Warren Murphy: Troubled Waters

Then Remo shot him with his own weapon. One dot for each eye, one for the nose and a few more for the mouth, and Remo had created a big sloppy paint-ball smiley face on the SEAL's chest.

The last two SEALS still waited below. Remo went down to join them.

He went down fast. So fast they could barely see the bounding black form that was suddenly in their midst. Before the last two SEALS knew what was happening, he was between them, striking left and right with his pinching fingers and putting them to sleep.

He couldn't leave them undead, so he shot them, too.

Now he had the place to himself and everything was quiet. It would stay that way until the exercise ended-when one of the teams called into the commander or 6:00 a.m., whichever came first.

Remo decided the saloon was his best lookout. He went back upstairs and climbed to the roof, finding it gave him the best view of the desolate reservation terrain in all directions.

He sat cross-legged, under the clear sky with more stars than he could count. But he didn't see the stars; he had other things to look at. The horizon. The land. And everything that prowled it.

"Come along, little doggies," he said to the night.

THE NIGHT WAS COOL, BY comparison to the day. The stillness was almost like a presence in the night desert. Sound carried far. Remo heard far. But he didn't hear the sounds he wanted to hear.

There was a small crash at about midnight from Sundberg's Mercantile. Remo had left the SEALS in the cellar conscious because they were trapped. Trying to get out was against the rules. "If those kids make one more noise, I'll go over and put 'em to sleep," he muttered to himself. But the SEALS in the cellar were silent after that.

At 2:15 a.m., by the clock in the sky, Remo heard a sound that stirred his blood. It was far off and coming closer. Four paws moving on the desert soil. Canine. And then there was another. And another. It was a pack.

But what he heard warned him to be disappointed. The paws sounded too light.

The pack appeared, and it was easy to make out the tail held low to the ground, not quite between the legs, and the small build.

Coyotes.

Six of them were approaching warily, sniffing everywhere, their bodies stiff with their awareness of danger. They marked their territory at every bush and rock, and gradually they relaxed and began yipping to one another. Remo cursed silently.

He knew exactly what he was seeing.

The coyote family had recently been frightened off this patch of territory by the arrival of the Mexican Grays. They were cautiously returning, sniffing out the terrain-and deciding that the interlopers had moved on.

The coyotes were telling Remo that his wolves were gone.

He felt angry. But mostly he felt defeated. He had picked up the trail of the wolf pack twice in the past three months as they made their bold, bloody migration across Texas and New Mexico. But these weren't ordinary wolves. They were intelligent. They were cunning. They knew they would be tracked. Time and again they had foiled the trail, mostly by stowing away on vehicles at gas stations and rest stops.

It looked like Remo would be going after them again. On foot, if necessary. The people who ran this summer camp might have a problem with that, but he'd let Smitty pave the way.

But now it was time to end the little game. He powered up a walkie-talkie appropriated from the SEALs and phoned their CO.

"All finished. Come and get 'em."

The coyotes fled when the sound of whining aircraft interrupted the night's natural noises. The officer in charge was red-faced, glaring hard at Remo as he walked through swirling dust, ducking below the helicopter's swirling rotor blades.

"Where are they, dammit?" he demanded. "Here ya go," said Remo. He had gathered the unconscious SEALs and sat them in a long row on the wooden sidewalk. Each had a hand on his neighbor's right shoulder, just to make them look less menacing. "Here come the others."

Two SEALs, paint splashed, had extricated themselves from Remo's pitfall in the old mercantile store with the ladder he tore off the side of a building and lowered to them. Their third companion was being dragged between them.

"Jesus Christ, I wouldn't have believed it," the commander muttered.

"Wonders never cease," said Remo.

"Bullshit!" the older man snarled. "These children will be going back to school."

"They're not all that bad, really," Remo said.

"Not that bad? How do you explain this mess?" he demanded.

"Oh, well, it's because I'm so damn good, ya see."

"You're not that good!"

"Am too!"

"By the way," the officer informed him, glaring balefully at him, "you've got a message waiting for you back at my HQ. Eyes-only, urgent. Better check it out."

"Aw, crap." Remo sighed. "I'll need the chopper, I guess."

"No sweat." There was a softening, however marginal, about the Navy officer's attitude. "I've got a full night's work ahead of me right here, just cleaning up your mess."

Remo strolled toward the chopper and called from just below the whirling rotor blades and flicked the object in his hand with one finger. It rocketed at the Navy officer.

"Hey!" Remo shouted.

The officer practically bounced off the ground and spun in place, almost losing his balance and desperately trying to crane his head to see what had just happened to his rear quarters. He discovered the seat of his trousers was wet with fresh blue paint.

The officer shot Remo a look that was disbelief and fury. He didn't know what to do first: ball him out or demand to know how he'd fired a paint ball without actually having a gun.

"Am too!" Remo shouted over the rotor noise.

Chapter 3

The red-eye into White Plains managed to arrive six minutes earlier than its absurdly precise ETA of 6:13 a.m. The plane was nearly empty, leaving Remo thankful for small favors, even though a fat man in a rumpled polyester suit had snorted, wheezed and rumbled in his sleep throughout the flight, directly opposite the seat in coach that Remo occupied.

A rental car was waiting for him at the airport, subcompact, no doubt the cheapest one available. Economy was critical to Dr. Harold Smith and CURE, the supersecret crime-fighting agency that Remo served, although its budget was so well disguised that only Dr. Smith himself had any real idea of the resources at his fingertips.

Remo had an odd relationship with money by the standards of most people, in that he didn't care about it. He had a lot of it, certainly. Being Reigning Master of Sinanju made him, technically, the custodian of Sinanju's wealth. He had no idea how vast his resources actually were. Chiun, Reigning Master Emeritus, smacked his hand if he tried to get anywhere near the money.

To Remo, you bought things with various plastic cards that were issued to him by CURE. The cards had lots of names on them. Most of them had the first name Remo, and they never ever had the last name Williams.

He didn't mind flying coach most of the time. He would have upgraded himself if he wanted to and nobody, but nobody, would have stopped him. He didn't mind driving an inexpensive set of wheels if it got him where he needed to go. But when he saw the three-year-old Beetle with a partially detached fender he went back to the Rent Cars Cheap! desk and said no thanks. "Got something a little bigger?"

The pretty young Rent Cars Cheap! clerk looked doubtful.

"Newer?" Remo asked. The clerk looked sad.

"Do you have a car without metal parts hanging down far enough to drag on the pavement?"

The clerk looked despondent.

Remo moved on to the next car-rental booth in the airport concourse and asked for something nice. "Yes, sir!" said the middle-aged man in a buttoned double-breasted jacket and neat tie, with gold tie clip. He looked more like a bank president than a car-rental clerk. "What are you looking for? Sporty? Luxury? An SUV?"