Warren Murphy - The Last Dragon

Far ahead, the van screeched to a halt, blocking the road. Its headlights were in their eyes, blinding them.

"Hit the brakes!" Nancy cried.

The hauler slid to a long, slow stop, its side doors sliding open with a harsh squeal.

And out came shadowy figures who stepped into the headlights. A quartet of masked men in camos and wearing jaunty green berets. Short-barreled weapons gleamed.

"Not again!" Relish snapped.

"It's a bluff!" Nancy shouted. "Drive through them!" Then she thought, Why I am telling them? They know who's been firing blanks all along.

At that moment the Skorpion machine pistols came up, smoking and shaking and chattering.

The windshield spiderwebbed before Nancy Derringer's shocked blue eyes, and on either side, a Burger Beret was slammed back into his seat with his face a ruin of blood and brain and bone.

My God! Nancy thought. The bullets are real!

Then the masked men were knocking in the glass of the cab doors.

Chapter 22

The Master of Sinanju was beside himself. "Oh, Remo, what can I do?" he squeaked plaintively.

Remo was sprawled on Nancy Derringer's couch watching a nighttime talk show hostess attempting to coax a group of adults dressed in disposable diapers to talk about their sex lives. "Simple," he told Chiun. "We move."

"I cannot move. It is the first castle Emperor Smith has bestowed upon me. To move would be an insult."

"So? Smith can stand it. He might not even care."

"And I have bargained dearly for it."

"Ah-hah. The real reason emerges."

The Master of Sinanju ceased his fussy pacing and settled on the center of the rug. "I am a prisoner in my own castle of hostile Vietnamese and I am fated to die soon. No Master of Sinanju has ended his days so bitterly since Hung."

While Remo was trying to remember the lesson of Hung, the phone rang. Remo picked it up, saying, "Sinanju Dragon Rendering Service. You find 'em, we'll grind 'em."

"Remo," a voice croaked.

"Smitty? What's wrong? You sound awful."

"Two Burger Triumph Berets were found on a deserted stretch of Delaware highway within the last twenty minutes."

"Yeah?"

"According to my monitoring of Burger Triumph interoffice electronic mail, the two dead men were the driver and his relief."

"What about Nancy?"

"There is no word on her fate," Smith said

"Damn. And we've been cooling our heels waiting for her call."

"Remo," Smith said, tight-voiced. "I want that Apatosaur found."

"Just point us in a direction, Smitty. I guarantee results."

"I have been unable to make sense of your report of staged firefights between the Burger Berets and the Congress for a Green Africa. But someone at the company must know something. Find that person and shake the truth from him. Work your way up the corporate ladder if you have to."

"My pleasure." Remo hung up. "Come on, Chiun. Let's go calling."

Skip King was walking the halls of Burger Triumph headquarters aimlessly. The board was in seclusion. No one was talking. Especially, no one was talking to Skip King, the company leper.

And worst of all, he no longer had an office. He had been locked out of his own. So with no desk to call his own, King was reduced to walking the halls, loitering at water coolers, trying to find out what was happening.

"This is fiendish," King confided in a middle-level clerk.

"Actually, this is how the CIA treats field operatives who screw up," the clerk said cheerfully. "They recall them to Langley and make them roam the halls, trying to look busy."

"You're a lot of help," King snarled, crumpling up his paper cup and throwing into a basket. He stormed over to the elevators. Maybe there would be more information on the next floor. If not, at least he still had his key to the executive washroom. Maybe he would set up an impromptu office there.

The elevator doors slid open and King started in. He noticed the lift was occupied. Then he noticed by whom.

King started to retreat but a hand connected to an extraordinarily thick wrist grabbed his power red tie and used it to yank him back. The doors closed on his yelp of surprise.

"Going up?" Remo asked casually.

"Actually, I was going down," King said glumly.

"Looks like you ride with us. Funny, we were looking for you, too. Let's have a private talk in your office."

"I don't have an office. They gave it to Nancy."

"Okay, let's have a talk in Nancy's office."

"I don't have the key."

"You won't need one."

The elevators settled at the top floor and Skip King stepped off, with Remo and Chiun a pace behind him. He knew better than to run.

At the office door, King said sheepishly, "Here it is."

The little Korean stepped up to the pebbled glass and used one long fingernail to score the glass. The sound hurt King's ears. Remo gave the circle a tap. The glass popped in, and he reached inside to turn the doorknob.

"In you go," said Remo.

King stepped in. "You know I'm not impressed."

"No?"

"Anyone can slip a glass cutter under their fingernail."

"Maybe. But not us. Where's Nancy?" Remo asked, without wasting any more time.

"I don't know. I heard she was riding shotgun when the brontohauler was hit."

"Hit by who?"

"Search me."

"He is lying, Remo," said Chiun in a cold voice. "His sweat reeks of falsehoods."

"That's ridiculous," King snapped.

And suddenly Skip King felt a viselike pressure around his ankles. The rest was a blur of sound and noise and motion-and once the blood rushing to his head cleared his vision, he realized he was being dangled out his former office window by his ankles.

"Let me go!"

"You don't want that. You want to be pulled back in safely. Right?"

"Pull me back in to safety-fast," King screamed, his tie slapping his face.

"First some truth. Who hijacked the hauler?"

"It must have been those Africans."

"Try again. We know the Africans were shooting blanks. So were the Berets. What's the story?"

"I don't know what you're talking about!"

"He is lying, Remo," came the squeaky voice of Chiun. "His voice shrieks his perfidy."

"I don't like being lied to," Remo said, an edge in his voice now.

"I don't blame you!"

"Ever heard of the melon drop?"

"No."

"It's an old Korean custom. Someone lies to you and so you dangle him by both ankles and play melon drop. Guess whose head substitutes for the melon?"

King guessed. "No! Please!"

"Ready for the one, two, three, splat part of the ritual?"

"Okay! Okay! I'll talk."

"You're already talking. Talk truth."

"The board must be behind this! It's gotta be them."

"Why?" Remo asked.

King let the words come out of him in a spray. "This whole Bronto thing is part of a marketing plan. We're putting Old Jack on tour. When it's done, we're going to euthanize him."

Chiun's wrinkled features grew perplexed. "Euthanize?"

"Dino dumping," said Remo grimly.

"The fiends."

"That's right," King agreed. "They're fiends. The idea is to sell Bronto Burgers at rare-art prices. The board expects to clean up. They must have moved the timetable up without telling me."

"What do you think, Chiun?"

"I think there is no limit to the barbarism of this land, where Vietnamese are allowed to live in the finer provinces and people would eat dragons."

"As opposed to skinning them for the magic bones?"

"One buries a dragon after it has breathed its last. It is the only proper thing to do."

"Why?"

"So a new dragon will grow from the organs, of course."

"I give up," said Remo, hauling King back into the room. King staggered over to the wastepaper basket and, getting down on hands and knees, began heaving into it.

"Let us hie to this board of evil, Remo, and remove their scheming heads."