Dream Thing

“What if the pressure increases?” his DOD liaison asked.

“Enough to break through again? Can’t happen—not that fast.”

The needle clicked against the sides of the paper feed.

“I’m calling my men out of there,” the DOD liaison declared.

Jay answered the call. “Yeah, base?”

“You boys increase your altitude right away. I mean now.”

“Understood.”

“Acknowledge, Jockey,” their base commander demanded.

“Understood. I’m—” Jockey shouted something wordless.

Jay banked hard, just in time to see the distant, tiny bomber intersect with the mile-wide steam shaft that had just spewed from the crumbled ice. The force of the shaft must have been tremendous—it sent Jockey’s jet tumbling up into the sky. The G-forces were unthinkable. Jockey would already be dead.

Jay yanked the stick and fed fuel to the engines, and began climbing steeply. Below him, where there had been nothing just seconds ago, the Antarctic exploded open and ten thousand tons of ice fragments were hurled skyward. It was ice dust by the time it buffeted the aircraft. Jay knew what would come next.

A fraction of a second later, the bomber was engulfed in superheated steam. The impact killed Jay White before the heat could even reach him.

Chapter 47

Remo paddled the little canoe slowly across the empty surface of the sunny tropical ocean.

“I feel like a guy on the front of a vacation brochure,” he growled. “Not some idiot squid chaser.”

“You are not chasing the squid. It is the other way around,” Chiun reminded him.

“Instead of you, I ought to have a blond babe in a bikini,” Remo observed. “If this were a vacation brochure, I mean.”

“Do not ever think of asking me to wear a bikini.”

Remo glared at the horizon unhappily. “I’m going in.”

“You will not!”

Remo paddled them for another ten minutes. There was no sign of the squid.

“Little Father, I’m going in.”

Chiun sighed. “I know.”

“It’s the right thing to do,” Remo said.

“It will be your death,” Chiun said simply.

Remo glowered. “You told me to find my instinct and then honor it with faith. I have faith in this decision.”

“That does not mean it is the correct decision.” Remo knew he had a good reason all ready, but he didn’t know just how to put it into words. “Chiun, I looked back at what happened at that castle in Scotland and I was filled with all this regret for something that didn’t happen. Now I’m acting on faith, and maybe preventing something worse from happening. If I fail, so what?”

Chiun’s eyes flashed. “I have explained to you just what may occur if you are enslaved by the thing that awaits you in there.”

“But so what? In the end, Sa Mangsang wins, right? With me as his gofer or without me. Maybe if I go there I can do something about this whole mess.”

“You cannot,” Chiun declared. “I will allow this only if I accompany you.”

Remo nodded. “I know.”

They made it to the sailboat without being attacked. They set sail and headed into the Corridor. No squid.

“Of course not. They want you to come,” Chiun pointed out. “When they attacked us it was only to protect their precious Faithful.”

The squid showed themselves again as the current began to pick up under the sailboat. A ring of colossal creatures bobbed just under the surface behind the boat.

“Don’t worry. We’re not changing our minds,” he shouted.

The squid were taken by the current just as surely as the sailboat. Remo collapsed the sails and he and Chiun stood on either side of the small craft, shifting their own weight to compensate for the gyrations of the craft in the current.

“There’s land,” Remo announced finally. “What a mess,” he added minutes later, as they began to make out the jungle of shipwrecks that lined the shore.

“Our boat shall join the others,” Chiun said.

“Hey, I gave that nice man a security deposit,” Remo said.

But there was nothing that could be done. As the current slung the tiny craft at the dark basalt slope, Chiun and Remo stepped out on either side and ran up the shore. The sailboat skidded over the rock and bellied up against the hull of a Coast Guard cutter that had been there for days.

The stench of death was thick. How many cadavers were crushed and decaying inside all these wrecks was something Remo didn’t want to think about. “This one is still alive,” Chiun remarked.

“But he doesn’t smell any better,” Remo noted. “Who’re you?”

The grimy young man was sitting on the ancient rock perimeter wall. He was filthy, and his head was a mass of blackening scabrous tissue. His personality was as pleasant as his physical presence. “I ask the questions around here. Who are you jokers?”

Remo shrugged. “Just a couple of jokers.”

“You pulled a neat little trick coming ashore. Nobody’s made landfall like that before.”

“Who’s that?” Remo nodded at the naked girl lying nearby, head pillowed on one extended arm. She, too, had a crusted head wound.

“I told you. You don’t ask questions. I ask the questions. For your information, that’s my girlfriend, Sandy. She’s the hottest babe on the island and she’s mine. You don’t touch.”