Warren Murphy - Skin Deep

The rock shuddered, chipped, and then bits of it tumbled down to close the hole. He hit the walls again, and the hole was filled over. Inside it, Remo could hear the squeaking of the rats, returned again to the darkness.

He stood up and walked back toward Chiun, wiping his hands on his black chino pants. The two rats that had fled around him now twitched, crusty and blackened, on the electric grating. As Remo looked past them into the Great Hall, the dim criss-cross pattern of light falling through the mesh netting dappled his face.

"The walls here too are useless," Chiun said, experimenting with his long fingernails on the wires that attached the grating to the side walls of the cave. "Perhaps with time..."

"There isn't time," Remo said angrily. He remembered seeing Smith, stumbling and grim, covered with blood, being led away by Zoran's soldiers. And he remembered the girl Ana's face, pleading with Zoran to stop his senseless killing... her pitiful threat to crush his army of trained soldiers with a village of dying lepers. He could hear her scream of pain as the Nazi doctor spat the strange command at her.

"What did Zoran say to make the girl lose her marbles the way she did?" Remo asked.

Chiun was flicking at the thin wires of mesh with his fingernails, making sparks fly with each small manipulation. "He said 'Nie wieder.' The chief of the village talked of foreign words Zoran uses to bend the girl to his ways. But it was an odd phrase. In German it means 'never again. "

"Never again?" Remo was stupefied. "Never again?"

"Yes. Why? Do those words have some special meaning for white men?"

"It's the motto of a Jewish group. Never again. They're talking about the Nazis killing six million people in World War Two. A strange thing for a Nazi to say."

He saw sparks flying out of Chiun's fingertips. "What in hell are you doing?" he asked, annoyed.

Chiun didn't look up. He worked busily with the electric netting, his fingernails tinkling against the sparking wires. "I am loosening the threads," he said.

Remo saw at once what he was trying to do. "I get it," he said. "Knock some of the ends off, hook them onto other loose ends, and boom, a short circuit."

"I am not concerned with circuses," Chiun said. "I wish only to stop the electricity."

"Sure, Chiun," Remo said, smiling.

"Ah, this will do." Careful not to expose his skin to the high-voltage mesh, he held up two frayed wire ends with his fingernails. "If this works, there should be a boom."

"The lights'll go out," Remo said.

"When that happens, break through the netting as soon as possible. We will use the darkness to get past the sentries and seek out Emperor Smith."

"I'm ready when you are."

As Remo got into position, Chiun brought the wires together. With a loud fizz and a light like the burst of a dynamite explosion, the electric portal blazed to life for an instant. Then it crashed into total darkness as the powerful lights in the cave gave out. A murmur rose from the soldiers.

"Now, Remo."

He thrust both hands through the netting and tore outward in a powerful breast stroke.

The stroke was never completed.

While Remo's hands were still clutching the mesh, the auxiliary generators of the cave were activated, and a pool of light from the Great Hall flooded into the dark prison.

The electricity entered Remo in waves. In an instant his feet were jolted off the floor. His hands, filled with live wire, smoldered and fried, unable to let go.

Then he was in the air, still shaking from the charge, thrust away from the electric wire by the tiny figure of Chiun, silhouetted in the spillover light from the Hall.

He landed crouched on his feet and hands. The slime on the cave floor felt cool on his damaged skin. Even in the darkness he could make out the diamond pattern of the netting burned deeply into his palms.

Chiun lifted Remo's hands for a look. "These burns are serious," he said quietly. The old man sighed.

The two sentries outside the mesh doorway walked to the entrance and shone their flashlights on the crouching figures inside. They complained to each other as they examined the broken netting where Remo had nearly broken through to freedom.

One of the guards shook an index finger at the prisoners. "Verboten!" he said, pointing to the hole in the netting.

"Go suck a strudel," Remo said.

The soldiers shouted something else into the dark cave, then switched off their flashlights and stood guard over the entrance, their backs to the prisoners.

"I think I see a way out," Remo said, looking at his hands uncertainly.

"You are burned," Chiun said. "Even Shiva must give himself time to heal."

Remo looked askance at his old teacher. Chiun vacillated between calling Remo a hopeless white fool and insisting that he was the reincarnation of the ancient Eastern god of destruction. It was pointless to press him about it. All he would say was that Remo's unusual history had been written millennia before in the prophecies of Sinanju.

Remo didn't hold much with reincarnated gods. At the moment, a rock prison with an electric fence was the only reality he was concerned with.

"I don't know what Shiva would do, Little Father," he said kindly, "but Smitty's dying somewhere in this cave. We can't stay here and let that maniac Lustbaden kill him."

For a moment they stood facing one another in silence. "Very well. Do what you must," Chiun said finally. "But try not to touch the wires again."

"I might not have to."

He strode over to the mesh portal, purposely treading noisily toward the guards. "Achtung!" he shouted as he reached the circle of light.

The guard looked over with a start.

"Warten auf ein augenblick," he said, summoning up all the German he knew. He beckoned the guards toward him.

They stared at him with dumb curiosity.

"La via del tren subterraneo es peligrosa," he rumbled, reverting to the Spanish warning signs he had read on the New York subway. It wasn't German, but it would have to do. "La plume de ma tante est sur le bureau de mon oncle," he whispered with a wink.

"Eh? Was ist los?" one of the guards asked, squinting as he drew near.

"Auf wiedersehen," Remo said, thrusting his hands carefully through the tear in the wire mesh. He grabbed both soldiers by the collars of their uniforms. He pulled them toward the grating, then released them and stepped back.

They screamed when they hit the netting, and their feet bounced off the ground in a jerky tattoo. Their mouths opened, wide and contorted, as the cave plunged into darkness once again. A metal alarm, like the bells used at prizefights, sounded. In the blackness, the scuffling feet of the SPIDER corps took up their positions at the mouth of the jail.

Remo flew feet first through the netting, knocking down two soldiers on his way to the ground.

"Quickly, Little Father," he said as the orange darts of gunfire began to burst in the pitch-black cave.

But Chiun was already out. A heavy body whooshed upward, struck the ceiling with a loud snap, and dropped with a thud onto a group of soldiers. In the light of the gunfire, Remo watched the body twitching in a macabre dance of death from the hail of bullets pumping into it.

"Herr Doktor!" someone shouted as the barrel of a rifle grazed against Remo's neck in the confusion. He took hold of the weapon. With a backward kick he sent the soldier splattering against a wall, then swung the rifle in a wide arc at head range. A chorus of cracks, like splitting melons, rose around him, followed by the moans of the wounded.

"Let us go now and find Smith," Chiun said, and in the intermittent light of random bullets Remo caught a glimpse of his yellow robe fluttering in the distance.

?Chapter Sixteen

Smith was alone in the laboratory, barely conscious. His breathing was labored, and he was covered with sweat. His eyes, for once unshielded by his steel-rimmed glasses, were bright and glazed with fever. Outside, running feet obeyed shrill commands, which grew louder as the soldiers closed in on the lab.