Timber Line

Chapter Eleven

The air was filled with flying, flaming bits of wood. They peppered Remo's face and body as he ran across the snow back toward the A-frame. Both sloping side walls had been blown open. Flames poured up through the opening where the peak of the building had been. The soft smell of pine that permeated the night air had surrendered to the pungent aroma of burning wood.

As Remo neared the building, he could see that even the interior walls that had marked the bedrooms had been blown out. As he reached the back wall of the building, he dove without hesitation through a blown-out opening in the wood, spun, and landed on his feet inside what was left of the A-frame.

Joey's bedroom had been to his right. The walls were gone and he could see only her bed. The bedding was aflame, and fire licked from around Remo's feet up around his face. But there was no darkened lump of body lying in the bed. He ran into that area, keeping flames away from his face with the movements of his arms in front of his body, and carefully looked around the flaming wreckage of the bed for her body. But there was no body, not alongside the bed or under the bed, or anywhere on the floor.

He ran to the other side of the A-frame, where his bedroom had been and where Chiun had been sleeping on the floor. The bed there too was aflame.

But no Chiun. No sign of the old man's body. Remo could not even find a trace of the fiber sleeping mat that the old man had carefully unrolled on the floor.

His stomach sank. The blast might have been so powerful that their bodies were literally blown out of the building.

He heard a creaking sound and looked up just as another section of the splintered side wall broke loose and crashed down toward him. Remo dodged the wall, took one last look around, then bolted for the front of the building, where the framing for the original front door still stood, the door long since blown away, but the framing standing as if it were an invitation to safety. As he ran, more and more of the sloping walls broke loose and peppered him with flame. The floor was burning also, and he could feel the heat of it under his shoes.

He burst through the opening of the building out into the clearing in front of the A-frame. He breathed deep to rid his lungs of smoke. And then he stopped.

Sitting under a tree, his legs folded tightly, his hands clasped in his lap in repose, was Chiun. Standing alongside him, both of them looking at the fire and at Remo, was Joey Webb.

Chiun looked up at the woman, nodded toward Remo, and said "Now he comes."

Remo smiled as he jogged toward them. "You're all right," he said.

"No thanks to you," Chiun said.

"What happened?" Remo asked.

"My sleep was interrupted," Chiun said.

"Besides that," asked Remo.

"I was sleeping," Chiun said, "thinking that I was safe with you on guard. I heard a noise. I paid it no mind. My prize student was standing guard in the night, and all was safe. So I thought."

"What happened, Chiun?" Remo asked again. "Save the carping for some other time."

"Carping? Is it carping when I relate to you how this child and I almost died?" He looked up at Joey. "Is that carping?"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"See," Chiun told Remo. "It is not carping."

"All right, get on with it," Remo said. "I give up."

"Where was I?" Chiun asked.

"You heard a noise. You thought I was on guard. Little did you know that I was down at the neighborhood saloon having a double Scotch on the rocks with a twist."

"Right," said Chiun evenly. "I heard a noise. I paid it no mind. Then I smelled fumes. The fumes of gasoline. Still I paid no mind. I knew you would protect us. So I slept on."

"And?"

"And then I heard the whoosh of flames. I jumped to my feet. I knew there was not a second to waste if I was to save my abandoned, unguarded body from disaster. I found this child in the next room. At great danger to my own life, I grabbed her up and we fled through the front door of the building just before it exploded. A boom."

"Bomb," Remo said. "Somebody set a bomb."

"Obviously," Chiun said. "It was the closest escape of my life. A moment's hesitation would have doomed us both. Fortunately, Remo, I never trusted you, so I was on my guard, ready to meet disaster if it came."

Remo looked down at the snow next to Chiun. He pointed to the object there.

"Chiun," he said.

"Yes, ingrate," Chiun said.

"If this was all so nip and tuck and a split-second dash to safety, and all that..."

"It was," said Chiun. "It was just like that."

"If it was," Remo said, "how'd you have time to roll up your sleeping mat and take it with you?"

Chiun looked at Remo, at the sleeping mat, then back at Remo again.

"Do you know what sleeping mats cost these days?" he said.

"No sign of who triggered the place?" Remo asked.

Chiun shook his head. "There were two of them. I could hear them bumping around like bison, whispering to each other, splashing things from cans. And then there was that friend of yours, screaming your name in the night."

Remo was puzzled for a second, until he realized Chiun was referring to the whispering voice that had gently called his name. He focused his ears for a moment, but the sound was drowned out by the crackling of flames.

"And that thunkety-thunk of all that machinery keeping those trees warm," Chiun groused. "It is impossible to sleep up here."

"But you didn't see who set the fire," Remo said.

"No. You expect me to do everything for you?"

They looked up as Pierre LaRue charged into the clearing.

His face was anguished, but when he saw Joey standing safely next to Remo and Chiun, the tension went from his countenance. He smiled as he came up and tossed a heavy woolen blanket around her shoulders.

"Peer was plenty worried, you bet," he said. "What happened here?" he asked Remo.

"A bomb," Remo said. "We don't know who."

"Damn Moonten Eyes," said Peer, with a deep, throaty growl. "They got to be doing this thing."

"Maybe you're right," Remo said. "Maybe you're right."

From down the road, they heard the whoop of the fire engine belonging to Tulsa Torrent, and as it pulled into the clearing, Remo saw Roger Stacy sitting on the front seat next to the driver.

When Stacy saw the burning building reduced to rubble, he shook his head to the driver. There was no point in pouring water on a building already destroyed.

"Just back off," he said. "Make sure nothing spreads to the trees."

He hopped down from the cab of the fire truck, and the truck pulled away, back onto the road to a point where it commanded a view of both the front and back of the building.

Stacy joined the four other people in front of the building.

"Sabotage?" he asked Remo.

Remo nodded. "Gasoline and a bomb."

"Thank God nobody was hurt."

The crackling sound of the fire was dying as the A-frame was slowly burning itself into ash. Remo could again hear the wind whistling overhead, and then he heard another sound.

He looked down toward Chiun. The old man had heard it, too. He nodded over his left shoulder, indicating that it came from that direction.

Without a word, Remo ran off toward the edge of the clearing. Just inside the wall of trees, he found the source of the sound.

Oscar Brack had been burned to the color of raw steak. His face was blistered, and all the hair had been singed from his face. His clothing was charred, and his lips were cracked, raw flesh showing through the broken skin.

He was sitting against the base of a tree, his hands folded over his stomach, where blood still oozed from a ripped-open wound.

He was trying to whistle, but his burned lips made no more than a hiss. Over and over again, he tried to whistle. Remo recognized the tune: the opening bars of "Danny Boy."

He knelt next to the man. Could it have been Brack who started the fire and explosion at the A-frame? It made no sense. Brack was almost like a father to Joey. What would have driven him to try to kill her? And yet, here he was, and the burns that covered his body were evidence of his involvement.

"Brack, what happened?" Remo said.

He moved the man's hands aside to look at the stomach wound. He could see raw innards, and he shook his head and refolded the man's hands.

The stench of alcohol poured from Brack's body.

"Joey," he hissed. "No good. He was no good. Not for her. A traitor." Then he lapsed into a temporary trance, staring straight ahead, trying to whistle again.

Remo sensed Chiun standing next to him.

He looked up at the old man.

"No hope, Little Father?" he asked.

Chiun shook his head.

The whistling stopped, and Brack began to whimper like a hurt child. Chiun knelt on the other side of the man and, with his fingers, pressed into different spots on the big man's body, deadening nerve endings that had been damaged by his injuries and his burns into never-ending sources of pain, pulsating pain.

Brack leaned his head back and took a big sip of air. "Traitor, traitor," he said. Then he slumped forward again.

Chiun kept working his body with his fingers. The man's head lifted again and his eyes opened. He looked toward Remo, than at Chiun.

"I don't know what that is, old man," he groaned. "But don't stop."

"You're going to be all right," Remo said.

"No, I'm not. I'm dying. Brack dying."

"What happened here?" Remo said. "Did you start the fire?"

Brack shook his head, angrily, from side to side, even though it was apparent that each movement caused him more pain.

"No. Trying to save Joey. Always try to save Joey." He paused and seemed to drift. "Joey," he called softly. "He was a traitor. No good for us."

"Who was a traitor?" Remo said.

"Danny. Danny a traitor."

Remo thought for a moment before he remembered that Danny had been Joey Webb's fiance, the man killed in the earful of crazed snakes.

"Danny took money to betray project. To kill copa-ibas," Brack said.

"From who?" Remo asked.

Brack shook his head. "The Association. Then he was worried... somebody found out... he was going to quit... then they killed him."

"Who killed him?" Remo pressed. He looked at Chiun. The old man was shaking his head. Brack had little time left.

"They came tonight," Brack said. "To talk. They knew I found out. Got me with knife. I got them too. Ran away to cabin. They found me there. Thought I was dead. Heard them talk about blowing up cabin. Came back for Joey."

"There was another man killed. A lumberjack," Remo said. "Was he one of them?"

"No," Brack grunted painfully. "He stumbled in. They killed him. I tried... get back... save Joey."

Remo shook his head. He could see the wounded Oscar Brack dragging his injured broken body for miles through the snow trying to warn Joey Webb. He must have reached the A-frame just too late, just as it exploded, and he was blown back into this stand of trees.

Remo watched as Chiun touched Brack in places that should have helped him, that could have kept him alive. But the old man had no desire to live.

"Who were the men?" Remo asked. "Who were the men from the Association?"

Brack smiled a smile that was much too wide. His upper gums showed; they had turned blue. He whistled a breezy version of "Danny Boy," then began to gasp.

Remo reached out to him. It was too late.

When Remo stood up, he saw Roger Stacy and Pierre LaRue standing behind him. They had been watching, listening.

"Any of that make any sense to you?" Remo asked them. Both men just shook their heads.

Chiun and Remo walked back to the clearing where Joey Webb leaned against a tree, watching her A-frame headquarters settle down into smoldering embers and ash.

As they walked, Chiun said, "This is very bad."

"It really is," Remo agreed.

"Then why don't you do something about it?"

Something in Chiun's voice made Remo ask, "What are you talking about?"

"That friend of yours who has been yelling your name all night. Now he is whistling."

Remo did not understand at first. Then he listened. In the growingly silent night there was a faint whistle from behind where the A-frame had stood — from the area where someone had been calling his name earlier.

Remo nodded and ran past the building, across the hundred yards of snow. He found the spot where he had been standing, where the sound had seemed the loudest. Now there was only a faint whistle coming from below his feet somewhere.

Remo reached down into a snowdrift and found it — a battery-operated cassette tape player, whistling now with the signal that it had reached the end of the tape.

Remo pressed a button on the wet machine to run the tape back a few feet. Then he pressed the play button and the hissing, whispering voice sounded over again.

"Remo... Remo... Remo..."

He turned off the machine angrily. Someone had planted this out here to get Remo out of the A-frame, so that it could be blown up without his interference, and an anger overwhelmed him that he had been used as a pawn, a dupe by someone.

Whoever that someone was would pay.