Warren Murphy - The Arms of Kali

"And that is Remo?" Smith said.

"Such is the legend," Chiun said.

"If Remo is this Shiva god, why doesn't he just armwrestle with Kali and beat her?"

"You scoff," Chiun snapped, "because you choose not to understand, but I will answer anyway. Remo is still just a child in the way of Sinanju. The power of Kali now is greater than his power. That is why I brought this ring. I believe it will make him strong, strong enough to win and to live. And someday he will be Sinanju's greatest Master. Until that day, I continue to teach him."

"Because of that, you know he's not dead?" Smith said.

There was utter disgust on Chiun's face, the countenance of someone trying to teach calculus to a stone. "Because of that," he said simply, and turned away. It was too much for Smith. Sadly, he felt that Chiun was deluding himself, holding on to the slim hope of some legend because he refused to face the hard fact that his disciple, Remo, was dead. But all things die. Didn't the old man know that?

"I have to call the police," Smith said. "I have to get them to round up everybody at that ashram."

"No," Chiun said.

Smith walked to the telephone, but Chiun took his arm and led him back to the bed.

"We will wait for Remo," Chiun said coldly. "This battle belongs to him, not to the police."

Harold Smith decided to wait.

Chapter Twenty-three

Remo held Ivory's hand as they drove from the airport back toward downtown New Orleans. For him, the miracle was not that he had survived the explosion on the plane, but that he had found Ivory after it was all over.

During the panic-stricken seconds right after the blast, the scene in the Air Asia plane was a horrible vision. Remo had felt his seat belt come undone and his body being tossed into a group of hysterical passengers who were trying, illogically, to undo their seat belts to free themselves.

Remo had scurried to the big yawning hole where the cockpit had once been, and stationed himself there to stop people from tumbling out into the nighttime sky.

The lake below was racing up toward them. Those who survived the impact had a chance to live if they all kept calm. Every nerve, every muscle fiber in Remo's body was pulled violin-string-tight. He had no time for horror and none for rage, even though he knew this had not been an accident.

The muffled thunder he had heard had come from the belly of the plane, not its engine. As soon as he had heard it, he knew it was a bomb. Some lunatic had somehow managed to plant an explosive inside the plane.

Some lunatic, he thought, as a piece of the plane hurtled down the last few dozen feet toward the lake. Why hadn't he thought of it before? It had been set up so simply. Someone had wanted him dead, someone careless enough about human life to be willing to sacrifice a hundred innocents just to kill him.

Who else but A. H. Baynes? He caught an old woman who was sliding down the aisle toward the ripped-open front of the craft and held her in his arms. He glanced behind him. Twelve feet. Six. Impact.

The plane hit with the flat slap of an egg dropped onto a tilted kitchen floor. As soon as he felt the first pressure of contact under his feet, he put the old lady into a seat and unstrapped a stewardess who was still buckled in.

"Are you all right?" he asked her.

She looked at him, in shock, as if unable to comprehend what had happened. Remo reached behind her head and pressed a hard index finger into a cluster of nerves at the back of her neck.

Suddenly her eyes cleared and she nodded decisively. In the rest of the plane, people were screaming, breaking from their seat belts, starting to claw their way to the front of the plane to get out.

"All right," Remo said. "You help these people. Make sure they've got floats or whatever they need. Get all the uninjured ones off. Give me room to work." She got to her feet.

"We're going to die. We're going to die. We're drowning." Voices came down the aisle of the plane. Remo's voice barked above all the others. "Shut up and listen. You're not going to die and you're not going to drown. One by one, you're going to leave this plane and get away from it before it sinks. Just do what this lady says."

"What are you going to do?" the stewardess asked. "I've got to see if anybody's alive in the forward section. If I can find it."

Remo turned and dived out into the cold black water of the lake. As he surfaced, he heard the stewardess's calm voice behind him, telling the passengers to remove their seat cushions and use them as floats and then slide out into the water.

Through the darkness, he saw a faint bump in the water fifty yards away and moved to it, not slapping his way through the water like a high-speed competition swimmer, but sliding through it like a fish, in movements so smooth that someone might look at the lake and see, not a human swimmer, but just one ripple among many.

When he was closer, he saw that the small bump he had seen was the hump atop the cockpit. The front half of the plane was settling, sinking down into the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Another minute or so and it would be totally submerged.

He dived down under the water and into the forward section of the plane, past the twisted ripped metal that showed where the bomb had exploded.

The pilot and copilot were still in their seats. Peering like a fish under the inky water, Remo could see that their eyes and mouths were open. They were beyond help, and he only hoped that their deaths had been swift. They hadn't deserved this.

He felt the rage he had been controlling starting to rise in his throat. The plane had been snapped apart just slightly behind the pilot's cabin. All the passengers were in the section that Remo had left behind, and he swam through the forward section of the plane for a few moments, but there were no other bodies. He felt the pressure as the plane began to slip under the water, and he swam out and surfaced.

On the shoreline of the lake, he could see the revolving lights of emergency vehicles, and his ears picked up the onrushing whirring of a helicopter.

Good. Help was coming. He looked quickly around him, but he saw no bodies floating, no one who needed help.

As he swam back to the other section of the plane, he was able to see the stewardess moving people out in a rapid line, one after another, into the water.

But the section of the plane had begun to tilt forward, and soon it would knife its way under the lake.

Remo slipped back to it and pulled himself into the cabin section.

"How we doing?" he asked the stewardess.

"I lost one," she said. Tears streamed down her face. "A little boy. He dropped his float and then went out. And I couldn't reach him. He went under." She was sobbing even as she was continuing to help people into the water.

"We'll see what we can do," Remo said. He let the air from his body and dropped like a stone under the waters of the lake. As he dropped, he rotated his body in the Sinanju spiral so that he commanded a full 360-degree view. The Sinanju spiral, he thought. This is how it should be used. For people's good. The last time he had used it, it was to kill a pigeon.

He saw a dark shape floating aimlessly in the water a dozen feet away. It was the young boy, and Remo wrapped him in his arms and shot back to the surface like a bubble.

He hoisted the boy's body into the cabin and put him on a seat.

"Oh. You got him. Oh . . ." The stewardess could barely talk. The plane had now been emptied except for six people who lolled unconscious in their seats. The others bobbed like cork chips in the water, away from the plane.

"Will he be all right?" she asked.

"Get yourself a float and get out of here," Remo said as he pressed his fingers into the boy's solar plexus. He had stopped breathing, but it had only been a minute or so. There was still time. With his fingertips, Remo grasped a small clump of tissue and twisted it.