Warren Murphy: King's Curse

Mrs. Smith watched him. She had not even known those bullets were there. And why was Harold putting them in that gun?

"Harold, what are you doing?" she asked.

"Get dressed, dear," said Smith, without looking up. "Put on your boots and a heavy coat in case you should have to go out suddenly."

He looked up and saw her still at the window.

"Now!" he commanded.

Numbly, not really comprehending, Mrs. Smith moved toward their bedroom. As she stepped inside, planning to dress quickly, just to throw clothes on over the pajamas and robe she now wore, she saw Harold moving about the room, the shotgun folded in the crook of his arm like a hunter. He locked the windows of the small cabin, then pulled the curtains closed over the windows.

"Does it have something to do with the bicentennial?" she called as she slipped her heavy snow-pacs over her booted pajamas.

"I don't know, dear," he said.

Smith emptied the box of shells into the left pocket of his robe. Into his right pocket he placed a 9mm automatic that he took from a niche between the couch and the warm air radiator in the main living room.

He looked back into the bedroom. "Make sure that those windows are locked. Pull the curtains and stay in there until I tell you differently," he said, adding "dear" without meaning it. Then he slammed the bedroom door closed.

The dozen Actatl moved silently across the snow field toward the small house, nestled alone in the tiny valley alongside the hill.

On a snowmobile atop the hill, Jean Louis deJuin watched as his men-his warriors, his braves-moved nearer the cottage. One hundred yards. Ninety yards.

He looked toward the snowed-over dirt road that cut its way through heavy pine growth to the cabin. ,

As the Actatl warriors moved nearer the house, deJuin saw what he had been expecting: a puff of snow coming along the dirt road to the Smith cabin.

A car.

This was it. The Actatl would win now or lose now. It was that simple. He smiled, for he had no doubt that the battle would be a victory for the Actatl.

Smith punched out a pane of glass from the kitchen window with the muzzle of his shotgun and put the barrel of the gun through the opening.

He sighted on the first of the feather-clad warriors, then coldly moved his aim toward the left, where a single shotgun blast might take out three men at once.

How long had it been since he had fired a gun? To kill? It all flashed through his mind in a split second, the days in World War II when he had to shoot his way out of a Nazi trap after he had spent four months in occupied territory in Scandinavia, organizing a resistance movement and training its members in sabotage, aimed at one target: the secret Nazi installation where heavy water experiments, needed to build an atomic bomb, were being undertaken.

A good cause then, a good cause now.

His finger began to tighten on the right trigger, but he stopped when he heard a car jerking to a stop before the front door of his cabin.

Was it more of them? Or was it Remo?

The door was locked. He would wait a moment. The warriors were now thirty-five yards away, stumbling ahead through heavy snow, and Smith again took dead aim.

At twenty-five yards he would fire.

Before he could squeeze the trigger, he saw a flash of color to the right of his window and then Remo, wearing only a blue tee shirt and black slacks, and Chiun, clad only in a green kimono, moved around the corner of the building and ran toward the dozen spear-carrying men.

The front pair of Indians stopped, set up quickly, and fired their spears. If Smith had not seen it with his own eyes, he would not have believed it. The projectiles sped toward Remo and Chiun. Both men seemed oblivious to them. At what seemed a fraction of a second too late, Remo's left hand moved before his face. The spear cracked in half and both parts fell harmless at his feet. He kept running toward the Actatl. The spear that went at Chiun seemed almost to have reached his stomach, seemed sure to penetrate, seemed certain to be deadly, when Chiun's long-nailed fingers reached down, and then Chiun was holding the spear in his own right hand. He had caught it in midflight.

Neither he nor Remo lost a step in their advance toward the Actatl. Then they were on them, and Smith realized that in all his years as the head of CURE, he had never before seen Remo and Chiun at work together. And as he watched them, he understood for the first time the terror that the Master of Sinanju and his disciple, Remo, could strike into so many hearts.

He understood too why Chiun believed Remo to be the reincarnation of the Eastern God, Shiva, the Destroyer.

Remo moved in a blur, in among the group of twelve warriors, who had stopped their charge on the house to dispose first of the two intruders. About Remo all was speed, as if he were surrounded by a special kind of turbulence, and bodies flew away from him as if they held a different magnetic charge from his and were thrust away by invisible forces.

While Remo charged into the center of the Actatl, Chiun worked around the perimeter of the group. His style was as different from Remo's as that of a rifle from a pistol. Chiun did not appear to move quickly; his hands and body were not blurred as he went from one spot to another. Smith noted almost scientifically that Chiun hardly appeared to be moving at all. But suddenly he was one place and then suddenly another place. It was like watching a film in which the camera had been stopped intermittently while shooting the picture, and Chiun's movement from one spot to the next had occurred while the camera lens was closed.

And the bodies piled up in a huge mound of yellow feathers, like some kind of giant canary graveyard.

Smith noticed another movement to his right and turned his head. A girl in a fur coat came around the corner of the cabin.

That would be Bobbi or Valerie, Smith thought. Bobbi, judging from the full length fur coat. She paused at the end of the cabin for a moment, watching as Remo and Chiun lay waste the Actatl warriors.

Not knowing she was being watched, she reached into the right pocket of her fur coat. She drew out a pistol.

Smith smiled. She was going to protect Remo and Chiun.

She raised the revolver at arm's length in her right hand. Smith wondered if he should call out to her and tell her to stop.

He glanced back at the battle. All the Actatl had fallen. Only Remo and Chiun still stood, ankle deep in the powdery snow. They had their backs to Bobbi. Remo pointed up to the top of a hill, where a man sat on a snowmobile, watching the carnage below. Remo nodded to Chiun and moved off in the direction of the man on the hill.

Smith glanced back at Bobbi. She extended her left hand and grasped her right wrist to hold the gun steady. She took deadly slow aim across the twenty feet between her and Remo and Chiun.

She was going to shoot them.

Smith wheeled in the window opening, moving to his left, and without aiming squeezed first the right trigger of his shotgun and then the left.

The first blast missed. The second caught Bobbi in the midsection, lifted her in the air, folded her as if she were a dinner napkin, and set her down into the snow eight feet from where she had been standing.

Remo turned, saw Bobbi lying on the snow, blood oozing out of her almost severed midsection, melting the snow where it touched it, creating a purplish brown paste. He looked at the window where Smith still held the gun.

"Nice work, Smitty," Remo said sarcastically. "She's with us."

Smitty passed by the bedroom door on his way outside. He called to his wife, "Stay inside there, dear. Everything's going to be all right."

"Are you all right, Harold?"

"I'm fine, dear. Just stay in there until I call you."

Smith put the gun against the wall and went outside onto the porch, which wrapped around the small cabin.