Arabian Nightmare

"Yes, of course they are," said Aboona, thinking that they were there, not to back him up, but to shoot him in the back if he did not advance. "It will be done as you command."

"Was there any doubt?" asked Maddas Hinsein, terminating the connection.

General Shagdoof Aboona replaced the receiver with the realization that he was cannon fodder, and had been all along. He went to the full-length mirror in his command bunker, noticing powdery sand on his fine British war-surplus uniform. He brushed himself off. All but one of the paper stars of silver fell to the floor. He could not understand why this kept happening, but he no longer cared.

He wished now for the first time that he was back in Duurtbagh, a simple cobbler again.

Then, tears in his eyes, he picked up his Soviet assault rifle and went to give the orders that would probably cause his own troops to contemplate fixing their sights on the small of his back.

No matter what he did, he wore an invisible target on his spine. This was how Maddas Hinsein ruled his people.

Chapter 25

The Battle of the Maddas Line went down in history as one of the most violent land engagements since Verdun.

It was also the briefest.

The Popular People's Popular Auxiliary poured over the line, shouting "Allah Akbar!" in loud voices and firing wildly into the air, in the hope that the UN forces would retreat from their fierce din. It was their only chance, they knew. If they fired toward the enemy, the enemy would probably shoot back. There were rumors that this was sometimes done in wars.

Such was the vastness of the desert that their cries went immediately undetected.

What alerted the waiting forces was the sounds of the PPPA attackers setting off their own antipersonnel mines. The mines had been laid by the Renaissance Guard under cover of darkness so the PPPA could not safely defect. Many were ashamed of the occupation of peaceful Kuran.

Explosions lit up the sky. Distant reverberations carried south. Body parts flew in all directions. And the dreaded defensive mine fields of the Maddas Line were totally cleared-by unfortunate Iraitis.

Since there were more PPPA forces than there were antipersonnel mines, most of the Iraiti troops got through.

They lacked tanks, APC's and field artillery. And so they yelled.

General Aboona called instructions to his field commanders from the safety of his behind-the-line bunker. When his soldiers had proved too demoralized to backshoot him, he decided not to press his luck.

"The First Armored Division is located to the south!" he exhorted. "Attack at will, brave ones. Captain Amzi, take your unit to Point Afar, where only a squad of marines lie dug in. You will overwhelm them manfully."

It was a good plan.

Except that where the division should have been was a force of less than brigade strength. And the squad of marines was a squad no longer. He did not know what it was. There were no forces of four hundred soldiers in either the American or Iraiti table of organization.

Discovering itself facing a mere brigade, the PPPA, emboldened, charged with bayonets fixed. The enemy pulled back. PPPA lungs shouting victory, they closed in for the kill.

And fell victim to the classic pincer maneuver first used by Hannibal during the Battle of Cannae to defeat the Roman Army. Two wings of the divisions rolled out of the night to encircle the PPPA in a ring of steel. The carnage was brief. The handful of survivors surrendered, which was an excellent decision inasmuch as they had few bullets and their bayonets kept falling off.

Meanwhile, in the face of the unexpectedly overmanned marine squad, Captain Amzi's PPPA unit was pounded into so much camel fodder by howitzer fire and mortar rockets. He died wondering what kind of unit it was he was fighting.

It was an ala, not that that would have meant anything to him.

After an hour of hearing the rattle of small-arms fire and the boom of 105-millimeter tank cannon coming through his walkie-talkie, General Shagdoof Aboona gave up issuing orders and began requesting battle damage assessments.

He could hear his brave fellow Iraitis clearly. Their shrill, uncomprehending cries could mean only one thing.

It was a slaughter.

General Shagdoof Aboona heard the ringing of the direct line from the Palace of Sorrows as if through deep water.

Sunken-eyed, he picked up his Kalashnikov, plunked himself down on the side of his bunk, and, with the insistent ringing faint in his ears, put the cold bitter muzzle into his mouth and fumbled for the trigger with a nerveless thumb.

The hollow-point lifted the top of his head like the lid off a crockery cookie jar.

He was the final casualty of the Battle of the Maddas Line-elapsed time: eighty-six minutes and twelve seconds.

Chapter 26

Praetor Winfield Scott Hornworks burst into the war room of the UN central command base.

"It worked! The Ninth Hispana Legion ground them into sand stew. And the Vermont Victrix ambushed the rest. Changing the order of battle was the smartest thing we could've done!"

The Master of Sinanju looked up from the tortoiseshell that lay at his feet. Sheik Fareem and Prince Imperator Bazzaz had repaired to the safety of a bunker.

"Show me," Chiun directed, no joy on his face.

"Sure thing." Hornworks strode over to the rug and sat himself down happily. Using his finger, he indicated several points on the spotted shell. They were exactly where the opposing cracks crossed.

"We stopped them here, here, and there. Just like on this road-kill thing here." He looked on, cocking an eye at the old Korean, who had earned his respect as had no other military officer since his father, George Armstrong "Buster" Hornworks, had paddled his behind for smoking cornsilk. "How'd you work these tactics out in advance? Astrology?"

"No," said Chiun absently. "I simply heated the shell in a brazier until it cracked."

Hornworks batted his eyes. "You mean that's all?"

"Of course not," spat the Master of Sinanju. "I first prayed to the gods for guidance. This form of divination has been the way of my people since before the sun source was revealed to Wang the Great."

"Well, however it works, it beats computers any day of the durn week." The praetor grinned expansively. "So what's next? Tea leaves? Palm reading? You say it and we'll do it."

Chiun shook his aged head, saying, "The enemy has been discouraged. But he is not beaten. I have been charting the stars and they tell me that a new personality is about to enter the lists."

"Yeah? Who? And if it's Gorbachev, we're in deep dogfood."

"I do not know this one's name. But her moon is in Aquarius."

"Is that bad?"

"For us, no. For our foes, possibly. For Taurus and Aquarius are in conflict, signifying delay and frustration."

"So we wait for his next move, is that it?" Hornworks grunted.

"No. We must move swiftly to stage the grand plan I have devised to win the day."

"This may not be the best time to bring this up, but there's an old general's saying: No battle plan ever survived contact with the enemy."

"And there is a saying in my village: No enemy ever survived contact with the House of Sinanju," Chiun retorted.

"Since your notion got us through the night, my faith's in you," Praetor Hornworks said quickly.

"Have the LEM's arrived?" Chiun asked.

"LME's. On their way. I scrounged up as many of 'em as I could. Just give the word, and I'll assign special teams to take 'em into the field. I suggest good old Army Rangers. Marines would probably lose every blamed one before they even got to the target sites."

The Master of Sinanju gathered his kimono skirts about his pipestem legs. "No. You will give them to me."

"All of them?"

"Exactly. Then you will arrange to convey me into beleaguered Kuran. I will pass out these devices to the forces I have selected."

"What forces? Beyond the neutral zone, there's nothing but unfriendlies."

"Yes. But the question is, who is unfriendly to whom?"

Praetor Hornworks took off his service cap and scratched his bristled skull.

"Listen, I can't let you go into Kuran. You're the best blasted field officer in this man's legion."

"I must. For my son is in that cruel land."

"Didn't you hear? All the hostages are out."

"Not all," Chiun said firmly. "And I am going. You are a soldier. Obey your imperator."

Praetor Hornworks struggled to his feet. He was getting too old for all this squatting and kneeling, but if it brought results, it was better than being up on the line.

"I'm on it," he said. He started for the phone, then turned, his eyebrows lifting quizzically.

"You say this new person is a gal?" he asked Chiun.

"So the stars foretell."

"What kind of gal could help out of Maddas?"

"The wrong kind."

"Good point. You know, even if this highfalutin plan of yours comes off, this fracas ain't gonna be over until someone up and nails that son of a camel."

Chiun's eyes glinted with a sudden cold light.

"Someone will," he said.

"We generals got another saying: In times of crisis, a leader's assassin is already at his side, but neither man knows it."

"The one who will dispatch the Mad Arab is not yet at his side," the Master of Sinanju intoned. "But soon, soon . . . ."

Chapter 27

When the last Air Irait jet returned from the outside world, the pilot and copilot emerged from the cockpit to face a pair of scarlet-bereted Renaissance Guard troopers.

"You have been sentenced to death in absentia," announced the first guard. "The stated crime is releasing Western hostages without permission."

"Allah! But we were acting upon direct instructions of al-Ze'em," the pilot protested.

"Al-Ze'em is no more;" the other trooper explained. "Our Precious Leader has resumed supremacy over proud Irait. "

The two pilots turned green as they were marched out onto the deserted concourse, stood up before a ticket counter, and shot down in cold blood. There they turned white as the blood flowed from their bodies, replenishing the drying patch of rusty fluid left by their late colleagues.

An Air Irait maintenance worker later went about the task of cleaning up the bodies. He wondered who would fly the commercial airplanes now that virtually every civilian pilot had ended up in a common grave. He hoped it would be him. Although he could barely drive a car, it was possible. In Irait, where summary execution was the commonest instigator of career advancement, the Peter Principle had been raised to high art.

He was contemplating the next stage of his career as he was cleaning out the late pilot's aircraft.

From the women's room came a dull pounding and a high voice speaking excited English.

"Let me out!" it said. It was a woman's voice. He went to unlock the door.

Out stumbled, not a woman, but a slip of a girl wearing a black-and-white optical-print dress that made him think of old Laugh-In reruns.

"Who are you?" he asked in thick English.

"I'm Sky Bluel," said the girl in a breathless American accent. She wore her hair long and straight, a yellow ribbon holding it in place. Behind rose-tinted granny glasses her eyes were wide and innocent to the point of vacuousness.

"You are pink, not blue."

"Think of me as the Jane Fonda of the nineties," Sky Bluel added. "Now, quick, take me to your leader. I have a secret plan to end the war!"

"But . . . there is no war."

"That's my secret plan. It's outta sight!"

Chapter 28

Kaitmast was an Afghani.

Kaitmast had been a simple goatherd when the brutal Russians had invaded his peaceful land. After his village was obliterated by a rocket attack, he joined the Hezbi-Islami faction of the Afghan Mujahideen. Over the course of the 1980's Kaitmast had sent many a Russian soldier back to his motherland in the "Black Tulip"-the evacuation helicopter that bore the enemy dead from the field of battle.

With U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles, Kaitmast-whose name meant "Tough" in his native Afghani-had shot down a few Black Tulips too. Not to mention assorted MiGs.

Now the Russians had slunk back to their godless land, and the only foes left for Kaitmast to fight were the traitorous Afghan collaborators of the hated Soviet-backed regime.

Now that victory lay near, he felt almost sad. Kaitmast had grown quite fond of combat. He did not look forward to returning to the goats at all. Such was his mood after a decade of conflict.

It was a moonless night when Kaitmast heard the dull sounds rolling out of Pakistan.

He snapped out of his sleep, thinking that it was the rumble of T-72 tanks. A fighting grin came over his battle-hardened features. Perhaps it was the Shouroui-the Soviets-he thought, returning for more sport. Could their soldiers have grown bored with peace as well?

His Kalashnikov cradled across his crooked elbows, Kaitmast crawled along the high barren crags of the Khyber Pass. Reaching a point of vantage, he peered down into Pakistan, his squint eyes eager.

What he saw made him blink in wonderment.

But what he heard froze his blood.

It was a high eerie keening. The winds through the eternal Khyber might have produced such beauteous sounds. It filled the clear night air like a dark wine of song.

"Allah!" Kaitmast muttered, not immediately comprehending. And because he feared what he did not understand, he lifted his AK-47 and, setting it to fire single shots, began to snipe into the great dark shape that moved inexorably toward the Khyber Pass.

Strangely, there was no return fire, no faltering of the ground-shaking thunder or the unearthly song that was like an intoxicating wine.

Kaitmast emptied his clip without result. Inserting another, he emptied that too. But it was like shooting at the wind. He began to grow afraid.

The song and the thunder did not abandon the Khyber Pass until long after the sun had risen the next morning.

When it did, it illuminated the cold cadaver of Kaitmast, the Afghan freedom fighter. Or at least such pieces of Kaitmast as had landed where the sun's rays shone. Those ragtag Mujahideen who found him later that day thought to themselves that a human being could be rendered into such ruin only by being drawn and quartered by wild horses and then the separate pieces chewed by ravenous wolves.

And when they went to see what had done this to their brave comrade, they discovered spoor like a great winding serpent track that was dotted with ill-smelling lumps of excrement.

It led deep into the heart of Afghanistan.

Over hot tea flavored with sour yak butter, they conferred over how best to deal with this incursion. After long argument, the freedom fighters were split, and they went their separate ways, each group to act upon its best judgment.

Those who elected to follow it were never heard from again.

Those whose curiosity was less keen lived.

Neither forgot to the end of their days the song they were privileged to hear.

Chapter 29

The decurion brought the Master of Sinanju a butyl rubber gasproof environment suit and matching gas mask.

Laying these before Chiun's feet, the decurion said, "Specially tailored to your size, sir. Since we're about the same height and build, I tried it on to be sure. It fits me."

The Master of Sinanju poked at the ugly slick material of the suit disapprovingly. He had seen its like before, months ago, in the doomed town in Missouri that had been decimated by deadly gases. It had been the start of the assignment that had brought him to a near-death in the cold water of a peaceless eternity.

Inwardly the Master of Sinanju shuddered at the thought. These last few months had been an ordeal. First the death that was not, and then the loss of Remo. He had seen the television transmission from cursed Abominadad, showing Remo and the girl who was Kali, their skins black in death. All was lost. All was over. One last mission and his work would be done. He would return to his humble village to live out the remaining days of his difficult life, childless and bitter.

Chiun looked up toward the decurion's expectant face.

"I do not intend to wear such an abomination," he said sternly. "I asked only to examine one of these monstrosities."

"But you have to, sir. The Apache's waiting to ferry you into Indian country. The Iraitis have gas up there."

"Then let them look to their diets," sniffed the Master of Sinanju.

"Sir?"

"Never mind," Chiun sighed. It had been a rare joke, to dispel his bitter mood. But the decurion did not find humor in it. That was the trouble with the young. They never laughed at an old man's humor. Remo would not have laughed either, but at least he would not have stood before him stiff of mien and without a glint of intelligence on his pale round-eyed face.

Chiun sighed anew. His hazel eyes glanced at the goggle-eyed lenses of the gas mask and its round snout.

"Have you many of these?" he asked the dull decurion.

"Every soldier in the theater has been issued one, sir."

"And these smelly plastic garments?"

"Standard issue."

"These brown spots-can they be removed?"

"I doubt it, sir. They are desert camouflage. We can get you a woodland version if you'd prefer, but I recommend desert coloration if you're going to go poking around in the sand."

"Only a white could fail to spy a man walking through the desert dressed for rolling in the dungheaps," Chiun sniffed.

"Whatever you say, sir."

"Can these be painted?" Chiun asked at last.

"We could try."

Chiun indicated the gas mask with a clear fingernail. "And these mask contrivances?"

"Possibly."

"Have them painted at once," Chiun ordered. "And tell my worthy Apache guide to wait. He may sharpen his tomahawk if time hangs heavy on his hands."

The decurion gathered up the uniform, asking, "What color would you prefer, sir?"

"Pink."

"Pink?"

"You do have pink paint?" Chiun inquired.

"We may have to special-order," the decurion admitted.

"Then do this. I would also like several sheets of pink paper and a pair of shears."

"Do you want the shears to be pink too?" asked the puzzled decurion.

"Of course not!" snapped the Master of Sinanju indignantly. "One cannot prosecute a war with pink shears. Now, be gone."

"Yes, sir. Right away, sir."

The decurion left the room wearing an expression of doubt and confusion. He took comfort in the fact that he was no longer a mere orderly, but a decurion. He didn't know what it meant, but it sounded great to the folks at home.

It took less than an hour, but the gasproof suit was returned to the Master of Sinanju, gleaming a fresh pink color.

Praetor Winfield Scott Hornworks personally laid these items at his feet. He placed the shears and pink construction paper atop the pink pile. The colors matched to within a shade.

"I heard you decided against going," Hornworks said. "Smart move. A man's gotta know his limitations, especially one your age."

"I have not," returned Chiun, picking up the shears. He began cutting the top sheet into a long pink triangle.

"How long you gonna wait, then? We got a lot of Scuds to kill, and of Maddas ain't exactly gonna wait for the Mahdi to return before he makes his move."

The Master of Sinanju cut a second sheet into an identical pink triangle.

"I have thought long on the way to defeat the foe we face," he said slowly.

"You ask me, this is a simple matter. Just go in and defang him."

Chiun frowned in concentration. "Maddas Hinsein has the sun in Taurus. If you cut off his hand, he will tell himself that he still possesses his remaining hand."

"So? We chop his legs out from under him."

"Then he will tell himself that as long as he has his brain, he is not defeated. Thus, you must lop off his head-which is what you should have done in the first place." Chiun cut a circle in the third sheet, and holding it up to Praetor Hornworks' uncertain gaze, punctured it with a pair of upraised fingers. Two identical ragged holes were created.

"That's what I been trying to get you to do all along," Hornworks said, throwing up his hands. "We gotta go after his command and control structure. Decapitate him from his army. It's a dang autocracy up there. Without Maddas, they'll fall apart."

Chiun studied his handiwork briefly and looked up. "You think we should cut off his head?"

"Not literally," Hornworks admitted. "It's not the American way to go after heads of state, personal-like."

"Then you do not know how to wage these kinds of wars," Chiun snapped.

The Master of Sinanju picked up the gas mask and the cut pieces of paper.

"If I command it," he said slowly, "could all these garments be made into this color?"

"Sure. But why would we want to? I'm anticipating a desert campaign, not a ladies' social."

"Because these garments are essential to the liberation of Kuran."

"They are?"

"According to my plan, no shots need be fired, no blood spilled."

"I like your thinking, even if I can't hardly follow it. But taking Kuran without firing a blamed shot-it would be easier to teach a pig to whistle 'Dixie.' And you know what they say about that."

Arching one faint eyebrow, the Master of Sinanju looked up as he affixed the pink triangles to the temples of the mask so they hung point-down.

"No? What do they say?"

"It won't work and you'll annoy the pig." Praetor Hornworks cracked a lopsided grin that was not returned.

The Master of Sinanju slapped the perforated circle over the silver canister of the mask intake. It stayed in place, held only by the adhesive power of his saliva.

"That is an excellent idea," he said absently.

"What is?"

"Teaching pigs to whistle. It is a brilliant stroke."

"Not that I ever noticed. And I'm from Tennessee."

"While I am away," said the Master of Sinanju, coming to his feet like pale incense wafting ceilingward, "it will be your assigned task to teach the pigs to whistle."

"What pigs?"

"The Pigs of Peace, of course."

"You ain't by chance got yourself confused with the dogs of war, now have you?"

"Certainly not. And if you can command Wild Weasels and other such beasts, why not Peace Pigs?"

Although Praetor Hornworks did not exactly follow the old Korean's logic, neither could he defeat it.

And so he asked, "Any particular tune, sir?"

"You may select one of your own choosing," Chiun said dismissively. "I will agree to delegate that task to you, since the liberation of Kuran is not dependent upon the song the pigs whistle, only that they whistle."

"I've always been partial to 'Bridge over the River Kwai,' myself."

"Acceptable. Now please summon the decurion."

"You're leaving?"

"Soon. But I wish him to try on this garment. It is a test."

"It's sure something," said Hornworks, reaching for the phone.

The decurion struggled into the garment under the doubtful eye of Praetor Hornworks and the critical gaze of the Master of Sinanju.

When it was on, he asked, his voice muffled, "How do I look?"

"Ridiculous," said Hornworks in an unenthusiastic voice.

"Perfect," said the Master of Sinanju, beaming at his handiwork.

Hornworks put his hands on his hips and bellowed, "He looks like he's going to a durn pajama party with those pink flaps hanging down. And that circle is restricting his air flow. He needs more than two holes to breathe through."

The Master of Sinanju walked around the decurion several times in silent contemplation.

"It is missing something," he mused.

"What?" asked Hornworks acidly. "A propeller beanie?"

The Master of Sinanju went to a desk drawer and removed a pipe cleaner, which he twisted into a corkscrew shape. Returning to the decurion, he affixed it to the pink seat of the suit.

"Now you done it," Hornworks complained. "You just punctured that man's protection. The suit's integrity is shot now."

"This is how you shall outfit your legions for the taking of the enemy limes."

Praetor Hornworks wrinkled his sweat-smeared brow. "Limes?" He searched his memory. "Oh, yeah, the frontline troops. My Latin is still rusty. We gonna laugh the enemy into submission, are we?"

"You are obviously an unimaginative lout. Summon the sheik and his son."

"Sure. Just let me put on my own gas mask. That dang Ay-rab has taken to bathing in Aqua Velva lately."

A moment later, Sheik Fareem and Prince Imperator Bazzaz started through the doorway.

On the threshold they came to a dead stop, their gaze drawn automatically to the ludicrous pink figure of the decurion. Their sloe orbs flew wide.

"Allah!" the sheik cried, clutching his brown-and-red robes.

"Blasphemy!" echoed Bazzaz. "Khazir!"

Faces filled with fright, they backed away. The door slammed. Their frantic feet could be heard receding the full length of the corridor.

The Master of Sinanju turned to Praetor Hornworks, asking, "Do you understand now?"

Praetor Hornworks' chin did not quite touch the rug, but it hung slacker than a discarded marionette's jaw. With equal woodenness he pivoted toward the startled decurion.

"Son, think you can whistle the 'Bridge over the River Kwai'? Let's hear a few bars for your kindly praetor."

An hour later, the Master of Sinanju strode toward a waiting Apache helicopter gunship.

"There's your Apache," Praetor Hornworks informed him.

"He looks like a Nubian," Chiun said, noting that the pilot was black.

"The LME's are all aboard. The pilot has orders to stick with you until the job's done and get you back in one piece."

"We will return separately. For I will continue on to Abominadad alone."

The Apache's rotors began whining in a gathering circle. Sand kicked up.

"What's up there?" Hornworks wanted to know.

"The man you wish me to decapitate."

"How you gonna do that without calling in the B-52's?"

"By calling another number entirely," said the Master of Sinanju, stepping into the rising rotor wash as if into a desert sandstorm. "Which I have done."

Chapter 30

In the sleepy village of Sinanju, poised over the cold. waters of the West Korea Bay, an unfamiliar sound arrived with the morning sun.

It brought the villagers from their fishing shacks and mud huts. Dogs barked. Children raced to and fro, as if to discover the source of the insistent bell under a rock or buried in the eternal mud that even the bitter cold of winter never completely hardened.

One man emerged from his hut with sleepy determination, however.

Stooped old Pullyang, caretaker of the village of Sinanju, Pearl of the East, Center of the Known Universe, trudged up the steep hill to the House of the Masters, which perched like a gem carved of rare woods on the low hillock that dominated the otherwise ramshackle village.

He muttered imprecations under his breath as he knelt before the ornate teak door, touching two panels with his forefinger. A concealed lock clicked. He removed a panel that revealed a long dowel of wood.

Only after old Pullyang had removed this obstructing dowel could the door be opened safely.

He passed into the close, musty atmosphere, where the insistent ringing continued more loudly.

A tall black object reposed on a low taboret. Pullyang knelt before it in wonder. The rings continued, spaced apart, but untiring. He saw that the source of this ringing was like a candlestick with an ugly black flower sprouting at the top. The object was of a dull black material, like ebony.

Old Pullyang searched his mind for the proper ritual.

"Ah," he murmured, remembering. Speak to the flower and listen to the pestle.

He took up the candlestick, plucking the pestlelike object from the forked prong from which it hung. He clasped this to his ear and lifted the ugly unscented flower of a thing to his mouth, as he had been instructed so long ago.

The bothersome ringing instantly ceased.

Pullyang spoke. "Yes, O Master?"

A voice buzzed from the pestle. Pullyang listened.

"But . . ." he began. "I did not hear that you were dead. Yes, I know that you are not sojourning with your ancestors. I-"

Wincing, he flinched from the sharp quacking voice emanating from the ear device.

"Immediately, O Master Chiun," he said.

He replaced the device and went in search of a specific item in the dim room.

Around him stood the treasures of the ages. Fine silks. Gold in all manner of shape and form. Jewels in jars, in heaps, spilling from silken sacks, lay in profusion. Coins bearing the likenesses of emperors of renown and obscurity were stacked in an open chest, segregated into two piles-those who paid on time and those who did not.

The object of the old Korean's search hung in a place of honor.

It was a sword. Over seven feet long, with a thin blade that flared into a broad spade-shaped point.

The hilt was encrusted with exquisite emeralds and rubies.

Taking care not injure himself, old Pullyang took the long ornate sword down from its silver pegs. Gingerly he bore it to a long ebony box and placed it within.

The interior of the box was molded to accept the sword. He clapped the lid shut and threw two brass hooks into eyelets, securing but not locking the box.

Then, after heating a bowl of wax, Pullyang affixed a seal atop the box. It was a simple device, a trapezoid bisected by a slash mark.

It was, he knew, better than the securest lock, more valuable that the most expensive stamp, and more fearsome than any written warning against theft.

It was the seal of the House of Sinanju and it would ensure that the sword reached its destination.

With a sharp stick dipped in the hot sticky wax, Pullyang inscribed the destination on top of the box:

TO PRESIDENT MADDAS HINSEIN PALACE OF SORROWS ABOMINADAD, IRAIT

Then he went in search of a messenger who would go to the outside world and summon a lackey of the North Korean government to start the sword on its way.

Chapter 31

Saluda Jomart belonged to the Pesh Mergas. In Kurdish this meant: "Those Who Face Death."

For hundreds of years the Kurds had suffered at the hands of the Arabs and Turks. For a century they dreamed of establishing a new Kurdistan in the north of Irait. For thirty years they had been at war with Irait.

The cruel decrees of Maddas Hinsein were only the latest oppressor, but as oppressors went, Maddas was especially wicked. Not content to exterminate the Kurds through bloodshed and cruelty, he had unleashed his death gases upon simple Kurdish villages.

Saluda had nearly died from such terror when the Iraitis had attacked his home village in the Behinda Valley.

In those days, he had been the commander of an entire surlek-a company of one thousand men. After the gas had been blown away, leaving only black-skinned corpses, he was able to muster but a lek of 350 Kurds.

Now, after the conquest of Kuran, he was down to a mere pal. But fifty men. The others had been forcibly conscripted into the Iraiti Army. It was a final cruelty-to be forced to fight for the oppressor.

Still, Saluda looked forward to the day when these very Kurds would become vipers in the bosom of the oppressor who dared proclaim himself as modern Saladin-knowing that Saladin had been, not an Arab, but the mightiest of all Kurds.

Saluda crouched in the crags of a mountain, cradling his 7.98 mm. Brno rifle-which he had pried from his valiant father's dead hands after a firefight-when the sound of a helicopter assaulted his ears.

It did not sound like one of the oppressor's craft, so Saluda held his fire after he had crawled up to a place of advantage.

It was a small craft, flying low, looking like a great dark shark of the sky. The markings were not Iraiti.

It settled in the sand, throwing up sandy billows, not far from a village on the banks of the Shin River.

Saluda clambered down from the mountain. Too late. The dark shark had already lifted off.

But it had left behind a man and many boxes.

Approaching cautiously, Saluda the Kurd saw that the passenger was an old man with strange narrow eyes. He stood resolute, chin up, his venerable white hair waving in the hot wind. He wore white, a color of bad omen.

"I see by the pattern of your turban that you are a Kurd of the Barzani tribe," the little man said calmly, oblivious of the deadly maw of the Brno.

"Spoken truly," said Saluda, whose red-and-white-checkered turban marked him as a warrior who never ran from battle. "And who might you be, strange man with strange eyes who speaks the tongue of my people?"

"I am Chiun. My ancestors knew yours when they waxed mighty and were called the Medes."

"Those days are all but forgotten, mamusta," Saluda said, respect softening his voice.

The stranger cocked his head curiously. "Is the House of Sinanju, too, forgotten?"

"Not forgotten, but the memory dims."

"Then let it shine anew from this day forward," said the Master of Sinanju, gesturing broadly to the wooden crates that lay in the dust. "For in these simple boxes I have brought liberation for your people and doom for the tyrant Maddas. Enough weapons for several surleks. "

"Alas," said Saluda, lowering his weapon, "I command but a pal these evil days."

"You have friends? Other commanders?"

"Many. Even ones in the hated Iraiti Army."

"This is better than I hoped, for these weapons are of use only against the dreaded Crud missiles of the scum oppressor."

With a curved knife, Suluda broke open one crate. He squinted at rows of the silver-and-black tubes within.

"What will these do?" he wondered aloud, taking one in hand.

"They will break the back of the evil one," promised Chiun. "And even a child may wield them to good use." insulted, Saluda spat, "Then seek you children for your tricks. The men of Kurdistan are warriors."

"No offense was intended, O Kurd. Your warriors need only use these to write their names in the pages of history."

Saluda removed the cap. The smell offended his nose. He went over to a rock and inscribed his name. The tip left a moist colorless trail that quickly faded to nothingness.

"This must be a mighty instrument for writing if it leaves no mark on stone, but inscribes one's name on the pages of history," Saluda muttered.

"If you are not man enough to wield it," Chiun retorted, "I will find another."

"Man enough?" Saluda flared. "I will scour the caves and foothills and find you surleks of men who are not afraid of making history!"

The Master of Sinanju drew himself up with quiet dignity. "Spoken like a true son of the Medes," he intoned. "I have found the Kurd who will cause the Wheel of Destiny to complete a full revolution."

Chapter 32

Naseem wore his Iraiti uniform like a hair shirt.

Hauled away from his village by the Iraiti conscriptors, he was given an ill-fitting uniform in exchange for his fine fringed turban and baggy woolen costume, and an old Enfield rifle with no bullets.

With this insult of a weapon, he was set to guarding a sand-painted bunker where a great rolling Scud missile launcher was held in readiness.

But in his back pocket he had a silver tube given to him by a fellow Kurd named Mustafa. His instructions were as simple as they were inexplicable.

When night fell, Naseem steeled himself to enter the bunker. He was not afraid, for since he was a boy he had heard the Kurdish proverb "The male is born to be slaughtered." If he was killed, this was to be.

The bunker door was not locked, for easy egress of the launcher on short notice. Naseem simply entered.

Setting his useless rifle by the door, he slipped up to the launcher and climbed atop the great buff-colored missile which lay flat on its movable rail.

Lying on his stomach, he uncapped the silver tube and began writing out his name. He wrote large, according to his instructions. He had been told that he would be writing his name in history, and because the world had long ago forgotten the Kurds, rightly called "the orphans of the universe," he wrote very, very big.

For he knew that all over Irait and Kuran, his Kurdish brothers were doing the very same thing to other Scuds and Iraiti strike aircraft.

Chapter 33

President Maddas Hinsein slammed down the field telephone receiver after the 1,785th unanswered ring.

"That traitor Aboona refuses to answer!" he roared.

All around the council room, his high command jumped in their seats. This included Vice-President Juniper Jackman and Information Minister Don Cooder, who were experiencing what Maddas had referred to as "orientation."

Maddas turned to his new information minister, who wore a Maddas Hinsein mustache that had been applied with black shoe polish.

"Explain this!" he demanded in Arabic.

"What's he saying?" Cooder asked Jackman nervously.

"No clue. I'd just start talking, was I you," Jackman said.

"Well, you see, your grace," Don Cooder began, "as I see it-and we must be careful with our facts here, because events are unfolding too rapidly to assimilate them in coherent sequence . . .

The foreign minister translated on the fly.

Maddas received the rambling account with a grim face. Since it did not contradict him, he took no exception. He was used to his ministers talking much but saying little. That is why he always had the council-room TV tuned to CNN-it was his only source of reliable intelligence.

He pulled the remote from a belt holster, causing most of the room to duck instinctively. The CNN logo came on. The council clambered back into their seats, features dripping cold perspiration.

They all watched in silence as the foreign minister essayed a running translation while patting his face with a handkerchief.

"We are thwarted," said Maddas Hinsein, after hearing of the failure to take Hamidi Arabia.

"A temporary setback," the foreign minister said quickly.

"Which you will surely overcome, Precious Leader," added the defense minister.

Maddas nodded.

"We must devise a new strategy to confound the infidel," he went on unhappily.

"Your brilliance will prove superior to their base perfidy," said the agriculture minister. "As always."

Vice-President Jackman leaned over to Don Cooder. "I can't tell what these mutton-munchers are saying, can you?"

"Shhh!" Cooder hissed. "You want to get us shot?"

"They won't shoot me. I'm vice-president now. I'm indispensable."

"Tell it to Dan Quayle."

That thought gave Iraiti Vice-President Jackman pause.

"I'm also a personal friend of Louis Farakhan," he pointed out. "That's as good as a free pass in this neck of the desert."

The voice of Maddas Hinsein intruded on their whispering.

"We must make a glorious gesture," he announced. "The eyes of the Arab world are on us now. How can we smash the aggressor? Come, come, I must have suggestions."

"We could send the Renaissance Guard south," the health minister offered, carefully. "If you think we should."

"Good. And then what?"

"They must take up the defense of the Maddas Line and our new thirteenth province before the hated aggressor overruns our position."

"A waste of good soldiers. Have more PPPA conscripts sent to the front. They are like the dinars in my pocket. Of use only when they are being spent. Our best must remain in readiness for the great sheik of struggles to come."

"We could blow up the oil wells in Kuran," the defense minister suggested.

"What good would that do?" asked Maddas Hinsein.

"It would make a wonderful series of explosions. Perhaps if there was no oil in Kuran, the Americans would have no reason to stay and vex us so."

Maddas Hinsein considered this novel thought at length.

The man who had ventured the suggestion had put it forth only because he had been put on the spot. He knew that such a deed would infuriate the world. But in a choice between infuriating the world and annoying his Precious Leader, it was no contest. The world was not sitting across the table from him.

"I will consider this," said Maddas Hinsein. "It is a good idea."

A servile knock on the door interrupted the next speaker.

"Come," said Maddas Hinsein.

A red-bereted Renaissance Guardsman entered. "Precious Leader, we have found an American girl on one of the returning planes. She desires to speak with you."

"Good. Have her tortured. I will speak with her afterward. "

"At once, Precious Leader. But she has said that she has a plan to end the war."

Hearing this, Maddas Hinsein broke out into a bristly smile. He laughed. The laugh grew into a roar, which traveled around the room like insane wildfire.

"She wishes to end the war and there is no war!" Maddas roared. "She does not understand the proud Iraiti people. We want war! We revel in war. We look forward to war."

"Yes, we revel in war," chorused the Revolting Command Council, which believed no such thing.

"She says she is an expert in things nuclear," the guardsman added.

Maddas Hinsein swallowed his laughter. There were only two words that riveted his attention. The word "nuclear" happened to be one of them. "Torture" was the other.

"Bring her," he said quickly, his face returning to its natural sober cast.

The girl was brought in. Her stark optical-print dress made their vision swim, as if they stared at her through a disturbed pond. The yellow ribbon in her hair made Maddas Hinsein frown darkly.

"Hi, I'm Sky Bluel," she said brightly. "Peace."

"Uh-oh," said Don Cooder, recognizing the girl.

The foreign minister stood up. In thick English he asked, "You are a U.S. scientist?" His tone was skeptical.

"Actually I'm a student at USC," Sky admitted. "But I did grad work at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories-before I got booted out for kinda borrowing nuclear-weapons technology."

"You seem a mere girl."

"Physics majors can be girls-I mean, women-too." Sky looked past the foreign minister suddenly. "Hey, I know you! You're that over-thirty TV anchor-pig. You helped me build a neutron bomb that got me into all that trouble. Tell them."

All eyes turned to Don Cooder.

"It's true," he said carefully. "I know this gal. She stiffed me. I helped her build a neutron bomb for demonstration purposes and she left town before airtime. We had to show a repeat." He made it sound like a leg amputation.

Maddas Hinsein interjected himself into this exchange with a gruff question. The foreign minister leaned over to explain the exchange.

While they huddled, Sky Bluel folded her arms. "For your information," she whispered to Don Cooder, "I was kidnapped. A lot of bad things happened. Palm Springs was almost wiped out. Someone died. And worst of all, I had to leave the country. My parents packed me off to Paris to study."

"My heart bleeds," said Don Cooder acidly.

Presently the foreign minister lifted his iron-gray head out of the huddle.

"You can build a neutron bomb?" he asked.

"If you got some tritium lying around, some beryllium oxide for the tamper plastique. Oh, yeah, and steel for a combat casing."

"We do. But why would you do this for Irait? You are an American."

"That's the groovy part," Sky said excitedly. "The U.S. has nukes all around you, right?"

"This is true."

"So I build you a few neutron bombs, and presto-instant balance of power. They can't nuke you and you can't nuke them."

This kernel of invincible logic was passed on to Maddas Hinsein. His moist brown eyes went to the girl's innocent face. A crafty smile came over his fleshy caramel visage. He whispered in the foreign minister's ear.

The foreign minister bestowed his most disarming smile on Sky Bluel.

"Our Precious Leader," he said smoothly, "he sees the wisdom of your point of view. He wishes to know how soon you can build these peace-ensuring devices for us."

"Oh, a week," said Sky. "Maybe a month. Depends on what I have to work with."

"I thought you were antinuclear," Don Cooder whispered.

"I am. But I'm more antiwar. Listen: No blood for oil! USA out of Hamidi Arabia!" She lowered her voice. "Do I sound like Jane Fonda, or what?"

"You sound 'or what,' " Don Cooder snapped. "Definitely."

When Sky Bluel's words were translated, Maddas Hinsein's grin broadened. He clapped his hands loudly. He spoke at great length.

The foreign minister spoke next.

"Our Precious Leader has decided to put this to a vote in true democratic fashion. All in favor of delaying further military action in favor of building neutron bombs, say yes."

"I'm voting no," said Vice-President Jackman.

"Me too," Don Cooder chimed in. "This is ridiculous."

"All opposed will be issued service pistols along with one bullet."

"Why only one?" asked Cooder.

"Because when one wishes to commit suicide by pistol," he was told, "one bullet is all that is necessary."

"I vote yes," Cooder said instantly.

Vice-President Jackman raised an eager hand. "Make that two yeses."

In point of fact, it was unanimous.

This impressed Sky Bluel. "Wow! Ho Chi Minh's got nothing on you!"

As the foreign minister led Sky Bluel from the room, she asked a question in an uncertain voice.

"That stuff about suicide. That was a joke, right?"

"In Abominadad, we are always cutting up. I myself often thank Allah for providing us with a sense of humor second to none in the Arab world."

And the foreign minister smiled like a piranha eyeing legs in the water.

Chapter 34

A day passed. Two. Three. A week. Two weeks.

As the world held its breath, America's industrial might geared up for the military mission destined to go down in the pages of history as Operation Dynamic Eviction.

An Ogden, Utah, factory went to around-the-clock shifts, turning out flamingo-pink butyl rubber gasproof suits outfitted with what appeared to be corkscrew antennas in the seat area. No one knew why.

In plants scattered throughout Iowa, Michigan, and elsewhere in America's heartland, specially customized pink gas masks rolled off assembly lines, were packed under the watchful eyes of armed MP's, and then loaded aboard C-5 Galaxy transports for the five-thousand-mile flight to Hamidi Arabia.

Idle Detroit auto factories received rush orders for unique fiberglass shells that were too big for ordinary stock cars and aerodynamically unsuited for small airplanes-the plant manager's second guess.

In Akron, Ohio, rubber capital of the world, customized blimps were rushed through the manufacturing stage and shipped flat, ostensibly for use in the next Rose Bowl parade. Their actual destination was the Star in the Center of the Flower of the Desert Military Base in Hamidi Arabia, where they were inflated in the security of desert-camouflage bunkers.

The entire operation was mounted under the strictest security since the bombing of Tripoli. There were no leaks. This pleased the sector of official Washington that was privy to the plan.

Which did not include the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. They didn't have a clue. For the first time in the history of the United States, America was going to war and its high command was out of the loop.

But not completely out of the picture.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs barged into the Tank, a green trash bag clutched in one fist.

"I got one!" he crowed. The Joint Chiefs gathered around a table as he emptied the contents into a table. They picked through it eagerly.

"It's pink!" mumbled the commandant of the Marines. "I can't have my men wearing one of these! The Navy will never let me live it down."

"What're these triangles hanging down?" asked the Army Chief of Staff, fingering one.

The Air Force Chief of Staff snapped his fingers. "Gotta be a gas-detection patch. Probably turns green at the first sign of chlorine."

"And this flexible squiggle in back must be some newfangled gas sensor," put in the chief of naval operations.

Everyone agreed that this had to be so.

But the pink coloration continued to baffle them. Outside of a guerrilla war in Miami Beach, no one knew of a combat environment in which flamingo pink was dominant.

But even more troublesome was the fact that the White House was keeping them in the dark about the operation to come.

At the White House, the President of the United States was out to callers-especially those emanating from the Pentagon.

He was on the cherry-red line to Folcroft Sanitarium and Harold Smith.

"So far, so good," he was saying. "General Hornworks says his troops will only need another day's training before they move north."

"Has there been any word of the Master of Sinanju since he went into Irait?" Smith asked.

"None. But I share your concern. It was a brave thing that he did, darn brave."

"Normally I would not be concerned, Mr. President. But after his lengthy ordeal, he is not up to par. When this is over, I fear he will be of little use to us in the field."

The President sighed. "Let's get through this crisis before we start fretting about the future. My biggest worry after this is over and done with is having our armed forces restored to normal. You should see the new table of organization. Reading it takes me back-to Mrs. Populious' ancient-history class."

"Of course, sir."

"Has there been any activity from bait?"

"Nothing. A few broadcasts. They're continuing the pretense that Reverend Jackman and that anchor, Cooder, are now full-fledged members of the Revolting Command Council, but that's obviously a ploy to duck the hostage issue. But no military activity has been reported since the attempted border incursion. Let us hope it remains that way until Dynamic Eviction has been successfully concluded," Smith concluded tightly.

"You know, Smith, as crazy as this thing is, I can't help but feel absolute confidence in it," the President confided.

"The Master of Sinanju has never failed us yet."

The call was terminated. The world went back to counting the days and wondering what would happen next.

But apparently nothing happened. Not on the ground or in the air.

Only in space was a hint of future events picked up. Five hundred miles above the earth, an orbiting Lacrosse spy satellite detected an unusual plume of methane gas emanating from the interior of Afghanistan. It was tracking westward, but CIA analysts could not identify it. It seemed to be a natural phenomenon, but on a scale they had never before seen.

Because it was moving against the prevailing winds, a volcanic or lake-bed eruption was discounted. The only other possibility might have been droppings of a mighty herd of water buffalo. But a water-buffalo stampede of this magnitude had never been noticed before. There was no animal on earth large enough to panic that many cattle.

Throughout occupied Kuran and Irait, Kurdish warriors stole into aircraft revetments and Scud bunkers, writing their names invisibly and leaving the scenes of their depredations undetected by man or satellite.

And in Abominadad, Irait, a wooden crate arrived, addressed to President Maddas Hinsein.

Chapter 35

President Maddas Hinsein was no fool.

When the wooden crate postmarked Pyongyang, North Korea, was delivered to the Palace of Sorrows, he had his most valuable council members open it while he descended to the German-made bunker under the palace, nicknamed the Mother of All Bunkers. He always selected his best men for this duty, because he knew it would deter them from shipping him bombs themselves.

Today his favorites happened to be the foreign minister and Vice-President Juniper Jackman.

Jackman was only too happy to take a crowbar to the crate. The line of AK-47's pointed in his direction constituted tremendous motivation.

"Bet Dan Quayle doesn't pull this kind of duty," he complained, confident he would not be shot because no one in the room understood English.

The planks split with a crack and revealed a magnificent sword as long as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and encrusted with precious stones.

Maddas Hinsein was called up only after the sword had been safely removed, examined for venomous barbs, and dipped in a solution that would change color if a contact poison had been applied to the blade.

"It is a gift, Precious Leader," the foreign minister reported. "Truly. See?"

"The North Koreans obviously stand in solidarity with us," said the president of Irait with quiet satisfaction.

"Yet they claim otherwise. I have spoken with their ambassador and he knows nothing of this magnificent gift."

Maddas Hinsein frowned. "I will accept it anyway. Hang it over my desk in a place of honor."

"At once, Precious Leader."

When the sword was firmly in place, President Maddas Hinsein locked the door behind him and stood looking at the sword. He grinned. It was a worthy blade, and it gave him solace after the destruction of the crossed scimitars that had lifted so triumphantly over Arab Renaissance Square.

The sadness of that setback reminded the Scimitar of the Arabs of the treason of the four-armed Kimberly Baynes, and made him wistful for the corrective discipline of her quick, firm hands. With her gone, there was no one to spank him anymore.

Impulsively he went to a phone.

"The spider-armed girl," he demanded of his chief torturer, the minister of culture, "is her body still in the dungeon?"

"With the American assassin, as you commanded, Precious Leader."

"Do they . . . smell?"

"Strangely, no."

A quick smile broke over the president's dark face. "No? Hmmm. Perhaps I will torture them, then."

"Can one torture the dead?" wondered the culture minister, a hint of interest in his voice.

"If one has the stomach for it." Maddas Hinsein laughed, hanging up.

Down in the coolest part of the dungeon, the bodies lay on cold slabs of black basalt. Their skins were a remarkable flat black, as if powdered with coal dust.

The woman was completely nude. Maddas Hinsein dismissed the thought of mounting her. He had raped a cold corpse once, when he was a carefree young man. Never again, he vowed. He had caught a terrible cold.

The man lay composed in death, eyes closed, an austere look on his face. His colorful harem silks were in tatters, but Maddas Hinsein had no eyes for those. He noticed the large egglike bump in the center of his forehead. Obviously a bruise.

It was quite unusual, and the President of Irait could not resist poking it with his finger.

To his horror, it slid apart like a ruptured plum.

"Allah!" gasped the Scimitar of the Arabs, recoiling. For the bump had opened like a dead eyelid, revealing a sightless black orb. There had been no such organ on the man's brow in life, he recalled clearly.

As Maddas Hinsein backed away, black arms stirred like an upended lobster on the slab behind him. A naked chest shuddered, impelled by an indrawn breath.

The figure on the slab levered itself to a sitting position in silence, and blood-red eyes fell upon his unsuspecting back with a fiery regard.

"You live . . . " a dead voice whispered too low to be heard.

And a loud, frantic voice came from the corridor, crying, "O Scimitar of the Arabs! The impregnable Maddas Line is under attack!"

President Maddas Hinsein bolted from the torture room a mere flick ahead of grasping black nails.

Chapter 36

If there was someone he could complain to without being shot for questioning authority, Colonel Hahmad Barsoomian of the Renaissance Guard would have complained loudly and vociferously.

But he figured he was in enough trouble as it was. His orders to report to the Maddas Line and take command of the ragtag Popular People's Popular Auxiliary could only mean he was regarded with suspicion by the high command. Why else would they exile him to work among undisciplined shopkeepers and teachers in ill-fitting uniforms?

It was night, and Colonel Barsoomian stood atop an earthen-mound breastworks scanning the neutral zone with his Zeiss military field glasses.

There was a crescent moon hanging low in the sky. It augured well, he thought. What little light it shed was like a shimmering silver rain collecting in the desert wadis below.

There was no sign of the anti-bait UN forces. They would never attack. They feared to, Barsoomian was certain.

A low shape appeared in the sky. A glimmer of moonlight revealed it.

Colonel Barsoomian adjusted his glasses. It was silent and oblate as a strayed moon. And it was coming this way.

"Searchlight crew!" he called down. "Direct your beam that way, you donkeys!"

A powerful tungsten light sprang to life. The beam wheeled southward, sweeping the sky.

"Left. Now right! There! Hold it there!" Barsoomian ordered.

And when the hot beam transfixed the floating silent thing, Colonel Barsoomian trained his binoculars upon it.

His jaw fell slowly at the terrible sight. His eyes grew round as coins. He could feel his heart pumping high in his throat.

"Shoot that blasphemous thing!" he commanded in a high, hoarse voice. "Bring it down!"

Orange-red tracers streaked through the night. And missed.

"Correct your aim, offspring of donkeys!"

The PPPA antiaircraft battery did. This time they fired wide in another direction, missing spectacularly.

Soon the thing was passing directly overhead and Barsoomian, seeing the four pink hooves looming directly over him, countermanded his order.

"Do not shoot! We do not want the unclean thing falling upon us!"

The order was unnecessary. The gunners were good Moslems. And they heard the continuous amplified squealing that the floating pink monster seemed to be making. It chilled the blood of every man along the long Maddas Line-for at strategic spots over the fortification, other silent pink monsters hovered like the most evil of omens.

Moslem faces turned skyward. Moslem mouths gaped in awe and fear. All eyes were on the silent monsters above.

And as if connected to a timer, the monsters all went pop! at once.

Shards of slick pink fleshlike matter began to fall. Soldiers scrambled for their holes, their bunkers. A few retreated from the line. Some ran screaming. No one stopped them. No one cared.

And when the commotion began to abate, the remaining defenders heard another sound.

It welled up from the south, out in the frontier. It was a kind of whistling, but great in its fullness and magnificence.

Colonel Barsoomian, thankfully untouched by the unclean pink rain, crawled up to the breastworks mound and employed his field glasses once more.

This time his mouth went round. For he saw the advancing host.

They were coming in a long skirmish line, thirty deep. It was a line that stretched in both directions, a wall of pink.

Pink legs marched in unison. Pink hands held M-16 assault rifles across pink chests. The rifles were not pink, but the faces above them were-pink, inflexible, and terrible. Eyes goggled glassily over pink snouts that were punctured by two pink-rimmed nostrils. Pink triangular ears flapped and beat against chubby pink cheeks as the pink soldiers advanced in an unbroken pink line.

And ahead of them, here and there, rumbled round pink monsters with identical beastlike snouted faces. They left trails in the sand like those of tracked vehicles. And they squealed and grunted and gave vent to "oink-oink" sounds that made Colonel Barsoomian's devout Moslem skin crawl as if from inquisitive ants.

But most terrible of all was the sound that advanced before that unclean beast-army like a wall of sound.

It was a great whistling. The tune was hauntingly familiar to the shocked ears of Colonel Hahmad Barsoomian.

He couldn't place it. But he knew he had heard it before. Somewhere.

Colonel Barsoomian had no idea he was listening to a thousand pink lips giving voice to the theme from the classic motion picture Bridge over the River Kwai.

He no longer cared. He dropped his AK-47 and dashed for an APC. The starter ground as he cursed the balky Soviet-made vehicle. Then he sent the APC careening north, driving with one hand over an ear to keep out that damnable whistling.

He had to warn his fellow Renaissance Guards that an army of the unclean was on the march.

He did not care what happened to the undisciplined PPPA. Let the infidel khazir army have them. It did not matter. It would take real soldiers to defend Irait from this most wicked aggression.

If that were possible.

Chapter 37

The news was so dire, no one wanted to deliver it to Maddas Hinsein.

The Revolting Command Council sat around the table. Their president was due at any moment. The foreign minister suggested that the vice-president deliver the bad news. But since the vice-president did not speak Arabic, this was difficult to implement.

"But the infidel have rolled across the Maddas Line," said the education minister in a voice so tight a hand might have been at his throat.

"Without firing a shot," added the minister of culture. "The PPPA simply deserted their posts. The Precious Leader will be furious. Someone will be shot."

"Let us suggest that he himself shoot the PPPA," the foreign minister said suddenly. "Each one. Personally. He will like that. And it will keep him occupied."

The defense minister added his two cents. "It is a brilliant idea, but too late, alas."

"What do you mean?"

"They have been decimated by the Renaissance Guard, who cut them down as they overran guard divisions."

"Are there not any left?" asked the foreign minister.

"Only Renaissance Guard elements, and they are our last hope to hold Kuran," he was told.

Eyes met around the conference table. At one end, Don Cooder and Vice-President Jackman exchanged uneasy glances.

"Looks like they got bad news or something," whispered Jackman.

"Looks like," Cooder said, fingering his new mustache. It was really coming in now. He hoped the Precious Leader would approve. Maybe it would impress him enough that he would not be shot, as seemed to happen a lot. He was just starting to get the hang of the job, which seemed to consist of groveling. Don Cooder had garnered extensive groveling experience during his previous career interviewing various heads of state.

"Well, we're safe," Jackman ventured.

"How you figure that?"

"I'm second from the top and you're my right-hand man."

"That didn't help the last information minister," Don Cooder pointed out.

Reverend Juniper Jackman grew very quiet.

President Maddas Hinsein stormed in a moment later.

"What news?" he demanded, taking his seat.

No one answered. Maddas pounded the table with his fist. "Report! What transpires at the front?"

"It . . . it has been overrun," said the defense minister. "Completely."

Maddas Hinsein blinked. "The Maddas Line? My pride and joy? The bulwark of Islam?"

"I am sorry, but it is true." The defense minister squeezed tears from his eyes. Frowning, Maddas Hinsein extracted his pistol from its holster and casually shot his defense minister in the face. Everyone was impressed by the results. Not to mention splattered.

The muzzle shifted to the culture minister. "You! The Maddas Line-does it hold?"

"Yes, Precious Leader. It stands as unbreached as before," the man said quickly.

"You are lying," said Maddas Hinsein, performing a radical tracheotomy with a lead slug.

The culture minister fell off his chair gurgling. The muzzle next went to the foreign minister.

"The truth! Speak it!"

"Pigs!" bleated the foreign minister. "The Americans have been breeding with swine! Genetic mutant pig soldiers have overrun our first line of defense. Mechanized sows! Flying pigs! What Moslem can stand before such an unclean army?"

Maddas Hinsein's sad brown eyes fluttered at this report.

"Preposterous! I will spare you if you speak the truth in the next few seconds."

"But . . . Precious Leader. This is the truth. Before Allah, I-"

The foreign minister's mustache was driven into his teeth, and his teeth through his spine by another bullet.

Vice-President Juniper Jackman would have been next, but a messenger entered at that point, crying, "Precious Leader, the Renaissance Guard! They are being destroyed!"

"By what army?"

"By our own army. Iraiti regulars have overun them in their panic to flee the advancing pig dancers."

"Dancers?"

"They appear to be dancing as they advance. And whistling."

Maddas Hinsein lifted a field telephone from under the table. It connected directly with the general in charge of Renaissance Guard forces in occupied Kuran, now Maddas Province.

Instead of an Arabic voice answering, he heard whistling. He recognized the theme from Bridge over the River Kwai. The Scimitar of the Arabs had no doubts that these were American pigs whistling. Bridge over the River Kwai was on the Iraiti forbidden-films list.

Woodenly he dropped the phone.

"There is worse news, Precious Leader," the guardsman said stiffly. "The U.S. government has declared that you are a war criminal. They say they intend to hang you until dead."

"I will not hang!" roared Maddas Hinsein. "I am the Scimitar of the Arabs. There is not a man alive who can make me hang if I do not wish to. Is that not so, my loyal ones?"

"Absolutely, Precious Leader," chorused the surviving members of the Revolting Command Council, save the vice-president and the information minister, who, not understanding Arabic, settled for staring wide-eyed into space and keeping their legs together so their bladders did not empty themselves.

"They say the Pigs of Peace, as the propaganda broadcasts call them, will cross into Irait if war criminals are not turned over to them. They are very angry over the gas attack on their computer outpost."

"Then they shall have war criminals," Maddas Hinsein announced resolutely. He gazed about the room. "Who will volunteer to surrender themselves? Those who do will go down in Iraiti history. The others will remain with me. Come, come. I know it is a difficult choice, but you are brave men."

A lot of fast thinking went on in the collective brains of the Revolting Command Council. Either option was grave. Neither was desirable. A few considered the American option, but the fear that this was a trick question, a test of loyalty, stayed them.

The minister of agriculture had the presence of mind to translate the option into English for the vice-president and the information minister.

Jackman and Cooder took only a second to decide.

"I'll do it!" said the former.

"No, I will," said the latter. "I'll gladly turn myself over to the Americans."

Their words did not have to be translated into Arabic for the benefit of Maddas Hinsein. Their eagerness to sacrifice themselves for him was plain on their infidel faces. This brought a tear to his eyes.

He came to his feet and gathered up both men in a bear hug. He kissed them on each cheek. Twice.

"You will never be forgotten," said the Scimitar of the Arabs. "Go, now. A plane will be waiting for you."

On the way out of the palace, Don Cooder said, "I can't believe the big lummox fell for it."

"Amen, brother."

As they stood outside the palace trying to hail a cab, Reverend Jackman raised a possibility that had not occurred to them before. "You don't think the U.S. will actually hang us for war criminals, do you?"

The anchor and the reverend exchanged sagging expressions.

They dashed back to the iron entrance gate, banging and shouting and begging for their old jobs back. This was reported to the president, who was forced to brush a tear from his face at the news. "Do not let them in," he added.

Then he turned to his council, saying, "I have this moment decided that I will not allow Iraiti honor to be sullied by this insult. If I cannot possess Kuran, no one may. Defense Minister-"

Maddas Hinsein looked around the table. The late defense minister's left foot had caught on the table edge. That was all of him that could be seen from a sitting position.

"Who would like to be the new defense minister?"

No one raised a hand, so Maddas Hinsein casually waved a hand in the direction of the health minister.

"You."

"I accept, O Precious Leader," said the new defense minister unhappily.

"Go forth and launch all our Scuds."

"The target, Precious Leader?"

Maddas leaned forward. His smile was sick.

"Jerusalem," he said.

An audible gasp filled the room.

"But, Precious Leader, Jerusalem is sacred."

"To the Jews. And the Christians."

"And to us. The Dome of the Rock is there. If we gas Jerusalem, not only will the infidel and the Jew be down upon us, each of our Arab neighbors will be too. Our allies."

"This is what I wish," said Maddas Hinsein firmly. "If I cannot have my way with the world, then everyone on earth must die. I have decided this. Issue the commands. Shoot any who hesitate."

"But, Precious Leader-"

"When you are done, shoot yourself," Maddas said flatly. "There will be no shirking. The hour of glory has come! Civilization was born in the glory that was Abominadad, and from here we will transform the world into a caldron of blood."

The defense minister hurried from the room.

On the way out, he bumped into Sky Bluel, who wore an unhappy expression on her well-scrubbed face. She pushed past into the council room.

"Excuse me," she said, "but I think this so-called tritium is actually a cheesy grade of uranium. I need better materials if I'm going to whip up a working neutron bomb, know what I mean?"

This was relayed to Maddas Hinsein, who invited the American girl to join him at the conference table.

"You want my advice?" she said. "Boss move."

Sky Bluel obligingly went for the seat indicated by the Iraiti president's careless gesture. It happened to be between the dead defense minister and the deceased foreign minister.

"Oh, gross! Are these guys dead?"

No one answered.

"What killed them, anyway?"

"Our Precious Leader has invited you to sit, so you must sit," said the minister of agriculture.

"I'm not sitting between two dead guys," Sky insisted. "No way. They smell and they're making uncool noises."

And since the Scimitar of the Arabs no longer needed an American nuclear expert because he expected American and Israeli nukes to rain down upon all their heads at any minute, he ordered the noisy American girl to be taken to the lowermost torture chamber to await his pleasure.

As she was dragged off, Sky Bluel hurled back the most vicious insult she could summon up.

"You're no Ho Chi Minh! You're not even a CU Guevara!"

Sky Bluel grew silent as she was escorted to the dungeon area. Her guard happened to speak English and remarked with some relish, "I will put you in with the dead American imperalists."

"If I have to be locked up with imperialists," Sky said, "I guess I'd prefer dead ones. I feel a strong urge to meditate coming on. This whole trip is getting very, very heavy."

The guard paused at a rude door marked by a small window bisected by iron bars. A faint pounding came from the other side.

"What is this?" said the guard, putting his face to the bars.

Instantly a quartet of black arms grabbed his face, his throat, and his epaulets. He screamed, dropping a ring of keys. Sky grabbed this and shrank into a corner as the guard was methodically throttled to death.

When he was still, Sky slipped up to the bars.

"Hello, in there," she hissed. "Are you political prisoners?"

"Yes." The voice was dead. "Open the door."

"Coming right up," said Sky, fumbling for the right key.

She pulled on a thick iron ring and the door creaked open.

To her openmouthed astonishment, out stepped a woman with matted hair and skin the color of coal dust. She was nude. Her red eyes blazed in Sky's direction.

"Far out!" Sky said in a thick voice, not quite registering the lean apparition's four arms. "What did they do to you? I mean, how can I help you, you poor oppressed thing?"

The red eyes bored into her. One hand lifted, curling so that a single finger pointed at her.

"Give me that."

Sky touched her hair. "You mean my headband?"

"Yes. It is my favorite color."

"Sure," said Sky, whipping the yellow ribbon from her hair. As she held it out, she asked, "It won't cover much, you know."

"Just your neck, " said Kali, who fell upon Sky Bluel like an ebony spider clutching a strand of yellow webbing.

As she was slowly throttled to the cold stone floor, Sky gurgled inarticulately. In that respect, she died as she had lived.

Chapter 38

The command went out.

All over Irait, mobile Scud launchers rumbled out of places of concealment. Crews sent their missiles lifting skyward on their rail launchers like a hundred symbols of Arab sexual prowess. Coordinates were programmed into on-board targeting computers.

More than one devout soldier, recognizing the significance of those coordinates, wept openly and cursed the name of Maddas Hinsein.

At air bases from the Kurani border to the frontier with Turkey, from Syria to the west and Iran to the east, pilots leapt into the Soviet MiG 29's and French-built F-1 Mirage fighters, as ground crews frantically affixed chemical payloads to bomb racks and wing mounts.

The flight that would send the world at last into the Red Abyss of Hell was about to be launched. At the command of one man.

It happened that Yussef Zarzour commanded the first Scud to lift off. The massive coordinated strike was supposed to launch simultaneously, but Zarzour was still flushed with the success of his elimination of the 324th Data Processing Cohort, and could not wait to taste of new glory.

Had he known that his Scud was aimed at Jerusalem, he would have instantly reprogrammed it to demolish the Palace of Sorrows. But he was ignorant of that fateful fact.

Hunkered in the shelter of a rock outcropping, he listened for the roar of the rising missile, setting himself for the seismic blast of superheated air and exhaust gases. His fingers were jammed into his dirty ears.

The long thunder of the Scud's plume never came. Zarzour was counting off the seconds. He kept counting. The number twenty should have signified liftoff. He stopped at fifty-five.

He stuck his head up from the rocks.

The Scud simply stood there pointing to the blue sky. It had not cleared the launch rail. Smoke dribbled from the tail. It was gray and lazy.

As Yussef Zarzour watched, the Scud suddenly came apart in a flower of noise, burning rocket fuel and shrapnel.

A sharp shingle of the latter whisked his head off his neck. His crouched body didn't so much as twitch as the shrapnel executed a textbook surgical strike. It was found months later, still in a crouched position, birds pecking at the raw stump between his inert shoulders.

Other Scuds did lift off throughout Irait. They executed parabolas, loops, and arcs that would have astounded their Soviet builders.

These acrobatics terrified the gaping crew chiefs, some of whom fell victim to their own weapons as the rockets careened and tumbled, wildly out of control, back to ground with explosive results.

Scuds blew up on their rails. Or landed hundreds of kilometers short of their targets. Some never got erect. As the rails toiled skyward, they snapped as if brittle with age. In those cases, crews discovered the heavy steel rail launchers had actually crumbled as if from the elements.

In other instances, after successfully erecting, the rails collapsed due to the vibration of launch. Since the Scud was never designed for horizontal launching, this was particularly disastrous to surrounding crews, buildings, and natural rock formations.

Iraiti pilots fared no better. Mirages, towed from their revetments, suffered acute damage during that simple procedure. Nose cones fell off. Landing gear collapsed. Bomb-laden MiG wings dropped loose at their roots, releasing nerve gases on ground crews.

A few Iraiti Air Force jets did get off the ground. Rudders and elevators came off under the G-force strain of takeoff. Wings were sheared off for no apparent reason. Canopies flew away in flight, forcing pilots to eject where they could.

More than one Iraiti pilot was doomed to ride his precision fighter down into the smoking hole that was to become his grave, cursing Soviet workmanship and Maddas Hinsein by turns.

It was as if the hand of God had interceded to save the world from one megalomaniac's nightmare ambition. For no one could understand how the entire Iraiti Air Force and its rocketry units could misfire simultaneously.

Especially President Maddas Hinsein, who shot dead the first two ministers who informed him to his face of the most crushing defeat in Iraiti history.

When he ran out of ministers to shoot, he promoted his personal driver, a corporal in the Renaissance Guard, to defense minister and had the trembling man drive him to a Scud site south of Abominadad, which had misfired but was still intact.

When the Scud crew saw the white limousine of their Precious Leader coming up the road, they formed a circle and drew their service pistols in unison. At the count of three, they opened fire on the center of the circle.

The center was empty. Their bloody bodies soon filled it.

President Maddas Hinsein stepped over the bodies with grim unconcern. He strode up to the inert Scud, squinting at it.

There was a long black squiggle running up one side of the Scud. He had to tilt his head to make it out.

It was a name. An unfamiliar name. The script was so large it curled around the tubular rocket's body almost to the point of being unreadable, forcing the Scimitar of the Arabs to walk around the launcher in order to read it in full.

The script read: "NISEEN."

"Who is this Niseen?" roared Maddas Hinsein, shaking his fist.

"I do not know, Precious Leader," replied the new defense minister.

"Then have every man in Irait named Niseen executed at once!"

"At once, Precious Leader," said Defense Minister Niseen Ammash, who threw his ID cards out the window during the drive back to the Palace of Sorrows and swore to himself that he would go by the name of Toukan for the rest of his days.

He figured that would take him through Tuesday.

Chapter 39

The launch plumes dappling the Iraiti landscape were visible from orbit. Central Intelligence Agency analysts counted over a thousand-which puzzled them because it was more than double the number of Scuds known to be in the Iraiti inventory.

It took hours, but they figured out that some of the flashes were not launch plumes but points of impact. All were well within the borders of Irait, another puzzle.

This intelligence was relayed to the Pentagon, which could make no sense of it, to the White House, which took great pleasure in it, and to Praetor Winfield Scott Hornworks, at that moment riding atop a Marine amphibious assault vehicle through liberated Kuran City like a pasha astride a pink elephant.

It was not obviously a Marine land vehicle, since its angular lines were concealed by a pink fiberglass shell in the shape of a fifteen-foot-high sow. It bounced along like a parade float, its squiggly tail whipping up and down.

An upright pig walked up to the sow and doffed its pink piglike gas mask.

"Sir, intelligence reports the Scud and fighter-jet threat to be completely suppressed," said the pig, actually a centurion with the Praetorian Sues, formerly the Presidential Guard.

"He did it, dang his yellow bones!" whooped Praetor Hornworks, waving a silver standard topped by an eagle and emblazoned with the letters CPQA. "That old gook did it! We liberated Kuran without suffering a single casualty. Screw taking the skies. We got total sand superiority! Sues Pacifica rules!"

"Sues Pacifica, sir?"

"The Pigs of Peace, son," Hornworks explained. "Get your snout in a Latin primer sometime. You might learn something useful."

"Does that mean we can climb out of these silly suits, sir? The men are thirsty as hell."

"Whistling up a sandstorm will do that to a centurion," said Hornworks, eyeing the horizon, which seemed to go straight up to Irait without a bump. "Start passing the canteens. It's Miller time."

"Aren't we forbidden to have alcohol, sir? This is a Moslem country, after all."

Praetor Hornworks fixed his centurion with a cold eye. "Son, if any Ay-rab so much as looks at you crossways, you rear up on your hind legs and give him a good loud oink. That'll get up his skirts worse than the sand fleas."

The centurion gave a snappy salute. "Yes, sir!"

Praetor Winfield Scott Hornworks returned to searching the northern horizon line. Somewhere up there, the Master of Sinanju roamed. The final phase of Operation Dynamic Eviction was in his hands. Hornworks hoped he had it in him. The old guy had looked as old as Confucius. And twice as tired. Hornworks had never seen a man look so tired. Like he had come to the end of his string, with maybe one last errand to finish before he cashed himself out.

The question was: how was he going to decapitate Maddas and his command structure without a passel of B-52's backing him up?

Chapter 40

The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran was alerted to the impending incursion by the president of neighboring Afghanistan.

"Why are you telling us this?" asked the speaker of the Iranian Parliament suspiciously. The two nations were not known for being on friendly terms.

"So you understand the scourge coming your way is not sent by us," replied the president of Afghanistan. "We have lost enough troops to the scourge."

"Scourge? Are the Russians coming?"

"These are not Russians. The Russians refused to come to our assistance. They were smarter than us, who have thrown away two crack divisions against the scourge."

Since such a high opinion of Russian intelligence was virtually unheard-of in the Islamic world, the speaker of Iran's Parliament took the warning to heart.

"What is it you suggest we do?" he asked carefully.

"Pray to Allah that the scourge is not intent upon gobbling up your nation and only wishes to pass through."

"Gobble?"

"You will know of its approach by the trembling of the ground and the singing," the Afghan president went on. "One will bring fear to your heart and the other tears of joy to your face. The scourge itself, however, will bring ruin to your armies if they dare stand in its path."

"If it is Allah's will that this be done, who are we to challenge the will of Allah?" asked the speaker.

"I trust that was a rhetorical question," returned the Afghan president dryly. "For it would be better that you spit in Allah's eye than contemplate victory over the monster approaching your border."

"Spoken like a godless tool of the Communists," spat the speaker.

"Perhaps. But my nation is still intact. Will yours be, come the morrow?"

The line went dead.

The speaker of the Iranian Parliament went to a wall map. He picked out the point where the creature or power the Afghan had called the scourge would cross their mutual border.

He saw that the path would take this scourge through the sands of the Dasht-i-Kavir Desert, south of Tehran.

Since he did not wish to lose his republic for the sake of a useless desert, the speaker put in a call to the Iranian president, with whom he reluctantly shared power.

"Should we not defend the revolution?" demanded the president after he had heard the speaker through. "For it is truly written that submission to Allah's will is not to be avoided."

"No," the speaker said thoughtfully. "For if I read my map correctly, this scourge of the Afghans is bent upon reaching the criminal Iraiti nation."

"Allah be praised."

Chapter 41

The city of Abominadad was the cradle of human civilization. Erected at a particularly sinuous twist of the Tigris River, it had birthed the first alphabet, the art of writing, astronomy, algebra, and a long line of kings that had included the most powerful and despotic in history.

Destroyed many times over the centuries, Abominadad had always been rebuilt. Always larger. Always to grow to greater power, more grandiose aspirations.

And while the center of earthly civilization had shifted to Persia, then Egypt, Greece, Rome, England, and, in the twentieth century, the unknown and unguessable Western land known as America, Abominadad patiently tore down her old towers and threw up new ones. She prospered, expanded, and, most important, dreamed. Waiting for the desert stars to favor her again.

In the late twentieth century, some five million Arabs dwelt in Abominadad-more human beings than had populated the young globe when her first minaret was erected in the storied days no eye living today had beheld.

Of them, no Iraiti ear had ever heard the haunting sound that swelled across the Tigris.

Yet all five million inhabitants of Abominadad felt their blood run cold when they first caught that sound. Fear clutched at every heart. Hands shook.

It was a sound, high and haunting, that they understood in their souls. It burned in their blood. It resonated in racial memories. Fathers had imitated that sound, teaching it to sons, and sons to grandsons. Although it had become diluted, imperfect, half-forgotten, every Iraiti from the mountainous Turkish border to southern salt marshes had learned to approximate the sound that keened through the dry air.

It was a call of defiance and a knell of doom.

And as it sliced the sky, pure and crystalline, it brought a startled silence from the city. The muezzin froze in their minarets, the call "Allaaah Akbaaar" dying in their suddenly tight throats. The women withdrew to their homes like black crows seeking shelter from a storm. The children sought their mothers.

And the men, who alone knew the true significance of that cosmic sound, made haste to gather up their clan.

For the first time in generations, Abominadad was about to be evacuated. Not because of the threat of falling bombs and raining missiles. Not because of pestilence. Not even because of fire.

But because of a beautiful song floating through the air.

"What is that exquisite song?" asked President Maddas Hinsein, who, because he had been orphaned young, had had no father to mimic that weirdly ethereal keening.

Receiving no answer, he turned to his defense minister, only to find the man staring down at his darkening crotch.

A puddle formed around the man's left shoe, ruining a Persian rug that months before had graced the palace of the deposed Emir of Kuran and now covered the floor of President Hinsein's office in the Palace of Sorrows. A great seven-foot bejeweled sword hung on the wall behind the man's head.

Since he could always shoot his defense minister later, Maddas Hinsein forbore to draw his pearl-handled revolver and instead affixed a broad grin of good humor on his face. They were always disarmed by that grin, were his victims.

"Are you ill, my brother?" Maddas asked sympathetically.

The new defense minister looked up. "No, Precious Leader. I am dead."

"Come, come," said Maddas Hinsen, striding over to clap a fatherly hand on the man's quivering back. "Do not think because you have pissed on my favorite rug that I will shoot you dead."

"I wish that you would."

Maddas Hinsein's mustache and eyebrows lifted all at once. "Truly? Why, brother Arab?" he asked.

"Because it would be infinitely more merciful than what I and all of Abominadad will suffer at the hands of the authors of that song."

"Tell me more," prompted the Scimitar of the Arabs, leading the man to a window with a reassuring arm across his shoulders. "I am very interested in what you have to tell me."

The window happened to be near a spot where the rug fell short. It also overlooked a broad panorama of the city proper.

Maddas Hinsein gazed out over the city that, even in this dark hour, was his pride and joy. Nebuchadnezzar had ruled this very city. Before the evil thing had befallen him and he was exiled into the desert to eat scrub grass and consort with oxen. In the future, this sprawling metropolis would be the capital of all Dar al-Islam, the Realm of Islam.

His chest swelled with the pride he felt. A shine appeared in his moist brown eyes, making them glow like mournful stars. His fixed grin widened, and softened with true joy.

Then his eyes focused on the streets and broad avenues choked with fleeing cars and trucks. His fleshy face fell.

"My people!" Maddas Hinsein said in surprise. "Where do they go?"

"To safety, Precious Leader."

He touched his heart. "Safety? They are safe here. With me."

"They do not think so," the defense minister said quickly.

Maddas Hinsein looked down at the man's sweaty face.

"You speak boldly, for once," he said suspiciously.

"I no longer fear you, Precious Leader," answered the defense minister. He closed his eyes. "You may shoot me now."

Maddas Hinsein took the man by both shoulders. "I have no intention of shooting you. Are we not brothers?"

That has not stopped you before, the defense minister thought. Aloud he said stiffly, "If you insist."

"Then tell me: before Allah, what frightens you, brother Arab?"

The calling came again. It cut through the glass like a blade of sound wielded by houris.

"Before Allah," said the defense minister, his fear-sick eyes darting about the room, "that."

"But it is so beautiful."

"Only to another of the ruh who utter it."

"Ruh? I do not believe in demons."

"You will." The defense minister licked drying lips. "If you are not planning to shoot me, Precious Leader, may I shoot myself?"

"No," said Maddas Hinsein sternly. "What sound is that? Quickly, I weary of this word play."

"Mongols," croaked the defense minister.

"Speak louder."

"Mongols," repeated the defense minister, this time in a high, squeaky voice like a child whose finger had been caught in a mousetrap. "It is their hoomei you hear. What they call the long song."

The sad eyes of Maddas Hinsein, Scimitar of the Arabs, narrowed at the sound of the word "Mongols." There was not much schooling in his past. He knew little of modern history-one reason he had miscalculated so badly in annexing Kuran. Of ancient history, he carried in his head only the great moments in Arab pageantry, and little of the terrible fates that befell those rulers who, like himself, overreached themselves.

But he had heard of Mongols. Dimly. They dwelt in the far east. Somewhere.

"These sounds are made by Chinese?" he muttered, blinking stupidly. "The Chinese are not arrayed against us. They have been our friends. Sometimes in secret ways. "

"Mongols are not Chinese," the other man said after several attempts to swallow. "The Chinese fear Mongols more than any other foe."

"They have never faced Renaissance Guardsmen," Maddas remarked confidently.

"Mongols are"-the defense minister groped for a proper comparison-"more fierce than even Turks. They nearly conquered the world once," he added in a strange voice. "Once, they vanquished Irait."

"I do not recall hearing such a tale," allowed Maddas Hinsein, a worried frown beginning to darken his features for the first time.

"They rode out of Mongolia astride their tireless ponies and laid waste to everything in their path. Those who resisted were put to the sword in cruel, merciless ways."

"And those who surrendered?" wondered President Maddas Hinsein. He noticed that the song, which had lifted again, seemed to emanate from the east. The population of Abominadad was beating a path west.

The defense minister swallowed. "Put to the sword in even crueler ways. For the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan despised those who refused to fight even more than they did resistance to their will."

Maddas Hinsein's arm fell from his aide's shoulder as if every nerve had been severed by surgical lasers. He had heard of this Genghis. He was a mighty warrior. As famous in his way as Saladin, who had routed the Crusaders.

"Perhaps they have come to join our cause," he said hopefully.

"Perhaps," the other agreed. "But when they were last here, they besieged Abominadad."

"The city was walled in those days," said Maddas Hinsein. "How could mere horsemen successfully besiege our glorious city?"

"It is written in the histories that the caliph in those days first saw a cloud of dust in the distance."

Maddas Hinsein went to the opposite window of his office. The one that looked eastward. He did see dust. Of course, there was always dust in the air. This time of year the sandstorms and dust devils were especially fierce.

"What else?" asked the Scimitar of the Arabs, nervousness coloring his deep voice for the first time.

"The rumbling of many horses told the caliph that the fate of Abominadad was nigh."

Through the glass, through his boots and the floor beneath them, came a faint vibration. It made Maddas Hinsein's teeth click and chatter. He set them defiantly.

"What then?"

"I cannot understand you, Precious Leader," said the defense minister.

"What happened then?" shouted President Maddas Hinsein, unclenching his teeth. The floor under him was shaking now. It was a very steady shaking. Like a thunder that had rolled out of the ages.

"The hordes of Hulegu came to the Ishtar Gate."

Maddas scowled. "Hulegu? What of Genghis?"

"Genghis was dead by this time-otherwise we would not be here speaking of these matters," the trembling defense minister offered. "Genghis left behind only dust. Hulegu was sloppier."

"Go on!" urged Maddas Hinsein, noticing that the dust cloud was darkening. It was midday but the brightness of the sun was fading. The dust was very, very black now.

"Hulegu and his Mongols stormed the Ishtar Gate and overwhelmed poor, defenseless Abominadad," the defense minister went on.

"Bah! We are not defenseless now."

"Nor were they then, Precious Leader. The garrison was captured and its soldiers divided among the Mongols."

"Slavery is a fitting fate for those without the stomach to defend their nation," Maddas spat contemptuously.

"They were not enslaved," said the man. "They were divided for slaughter. The caliph was captured and forced to order his people to leave the city where they laid down their arms."

That reminded Maddas Hinsein of the teeming refugees passing beneath this window.

"Why do my people run without leave from their Precious Leader?"

"Perhaps because they have read the same histories as I," suggested the defense minister.

"What histories?" demanded Maddas Hinsein through tight teeth. The palace was shaking now. It was designed to withstand a direct missile hit. It took a lot to make such an edifice tremble. Yet he barely heard his defense minister's words of explanation.

"The ones that tell of how after the people of Abominadad surrendered, they were all put to the sword. The Tigris ran red on that evil day."

"Never mind the people!" Maddas shouted, seeing for the first time a line of horses coming out of the desert. They looked small, the riders astride them low and squat, their wide faces as hard and unfeeling as rank upon rank of hammered bronze gongs. "Tell me of the caliph's fate!"

"Caliph al-Musta'sim was allowed to live for seventeen days, while Abominadad was sacked and burned." Tears welled up in the defense minister's jewellike eyes.

Maddas Hinsein turned, his face sagging. His eyes implored an unspoken question.

"The caliph!" Maddas roared. "What of the caliph, you ignorant dog?"

"Then they sewed him in a bag and trampled him to death under the hooves of their horses," replied the weeping defense minister. "May I die now?"

"No, you may not die!" thundered Maddas Hinsein, drawing himself up. "You are an Arab. Arabs do not lay down their lives before an enemy. Where is your courage?"

The defense minister obediently pointed to the dark wet stain on the former royal rug of the Kurani emir.

"It is there, Precious Leader," he said simply.

"There is a way out of this predicament," Maddas shouted, pacing the rug. "There is always a way. I need only think of it."

"It is too late. The thunder of Mongol doom is upon us. And our best forces are bogged down in Kuran."

Maddas Hinsein's deep brown eyes acquired a crafty light. He snapped his fingers, bringing a broad grin to his sober face.

"Contact the Americans," he said quickly. "Inform them I wish to enter into an alliance. They may have all my oil in return for protection from these bandits."

The defense minister shook his head doubtfully. "The Americans know your true colors, Precious Leader. They know how you break your promises for the sake of the moment."

"Phone Tel Aviv, then. The Zionist Entity will be happy to learn that I now regard them with respect and affection."

"That I would not do if I were the caliph of old Abominadad and it was my only hope to escape the sewn bag of death."

"Then contact the hated Kurds!" Maddas thundered. "They are almost as savage as Mongols. Perhaps they will hurl themselves into the teeth of these animals, and both armies will be wiped out!"

"How will I do that?" the defense minister asked plaintively. "The Kurds have no telephones, no radios, and no cities. They have been practically gassed out of existence."

"What traitor did that?" roared Maddas Hinsein.

"You did."

Maddas drew his scraggly black eyebrows together like burnt caterpillars mating. He fingered his mustache worriedly. It was true. He had gassed the Kurds. In all the excitement, he had almost forgotten.

"There must be some ally that will succor me," he muttered, pacing the rug. "The Russians have nuclear weapons. Whose side are they on this week?"

"I do not think even they know," the defense minister admitted truthfully.

"Where is the PLO? After all I have done for them."

"Their leadership has been decimated by your own assassins, Precious Leader."

"What of the Grand Mullahs of Islam? They will not allow a fellow Moslem leader to perish at the hands of unbelievers."

"They have declared you an enemy of God and decreed that for your crimes against Islam, you be killed and your hands cut off."

"Oh."

And out the window, rank upon rank of Mongol horsemen drew near, the pounding of their multitudinous hooves raising a black cloud that had blocked out the very moon and cast a pall over even the unquenchable spirits of President Maddas Hinsein.

He wondered if he too would end up like King Nebuchadnezzar, cast out into the hostile desert, eating tufts of dry scrub grass with the oxen and other dumb brutes.

Then, remembering the fate of Caliph al-Musta'sim, he realized the answer to that question.

Only if he were lucky.

Chapter 42

President Maddas Hinsein fingered the wallboard control that caused the six-thousand-pound steel door to roll closed behind him.

He descended into the multilevel bunker under the Palace of Sorrows that had been made by German engineers to withstand a direct hit from everything from an H-bomb to laser cutting beams, content that no matter what happened to his unimportant populace, he would emerge alive at the end of it.

And if alive, he would be ultimately victorious.

Maddas swaggered through the maze of passages to a duplicate of his office above. All that it lacked was the Kurani emir's excellent rug.

But at least it would have the wonderful Korean sword, which Maddas personally carried, wrapped in heavy burlap to protect his fingers from the wickedly sharp blade.

He placed this on his great desk while he removed the knit khaki jersey that he had worn when he had executed the final member of his cabinet, the defense minister whose name he had already forgotten. It was stiff with blood and smeared with coagulated brain matter.

From a drawer in the desk he drew forth a long funereal black garment-a spare abayuh. Pulling this over his head, he allowed the fine fabric to settle down over his thick hips, which wiggled sinuously. He drew a veil over his sad brown face.

"Ahhh," sighed the Scimitar of the Arabs as the comforting fabric soothed his troubled soul. Wearing the veil was his most secret vice, kept from even his late wife. It was a relic of the days he had escaped to Egypt disguised as a woman, after the failure of a youthful coup. The abayuh proved to be a tension reliever more excellent than torturing Kurds.

He slipped a CD into a Blaupunkt deck. The strains of "Salome's Seven Veils" rolled over his shrouded form like waves of bedouin glory.

Throwing his hands up in the air, he began throwing his hips about, fingers snapping in syncopation.

"Mad Ass, Mad Ass," he sang in a low baritone. "I am the most crazy-assed Arab of all time."

The dry clearing of a throat caused his eyes to go wide behind his veil. In a long wall mirror he caught a reflective glimpse of a wispy presence in white.

Maddas Hinsein wheeled.

Standing in the doorway, hands tucked in the sleeves of a pale kimono, was a tiny Oriental man who looked as old as the Prophet himself.

"What are you doing here?" Maddas demanded, yanking off his veil. It did not matter that the man had discovered him in an abayuh. They were entombed together in the bunker. The old man would not live to reveal the secrets of Maddas.

"I am Chiun," he said quietly. "I entered with you."

"I entered alone."

"Did not your shadow follow you in?" asked the old one.

"Of course. But what has that to do with you?"

"I am your shadow," said the old Oriental, padding forward on silent white sandals. He might have been a little yellow ghost in a shroud of bone. His eyes were unreadable slits.

"Who are you really, old one?" Maddas demanded, slipping one hand into a gap in the folds of his black garment. It closed about his ivory-handled revolver.

"I am Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju."

"That title means nothing to me," Maddas spat.

The little wisp of a man stopped not six feet away from the Scimitar of the Arabs.

"I am he who trained the assassin who fell into your power," he said without emotion.

"The American?"

"His name was Remo. And he was the greatest pupil a Master of Sinanju could ever have."

"This Sinanju, why have I never heard of it?"

"Perhaps," said the old man, "because you are ignorant and unread."

Maddas Hinsein knew an insult when he heard one. The pistol came out like a viper's head, muzzle zeroing in on the Oriental's sunken chest.

"You would not shoot me, an old man," the Master of Sinanju said simply.

"Why not? I have shot so many." And Maddas laughed.

"Because I have seen fit to present you with one of the treasures of the House of Sinanju, the finest house of assassins ever to walk this ancient land."

A yellow claw of a hand emerged from the joined white kimono sleeves to gesture to the seven-foot-long sword lying swathed in burlap on the desktop.

"You! You sent this fine blade to me?"

"Yes," said the Master of Sinanju, padding up to the weapon. "I trust you have treated it with respect, for it has been in my family for over two thousand years."

"You say you are an assassin," Maddas asked, interest silvering his suspicious tone.

The one called Chiun drew himself up proudly. "No, I am the assassin. The last of my line."

"I have need of an assassin," Maddas said thoughtfully. "The American President has caused me much trouble. I would like him killed. Could you do this?"

"Easily," said the Master of Sinanju, carefully laying the burlap folds aside to expose the gleaming blade. He examined the rubies and emeralds on the hilt with a critical eye.

Maddas Hinsein absorbed this answer with interest. "Could you assassinate the American President with that very sword and return it to me with the President's blood upon the blade?"

"With the President's head impaled upon the tip of the blade, were it my wish to please you so."

Maddas Hinsein's brown eyes glowed with pleasure. "It would please me greatly. I think we can do business, Master of . . . what was that name?"

"How quickly they forget," said the Master of Sinanju. "Bong must be doubly shamed that his service has made no impression on you Mesopotamians."

"Names do not matter," Maddas said impatiently. "Only deeds. Will you cut off the President's head with that sword for me, or not?"

"No." The old Oriental's voice was distant. He did not look up from his examination.

Maddas Hinsein was not used to the word "no." It startled him so much that instead of shooting the old man then and there, he sputtered a question: "Why not?"

"Because this sword is reserved for the execution of common criminals, not dispatching emperors," said the Master of Sinanju, who laid careful hands upon the hilt. He seemed only to touch it, and the blade lifted into the air as if weightless.

But Maddas Hinsein knew full well that it was not weightless. He had worked up a sweat carrying it, and the Scimitar of the Arabs was built like the Bull of Bashan.

"Then how would you kill the President?" he asked.

"With the only proper instrument-my hands," replied Chiun.

"I would accept this," said Maddas Hinsein, thinking the old Oriental meant slow strangulation.

"But I would not," said the Master of Sinanju, turning to face the Scimitar of the Arabs, the weapon held balanced before him, the flared tip less than a foot from Maddas' still-sweaty face. He could not believe the little man possessed such strength.

"There is not enough gold on the face of the earth to entice me to work for one such as you," the old man went on in a tone whose coldness matched that of the blade. "I may be the last of my line, a childless old man, but I still have my pride."

Maddas Hinsein blinked stupidly. That was a second no. Did this unbeliever not comprehend with whom he was treating?

"I demand that you work for me!" he roared, cocking his pistol.

"And I refuse."

"I do not understand. If you do not wish to sell your services to the Scimitar of the Arabs, why did you send me such a magnificent sword?"

"Because," said the Master of Sinanju, drawing the blade back over his shoulder with a sharp whisk of steel cutting air, "it was too heavy to carry."

Maddas Hinsein registered the abrupt drawing back of the blade. His first thought was to pull the trigger at once. No conscious thought was involved in this snap decision. It was pure reflex.

But it came too late.

For as his brain processed the first danger signal, the old Master of Sinanju swept the blade around. His sandaled feet left the floor. And the old man became a floating flower of spinning skirts, with the sword becoming a long pistil of flashing silver beneath the overhead lights.

Maddas Hinsein realized the stroke had completed itself when the Master of Sinanju alighted on his feet, his back to him, the sword momentarily lost to his sight.

He felt the soft breeze of the blade's passing. But he knew that it had accomplished nothing. He had felt nothing, save for that gentle breeze. His eyes still saw. His feet still stood firmly, supporting his strong body.

"You missed," Maddas Hinsein's brain commanded his tongue to taunt. But what came out of his throat instead was a bubbling sound oddly unlike human speech.

And as the Master of Sinanju turned to face him once more, the long blade came up before his unreadable Oriental face. The tip was scarlet with gore, and as it lifted ceilingward, blood ran down it like cough syrup.

Out of the corner of his eyes, the Scimitar of the Arabs caught sight of his own throat in the long wall mirror. A thin red line was visible there. It seemed to go around to the back of his neck. As his eyes grew startled, the line exuded blood like more thick cough syrup dripping from a glass jar rim.

"My son has been avenged," said the Master of Sinanju coldly.

They were the last words Maddas Hinsein ever heard in life.

His legs finally got the message that no more commands would ever come from his disconnected brain. They buckled at the knees. And as he fell, his head, severed so expertly that no vertebra was injured by the razorlike blade, so swiftly that the stump to his neck kept it balanced in place, simply fell off like a shaggy hat.

The Scimitar of the Arabs felt nothing. But before the light went out in his moist eyes, his tumbling head caught sight of his falling body and the ugly red orifice that was his exposed neck.

A single tear escaped his right eye.

It was the only tear ever shed over the passing of Maddas Hinsein, self-styled Scimitar of the Arabs. And it was red.

The Master of Sinanju took his time wiping the tainted blood from the blade of his ancestors. Then he left the bunker like a ghost from the storied past of doomed Abominadad.

Chapter 43

On the roof of the Palace of Sorrows, Kali danced.

Clasping her mate, her lover, and her dancing partner all in one to her corpse-black bosom, she turned and spun. Her naked feet made dry rustling sounds on the limestone roof, like the dead leaves of autumn skittering along pavement.

She led, because her dancing partner hung limp in her four-limbed embrace. His slipper-clad feet dragged uselessly. His head hung low, bobbing on a boneless neck like that of a strangled chicken.

"Dance! Why do you not dance, lover?" Kali whispered. "I need for you to dance. For without your mighty feet moving in concert with mine, dancing the Tandava, this world of woe will toil on as before. Dance, O Red One. The Red Abyss awaits us both."

Though no reply came from her mate's blackened lips, she danced on, her limbs shaking and quivering in death throes that would never end.

Tears flowed from Kali's blood-red eyes. The tears were a poisonous whitish-yellow, like pus. She was thinking of all the hot fluids she would drink from the Caldron of Blood, if only Shiva would lead.

Chapter 44

Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, ascended to the roof of the Palace of Sorrows to watch the fall of Abominadad by starlight.

He found instead a macabre dance, and the body of his dead pupil clasped in the scorpion's grip of the demoness that, as much as the Arab tyrant Maddas, had brought him to the end of all happiness.

As she went through her impotent motions, Kali's scarlet eyes stared blindly through him. She might have been oblivious of all the universe.

Yet she spoke. "Begone, old one. There is nothing for you here." Her voice was akin to a death rattle.

"This is the body of my son, whom I now claim," said the Master of Sinanju in an austere voice.

Kali expelled a rude laugh. "If he will not dance, then I shall split his bones, lick of his marrow, and depart this body to await the next avatar of Shiva."

The Master of Sinanju noticed the palsied twitching of her black features, the shivering of her limbs. She almost dropped her limp consort, whose head lolled so pitifully. Her anchorless head, too, whipped from side to side in her mad gyrations. They were two corpses dancing in a mockery of life.

The sight filled Chiun with the ice of bitterness.

Twenty years of love and discipline, and it had come to this sick end. He lifted his voice.

"Though you are Kali the Terrible, and I but an old man," Chiun warned, "I will expend the last of my essence before I allow you to despoil my son's body further. "

Kali laughed mockingly. "You are but a mortal husk, bereft of virility, devoid of power. I will gnaw the living flesh from your old bones if you do not begone."

"Bare your teeth, then, harlot," said the Master of Sinanju, advancing, the great sword of Sinanju before him. "For you face a fury more implacable than the hell from which you sprang."

Kali swept to a stop, Remo's head bobbing ghoulishly. Her blind scarlet eyes fixed upon the old Korean. A corpse grin twitched her lips into a death rictus.

"I hunger for blood, but living flesh may suffice, " she said, dropping Remo into a pitiful pile. Her quivering arms lifted in unison, like an optical illusion.

"And I yearn for vengeance," said Chiun, sweeping in.

The Master of Sinanju shook his pipestem arms free from billowing kimono sleeves, the better to wield his mighty blade.

Kali's outspread arms closed like a Venus's-flytrap.

The sword's spade-shaped point clicked against a dead black forearm. The Master of Sinanju thought this would be the final blow he was destined to land in life.

But it was not. A black hand, like a spider descending a strand of silk, simply dropped off the attacking wrist.

Recovering his balance, Chiun slashed defensively.

An elbow splintered like a dried tree branch, causing the lower left arm of the demon Kali to suddenly hang down at a crazy, useless angle, as if hinged.

"Aiee!" cried the demon. And her bloodless stump descended for the Master of Sinanju's bald head.

Chiun planted a foot with a hard stamp, pivoted, and using the centrifugal force of the moving blade, flicked away from the blow. He felt its breeze. But there was no force behind it.

Withdrawing several paces, he turned to face anew his opponent. A wan smile brought grim humor to his cold hazel eyes.

"You are mighty, O Kali. But your host is not. The girl's sinews are poisoned from the Arab's death gas. She is dying. Just as my Remo has perished. You will join him in death."

And he laid aside his great weapon. It was weighing him down. He was still not recovered from his long ordeal of water and undeath.

"I will kill you first!" screamed Kali. Yellowed teeth bare, she sprang at him like a dog.

Chiun darted from the lunge, hurling a taunt over his shoulder.

"You will kill me never, carrion thing," he spat. "You were born dead and you will die forever."

"I will eat you!"

Sweeping around, the Master of Sinanju paused only to take up Kali's severed hand. It was cold to the touch. Still, it twisted with tarantula animation.

"Eat you this!" called Chiun, hurling the member in the face of his attacker.

Kali screamed anew. Blood oozed from the corners of her mouth, as if the lungs had ruptured from the very violence of her cry. She caught the hand and began to gnaw upon it like a bone.

"I will consume your hands," she said through a mouthful of her own fingers. "Just as I consume my own."

"Only a cannibal speaks empty words through a full mouth," Chiun jeered.

At that, Kali the Terrible threw away the fingerless hand and came at him screaming.

Chiun stood his ground, his eyes resolute, his thoughts cold.

Yes. Come, Kali. Come to your doom, he told himself. And he set himself to flick from her path so that Kali would hurl herself to her own death.

Kali undoubtedly would have done exactly that, except for one obstacle-the cold corpse of Remo Williams. He lay in her path. One of her naked feet stubbed Remo's unresponsive head. Kali stumbled.

And like a bear trap that had been sprung, Remo's arms lifted, digging deep into the cold dead flesh of her legs.

"You tricked me!" Kali howled. "You live!"

"And you die," a remorseless voice returned, beginning to drag her down to him.

As Chiun watched, his wrinkled features twisting in horror, the lolling head of his pupil strained upward on its unstable neck. Three eyes burned in his face. They were as black as balls of polished ebony. They locked with those of Kali, and the mouth, roaring, snapped and snarled at Kali's astonished face with the fury of a wild dog. The third eye began to glow, emitting a pulsing purplish beam of light.

Inexorably, Kali was wrestled to the ground. Shiva-for that was the true name of the entity that animated the remains of Remo Williams, Chiun understood-assumed a superior position, straddling the kicking, screaming corpse-thing. The purple beam bathed it like hard radiation.

"What are you doing?" Kali screamed, averting her face from the awful light. "I only wanted to dance! This is our shared destiny!"

"My hour has not yet come," Shiva said in metallic tones. "The day of the Tandava has not yet dawned. You desire blood? I give you bile. "

And with that, Shiva's mouth yawned to its fullest and began extruding a black bile that was like cold tar streaked with blood.

The viscous matter poured over Kali's unprotected face. She kicked, she fought, howling like a cur. But in the end her nerve-damaged limbs lacked the power to resist.

Quivering and twitching, she subsided.

As Chiun watched, true fear a cold stone in his belly, Shiva dismounted his consort. He turned slowly. The three black eyes seemed to regard the Master of Sinanju like a doom.

"I do not fear you, Supreme Lord," Chiun said in a quavering voice.

"Then you are not worthy to call yourself a Master of Sinanju," Shiva intoned.

Chiun swallowed. "What is your will?"

Shiva raised both hands to his forehead. They swept down to his thighs like a benediction. "That this fleshly throne remain whole until I claim the right to sit upon it, " he said.

Chiun's facial hair quivered. "Remo is not dead?" he gasped. His eyes went round and unbelieving.

"The gas of death is strong, but my will is stronger."

Chiun indicated the prostrate form of Kali. "What of her?"

"She has tasted the excretions that, now purged, allow my avatar to breathe the air of this realm anew. "

The Master of Sinanju trembled, and fought back welling tears.

"Give me back my son, O Shiva, and any wish you desire, I will swear to fulfill."

"Remember that vow, Sinanju," said Shiva. "You may come to regret it. But on this day, in this hour, I need only to return to Chidambarum, the center of the universe, where I sleep. "

Chiun nodded. It was more than he could ever have dreamed. A lump rose in his throat and the air coming into his lungs was inexplicably hot.

Then, assuming a lotus position on the limestone roof, Shiva the Destroyer laid his wrists upon his knees and closed all three eyes. A wave of color, like the wind worrying sailcloth, rippled over the flesh of Remo Williams. Another. The slaty color began to fade. Magically, the lopsided head reoriented itself to the vertical, the livid blue bruise of the throat lessening, fading, growing pink and healthy once more.

Remo Williams opened his uncomprehending brown eyes. They blinked, focused, and seemed to accept the pale vision that was the Master of Sinanju standing before him.

"Little Father . . ." he began, his voice a bullfrog croak.

Chiun said nothing. He could not. His every thought was focused on holding back unseemly tears.

"I thought you were . . . dead," Remo said slowly, seeming not to know where he was. He looked around. At every point of the compass, smoke lifted into the intensely black sky, and fires raged.

"Is this . . . the Void?" Remo asked tightly. "The last thing I remember was killing Maddas Hinsein. Then Kimberly grabbed me by the . . ."

His gaze suddenly alighted on the prostrate form of Kimberly Baynes, only a yard away.

"Is she dead too?"

Before the Master of Sinanju could summon up an answer, the blackened arms of Kali flung upward. Her spine coiled and her legs jackknifed. Her tottering body came erect, surviving arms outflung as if for balance.

"What's this?" Remo asked nervously.

"A gift," said the Master of Sinanju, stepping up to the creature as it pawed slime from its matted hair and face. The sounds coming forth were confused and muffled. "The Supreme Lord has offered Sinanju an opportunity to extract full vengeance."

"Hold it!" Remo warned, trying to get to his feet. "She's more dangerous than you think." His legs, locked in a lotus position, were unresponsive, as if nerve-dead.

"Do you hear me, O Kali?" Chiun demanded, ignoring his pupil.

"I will eat you!" Kali roared, trying to see through the dripping slime.

"Perhaps. But first I have a riddle for you."

"What?"

"What has three arms and screams?"

"I do not know, foolish old man. Nor do I care."

"Little Father!" Remo shouted, uncrossing his legs by hand. "Don't take her on alone!" His eyes were wide with worry.

The Master of Sinanju lashed out with a stiff-fingered strike, knocking the maimed arm of Kali loose from its socket. It fell with a plop.

Kali screamed. Her three, surviving arms waved.

"Since you did not solve that one, I have another," Chiun went on calmly. "What has but two arms and screams?"

Kali obviously guessed the answer to that one, because her upper arms-the unimpaired ones-reached for the Master of Sinanju's face.

Chiun knocked her legs out from under her and grasped the swinging broken arm as she fell. The arm tore free like cloth ripping.

"I got one," Remo said, finally finding his feet. He strode over Kali's almost-normal form and asked, "What has no arms and flies?"

"And sprouts feathers in flight?" added Chiun.

Remo blinked. "Feathers?"

"Feathers," said Chiun, nodding.

His brow wrinkling around his closed third eye, Remo Williams set one foot on Kali's bloated stomach. He grabbed her wrists and exerted pressure.

They came loose like cooked turkey drumsticks and, flinging them one way, Remo drop-kicked the maimed armless shell that was Kali in another.

Howling unimaginable curses, Kali described a shallow parabola over the Palace of Sorrows.

At the apex of her flight, she acquired a sudden halo of feathered shafts. They seemed to spring from her body like porcupine quills. But in fact, several plainly impaled her head and vitals, entering from one direction and emerging from the other.

Kali plummeted like a stricken bird. Her howl followed her down. When she hit the ground, she splintered. She didn't move until a group of men carrying great war bows descended upon her. And then she moved only because they flung her dead corpse into the nearby banks of the Tigris River, which was already running red with the blood of Iraiti soldiers.

Remo watched this from the palace parapet.

"We're in Abominadad, right?" he asked Chiun.

"Correct."

"Then why do I see Mongols down below?"

"Because you do."

Remo was silent a long moment. "Are those your Mongols or mine?" he asked at last.

"They are our Mongols," said Chiun, suppressing a smile as his proud eyes searched his son's face.

Boldbator Khan rode up to the Master of Sinanju and his pupil, his broad countenance beaming and bloodspattered. He dismounted his white pony, which dropped excrement with Herculean abandon. Boldbator wore a long del of blue brocade.

"Sain Baina," Master of Sinanju," he said gruffly.

Chiun acknowledged the hail with a formal, "Sain Baino."

"What're you guys doing here?" asked Remo, ever the informal.

"We followed the Seven Giants as our Master bade us."

"Seven Giants?"

Boldbator Khan of the New Golden Horde pointed a stubby finger into the night sky, where the Big Dipper shone. Remo counted seven stars and said, "Oh. We call it the Big Dipper."

"Everyone knows that it is really the Seven Giants." Boldbator addressed the Master of Sinanju. "We searched in vain for the Ishtar Gate, O friend of the old days."

"The barbarians never rebuilt it since you last visited their land," Chiun supplied. "Laziness, no doubt."

Another Mongol came running up, dragging something long and limp in one hand. He wore a black leather vest and his face resembled a weather-beaten brass gong.

"Remo! It is good to see you again, White Tiger."

"Hyah, Kula. What's with the freaking bag?"

Kula the thief lifted a long canvas bag. "It is for the freaking caliph," he said proudly.

"Not much of a present," Remo noted. "Looks empty."

Kula smiled happily, saying, "Soon it will not be."

"Where is the evil one?" asked Boldbator.

"Dead," said Chiun. "I have dispatched him."

The moon faces of the two Mongols collapsed into expressions so tragic they were almost comical.

"The horses will be disappointed," said Bolbator. Kula threw away the bag with a muttered curse.

"Am I missing something here?" Remo wondered.

"It is a fine Mongol tradition," Chiun explained. "One sews up the offending monarch in a bag and tramples out his life under the hooves of wild horses."

"If we're talking about Maddas Hinsein, it sounds good to me," Remo allowed. "Except I got him." He frowned. "Didn't I?"

"That he has been dealt with is all that matters, not proper credit," Chiun sniffed.

"If you say so," said Remo, tearing a length of scarlet silk from his disheveled harem pants and using it to wipe his brow. To his surprise, he encountered a round bump like a pigeon's egg.

"What the heck is this?" he demanded.

"Do not touch it!" Chiun said, slapping Remo's hands away like those of a child. "We will deal with that later."

"Hey, is that any way to act during a family reunion?"

"There would not have been need of a reunion had you not been so reckless in your ways," Chiun scolded. "Your obtuseness has caused me much suffering. How could you not comprehend the gesture my essence made as it appeared before you? Even Smith understood this."

"Bully for Smith. Where the hell were you the last three months-hiding? I thought you were dead."

"You only wished I was dead. You coveted my Mastership. "

"Bulldooky!"

"And you never informed the village of my demise."

Remo folded his arms. "What demise? You aren't dead."

"We will discuss this later," Chiun flared, one eye darting to the interested Mongol faces. "After the company has left."

"If this is a party," Remo said, looking down at the ruins of Abominadad, "I'd hate to see these guys at a riot. No offense."

"None taken." Kula beamed, nocking an arrow and letting it fly in Remo's direction. It whizzed by Remo's ear.

A Renaissance Guardsman, picking his way through some rubble, caught the shaft square in the eye. He screamed like a piano wire snapping. It was that short.

"This is good sport," said Kula, grinning.

"Looks like war to me," Remo muttered, checking his ear. It was still there.

"Yes, good sport. If you do not mind, we have many Arabs to massacre." They started off.

"Spare the women and children," warned Chiun.

"Of course. If we kill them too, then our descendants will have no sport in the centuries to come. They will curse our memories. Better that the Arabs curse us while we live. We will not have to listen to them after we are with our ancestors."

Laughing, they slipped away into the night.

"Nice guys," Remo said dryly.

"They are true friends of Sinanju." Chiun turned. "Have you no questions to ask of me?"

Remo pretended to think. "Yeah, just one."

"And that is?"

"Did they ever explain who killed Laura Palmer?"

Chapter 45

"It was an owl named Bob," said Harold W. Smith with a straight face.

Remo laughed with surprise. "That's pretty funny," he said. "I didn't know you had a sense of humor."

It was the next morning. They were in the Royal Emiri Palace in liberated Kuran City. Remo had been briefed by Smith, who had flown to Hamidi Arabia to take charge of Reverend Juniper Jackman and Don Cooder, both of whom had been discovered hiding in a closet of the Palace of Sorrows.

As vice-president of Irait and the highest-ranking survivor of the Revolting Command Council, Reverend Jackman had formally surrendered the nation to the Master of Sinanju.

Immediately Don Cooder had begun pestering him for an interview. Jackman had refused on the grounds that he had too much on his mind. With an actual elected office under his belt and the presidential sweepstakes only a year away, he would make a formal announcement later. After the war-crimes tribunal.

Remo had slipped up behind them and, applying pressure to nerve centers, made them limp enough to be carried out of Irait.

That had been the day before. This was now.

"I am speaking the truth," Smith said flatly.

A decurion in a pink gasproof suit, his swinish gas mask hanging from his web belt, entered the throne room.

"The transport has arrived, sir."

"I don't suppose anyone wants to explain why the U.S. Army is tricked out like Porky Pig these days?" Remo wanted to know.

No one did, so Remo wrote it off to the vagaries of the all-volunteer army. He had been a marine. Remo did understand that Kuran had been taken without a shot being fired. Sheik Fareem and Prince Imperator Bazzaz were in the capital, Nemad, claiming the lion's share of credit. Officially, Washington had decided not to contradict this boast. The truth would have been impossible to support.

"Did you bring my ice?" Remo asked the orderly, for some inexplicable reason called a decurion.

"Here, sir."

Remo accepted the cube in a handkerchief and applied it to the lump of flesh on his forehead.

"You know," he murmured unhappily, "I don't think this swelling is going down at all."

"We will deal with that back in America," Chiun said.

"They don't have ice back in America?" Remo asked.

"Hush!" Chiun snapped.

"Why do I get the impression everyone is holding something back from me?" Remo said suspiciously.

"Because we are," said Chiun flatly.

Praetor Winfield Scott Hornworks barged in at that point, and when he saw Chiun, a bearlike grin broke over his broad face.

"Imperator Chiun!" he bellowed.

Remo almost dropped his ice pack. "Imperator?"

"You should hear what's going on up in Irait! The Kuranis have grabbed a hunk of their southern frontier. The Syrians have swept in to the Euphrates. The Iranians grabbed a slice of the east, and the Turks are taking back all the land they lost back when the Ottoman Empire broke apart. The way it's going, all that's gonna be left of Irait will be Abominadad and some suburbs, and the Kurds are sure to lay claim to that once the Mongols get through picking it over. I gotta hand it to you, using the Kurds and Mongols means we ain't ever gonna hear a squawk outta Irait again."

"What did the Kurds do?" Remo asked.

"They wrote their names on the Spuds," Chiun supplied.

"Potatoes?"

"No, he means Maddas' Scud missiles. Here . . ." Praetor Hornworks pulled an LME tube out of a slash pocket and tossed it to Remo.

Remo looked it over and said, "A Magic Marker, right?"

"Naw, it's an LME. Stands for liquid-metal-embrittlement agent. You smear some of it on any metal or alloy, and faster than corn through a cow, it breaks it down like invisible rust. Metal fatigue equals catastrophic failure. When of Maddas launched his rockets and planes, they up and discombobulated." He paused. "There's only one downside."

"And what is that?" asked Harold Smith.

"We not only chased all the Iraitis out of Kuran, but the Kuranis too. They all lit out for Bahrain. And nobody can find the emir to give the country back to. There's rumors he's off buying up half of Canada."

Hornworks suddenly noticed Smith's three-piece suit. "Are you CIA?" he asked.

"No." Smith pretended to adjust his glasses. He kept his hand over his face in a suspicious manner.

"You sure? You got 'spook' written all over you. I dealt with you CIA types all during the Nam thing."

"I think it is time that we depart," said Smith uncomfortably.

"Before you do," Hornworks said, turning to Chiun and coming to attention, "I just want to say that you are the finest officer I ever served under. And that includes my dear departed daddy."

"Officer?" Remo said.

Praetor Hornworks saluted smartly. The Master of Sinanju returned the salute with a deep formal bow.

Remo watched all this in growing confusion.

"Maybe this will start to make sense after the swelling has gone down," he grumbled.

The strange looks on the faces of Harold W. Smith and Chiun caused him to doubt that statement, but he shoved the doubt into the back of his mind. The nightmare was over. Everyone who mattered to him had gotten through it alive. Everyone who deserved to die, had.

Remo Williams felt a nervous exultation quivering in his solar plexus like butterflies of promise.

His good mood carried him through the fifteen-hour flight in a C-5 Galaxy.

"When we get home," Remo said, lying in a webbing net, his hands clasped behind his head in contentment, "I'm going to bake you a rice cake, Little Father. With a hundred candles."

"Why?"

"For your birthday. You're a hundred now."

"I am not!" Chiun snapped.

Remo sat up. "Then what was all that phony crap you dished out last spring?"

"That was true crap," Chiun retorted. "But I have missed my kohi, therefore I have not properly achieved the venerated age. Since Masters of Sinanju celebrate no birthdays between the ages of eighty and one hundred, I must remain forever young."

"Bull. You're a hundred."

"I am only eighty," said the Master of Sinanju firmly. "Remember this. Any assertion to the contrary is a canard."

They argued this point for the remainder of the flight. Remo Williams didn't care. Smiling contentedly, he let Chiun's carping and complaining wash over him like a reviving surf. All was right with the world. Nothing this bad could ever happen to them again, he was certain.

Epilogue

Miss Lapon of the Hutchison Elementary School in suburban Toronto watched the six-year-olds file into the room.

"Welcome to kindergarten," Miss Lapon said brightly.

The children laughed and giggled. It would take a while to settle them down at their miniature tables, so she went to a cabinet, returning with colorful cardboard cans heavy with Play-Doh.

"For our first day, we're going to work in clay," she announced, setting a can on each table.

"Yay!" the children cried. A little blond girl with sparkling cornflower-blue eyes put her hands over her mouth, suppressing bubbling laughter.

After Miss Lapon had finished passing out the Play-Doh and the children had settled down to kneading and shaping the pastel claylike matter, she went among them to see what their young imaginations were producing.

Not much that an adult mind could recognize, Miss Lapon was not surprised to see. But that was not the purpose of this first-day exercise. Miss Lapon was looking for students having difficulty with motor coordination. It was important to spot the troubled ones early.

One little girl-it was the one who had been giggling earlier-had found a corner all to herself and was industriously pushing and pulling a sickly green lump of PlayDoh into a surprising anthropomorphic shape.

It looked to Miss Lapon's practiced eye like a squatting earth-mother figure, similar to those found in ancient Sumerian archaeological sites.

Except that this earth mother had six spidery arms.

Miss Lapon bent over her. "And how are you coming?"

The serious little girl didn't react at first.

"I asked," repeated Miss Lapon, thinking she had found a hearing-impairment problem, "how are you doing, little girl?"

The girl started. Her eyes focused. Miss Lapon made a mental note: strong powers of concentration.

"I'm almost done finishing her," the little girl said.

Miss Lapon smiled encouragement. "Very nice. Does she have a name?"

"Kali."

"Cally. That's a nice name. And what is your name?"

"Freya, daughter of Jilda," said the little blond girl with the cornflower-blue eyes.

Miss Lapon's eyes shone with amusement. "Don't you have a last name, Freya?"

A serious cloud passed over the childish features. "I don't think so," Freya admitted.

"No? Don't you have a daddy?"

The eye lit anew. "Oh, yes."

"What is your daddy's name?"

"His name," Freya said with childish pride, "is Remo."