his hands clasped in his lap in repose, was Chiun. Standing alongside him, both of them looking at the fire and at Remo, was Joey Webb.

Chiun looked up at the woman, nodded toward Remo, and said "Now he comes."

Remo smiled as he jogged toward them. "You're all right," he said.

"No thanks to you," Chiun said.

"What happened?" Remo asked.

"My sleep was interrupted," Chiun said.

"Besides that," asked Remo.

"I was sleeping," Chiun said, "thinking that I was safe with you on guard. I heard a noise. I paid it no mind. My prize student was standing guard in the night, and all was safe. So I thought."

"What happened, Chiun?" Remo asked again. "Save the carping for some other time."

"Carping? Is it carping when I relate to you how this child and I almost died?" He looked up at Joey. "Is that carping?"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"See," Chiun told Remo. "It is not carping."

"All right, get on with it," Remo said. "I give up."

"Where was I?" Chiun asked.

"You heard a noise. You thought I was on guard. Little did you know that I was down at the neighborhood saloon having a double Scotch on the rocks with a twist."

"Right," said Chiun evenly. "I heard a noise. I paid it no mind. Then I smelled fumes. The fumes of gasoline. Still I paid no mind. I knew you would protect us. So I slept on."

"And?"

"And then I heard the whoosh of flames. I jumped to my feet. I knew there was not a second to waste if I was to save my abandoned, unguarded body from disaster. I found this child in the next room. At great danger to my own life, I grabbed her up and we fled through the front door of the building just before it exploded. A boom."

"Bomb," Remo said. "Somebody set a bomb."

"Obviously," Chiun said. "It was the closest escape of my life. A moment's hesitation would have doomed us both. Fortunately, Remo, I never trusted you, so I was on my guard, ready to meet disaster if it came."