Warren Murphy - Failing Marks

"This is not your family portion of the map," he explained. "It is the Hagan piece, which I kept for years on my mantel at the Four village. Presumably you stole it when you stormed the fortress." He smiled.

"Enough, brigand ancestor of a deceitful king!" Chiun snapped. His eyes were fire.

Kluge considered only for a second. With an outward dispassion that belied his inner fear of the wrath of the Master of Sinanju, he squatted down next to the nearest empty grid. He hastily sketched out his family portion of the map.

When he was finished, Kluge-still on his haunches-handed the stick up to Heidi.

"It is your turn. Again." He smiled tightly. Heidi didn't hesitate. She pulled the stick away from Kluge. In the final quarter of the larger square, she drew for them the last piece of the Siegfried map.

Chiun examined the section she had drawn, making certain that its lines matched the ones in the piece they had retrieved from Heidi's ancestral home. They did.

In the dirt before them, staring back at them from across the ages, was the entire map to the Nibelungen Hoard. Incomplete for more than fifteen hundred years, its assembled pieces now gave them clear directions to the great treasure.

"I have maps of the area," Kluge said, excitedly, pushing himself to a standing position. "We can use them to find the location."

The IV leader began striding to the car, but Chiun stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

"That will not be necessary," the Master of Sinanju said. "My ancestor compiled many maps in his years of feckless wandering in these woods." Chiun nodded to the map they had all drawn. His voice was filled with a grand solemnity. "This place is known to me."

REMO WAS PEEVED. He made this clear to Colonel Heine.

"I don't know why I'm even going," he complained. "I mean, it's got nothing to do with me."

"Perhaps-" Heine began meekly.

Remo interrupted. "It's just another dippy million-year-old legend he's somehow gotten me dragged into," he griped as he steered the border police jeep down the long forest road. "I tell him I'll help him find his block of wood and his gold coins. Fine. Everything should be hunky-dory afterwards, right? Wrong. No sooner do we find them, along with the guy we've been looking for for the last three months, than he goes running off with the bastard on some half-assed treasure hunt. And he gets mad at me." Remo's voice approached a level of incredulity that left Colonel Heine nodding in nervous, sympathetic confusion.

"I have found only recently that loyalties are not what they should be," Heine said through clenched teeth. He was holding on to the seat with both hands as Remo's foot stayed clamped heavily to the accelerator. The forest whizzed by.

"Tell me about it," Remo continued. "You've got a heck of a bunch back there," he commented, nodding to the trailing line of trucks. "If I were you, I'd sleep with one eye open and a frigging howitzer under my pillow."

"There is a danger that they might join the enemy," Heine admitted. "If that happens and we fail, the army will be called in. Although I would not trust that the army will not join them, as well." Remo shook his head. He wondered again whether or not he should let Chiun go this one alone. After all, the Master of Sinanju had only the neo-Nazis, the border police and possibly the German army to contend with. It'd serve him right to work up a sweat over this one.

They came tearing around a corner near a pile of toppled boulders. A fork suddenly appeared in the road ahead of them. Remo barely lifted one foot off the gas pedal as the other one was stomping down on the brake.

The jeep spun out on the shoulder, completing two full circles on the dusty road. At the nadir of the first screeching circle, Colonel Heine saw the rapidly approaching shape of the nearest trailing truck. It, too, had slammed on its brakes. Plumes of dust poured up from beneath its locked wheels.

Heine closed his eyes and waited for the truck to plow into them. As he did so, he was vaguely aware of the driver's-side door opening and closing. He felt the jeep grow lighter.

When a few tense seconds had passed without the sound of a crushing impact, Heine opened one eye. The jeep was rocking to a gentle stop near an oldfashioned wooden signpost. Colorful characters and black German words marked the three destinations beyond them.

Remo was crouching at the fork.

With a sigh of relief, Heine opened his second eye. He climbed out of the jeep on wobbly legs, walking up to join Remo. Looking back once, he saw the troop truck had stopped a hair away from the parked jeep.

"They took the left fork," Remo said. He nodded as if to some obvious marks in the road. Heine saw nothing but a few grooves in the sandy shoulder.

"Can you get some helicopters in here?" Remo asked, standing. "With a few eyes in the sky, we could get this thing over with in less than an hour."

Heine shook his head. "The chancellor does not wish to alert them," he said, panting. His mind still reeled from his brush with death a minute before.

"I wish we were closer to Berlin," Remo complained. "One visit'd get the air force out here like a shot. Heck, kidnap the presidential pastry chef and you could probably get that pork hog to surrender to France." He spun from Heine. "Let's go."

"Do you wish me to drive?" Colonel Heine said with weak hopefulness.

"Naw," Remo said. "We've screwed around enough. I think we're going to have to start picking up the pace."

He headed back to the jeep. Heine followed reluctantly.

Chapter 23

In spite of the cold weather, they found the digging easy. The nearness of the small stream kept the ground where they worked much damper than the rest of the forest floor.

The skinheads were caked with slippery brown mud. They grumbled among themselves with each shovelful of rich, cold earth they overturned.

The pile of displaced slimy sod had grown large over the past two hours. The Master of Sinanju remained at a cautious distance, ever aware of even the slightest dollop of mud that might fly his way. Whenever a skinhead would overshoot the pile and send a speck of dirt near Chiun's brilliant yellow kimono, the Master of Sinanju would let out a horrified shriek.

Once, when a clod of dirt came perilously close to his brocade robe, Chiun had stomped over to the diggers and wrenched the shovel from the perpetrator's hands, clanging the young man over the head with the flat end of the metal spade. After that, both the skinhead and his companions had made an extra effort to keep the mud within the designated area.

Kluge had brought three small folding stools from the rental car, one for each of them. Chiun had refused the seat, preferring instead to stand as close as possible to the deepening hole. Heidi paced back and forth between the line of stools and Chiun. Only Adolf Kluge opted to sit.

Kluge was sitting there now, hands folded patiently across his precisely crossed knees. The only outward hint of any inner agitation the IV leader might have felt was at his mouth. Kluge's tongue darted forward with unswerving regularity, dampening his lower lip. It was a nervous habit he had picked up years before.

"Pah!" Chiun complained, spinning from the massive mound of jiggling mud. "It is too deep."

"That is the correct spot according to the map," Heidi said nodding. Arms crossed, she chewed one thumbnail anxiously as she watched lumps of mud fly up from the hole.

"Fifteen hundred years is a long time," Kluge suggested. He pointed at the marks in the surrounding uneven forest floor. "It appears as though the river ran directly through this area at one time. Surely sediment would have collected, covering it more deeply."

"But if the river was here, how did they build it to begin with?" Heidi asked.