Dream Thing

“This end of London is in the crapper, all right. But there’s one thing wrong with what you heard. You said ‘organized,’ right? Trust me, there’s nothing organized about any of this. The maniacs in kilts are nothing more than maniacs in kilts. They don’t know why they’re running amok—they’re just enjoying it while it lasts. The civilians? My guess—wait.” Remo dropped the phone and stepped up from the sidewalk to the top of the eight-foot red phone box, where he observed a few warring bands fly violently and heedlessly into one another. He stepped down.

“Yeah, the Londoners are just as nutty. If it weren’t for the kilts you couldn’t begin to tell the two sides apart. Oops. Hold on a sec.”

Dr. Smith held the telephone to his ear and watched the windows of muted news feeds coming through to the large LCD monitor mounted under the glass desktop. It was unreal, the raw footage of so many scenes of violence—as if someone had edited together the shots of conflict from an entire season of a police reality show. How could it all be happening at the same time, right now?

Then, making it feel more unreal, Smith was provided with a soundtrack to accompany the video. The phone relayed curses and exclamations in brogues and Cockney and even an “I say.” There were also the sounds of crunching bones, smashing bodies, breaking glass.

“Wouldn’t you know?” Remo said. “We were at ground zero for a second, but then everybody decided to give peace a chance.”

Smith could picture it. Remo in the telephone box, Chiun calmly standing nearby and the ground littered with fresh corpses.

Mark Howard nodded to Smith from across the room. He had been waiting for the call from Remo. He had traced it and dispatched the waiting helicopter to the exact location.

“Chiun’s probably told you that the trouble’s becoming serious in the Highlands,” Smith reported. “My fears about the Scottish target are confirmed. We’re getting you on-site ASAP. I asked Chiun to join you, in case the situation becomes extremely serious.”

“Not sure how much worse it can get,” Remo said.

“It can get much worse,” Smith replied.

The U.S. Navy helicopter loomed out of the London sky and settled its skids on the garden at the center of a roundabout.

A quartet of Navy SEALs popped out and swept the street with their submachine guns. They were experienced SEALs. They’d been everywhere. They’d done all that. Except this.

“Hi,” said the slim, dark man in a beige T-shirt, chinos and expensive-looking leather shoes. He was following a silent figure who was as small as a young boy, but as old as Stonehenge.

Around them was a charnel house. The SEAL team commander had never thought he would actually see the gutters running with blood but that was certainly the case here.

“What happened?”

“There was a fight,” said the younger man. “Maybe you noticed the folks of London town having it out.”

“Yeah, but not like this. Who won?”

“Nobody won. They wiped each other out completely.”

“You mean no one got away? Not one person?”

“Don’t think so. Anybody escape, Little Father?”

“I let no one escape,” squeaked the old Asian man indignantly. “You insult me.” The tiny senior citizen stepped from the street into the Sea Hawk, five feet off the ground. He made it look effortless.

“Is he saying he killed all these people?” the commander asked.

“Humor him,” said the younger one. “He’s very, very old and—” The younger man finished by twirling one finger in the vicinity of his ear.

“You should live to be as old and half as wise,” retorted the old Asian, who was now out of sight inside the rumbling helicopter. The old man couldn’t possibly have heard what the young man said.

The SEAL commander couldn’t make any of this fit together. None of what his eyes saw meshed with any explanation he could muster. And the implication that the old man had wiped out this crowd of rioters—impossible! This pair wasn’t even armed.

And yet they were VIPs who rated a personal and immediate U.S. government transport, even when all British-based equipment and personnel were supposed to be helping the U.K. in their time of crisis.

“They ain’t shot,” murmured one of his SEALs.

The commander didn’t know what his man was talking about, then he gave a last glance at the field of the dead and understood. There were some gunshot wounds, but nearly all the dead had been killed—quite obviously—by some form of horrific manual damage. A head torn off. A chest cavity smashed in. Lots of cut throats and foreheads with unnatural-looking holes in them.

Was the old man telling the truth? Had he truly, honestly wiped out all those rioters barehanded?

The SEAL team leader got into the helicopter and called for the pilot to take off, then sat and examined his two VIPs as he would have watched a pair of poisonous snakes. This lasted until the old man said something to his companion in a language the SEALs didn’t know.

Remo sighed. “He says take a picture, it will last longer.”