Dream Thing

“I got it.” He felt like biting the phone in half.

“The place has been hit aggressively. Contact is lost. The nature of the cover makes it low on the list for a military response.”

“Are there not conflicts occurring throughout Scotland?” Chiun wondered aloud. Remo relayed the question.

“The castle is inside Scotland and owned by an English family,” Mark admitted. “This could be just one more of those small-time conflicts.”

“Anybody believe that?” Remo snapped. “Smitty? Junior?”

“I’m hopeful—” Smith started.

“What does your gut tell you, Smitty?” Remo demanded.

“Without more facts—”

“Forget it.”

Remo hung up feeling angrier than he had felt in weeks.

Chapter 13

“It’s a war zone,” said the SEAL after talking to the pilots. “You sure you want to debark here?”

“Yes, thanks.” Remo shook his head at the proffered backpack. “No thanks to that.”

“You have to jump. You’re not getting a touchdown. We don’t know what’s going on around here.” The SEAL was adamant. “You jump and we’ll take your friend to the base.”

“We’ll jump together,” Remo said. “No parachutes for either of us.”

The SEAL leader and the pilots argued for a full five minutes as they scanned the terrain for a jump-off point. They closed in on a hilltop in what looked like a peaceful countryside sheep pasture.

“Here’s the deal,” the SEAL team leader said. “We’re 3.3 miles from the place you want to be and he’ll take you down to the hilltop. Skids no closer than five feet to the ground. That’s the pilot talking, not me. You’ll be totally exposed.”

“That’ll do just fine.”

“If this helicopter doesn’t get blasted out of the air while we’re dropping you off,” the SEAL added, “you’ll probably get shot dead when we leave.”

“We’ll manage. He’s scrappy.” Remo nodded at Chiun, who showed his disdain. “Or was it Grumpy?”

“Your funeral,” the SEAL said with a shrug.

There was no one within sight when they stepped out of the helicopter onto the treetop. The SEAL saluted them grimly. Remo gave him the Vulcan V-sign. As the Sea Hawk was vanishing on the horizon, they were in a world as peaceful as a travel brochure. There wasn’t a soul in sight as they glided swiftly over the fields to Loch Tweed Castle.

The castle grounds were well-kept, but the castle’s glory was faded. The loch was narrow and looked cold, the color of gunmetal. The red blood spills were hard to miss.

There were just a few corpses outside. Remo and Chiun could hear the clamor of battle waging inside—deep inside.

There were more bodies inside. In the large dining hall was an armored, motorized false wall that was still trying to close, even with a few bodies in the way. The motor must have been a good one, because it had managed to soften up the corpses considerably.

“Another hour and it’ll fulfill its function,” Remo observed, then shouldered the armored wall gently. The movement drove it off its tracks and the motor screeched in protest before locking up. They followed the long subterranean corridor and found the battle aftermath.

The Cottingsharm villagers had finished with their deadly foe, whoever they were, and were now taking out their aggressions on a stainless-steel cube. There were several such cubes, ranging from the size of a British roadster to a Ford SUV. They were thick-walled. The Cottingsharm attackers were only making pockmarks in the surface.

“Who are you?” shouted one of them, charging at the new arrivals with a blunted pickax. “You British? You Tweeds?”

“Neither,” Remo said. “What are you, a florist or something?”

“What?”

“Your occupation. Your calling.”

“I’m a Scot. Sheep farmer.”

“You ever paint or write poems?”

The man blushed and toed the stainless-steel floor. “I do make up some pretty rhymes.”

“I’m a singer,” volunteered the brute who was using a sledgehammer on the steel cube. “Listen to this.” He sang in falsetto about suicidal young lovers as he raised the hammer and brought it down.

“I asked you to stop,” Remo said, now holding the hammer. The singer looked at his empty hands and his voice died with a perplexed sound. “See, Chiun, just a bunch of those ‘sensitive’ types you were talking about.”

“I never doubted this. What is the point?” Chiun asked.

“The point is, we don’t need to go wiping them out just because they’ve got Sa Mangsang in their heads.”

“Shush!” Chiun barked. “Have I asked you to refrain from speaking the name?”

“He’s who we should be going after. Not these guys. They’re victims.”

Before either of them could answer, they heard the distant song of metal striking metal.

“I shall dispose of this,” Chiun said, and he streaked into a tight back corridor at the end of the steel room, speeding into the earth faster than most humans would drive. He emerged into another smaller laboratory a quarter mile from the first. There was one man there with a hammer, pounding at a metal cube that was brushed aluminum rather than steel. The softer metal yielded to the attack.