Warren Murphy: Air Raid

The intense heat chased them down the driveway and out into the street. Still Chiun ran, Amanda thrown over one shoulder. Even when he stopped, he danced through falling fragments of Hubert St. Clair's chalet.

Chiun set Amanda to the street. She reeled in place as she tried to get her bearings.

It all seemed to have happened in an instant. In a fiery blur she'd gone from standing in the cellar to dodging flaming house chunks out beyond Dr. St. Clair's twisted front gate.

The heat from the oil-fed fire pushed them back. Acrid smoke poured out of the jagged hole where the upper story had been. The roof had been blown off completely.

Amanda fought the fire for oxygen, panting to catch her breath. For a moment, her Lifton pretensions burned away. The money, the cars, the hotelsnone of it seemed to matter as much as her life. She looked gratefully at the two men who had saved her.

She saw only Chiun. Worry formed deep in the lines of his weathered face as he watched the fire. "Where's Remo?" Amanda asked.

She glanced back at the chalet. The bottom-floor walls were starting to collapse into the central crater. Flames of orange crackled and danced.

"He did get out, didn't he?" she asked, her voice growing very small.

Chiun didn't reply. His expression carved in stone, he watched impassively as perdition claimed the sunny Swiss mountainside.

HERR HAHN KEPT his eyes off the thermal-imaging unit from the moment he pressed the toggle switch. With that much heat exploding into light, if he'd seen it he would have been blinking away stars for the rest of the week.

He watched out the boat's cabin window as a thick curl of angry black smoke rose from the hills above the cold waves of Lake Geneva.

Thanks to all that oil buried in the underground tanks, the fire would burn for hours.

An oil-well fire in the Alps.

As the hired killer of the Congress of Concerned Scientists, Hahn had found the notion intriguing. It gave him the opportunity to test his engineering and technical skills. Of course it was an extravagant way to demolish the chalet, but the CCS wasn't lacking for donations. And this method had one side benefit, unknown when the tanks were first installed. The two men who had survived the CCS greenhouse could not possibly have made it out alive.

They along with the pesky girl-who was his true target-were cinders by now.

Savoring the victory over the only interesting targets he had ever encountered, Hahn gathered up his binoculars from the table in his boat cabin. There was a plate of pfeffernuesse next to them. Hahn blew powdered sugar from the lenses before aiming the binoculars at the hillside.

The sound of emergency vehicles already rose in the distance. Sirens howled over the cold wind. What was left of the wooden house was engulfed in flames. As Hahn watched, the burning walls fell into themselves.

It would be days before fire officials learned about the oil tanks, days before they realized why the fire had taken so long to put out. By the time it was extinguished, there wouldn't be so much as a tooth or scrap of bone left of Herr Hahn's latest victims.

Herr Hahn was about to lower the binoculars when he caught a brief flash of movement near the driveway of St. Clair's chalet.

Fire and police officials wouldn't be there already. Probably gawking neighbors.

Hahn shifted his great bulk in his creaking chair, backtracking with the glasses.

When he found the source of movement, Herr Hahn shot to his feet as if someone had wired his chair. The pfeffernuesse plate tumbled to the floor along with a stein of thick German beer. The plate shattered, and little cookie balls rolled across the cabin floor.

It couldn't be.

The old Asian stood at the mouth of the driveway. Along with him was the Lifton woman. As Hahn watched in shock, the Asian ran back up the driveway.

The old man rounded the ruins of the house. The heat from the fire should have been unbearable. Yet he seemed unmindful as he ran.

Hahn's brain could not reconcile this with the world he knew.

He couldn't have gotten out. Hahn had tracked them with the thermal sensors to the last possible instant. They were trapped in the basement. He had detonated the explosive cap attached to the furnace when they were standing in front of the door. In Herr Hahn's world, men did not outrun explosions.

Maybe there were two old men. Another woman who resembled Amanda Lifton. He didn't see the younger man. Maybe he didn't have a twin. Maybe the sole young one had been properly killed in the blast that had obliterated the twins of the old Asian and Amanda Lifton.

This ludicrous speculation flitted through Herr Hahn's brain in a shocked instant. All such conjecture ended the moment Hahn saw a new figure race out from behind the wall of flame.

It looked as if the fire was holding on to him, but Herr Hahn soon realized that the young one's shirt was ablaze. He stopped, did a little pirouette, and the flames winked out. It was as if that simple move had created a vacuum, extinguishing the fire.

The old Asian raced up to the young American. Sharp hands slapped furiously at the back of the young one's shirt.

They appeared to argue for a moment, the young one pushing away the old one's slapping hands. But then the attention of both seemed to be drawn in another direction. Like two heads controlled by a single mind, the two men turned their eyes down the hill.

They didn't search the waters of Lake Geneva. There was no uncertainty. No hesitation at all. It was as if they were possessed with an ability to focus in like laser beams on something that was breaking into their conscious sphere.

They found the boat.

They found the man on the deck of the boat. Together, they stared down the binoculars of Herr Hahn.

And then they began loping down the hill toward him.

"YOU DIDN'T HAVE to slap me like that," Remo complained as they bounded down the steep hill toward the distant lake.

"True," Chiun replied. He leaped over a boulder, landing at a sprint. "I could have left you to cook like a pig on a spit."

A broad black rock surface appeared suddenly on the hill before them. Remo's legs split like a hurdler's as he soared over an angled crevice in the rock face. Chiun bounded down after him. They continued on. "I was already out," Remo snarled.

"I thought I saw an ember."

"Ember shmember. You were ticked because you thought I'd got myself blowed up real good. If Amanda had slowed me down a second more, I might have."

"Do not blame the woman," Chiun said, leaping down over a knot of pines that was growing up from a sheer rock face on the mountainside. "And if I am upset with anything, it is your new habit of causing every dwelling we enter to spontaneously combust. Really, Remo, how do you expect me to get home insurance for any future Castle Sinanju if you persist in playing with matches?"

Remo ignored him.

The mountain angled flat. Remo vaulted a hedge, landing in someone's backyard. Chiun floated in after him.

They flew past another chalet set into the hill and exploded out onto a narrow road. The lake was closer than it had been, but it was still too far away. More rooftops peeked from pine trees below. Beyond, the boat still sat in the cold waters of Lake Geneva. The man with the binoculars was no longer on the deck. Both boat and lake vanished as they raced into another grove of trees.

"That wasn't St. Clair," Remo said. "If he's the one at the greenhouse, too, I can't wait to get my hands on him."

"We may not get the chance," the Master of Sinanju pointed out.

In spite of an area of over two hundred square miles, Remo's keen ears isolated the same, lone sound Chiun had detected over all the other lake noise.

It was the sound of a boat engine misfiring. Remo's face grew grim. Feet flying over treacherous rock, the two men continued racing down the steep slope.