Blood Lust

Kimberly frowned. "Where are you, anyway?"

"Inside you. A seed. I am but a seed which germinates in the dark loam of your soul. In time, I will sprout. We will grow together, you and I, Kimberly Baynes. And at the foretold time, we shall flower as one. You must obey me until then."

"What do I do, my mistress?" Kimberly asked.

You must go to the Caldron of Blood.

"Where is that?"

The Caldron of Blood is not a place. It is a hell you and I will create together, in a land far from here. And when it begins to bubble, He shall come.

"He?"

Our enemy, my mate, your murderer and lover in one.

Kimberly's eyes went wide.

"I'm not a virgin anymore!"

He lusts for us both now. He will seek us out. And He will find us-but only after we have stirred the blood in the Caldron and the world careens toward the Red Abyss.

Kimberly Baynes fought back tears of shame. "I obey."

An insistent knocking came from outside the hotel door:

Kimberly climbed to her feet.

"Who is it?" she called, folding two pairs of hands over her exposed breasts.

"Hotel security. Are you all right in there?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Because there's some kinda clay head down on the sidewalk with pieces of your window in it. I'm going to have to come in."

"One minute," Kimberly said. "Let me get my scarf . . . I mean, my robe."

The door opened only long enough for the hotel security man to catch a good look at a pair of naked breasts, and more hands that he expected pulled him into the room and wrapped something tight around his throat.

"She loves it!" Kimberly cried exultantly. "Don't you?"

I love it. Don't forget his wallet.

Chapter 16

Mrs. Eileen Mikulka had been executive secretary to Dr. Harold W. Smith for a nearly a decade.

She had seen a great many unusual sights in that time. One had to expect the unusual when one worked in a private hospital that included warehousing the deranged. She had gotten used to the occasional escapee, the padded rooms, and the straitjacketed patients who sometimes howled their madness in voices so frightful they carried over to the administration wing of Folcroft Sanitarium.

There was nothing unusual about the man who abruptly appeared before her desk asking to see Dr. Smith in an urgent tone.

She looked up, one hand going to her modest decolletage.

"Oh! You surprised me, Mr ...."

"Call me Remo. Tell Smith I'm here."

"Please take a seat," Mrs. Mikulka said crisply, lifting her chain-hung glasses off her chest and placing them on her nose.

"I'll stand."

"Fine," Mrs. Mikulka said as she reached for the intercom. "But you needn't stand so close to the desk." She recognized the man now. He had once worked for Dr. Smith in some menial capacity. He was an infrequent visitor. Mrs. Mikulka was under the impression he had once been a patient. It would explain the urgent look on his face and the unnerving way he stood right up to the edge of the desk. He leaned over, both hands resting on her blotter.

Those eyes made Mrs. Mikulka shiver. They were the deadest, coldest eyes she had ever seen. Even if they did look a little haunted.

"Yes, Mrs. Mikulka?" came the crisp, reassuring voice of Dr. Smith through the tinny out-of-date intercom.

"I have a . . . gentleman named Remo here. He has no appointment. "

"Send him in," Dr. Smith said instantly.

Mrs. Mikulka looked up. "You may go in now."

"Thanks," the man said, edging around the desk to scuttle toward the door.

What on earth is that man's problem? she asked herself as he abruptly spun and sidled through the door with his back to her.

She shrugged, returned her glasses to her chest, and resumed her inventory work. It seemed the commissary was dangerously low on prune-whip yogurt, Dr. Smith's favorite. She would have to order more.

Dr. Smith watched Remo enter the office with owlish interest. The door snapped open. Remo slipped in quickly, dropping to the long leather divan that sat next to the door in a fluid, unbroken motion. He crossed his legs quickly. His face was crimson.

Smith adjusted his rimless glasses curiously. "Remo?"

"Who else?" Remo said, pushing the door closed with his hand from his seated position.

"Is something wrong?"

"We gotta find her!"

"Who?"

"Kimberly."

Smith blinked. "I thought she was . . ."

"She's not. And she got away."

"What happened?"

"I just told you!" Remo said hotly. "I went back. She wasn't dead. She got away from me. End of story. Now we gotta find her. And don't just sit there looking befuddled. Get those computers of yours going. This is an emergency."

"One moment," Smith said firmly, coming from behind his desk. He crossed the Spartan, slightly shabby office in less than a dozen long-legged strides.

Standing over Remo, Smith saw his flushed features, his harried expression, and the way he hugged his folded leg into his lap. The body language was wrong. This was not Remo's body language, he thought. Remo was casual, if not cocky.

"Remo, what you have just told me makes no sense whatsoever," Smith said in a level no-nonsense voice.

"It's what happened," Remo said tightly. "Now, are you going to do your job so I can do mine, or do I have to plant you back in that seat and hold your hands through the early steps?"

Remo's dark eyes locked on Smith's. Dr. Smith's gray orbs met them unflinchingly.

"You told me she was dead," Smith persisted.

"My mistake."

"Everyone makes mistakes," Smith said in a reasonable tone. "So you went back, found her alive, and she eluded you? Is that it?"

"That's as much as you need to know," Remo growled, averting his eyes.

"I need to know her identity. You were going back for her ID. Did you find it?"

"No," Remo said flatly. He adjusted his folded leg. Smith recalled that Remo usually folded his with one ankle resting on the opposite knee, his bent leg forming a triangle with the thigh in repose. An open-legged cross.

Today, however, Remo crossed his right leg over his left one. A more defensive cross. Not Remo's style. Not even in the early days before he had learned Sinanju.

"Remo," he began evenly, "for as long as I have known you, you've never struck a fatal blow that did not turn out to be fatal. As long as I have known you, you have never mistaken a live body for a dead one. What have you to say to that?"

Remo shrugged. "Hey. I was having a bad night, okay?"

"You are a professional," Smith went on with unrelenting logic. "You are the heir to the House of Sinanju. You do not make these kinds of mistakes. Now, tell me, what happened when you went back to Kimberly's hotel room?"

Remo's hard eyes held Smith's as a play of emotions raced across Remo's face-anxiety, anger, impatience, and hovering behind them all, something else. Something Smith had never seen on Remo's face.

When Remo looked down to the floor, Harold Smith realized what it was. Embarrassment.

"We had sex," Remo admitted in a dull voice. "After she died."

Smith swallowed. It was not the answer he had expected. He adjusted his tie.

"Yes?" he prompted.

"Maybe I should back up." Remo sighed. "I went back. She wasn't dead. I know I did her, but she wasn't dead. Not anymore. She attacked me."

"And?"

"She was too much for me."

"Are you serious? A call girl?"

"She wasn't a call girl anymore. She wasn't Kimberly anymore."

"What was she, then?" Smith asked.

'Kali. Or a puppet of Kali's. I know the spirit of Kali had been in the clay statue. I smelled her scent before I destroyed it. Then I smelled it from that . . . thing."

"Thing? What thing?"

"Kimberly," Remo said, still looking at the floor.

"Why do you call her that?"

"She had four . . . arms, Smitty."

"Kimberly?" Smith's voice was thin with uncertainty.

"Just like the statue. Except Kimberly's arms were alive. They tried to strangle me. I fought. Thought I beat her. But she jumped me. Then that smell came again. Just like the last time. I could fight her, but I couldn't fight the smell, Smitty." Remo looked up. His eyes were hurt. "It touched something deep in me. Something that Chiun had always warned me about."

"The Shiva delusion?"

"I don't know what you'd call it," Remo admitted. "But she called me Shiva too. If Kimberly wasn't Kali, how would she know to call me that? And if she was Kali, what does that make me?"

"Kali is a mythical being, as is Shiva. They have no basis in reality, no connection with you."

"Explain the four arms," Remo retorted. "The statue. I heard its voice, saw it move. Explain the best sex I ever had."

"Sex?"

"She had four arms. She was incredible. I never experienced anything like it. You know the curse of Sinanju-mechanical, boring connect-the-dots sex. It was different with Kimberly. I couldn't get enough."

"Remo, there is only one explanation for all this," Smith said flatly.

"Yeah?"

"A hallucinogenic drug."

"I know what I know," Remo growled. Smith put his hands in his trouser pockets.

"Hallucinogens induced in gas form could account for everything you have just described," he went on. "If fact, it is the only possible explanation, which you will see, once you calm down."

"Do hallucinogens cause permanent hard-ons?"

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me."

"I rather doubt it," Smith said dryly.

"Then why can't I uncross my legs in mixed company?" Remo snapped.

Smith swallowed again. This time he nervously adjusted his rimless glasses instead of his tie. He retreated to his desk. Pressing the concealed stud, he brought his computer terminal up to view, where it offered its keyboard like an unfolding tray of white chocolates.

Smith attacked the keyboard.

"What are you doing?"

"I am beginning a trace of this woman Kimberly. That is what you want, is it not?"

"Yeah," Remo said thickly. He did not sound enthusiastic.

Smith looked up. "Are you prepared to execute my orders, Remo?"

"I guess so."

"Are you prepared to terminate this woman if the order is given?"

"No," Remo admitted.

"Why not?"

"Because I think I'm in love with her," Remo said miserably, slowly withdrawing a long length of yellow silk from his pocket. He brought it up to his nose and began to sniff it, his eyes growing avid and sick all at once.

Chapter 17

The customs inspector zipped open the shoulder bag with a fierce rip of his arm.

"Any contraband?" he demanded, not looking up.

"No," said Kimberly Baynes, holding her chin in one hand, as if in thought. It was the best way to keep her broken-necked head vertical.

"Alcohol? This is a Moslem country. No alcohol is allowed to enter."

"I'm not carrying any alcohol."

"Drugs?"

"No."

"Pornography?"

"Of course not."

The inspector pulled out a fistful of yellow silk scarves. He looked up, his dark sloe eyes questioning.

"So many. Why so many?" he demanded.

"It's an American custom."

"Explain."

"When we have hostages, it's customary to tie a yellow ribbon around a tree. These are my yellow ribbons."

The inspector considered this explanation. Wordlessly he stuffed the yellow tendrils of silk back into the bag and without zipping it closed returned it to Kimberly Baynes.

"Entry allowed," he said gruffly. "Three months. You must not work in that time and you cannot take more money from our country than you brought with you."

He stamped her passport with a pounding jerk of his rubber stamp, saying, "You are hereby permitted to enter Hamidi Arabia. Next!"

The bazaars in the Hamidi Arabian capital of Nehmad teemed with humanity. Arab men in flowing white thobes and headdresses tied with plaited ropelike agals moved like the lords of the desert. The women, mostly in black abayuhs that masked them from head to toe, gave silently before them, their eyes evasive and mysterious.

And joking and laughing U.S. servicemen and women moved through the spectral Arabs in twos and threes for protection, buying fruit from the stalls and sipping soft drinks to fend off dehydration.

Still carrying her bag, Kimberly returned their smiles and winks as they passed. Suggestions that she join them for a Coke were politely declined.

She wanted nothing from any of them. The person she needed to fill the Caldron with blood would show herself. Kali had promised her this. And Kali never lied.

Specialist Carla Shatter still couldn't believe she was in Hamidi Arabia.

Only a few weeks ago she had been a paralegal in Hingham, Massachusetts. Her Army Reserve status was good for nearly five thousand dollars per year in supplemental income-this in return for the weekend training sessions and a month each summer at Fort Devens.

When the call-up came, she had been scared. But her unit was not a combat unit. Their job was military justice, and the very fact that she had suddenly found herself stationed in Hamidi Arabia told her that the United States government had expected to be running war-crimes tribunals.

And since the U.S. Army didn't try war criminals until there had been a war, she had existed in a state of low-level apprehension, certain hostilities were about to break out.

Today her concern was the terrorist threat. U.S. service personnel had been warned that every time they entered the capital they were at risk to pro-Iraiti terrorist attack.

She walked through the bazaar with her eyes open. Despite the brutal heat, her sleeves were rolled down and her regulation blouse was buttoned up to the top button in deference to the sensitive Hamidi mores. She had been told to watch out for the Mutawain-the Hamidi religious police, who could insist upon her deportation for offenses ranging from holding hands with a man in public to brazenly displaying her seductive ankles.

Carla thought it was all a bunch of crap, but at least she didn't have to wear one of those medieval abayahs. They looked hot.

Few U.S. civilians prowled the bazaars these days, so Carla was surprised to see a blond woman in a flowing yellow chiffon dress walking through the dirty street like a Fifth Avenue mirage.

Carla walked up to her, smiling. An American woman to talk to. This was better than a letter from home.

The blond was quick to smile. Carla liked her smile. Of course she was from America, the blond said.

"Oh, where?" Carla asked, barely containing her glee.

"Denver."

"I'm from Massachusetts!" Carla burbled, thinking: Any port in a sandstorm.

They found a Pizza Sheikh whose English sign was repeated in Arabic, and swapped stories while the ice-choked Cokes kept coming and the blazing Arabian sun descended to the superheated desert sand.

Carla learned that Kimberly was twenty-two, a reporter with the Denver Post, and had a "crick" in her neck from sitting too close to the air conditioner on the flight over. Carla thought the way her head kept lolling to the left was more than a crick, but let it pass.

Kimberly asked a lot of boring questions about Carla's job, her unit, the distance to the neutral zone, and other reporter-type questions. When she could get a word in edgewise, Carla asked about home-now broadly defined as the continental U.S.-and hung on every answer.

Strange how fascinating it all was, after so many months stuck in the sand.

Finally Carla stood up, saying, "Listen, this has been great, but I gotta get on the bus back to the base."

"Is that where you're stationed?" Kimberly Baynes asked.

"Yeah, and it's a three mile-ride. If I miss my bus, I gotta walk. No, thank you," she laughed.

"I'll escort you to the bus," Kimberly offered.

"Fine by me."

They walked through the cooling dusk. Sand blew in the air. Sand always blew in the Hamidi Arabian air. The sun was sinking, a breathtaking ball of smoldering fire.

And somewhere between the Pizza Sheikh and the dusty street corner where a khaki bus waited, Kimberly offered Carla Shaner her yellow silk scarf.

"Oh, no. I couldn't take that," Carla protested, laughing. But Kimberly refused to take no for an answer. She even insisted on tying it around Carla's neck for her.

"Over here," Kimberly said, gently pulling her into an alley. "There's more light over here."

Actually, Carla found, there was less light in the alley. That was where it got cloudy. Then fuzzy. Then dark. Very dark.

When Carla Shaner's uniform left the alley, she was no longer wearing it. She lay in the dark alley with her moist purplish tongue collecting windblown sand the way an ice cream cone collects jimmies.

The yellow scarf encircled her throat, tied in an intricate knot that the Royal Hamidi Police were later forced to cut with a knife in frustration.

Kimberly Baynes caught the last bus to the base. More than one serviceman's eyes bugged out at the sight of her generous, button-straining bust. She sat with her arms modestly folded over her chest. One hand covered her name tag.

The Star in the Center of the Flower of the East Military Base lay three miles north of the Hamidi Arabian capital city of Nehmad. For nearly a year it had been under a joint Hamidi Arabian/U.S. command. For all that time it had remained in a state of high alert.

In theory, this was a symbol of U.S./Arabian cooperation. In practice, it meant no one was in charge.

So every twelve hours, the command structure was rotated. The U.S. general would grumblingly vacate his office and Prince General Sulyman Bazzaz of the Royal Hamidi Armed Forces and his aides would take up residence. The official language of the base became Arabic and the guards were changed at the main gate.

Which, at sundown, meant that a quartet of Hamidi Arabian sergeants huddled in the guardshack playing backgammon and chewing sweet dates.

When they heard the approaching bus from the capital, one poked his blue-bereted head out and saw that it was the American bus. He waved it through without checking. He was not afraid of infiltrators or terrorists. Not with the mighty American Army there to protect him, praise Allah.

Thus did Kimberly Baynes penetrate the Star in the Center of the Flower of the East Military Base.

Hours later, she left in a wide Humvee-the jeep's wide-bodied descendent which she had commandeered from a swaggering Hamidi corporal by putting her ample chest under his nose and strangling him with a length of yellow silk used as a ligature as he contemplated her bursting buttons.

Kimberly was stopped at the gate as she drove up to it.

"What is your business?" the sergeant in charge of the gate asked her in his native tongue.

"I don't speak Arabic," Kimberly said patiently, bathing the sergeant in the sweet radiance of her American smile. And while the sergeant went into the guardshack to get the Sergeant in Charge of Speaking English, Kimberly gunned the Humvee and sent it running along the undulating dips and rises of the benighted Hamidi Arabian desert. No one followed.

She drove north. Toward the border and occupied Kuran.

And in the back of her racing mind, a small hollow voice said: Well done, my chosen vessel. Well done.

"Thank you."

But next time, remember to kill your victims more slowly. For it is not the dead that I truly love, but the dying.

Chapter 18

Maddas Hinsein, President of the Republic of Irait, field marshal of the Iraiti Armed Forces, and self-styled Scimitar of the Arabs, entered the simple conference room dressed in an olive-green general's uniform and black beret like a sullen bull moose walking upright.

His Revolting Command Council jumped to their feet, their arms stiffening at their sides, their eyes identical dark pools of fear.

"Sit," said President Hinsein, and his Revolting Command Council slammed their rumps into the hard wooden chairs with coccyx-threatening force.

Under his bristly mustache, President Hinsein smiled.

Under their identically brushy mustaches, his Revolutionary Command Council smiled, showing flashing white teeth and bringing fear wrinkles to their eyes.

After ascertaining there were no poisoned tacks on his chair, the President sat, saying, "Give me your status reports."

"The Americans are too afraid to attack, Precious Leader," said the defense minister, praying that the Americans would not bomb until after the meeting was over. He did not mind being bombed. He just did not want to be in the same room with Maddas Hinsein when the B-52's roared overhead. There were worse things than bombs.

"And the cowardly Hamidi Arabians?" he asked of his information minister. His voice was subdued. Grave without being worried.

The information minister smiled a sick little smile as he spoke.

"Cowering behind the trembling American defensive line," said the information minister, who knew full well that elite Hamidi Arabian forces were dug in at forward positions less than a mile below the Kuran-Hamidi Arabian neutral zone, along with units of French, British, Spanish, Greek, and Tahitian troops. It was rumored the Italians had taken a wrong turn in Egypt but would be on station no later than the turn of the century.

He dared not tell the President that this was no longer a case of the U.S. supporting the soft, weak Hamidis, but virtually the entire world now encircling their beleaguered country.

"Excellent," said the President. "It is time to gather intelligence for the day."

And each man felt his heart leap into his throat like a frisky salmon as the President of Irait reached for the dreaded black device and aimed around the table, clicking the button.

Even though it was only a TV remote-control unit, such was their fear of the Scimitar of the Arabs that they each flinched by turns. Maddas Hinsein smiled appreciatively at each flinch. He had been the palace torturer to the previous President, whom he tortured into abdicating.

When the remote unit triggered the big-screen TV at the far end of the room, under the twelfth-century fresco of the Arab hero Nebuchadnezzar riding a chariot, they turned their heads as one to behold the soul-freezing CNN logo, their only source of hard intelligence-and the one thing that could get them all hanged as traitors should the President choose to believe the wrong reports.

More than one hand stole under the table to manually choke off an imminent liquid accident.

A woman newscaster appeared on the screen. Though her words were in English, Arabic subtitles reflected her report.

"The United Nations joint command today reported that the array of forces now numbering units from virtually every standing army of the world, less Italy, are only three months away from hammering out a workable command structure."

"Lies," President Hinsein smiled. "Flimsy propaganda."

"Lies. Yes, lies. Transparent fabrications." The murmurs of agreement rippled around the long table. Laughter came easily.

"In Washington, Reverend Juniper Jackman, perennial presidential candidate and shadow senator to the District of Columbia, announced that he would go to Abominadad and attempt to win the release of BCN news anchor Don Cooder, now in his fourth day of captivity."

"Tender the Reverend Jackman an invitation to visit Abominadad," the President told his information minister.

"Yes, Precious Leader. Shall I have him detained?"

"No," muttered President Hinsein. "He is an ass-kisser. I do not arrest those who understand where to place their lips."

"Of course."

And every man in the room made a mental note of their President's pronouncement. If there was one good thing about Maddas Hinsein, it was that he spoke his mind exactly.

The report continued.

"In other news today, the citizens of La Plomo, Missouri, today held a rally in support of U.S. hostages in Irait and occupied Kuran, tying yellow ribbons around every tree in the tiny farm community, struggling to return to normalcy after last spring's catastrophic poison-gas-storage accident."

His chin cupped in his strong hands, his elbows on the table, Maddas Hinsein narrowed his liquid brown eyes at the words.

This warning signal went unnoticed because all eyes were on the TV screen and the flickering images of U.S. farmers busily tying yellow ribbons around a huge oak tree.

They were shouting at the top of their lungs.

"Mad Ass Mad Ass Mad Ass."

"See?" Maddas Hinsein crowed. "Even the American farmers support me. They despise their criminal government for denying them the right to sell their grain to the proud but hungry Iraiti people. It is just like Vietnam was. A bottomless pit of sand."

No one dared contradict the President. They knew, whereas their leader did not, that Americans had learned a bitter lesson in Vietnam and would go to any length to avoid repeating the experience. Including pulverizing storied Abominadad.

Then the camera panned to an obvious caricature of Maddas Hinsein hanging from a noose. A boy in a green-and-brown-checkered shirt brushed the straw-stuffed effigy with a lighted torch. Licking flames crawled up its legs. In moments the effigy was blazing.

The cry "Mad Ass Mad Ass Mad Ass" swelled.

And every sweaty face along both sides of the conference table jerked back to take in their President's reaction.

Maddas Hinsein leapt to his feet, hands gripping the table edge, ready for anything. A few more attempted to choke off bladder releases by crossing their legs.

"Why do they call my name so strangely?" Hinsein demanded. "Do they not know how to pronounce my name, which is revered by all Islam and feared by the infidels who dwell beyond Dar al-Harb?"

No one answered at first. Then, seeing the growing darkening of their leader's face, everyone attempted to answer at once.

Maddas Hinsein brought order to the room by whipping out his sidearm and waving the muzzle at every face. Hands that had been under the table surfaced. The trickle of running water came. No one wanted to be mistaken for an assassin with a concealed pistol-the chief reason that the Revolting Command Council met around a large square table with almost no top other than a thin border around the edge.

Silence clamped down like an aural eclipse. The weapon stopped pointing at the information minister, who wore a military-style uniform and about a gallon of sweat where his face should be.

"You. Tell me."

"They are making fun of your name, Scimitar of Islam," he said in a shaking voice.

"Maddas is my name."

"In English, 'mad' means something else."

Maddas Hinsein's meaty face gathered in puzzlement.

"What?"

"It means 'angry.' "

"And the other word?" Maddas asked slowly.

"This word, O Precious Leader, has the same sound as the backside of a man."

Maddas Hinsein blinked his deadly emotionless eyes.

"Angry Ass?" he said in English.

The information minister swallowed. "Yes," he admitted.

"Me?" he said, pointing at his chest with his own gun. Everyone silently beseeched Allah for the gun to discharge and preserve Irait from this madman. It did not.

"Yes," the information minister repeated.

Maddas Hinsein threw his head to one side, thinking. His eyes crinkled. His mouth gave a meaty little pucker.

"I have heard this English word," President Hinsein said slowly. "Somewhere. But it did not mean 'angry.' "

The gun whipped back toward the information minister. "It means 'crazy'!" he snarled.

The Revolting Command Council gasped as one.

"Both!" the information minister bleated. "It means both!"

"You lie! How can a word mean two things?"

"The American are like this! Two-faced! Is it not so?" the information minister asked of the room.

The Revolting Command Council was silent. No one knew the safe answer, so no one spoke.

And getting no response, the President turned his pistol toward a perspiring general. "Answer this. Does 'mad' mean 'angry' or 'crazy'?"

" 'Crazy,' " the general said quickly, hoping he would not be shot dead in the face.

He was not.

The President said, "Thank you." Then he shot the information minister in the face. The man's head snapped back with such force that it carried him and his hardwood chair backward.

The information minister's body jerked and quivered like a convict in an electric chair that had fallen over.

Calmly the President of Irait holstered his pistol, muttering solemnly "I will not accept lies to my face." He sat down. "So," he added, "the Americans think I am a crazy ass, no?"

"Allah will punish them," said the defense minister, not looking at the quivering body.

President Hinsein patted down the luxurious mustache that was repeated on every male face over the age of fifteen throughout the land. His solemn eyes grew reflective.

"Crazy Ass," he muttered.

"They insult all Arabs with such talk," spat the defense minister bitterly.

"Crazy Ass," repeated the President thoughtfully.

"We will pass a law condemning to death any who repeat this slander," a general vowed.

"Crazy Ass," Maddas said again. And he began laughing. "Maddas Hinsein, Scourge of the Arabs," he cried. "Scimitar of Arabia. Uniter of the Arab Nation. That is me. I am one crazy-assed Arab, am I not?"

"Yes, President," the assembled Revolting Command Council said in well-rehearsed unison, "you are one crazy-assed Arab."

He threw his head back and gave vent to an uproarious peal of mirth. Tears squeezed from the corners of his amused eyes.

The others joined in. Some tittered. Others guffawed. But no one refused to join in, though their laughter was not reflected in their eyes. Their eyes, instead, were sick with fear.

With a final burst of laughter, Maddas Hinsein settled down. He brushed his mustache. His strong chin found his folded hands once more as his elbows took their usual position on the table edge. A serious, intent expression settled over his dark, troubled features.

"I will show them what a crazy ass I am," he said darkly. "Issue the following proclamation through our Propaganda Ministry."

No one moved. When Maddas Hinsein saw that no hand picked up pen to transcribe his all-important words, he said, "Where is the minister of information?"

"Dead," he was told.

"You have shot him."

Maddas Hinsein peered past the man who last spoke. He saw the twitching knee in the air.

"He is not dead. He still moves," Maddas pointed out.

"He is dying."

"Until he is dead, he is not excused from his patriotic duty. Give him pen and paper."

The defense minister hastily obeyed, crushing the information minister's oblivious fingers around a pen and slipping a sheet of paper in the other hand. As his leader began to drone on in a monotone, he did not worry about the lack of animation on the dying man's part.

There was no ink in the pen. Irait had run out of ink in the fifth month of the international blockade, when it had been discovered that ink made an acceptable salad dressing.

Previously, they had pissed on their salads.

Chapter 19

Harold Smith paused at the door and cleared his throat before knocking briskly.

"Come in," Remo Williams said. Smith entered.

He found Remo seated cross-legged on a tatami mat in the middle of the bare floor, a half-eaten bowl of rice at one knee. Across the room, a TV set flickered and a world-famous face filled the screen. The rugged face was showing signs of strain, especially under the eyes. The dark pouches hung almost to his chin.

"This is Don Cooder, BCN anchor reporting live from Abominadad, Irait, reminding you that BCN was first to report from Abominadad, first with an exclusive interview with President Hinsein, and now we're proud to be the first to have an anchor taken hostage. BCN. We're here so you don't have to be."

"I hate that guy," Remo muttered, lowering the sound with a wave of his remote.

"He is not very popular," Smith said dryly.

"He was the jerk who helped that dipshit girl with the neutron bomb-Purple Haze or whatever her name was-get a working core just so he could boost his ratings," Remo said bitterly. "Chiun might still be here if he hadn't stuck his oar in. I hope he rots in Abominadad."

"Are you feeling any . . . um . . . better?" Smith inquired.

"Step around and take a look," Remo said. "But I warn you, it's not a pretty sight."

Coloring, Smith declined the invitation.

"The FBI laboratory results on the silk scarf came in," he offered.

"Yeah?" Remo grunted, shifting the mat around to face Smith. He kept one hand draped strategically across his lap.

"Other than human perspiration odors and other common organic chemical traces, they report no unusual odors attached to the sample."

"No? Well, their machines must all have broken noses or something, because the thing reeks of her."

"I smelled nothing when I took the scarf from you," Smith said firmly.

"Yeah, well, take a whiff of this," Remo said, snapping another scarf from his pocket. He sniffed it once before tossing it to Smith. Smith caught it and distastefully brought it to his pinched face. He sniffed shortly and lowered the cloth.

"I smell nothing. Absolutely nothing."

"See a doctor about that cold," Remo said, yanking the scarf back with a sudden jerk. He held it close to his nose, Smith saw. Remo's eyes reminded him of his own daughter's, back in the terrible days before she kicked her heroin habit. He shuddered inwardly at the smothering memory.

Smith adjusted his tie.

"I have other news."

"You find her?"

"No. But I know who she is now."

"She's Kali."

"Her name is Kimberly Baynes. There has been a nationwide APB out for her for nearly a month. It is believed she was abducted by a sex maniac who slew her grandmother and a next-door neighbor."

"Tells us nothing," Remo said dismissively.

"On the contrary, Remo, Kimberly Baynes is the only surviving offspring of the late president of Just Folks Airlines, A. H. Baynes III."

"Another dynasty falls," Remo said bitterly.

"I cannot pretend to understand it, but obviously the girl retains some memories of the Thuggee cult to which her family belonged."

"What's the big deal? If you had been forced to join a cult that strangled travelers for their wallets, it would leave an impression even on you."

"Kimberly," Smith said, "was only eight when she was liberated from the cult. That would make her thirteen now."

Remo snorted. "Thirteen? She was twenty if she was a day."

"Records do not lie. She is thirteen."

"She had the body of a twenty-year-old. She was twenty. Maybe nineteen. I'm not into kiddie humping, Smith."

"I am not suggesting you are. What I am trying to say is this. Kimberly did not have four arms. I have seen her school medical records. They are very clear on this point."

"I told you-"

Smith's hand shot up.

"Let me finish, please," he said. "I have checked with the Watergate Hotel. The woman they describe as Kimberly Baynes-she used that name when she registered -was clearly more than thirteen years old. That leads to only one conclusion. That this woman is impersonating the abducted girl for some unfathomable reason."

"It fits. So who is she?"

"I have no idea. An FBI forensics team has checked her room for fingerprints. They are not on record. But I do have something to show you."

"Yeah, what?"

"This," Smith said, holding out a sheet of fax paper. Remo took it.

"That's her," Remo said, looking at a charcoal sketch of the woman he knew as Kimberly. His dark eyes lingered on the image.

"You are certain?"

Remo nodded. "Where'd you get this?" he asked, returning the sheet.

"FBI artist's sketch," Smith said, folding the sheet and returning it to an inner pocket. "It was constructed after extensive interviews with the hotel staff."

"Oh," Remo said in a disappointed voice. "So that's it? You came here just to tell me you have zip?"

"No, I've come to suggest that in your current state, it might be better if you do not prowl the Folcroft corridors. The staff are becoming nervous and inquisitive. I would like to suggest you return home."

"No chance. He's just waiting for me."

"I cannot understand this belief of yours, Remo. The Master of Sinanju is deceased. The dead do not trouble the living."

"Tell that to Chiun."

"I wonder if this is not merely a manifestation of your extreme grief. Your relationship with Chiun was a combative one. Are you certain you are not projecting your grief onto an empty house?"

Remo stood up, his lower legs lifting his body with a scissors motion. Smith averted his eyes with embarrassment.

"Why are you asking me all these idiot questions instead of doing your job?"

"I am doing my job. The security of CURE depends on the inner circle of agents--you and I, as matters now stand-being effective."

"Don't sweat my end. Find Kimberly before she starts this Caldron of Blood she warned me about."

Smith's eyes flicked to the silent TV screen.

"Is that why you are monitoring the Iraiti situation?"

"Know any other global tinderboxes?" Remo growled.

"Yes. Cambodia. Russia. And China. Among others."

"None of which are steamed up about a missing ambassador. What's Washington planning, by the way?"

"I do not know." Smith turned to go. "I will inform you once my computers have traced this Kimberly Baynes impostor. In the meantime, I would ask that you remain in this room as much as possible."

"Count on it," Remo snapped, dropping back into his lotus position. He tapped the remote. The sound came up.

"Day Four," the voice of Don Cooder intoned. "As I greet this new day, possibly the first of many that might be as countless as the desert sands themselves, I ask myself this one question: What would Walter Cronkite do in a situation like this? . . ."

"He'd say 'Get a life,' " Remo told the unresponsive TV screen as the door silently closed after a troubled Harold Smith.

Chapter 20

Kimberly Baynes drove as deep into occupied Kuran as the Humvee's gas tank would allow. When it coasted, grumbling and sputtering, to a stop, she shouldered her bag and began walking.

She came upon a detachment of uniformed Iraiti troops performing "security operations" in an outpost town.

Security operations in this case consisted of dismantling the smaller buildings and loading them onto trucks as the weeping women and children watched helplessly.

The larger buildings were being systematically dynamited. But only because they would not fit into the sand-painted military trucks. They jackhammered the street signs loose and tossed them in with the dismantled houses. Even the asphalt sidewalks were chewed into hot black chunks and thrown in.

Kimberly walked up to the nearest Iraiti soldier and said, "I surrender."

The Iraiti soldier turned, saw Kimberly's U.S. uniform, and shouted over to his commanding officer in incomprehensible Arabic.

"I surrender," Kimberly repeated. "Take me to Abominadad. I know the secret U.S. plan to retake Kuran."

The two men exchanged glances. Their guns came up. In Arabic they called for more men.

After virtually every Iraiti soldier had surrounded her-some five in all-Kimberly realized that none of them spoke or understood English.

One touched her pale cheek curiously. He pushed Kimberly's head upright. When he withdrew his dirty fingers, it tilted left again. They laughed uproariously.

"They don't speak English," Kimberly muttered nervously. "What do I do, O Kali?"

Go with them.

Worry quirking her lips and violet eyes, Kimberly Baynes allowed herself to be taken to one of the half-standing large buildings, even though she was certain they were only going to gang-rape her.

Her suspicions were confirmed when they stacked their rifles in a corner and started unbuckling their belts.

One of them had her bag. He pulled out a long yellow silk scarf.

"What do I do? What do I do?" Kimberly whispered.

Show them your tits.

"Here," Kimberly said, reaching for the scarf. "Let me show you how this works."

The soldier let her loop the harmless silk around his throat. The others laughed, anticipating a long afternoon with the unsuspecting blond American servicewoman.

"Ready?" Kimberly asked.

Without waiting for an answer, she pulled the ends of the scarf in opposite directions. The fabric made his throat muscles balloon around it. His face went scarlet. The Iraiti gurgled his horror. His tongue slid from his gagging, yawning mouth.

The Iraitis laughed, thinking their fellow soldier was having sport. The girl was very slim. She did not look strong at all. Besides, she was a female, and every Arab man knew how weak the other sex was.

When his face turned blue, they changed their minds. They converged on the woman, who oddly enough let their comrade fall into a swoon and began unbuttoning her blouse to expose her prodigious brassiere.

It was the type that fastened in the front. She unhooked it. The Iraiti eyes brightened in anticipation of the pale breasts that were about to be revealed.

Their anticipation turned to horror when two long crablike arms unfolded themselves, snapping a silken scarf between them with nervous, predatory tugs.

As one, they took a step back.

By then it was too late. The unclean heathen thing leapt for them, and they all fell to the floor in a gang throttle in which everyone participated, but only one person survived.

Kimberly Baynes emerged from the damaged building modestly buttoning up her uniform blouse and commandeered one of the sand-colored trucks.

She drove due north.

Somewhere, there would be an Iraiti detachment that spoke English. And she would find it.

Not that Kali complained about the delay. She was enjoying the ride immensely.

"Did I do better that time?" Kimberly asked.

They writhed magnificently, Kali told her.

Chapter 21

The house was dark.

Remo had walked all the way from Folcroft. He had not started out for the house. He had never expected to set foot in it. Ever again. Too many memories, as he had explained to Smith.

What had happened was that he had started to feel the call in his blood. The call of Kali. He had first dragged out a silken scarf to satisfy his craving. But it had only made him yearn for her more.

Jerking every scarf from his pockets, he threw them against the walls.

"You don't own me!" he cried. "You'll never own me."

The scarves slipped into little piles like limp discarded hand puppets'-which was exactly how Remo felt inside his soul. Limp. Helpless. Cast off.

A cold shower had not helped, so he had stepped out into the hot night to walk, wearing underwear three sizes too small so his uncontrollable tumescence wouldn't be too obvious.

The heat only fired his blood. So he walked.

And in time he found himself on the tree-lined residential street that lay snug under the hills of the Folcroft Golf Course, where he had been living in a Tudor-style house. Remo had purchased it on recommendation from Chiun, only to learn later that he had been tricked into becoming Harold Smith's neighbor. For Smith owned an adjoining home. The Master of Sinanju had explained this away with a flowery platitude about the royal assassin needing to dwell close to the seat of power.

Remo's was a modest house. Nothing fancy. Not even the white picket fence he had once dreamed he'd have. It wasn't a white-picket-fence kind of neighborhood.

As he passed through the zones of the pale yellow streetlight illumination-nightfall had come to Rye, New York-Remo's eyes went to the dark blank windows.

It looked empty, that house. As empty as Remo Williams felt.

He walked past it, his eyes glued to the windows, half-hoping, half-fearing to see a familiar wrinkled face in a window. He had lived there less than two years-an absurdly small segment of his total life, but such an overwhelming wave of nostalgia washed over him that Remo abruptly turned up the walk.

It was, he thought, as if he were drawn to the place.

At the door, Remo dug around in his pockets. Then he recalled that he had thrown the house key away in Tacomaor was it Chicago?

The Yale lock cylinder resembled a brass medallion in the painted wood. Remo simply set his hard fingers around the edges. He twisted.

Slowly the lock turned like a flush dial. Wood and metal squealed, settling into a long low groan of protest. A panel split under the powerful force exerted by his inexorable fingers.

Wounded and beaten, the door fell open.

Remo stepped over the theshold, flicking a light switch that produced no light.

"Smith," Remo muttered. "Cut the electricity to save two cents." Remo grunted. At least Smith was consistent.

He went from room to room, his visual purple adjusted to the darkness. In the bare living room the big-screen TV lay idle, a video recorder and several stacks of tapes resting atop it. Chiun's British soaps. His latest passion.

No, Remo thought sadly, last passion.

Remo's bedroom was a simple room with a reed mat. Remo glanced over it without feeling or connection. It had only been a place to sleep. He skipped Chiun's bedroom and went to the kitchen with its simple dining table and long rows of cabinets. He opened them, touching the sacks and canisters of uncooked rice of all varieties.

It was here, Remo thought morosely, that he and Chiun had enjoyed their best times together. Cooking and eating.

And arguing. Always arguing. It had become a ritual with them. And now he missed it terribly.

Remo left the kitchen, going to the storage room.

And he knew then what had impelled him to return.

Chiun's steamer trunks. Fourteen oversize lacquered trunks in every ungodly color imaginable. Emblazoned with dragons, phoenixes, salamanders, and other exotic creatures. They had been a pain in the ass to truck around during their vagabond days. But Remo would carry them to the moon and back for another combative afternoon with Chiun, listening to his carping and eating steaming bowlfuls of pure Javonica rice.

Dropping to his knees, he threw open a lid at random. Remo was not surprised to see that it contained an assortment of junk-restaurant giveaway toothpicks in colored cellophane, swizzle sticks, coasters, towels emblazoned with the crests of scores of hotels from around the world. Remo closed it, feeling sad. All this stuff carefully collected. And for what?

The next trunk contained rolls of delicately packed parchment scrolls, each tied closed with a different-colored ribbon. Here was the history of Chiun's days in America. These were what had called Remo to the house. He would have to return them to the village of Sinanju, where they would join the histories of past Masters.

Remo reached down to pluck one up. It looked to be the freshest.

He held it in his hand for a long time, fingers poised over the emerald ribbon.

Finally he simply replaced it unread. It was too soon. He could not bear to reexperience their days as seen through Chiun's jaundiced eyes. Remo closed the trunk.

The next one opened up on a sea of silks and fine brocades. Chiun's ceremonial kimonos. Remo lifted one-a black silk kimono with two orange-and-black tigers stitched delicately onto the chest, rising on their hind legs, their forepaws frozen in eternal combat.

A faint light made the tigers jump out from the shimmery ebon background.

"What?"

Remo turned, the kimono dropping from his surprised fingers.

Feeling his mouth go dry, he gasped.

"Little Father?"

For there, less than six feet away, stood the Master of Sinanju, shining with a faint radiance. He wore the royal purple kimono that he had last worn in life. His hands were concealed in the joined sleeves. His eyes were closed, the sweet wrinkles of his face in repose, his head tilted back slightly.

Remo swallowed. Except for a bluish cast, Chiun looked as he had in life. There was no corny opalescent glow like in a Hollywood ghost. No saintlike nimbus. None of that ghostly stuff.

Still, Remo could see, dimly, the shadowy bulk of the big-screen TV behind the Master of Sinanju's lifelike image.

"Little Father?" Remo repeated. "Chiun?"

The bald head lowered, and dim hazel eyes eased open as if coming out of a long sleep. They grew harsh when they came into contact with Remo's own.

The sleeves parted, revealing birdlike claws tipped with impossibly long curved nails.

One trembling hand pointed to Remo.

"What are you saying?" Remo asked. "If it's about my going through your trunks"

Then it pointed down, to the Master of Sinanju's sandaled feet.

"You did this last time," Remo said. "And the time before that. You're telling me that I walk in your sandals now, right?"

The eyes flashed anew. The hand pointed down, the elbow working back and forth emphatically, driving the point home again and again.

"I'm going back. Really. I have something to clear up first."

The elbow jerked.

"I was on my way but Kali came back. I don't know what to do."

With the other hand the spirit of Chiun indicated the floor.

"You can't hear me, can you?"

Remo put his hands in his pockets. He shook his head negatively.

The Master of Sinanju dropped silently to both knees. He rested tiny futile fists against the hardwood floor and began pounding. His hands went through the floor each time. But their violence was emphatic.

"Look," Remo protested, "I don't know what you're trying to tell me. And you're starting to drive me crazy with all this pantomime stuff. Can't you just leave a note or something?"

Chiun sat up. He formed strange shapes with his hands and fingers.

Remo blinked. He peered through the half-light.

"What is this?" he muttered. "Charades?"

Chiun's crooked fingers twisted this way and that, forming Remo knew not what. He thought he recognized the letter G formed of a circled thumb and forefinger bisected by another index finger, but the rest was a meaningless jumble of pantomime.

"Look, I'm not following this," Remo shouted in exasperation. "Why are you doing this to me? You're dead, for Christ's sake. Why can't you just leave me alone!"

And with that, the Master of Sinanju came to his feet like ascending purple incense.

He approached, his hands lifting to Remo's face.

Remo shrank back. But the hands plunged too quickly to evade.

"Noooo!" Remo cried as the whirl of images overtook his mind. He smelled coldness, visualized blackness, and tasted brackish water-all in one overwhelming concussion of sensory attack. His lungs caught in mid-breath-from fear or what, he didn't know. It felt like the oxygen had been sucked from them.

He sank to his feet, eyes pinched shut, breathing in jerky gasps.

"Okay, okay, you win!" he panted. "I'll go! I'll go to Sinanju. I promise. Just stop haunting me, okay?"

The images swallowed themselves like water swirling down a drain.

"What?"

Remo opened his eyes. The faint radiance was gone. In the half-light he thought he caught a momentary retinal impression of Chiun's dwindling afterimage. The Master of Sinanju had thrown his face to the heavens. Remo could almost hear his wail of despair.

Now Remo knew. The Master of Sinanju had gone to the Void-the cold place on the other side of the universe where, according to Sinanju belief, those who had dropped their mortal shells were ultimately cast.

It was true! There was a Void. And Chiun was there. Remo swallowed his fear several times before he found his feet. Now he understood. No wonder Chiun kept coming back. The Void was a terrible place. And it was the place Remo would one day go too. Remo shivered at the thought.

Perhaps he was better off a slave of Kali. He did not know. Remo reached into the open trunk and took up a shimmery bolt of fabric.

Then he left, sealing the front door by compressing the protesting hinges with the heel of his hand. They would have to be unscrewed before the door would ever open again.

Remo did not expect to see that done. Ever.

Chapter 22

President Maddas Hinsein, Scimitar of the Arabs, left the presidential palace in his staff car. He was feeling very Arabian today, so he wore a blue-and-white burnoose whose headdress was held in place by a coiling black agal.

It was also excellent protection against the scourge of the Arab leader-the would-be assassin. For no one knew what Father Maddas, as his worshipful countrymen called him with childlike affection, would wear on a given day. A paramilitary jumpsuit, a Western-style business suit, or traditional bedouin garb. It was one of the many survival tricks he had learned in a lifetime of surviving the snakepit that was modern Irait.

The decree that all males of puberty age and above wear Maddas Hinsein mustaches was another. If all Iraiti men looked alike, Maddas reasoned, an assassin would have to consider well before shooting, lest he fire upon a relative. In that fractional hesitation sometimes lay the difference between glorious victory and ignominious death.

The staff car whirled him through the broad multilane highways and the sparse traffic, through Renaissance Square, where two huge forearms-cast from life molds of Maddas' own and expanded to the girth of a genie's arm-clutched curved scimitars to form an arch. On every building, on the traffic islands, and in the centers of rotaries, magnificent portraits of Maddas alternately smiled and glowered in testimony to the sweeping depth of his magnificent wardrobe. How could a man who so inspired his people, Maddas thought with deep pride, fail to unite the Arabs?

Presently the car brought him to Maddas International Airport, where a Tupolev-16 bomber sat on the tarmac.

Under armed escort, Maddas Hinsein entered the airport.

His defense minister, General Razzik Azziz, rushed forward to meet him.

General Azziz did not look well. Maddas preferred his generals to look unwell. If there was fear in their bellies, he was a safer president. They exchanged salutes.

"Salaam aleikim, Precious Leader," said General Azziz. "The plane has just arrived."

Maddas nodded. "And this United States deserter, where is she?"

"For security purposes, we have not allowed anyone to deplane. The crew awaits you."

"Take me."

Members of his elite blue-bereted Renaissance Guard formed a protective circle around Maddas Hinsein as he strode in his familiar rolling gait onto the tarmac. A wheeled staircase was brought up to the aircraft, which had flown in from occupied Kuran carrying the deserter. She had presented herself to an astonished patrol.

Two airport security guards climbed the aluminum stairs and knocked on the hatch. They waited. Nothing happened. They pounded this time, shouting insults and curses in voluble Arabic.

This produced no result. They hastily clambered down the staircase and moved it in front of the cockpit. They climbed up and looked in the window.

Their manner became excited. They shouted. Other soldiers came running. From the top of the stairs they opened up on the occupied windows with AK-47's. Glass flew. Blood splashed, spattering them all.

Finally the shooting died down.

Reaching in, they hauled out the dead pilot and copilot. Their inert bodies slid and slithered down the wheeled staircase.

Maddas Hinsein saw the tight yellow knots around their throats. They contrasted sharply with the purplish-blue of their congested faces.

He frowned, his face a thundercloud of annoyance.

"What is this?" Maddas demanded of his defense minister.

"I have no idea," the general gulped.

Maddas drew his sidearm, a pearl-handed revolver. He placed the immaculate muzzle to General Azziz's sweating temple.

"If this is a trap," he uttered venomously, "you will soon have no brain."

General Razzik Azziz stood very, very still. He hoped that this was not a trap too.

The security men crawled into the cockpit. Soon the hatch popped open.

When a new staircase rolled into position, Maddas Hinsein ordered his Renaissance Guard to storm the plane. No shots were fired. Only when they called back that it was safe to board did Maddas Hinsein mount the stairs personally.

Just to be certain, he marched his defense minister into the plane at gunpoint.

When the man was not gunned down, Maddas Hinsein stepped in, towering over his men.

The crew sat in their seats, tongues out like those of parched dogs, their faces horrible purple and blue hues. Their stink was not that of corruption, but of bowels that had released in death.

Maddas Hinsein had no eyes for the dead. He wanted the American servicewoman who had promised his patrol the secret American order of battle.

But a two-hour search produced no American servicewoman, even though General Azziz repeatedly assured him that she had been aboard."

"She must have escaped," General Azziz swore. "Before I arrived here," he added.

"Have the responsible parties stood before a firing squad," Maddas Hinsein told his defense minister.

"But, Precious Leader, they are already dead. You see them about you. All of them."

Maddas Hinsein fixed General Azziz with his deadly gaze.

"Shoot them anyway. As a lesson to others. Not even the dead are safe from the firing squad."

"It will be done as you say, Precious Leader," General Azziz promised eagerly.

"And have the CIA spy-for that is obviously what she is-captured alive if possible. I will accept dead. No doubt, she is an assassin."

"As you command, Precious Leader."

As he was whisked from the airport, Maddas Hinsein was thinking of the yellow silk scarves and how much they resembled the yellow ribbons that American farmers had tied around their coarse western trees.

And he wondered what fate had truly befallen his ambassador to the United States.

The Americans were sending him a message, he decided. Perhaps their patience was not inexhaustible, after all.

Chapter 23

The Reverend Juniper Jackman took great pride in his blackness.

It was his blackness that enabled him-despite a complete lack of credentials-to run for the office of the presidency and convince the media and a sizable but electorally insignificant portion of the American voters that he might actually win.

It was such a convincing con that on his last foray into national politics, Reverend Jackman himself actually caught the fever and fell under the sway of his own hypnotic speechmaking.

He came to believe he had a chance to become the nation's first black President.

He had no chance, but he clung to the whiff of victory straight through the primaries. The aftermath of his party's convention, where he wowed America with an arresting speech about catching the best bus, was a bitter comedown.

There was talk of Reverend Jackman running for mayor of Washington, D.C. Many of his constituents practically demanded it. But the Reverend Jackman declined the offer, saying he saw himself as a player in a larger area-global politics.

The truth was, he understood better than anyone else that if he won the mayor's race, he was sunk. What did he know about running a city? And he didn't want to end up like the last disgraced mayor of Washington. As the Reverend Jackman saw it, his only chance was to grab that presidential brass ring and hold on for dear life. They wouldn't dare impeach him. Not him. His blackness would get him in the door and his mouth would keep him in the Oval Office-even after the nation realized it had been scammed.

But the calls for the Reverend Jackman to run for some elected office were too strong for even him to ignore. Especially when, in the wake of the last election, the pundits began calling him irrelevant. So he had allowed himself to be drafted into the meaningless role of shadow senator.

It was perfect. No responsibilities. No downside. He could phone his work in. Often did.

Which, after he had launched his TV talk show-the reverend's latest scheme to acquire a national platform-was exactly what he needed.

Now, with an actual political office on his resume, they stopped calling him irrelevant.

He was once again branded by the press as a shameless opportunist. The Reverend Jackman hated that tag, but it was better than being irrelevant. A shameless opportunist was at least a player. And if there was anything the Reverend Jackman needed to be, it was a player.

So it was that he sat in the plush cabin of his former campaign jet, the Rainbow Soundbite, winging his way over the Middle East to a rendezvous with destiny.

"I'll show 'em," the Reverend Jackman said, sipping a tumbler of pepper vodka.

"Yeah," his chief adviser slurred, hefting a tall rum and Coke, "those jerks in Washington are gonna sit up and take notice of you now."

"I don't mean them," Reverend Jackman snapped. "I mean those glory hounds at BCN. I ain't forgotten how they scooped me on Maddas. I had the first interview with that date-muncher all sewed up. And they sent in Don Cooder to beat me to the punch."

"We should never have broadcast our intentions. Secret diplomacy. That's what we gotta learn. Secret diplomacy."

"Damn Cooder is scoop-crazed. I hate people like that," Reverend Jackman said with a surly twist of his upper lip. His mustache contorted like a worm on a pin.

"Well, the Arabs got him now, and if this works, Juni, you gonna make that guy look as dumb as the time he promised to put a live neutron bomb on TV and ended up showing a twenty-year-old rerun about saving the humpback whale."

"I'll talk of Maddas into letting him go in my custody, and that ass-kisser Cooder will be kissing my ass all the way home. You seen him on TV? Man's scared. Never seen a man so scared. Probably has to change his underwear three times a day."

The two men laughed. Reverend Jackman looked out the porthole. Endless sand rolled beneath the starboard wing.

"What do you think, Earl? Maybe when I step off, I'll announce that I've come to trade places with Cooder. Think that'll work?"

"It might. But what if they take you up on it?"

"They wouldn't dare. I ran for President twice. Which is more than you can say for JFK, LBJ, and Ford. And Ford got in without even runnin'."

"Maybe you're right. We are brothers, us and the Arabs."

" 'Cept we got more sense than to dress up in our bed linen." Reverend Jackman sneered. "Then that's what I'll do. I'll offer myself in trade. We'd better work up a speech."

"What kind you want?"

"One that doesn't say anything but sounds good."

"I know that, but what do you want to be sayin', Juni?"

"As little as possible. That's how people like it. Just make sure it rhymes. I'm gonna hit the head. All this sand is making me thirsty and all this vodka is making me leakier than the State Department."

The Rainbow Soundbite touched down at Maddas International Airport after being cleared by Iraiti air-traffic control. It taxied up to Terminal B, where a wheeled ramp was pushed into place.

A cordon of Iraiti security officers in khaki and black berets kept the multinational press at bay. The press cheered the opening of the hatch door. They cheered the appearance of the Reverend Juniper Jackman as he stepped onto the top step.

They cheered because when they weren't reporting on events in Abominadad, they resided in the Abaddon Air Base, known to be a primary U.S. target in the event of hostilities.

Reverend Juniper Jackman lifted his hand to acknowledge the cheers. His pop eyes cast down to the reception committee and his youthful features broke into a frown.

"What is this crap!" he demanded. "I'm not going down there. I don't recognize anybody. They sent some flunkies!" His chief adviser looked out. "Yeah, you right, Juni. I don't see hide nor hair of the foreign minister. I don't even see the information minister. Maybe that's him-the one with the brushy mustache."

"They all got brushy mustaches," Juniper Jackman growled. "You get on the phone. Call everybody you gotta. I ain't steppin' off this plane until they send somebody important to shake my hand in front of all this media."

"Gotcha, Juni."

The Reverend Jackman put on his famous smile and waved with his other hand. Cheers went up from the press. Juniper Jackman beamed. What the hell. This wasn't so hard to take. Some of the same jerks who'd bad-mouthed him on the air were now cheering to beat the band. He hoped they'd remember this moment the next time he ran for President instead of claiming it was like making a fry cook chairman of the board of McDonald's without having to work his way up.

Reverend Juniper Jackman switched hands until they got tired. The press cheered until they were hoarse.

"What's keeping you?" Jackman hissed through his wilting smile.

"I'm being stonewalled," his aide called back. "I don't like this."

"Maybe you ain't dialed the right number yet."

Then a quartet of soldiers came up the stairs, trailed by the mustached man in the blue business suit.

They took Reverend Jackman by the hands. Smiling, he attempted to shake hands with every one of them.

But shaking hands was not what the Iraiti soldiers had in mind. They took Reverend Jackman by the upper arms and forcibly marched him down the steps.

Trying to put the best face on it because of all the cameras, the Reverend Jackman lifted his arms to wave. His arms were held down.

"What the F is goin' on?" Reverend Jackman undertoned in panic.

The Iraiti in the blue business suit spoke up.

"Reverend Jackman, so happy to see you. I am Mustafa Shagdoof, deputy information minister. On behalf of our benevolent leader, President Maddas Hinsein, I welcome you as a guest to our peace-loving country."

"Thanks, but I . . ." Reverend Jackman's eyes started suddenly. "Wait a minute! What do you mean by guest?"

"What we say," the deputy information minister said, displaying an officious smile. "You are entitled to our hospitality."

"You ain't by any chance plannin' on duressing me?"

"Do you feel duressed?"

"As a matter of fact . . ." Reverend Jackman nearly stumbled. He looked up.

They reached the bottom of the stairs.

The deputy information minister addressed the gathering TV cameramen. "On behalf of the Republic of Irait, I formally welcome Reverend Jackman as a guest of the state. He will remain our guest until our own ambassador is accounted for."

If anything, Reverend Jackman's staring eyes protruded further. They resembled hard-boiled eggs with sick black spots at one end.

Thinking "Might as well go for broke," Reverend Jackman sucked in a deep breath.

"I came to trade myself for Don Cooder," he shouted. "You hear me? I'm not afraid to take his place." The sweat crawled down the reverend's face like transparent worms.

From the back of the TV crew a familiar Texas drawl was raised in excitement.

"That's me! That's me! Let me on that damned plane!"

And hearing that familiar voice, Reverend Juniper Jackman turned to the Iraiti deputy information minister.

"Just between you and me, I don't suppose you'd take my assistant instead of me? I'll throw in the plane. You can keep Cooder too."

"You should be very happy here in Abominadad," the deputy information minister said.

"What makes you say that?"

"You already wear the politically correct mustache."

Word of the detention of the Reverend Juniper Jackman was satellited from Abominadad to Washington through the Cable News Network.

The President received the report in writing during a cabinet meeting. He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. No love was lost between him and the reverend, but the man was a political figure of some standing. When word of this hit the streets, there would be enormous pressure that he take action. Especially from the black community.

"Excuse me," the President told his cabinet. "Gotta make a call."

The President walked the lonely halls of power to the Lincoln Bedroom. Perching on the side of the antique bed, he opened the nightstand drawer, revealing a dialless red telephone.

He picked it up, triggering an automatic connection.

Hundreds of miles north, at the other end of the dedicated line, an identical telephone rang on the desk of Harold W. Smith.

"Yes, Mr. President?"

"The Iraitis have taken Reverend Jackman hostage."

There was silence on the line as both men considered whether that was truly as bad as it sounded.

"They're threatening to give up Dan Cooder," the President added.

"Unfortunate," Smith said at last.

"They want their ambassador back. What do I do? If I ship them a corpse, they'll do the same. I don't want to go to war to avenge that glory-hound minister."

"I believe I can help you on this one," Smith said at last. "Leave the rest to me."

Harold Smith hung up the phone. An hour ago, he would have had to inform the chief executive of the United States that he couldn't send his special person to the Middle East. His special person refused to go anywhere unless it was into the arms-the four arms, according to his delusion--of a woman he believed was the reincarnation of the Hindu goddess Kali.

But in the last hour, Harold Smith had made a breakthrough. Unable to trace Kimberly Baynes-or the woman who used that name-through the usual computer taps, he had reprogrammed the search to trap any Baynes with a feminine first name.

An airline reservation in the name of Calley Baynes had bubbled to the surface of the vast active memory. He might not have paid it much attention, but the flight's destination was Tripoli, Libya.

And as he wondered what this Calley Baynes would be doing in Tripoli, it sank in that his computers had provided a way to convince Remo to accept this assignment.

Provided Harold Smith was prepared to lie now and blame his computers later.

He shut down his terminal and sent it retreating into its hidden desk recess.

Remo, he felt confident, would be more than happy to go to the Middle East. But Smith would not send him to Libya. He would send him to Irait.

He just hoped that in his present state Remo Williams was up to the task.

Chapter 24

"I have found . . . ah, your Miss Baynes," Harold Smith told Remo.

"Where?" Remo's voice was calm--calmer than Smith had expected.

It was dark in the room. Only the bluish TV etched Remo's head and shoulders in the blackness. The sound was off. Remo had not turned his head once in the darkness.

"Hamidi Arabia."

"I've been there. It's all sand. She'll be hard to track down."

"I am working on that," Smith said. "In the meantime, the President has asked that we intervene in the Juniper Jackman situation. He has been designated a guest under duress."

Remo grunted. "Another breakthrough for jive diplomacy. Maybe Maddas will draft him as his vice-president."

"That is not funny."

"So how do we fix the problem?" Remo wondered.

"By liberating the reverend from Abominadad."

Remo perked up. "Do I get to nail Maddas?"

"No. That is not on the menu. Get Jackman to Hamidi Arabia. By the time you conclude this matter, I should have Miss Baynes's exact whereabouts and you can deal with that loose end."

"Then I was right," Remo said slowly. "The Middle East is where the Caldron of Blood will start to boil."

"Are you all right?" Smith asked.

Remo paused. "I went to the house. He was there, Smitty."

"Chiun's ghost?" Smith said dryly.

"I don't know what you'd call it. But I saw him. And I made him a promise."

"Yes?"

"I promised I would return to Sinanju."

"And what did Chiun . . . er . . . say?"

"Nothing. He looked at me like a drowning man. I don't understand, but I made the promise. I'm going to Sinanju. I'm going to do my duty."

"What about the assignment? And Kimberly Baynes-or whoever she really is?"

"I'll handle both of them. I'll have to. Then my responsibility will be to fulfill my duty to the House."

"As you wish. I will make the arrangements to get you to Hamidi Arabia. The entire country is in a high state of nervousness. I thought I'd send you on a military flight. It would be better in your . . . um . . . condition as well. I'll arrange for someone to liase with you."

"No need," Remo said.

"Oh?"

"Just get word to Sheik Abdul Hamid Fareem."

Smith started. "The ruler of Hamidi Arabia? And what shall I say?"

Remo stood up in the darkness and Smith saw the play of bluish TV light on the folds of his black silk garment.

Remo turned, shadows crawling across his face. They settled into the hollows of his eyes so they became like the empty orbits of a skull in which diamond-hard lights gleamed faintly. He tucked his hands into the wide sleeves of his long ebony kimono, on which facing tigers reared in frozen anger.

"Tell him the Master of Sinanju is coming to Hamidi Arabia," Remo Williams said quietly.

Chapter 25

Everything Maddas Hinsein knew about global politics, he had learned in the coffee shops of Cairo.

Young Maddas had spent several years in Egypt in the aftermath of a failed attempt to assassinate the Iraiti leader of that time. There he had argued about Arab unity with students from the nearby Cairo University.

They were smooth-faced man-boys, their heads filled with citified dreams. He could never understand their appetite for loud talk. They argued forever-never learning the great truth of Maddas Hinsein's life.

It was far, far quicker to shoot those whose views were unacceptable than to argue back.

Although no older than the university students, Maddas was already a hardened veteran of internecine political warfare. After the failed assassination attempt, although wounded in the leg, he had narrowly escaped capture by the Iraiti secret police. Limping through the flat opulence of Abominadad, he had ducked into an alley as the ululations of their sirens drew nearer, ever nearer.

He happened to encounter an old woman in the alley. She wore the traditional black abayuh, which covered her like a shroud, black eyes peeping through her veil.

Maddas had approached her in the same direct way he had pursued his career as an Arab revolutionary.

"Sabah al-Heir," he had said. "May your morning be bright."

"Abah al-Nour," she murmured in reply. "May your morning be bright also."

As he knew she would, the woman modestly averted her eyes. And Maddas Hinsein reached down with one hand for the hem of her costume and lifted it straight up.

With the other, he yanked out his pistol and shot her once in the chest.

Stripping the body of the undamaged garment, Maddas Hinsein had pulled it over his head, hating himself for having to stoop so low. Wearing female garb was repugnant to him. Killing the woman was one thing-in revolution one recognized certain necessities-but being forced to wear soft garments was entirely different.

Besides, the woman was old, he saw as he pulled the veil from her face. She had had her life. And Maddas Hinsein was a man of destiny.

In the flowing black abayuh, Maddas Hinsein had traveled across the punishing desert, the traditional Arab respect for women saving him from search and inevitable capture. The longer he traveled, the safer he felt. He began to feel almost invincible when wrapped in this ebony shroud, his face masked, his life secure from harm. And as the miles melted behind him, Maddas Hinsein discovered a wondrous truth. He grew to enjoy the feel of the abayuh swathing his bulky, muscular body.

Upon reaching the Egyptian frontier, Maddas Hinsein had reluctantly folded the precious garment and carried it under his arm, telling the authorities it had belonged to his poor deceased mother.

"It is all I have to remember her by," he had told the curious border guards. He brushed a soulful eye with a spit-moistened finger, producing a convincing tear.

The sight of such a bear of an Arab moved to tears convinced the Egyptian border guard. They let him pass.

During the years in the Cairo coffee shops, Arab unity was on every lip. It was the Grand Dream, the Great Hope, and Paradise on Earth all in one. The reason was profoundly simple. No one could remember a time when there had been such a thing as Arab unity. So everyone was secure in the belief it would be wondrous. And in that atmosphere, Maddas had learned the lessons he had carried with him into his leadership days.

Truth one: the Arabs were disunited because imperialists kept them this way.

Truth two: the Arabs were meant to be united and only awaited a strongman like a modern Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who had captured Jerusalem in 597 B.C.

Truth three: for as long as the United States vied with Russia for world domination, Irait would be protected by the USSR from U.S. adventurism.

Truth four: Maddas Hinsein was destined to be the man who would unite the Arab nation under the Iraiti banner. This was Maddas' sole contribution to the discussions. Doubters were shot in the back at his earliest opportunity. Soon the Four Great Truths were discussed without dissent.

Had Maddas Hinsein learned his history from books and not idle conversation, he would have learned that the Arabs had enjoyed unity but once in their long history. And that had been under the prophet Mohammed, over a thousand years ago. Then Mohammed had died. United Araby was quickly dismembered under the ravenous talons of Mohammed's heirs.

Had he read newspapers, Maddas would have learned that the cold war had become a thing of the past and that Irait lay naked and exposed, no longer important in the global new world order that had shifted from ideology to the ultimate reality of international politics-economics.

So when after nearly a decade of unending war with his neighbor, Irug, Maddas Hinsein found his treasury bankrupt, he turned on his nearest oil-rich neighbor and swallowed tiny defenseless Kuran-hide, hoof, warp, and woof.

The unexpected appearance of a multinational force on his new southern border, when reported to him in the middle of the night by his defense minister, prompted him to conclude one thing: his adviser was drunk. And since alcohol was forbidden to Moslems, he had had the man shot before a firing squad. Then he had downed a stiff belt of cognac.

When the reports from the field told him that such a force not only existed but also was growing daily, President Hinsein had had the adviser exhumed and returned to his place of honor at the Revolting Command Council as a gesture of contrition.

"Let no man say again that Maddas Hinsein is not a man who readily admits his mistakes," he pronounced, as his advisers sat around the big table holding their noses against the stench of corruption.

Only when the corpse had begun to fall apart was he returned to his shallow grave. With full military honors.

It was in those early days of the U.S. buildup that Maddas, who had kept the nameless old woman's abayuh in a sealed trunk, exhumed it for the first time since his Cairo days.

The fine fabric reassured him as it had in the days he crouched under donkey carts as the secret police-his secret police now-blew past.

He knew it would protect him until the Soviets came to succor him.

When word came that the Soviets had joined the global embargo, Maddas Hinsein had taken to carrying the abayuh in a briefcase, and toting the briefcase wherever he went.

And at night, when he slept, he slept swathed in its protective folds. He told himself that this was to facilitate his escape in case of a coup, or worse. But the truth was far different.

The truth was that Maddas Hinsein loved to wear the abayuh.

He had first begun to suspect these tendencies in Egypt. Once he had assumed the presidential office-by doing away with the previous President, his mentor-President Hinsein had buried the abayuh in a trunk, where it would not tempt him. And most of all, where his wife, Numibasra, would never find it. The woman was a witch. And her brothers, Maddas knew, secretly plotted against him. Only because he would never have heard the end of it from his wife did Maddas refrain from having them beheaded.

One day, he told himself. One day.

But today Maddas Hinsein's thoughts were not of his wife and her cutthroat brothers, but of the reports he was receiving from his general staff.

Maddas paced his office. The aides would come to the door, knocking their timid, sycophantic knocks.

"I am receiving no one," Maddas barked. "Give me your report and go."

"They have found more dead soldiers," the aides called. "The yellow cords around their throats."

"Soldiers exist to die," Maddas spat back. "They are martyrs now and better off."

"The defense minister wants to know if you plan a military response to these outrages?"

Maddas Hinsein stopped pacing. The black abayuh skirt rustled against his shiny black paratroop boots.

This was the question he feared. He had brought the wrath of the world down on his head through his own ignorance, but he dared not admit it. So he had hunkered down, giving pronouncements, calling on rival Arab nations to join him in a jihad. And he had been ignored. Nothing that he had done worked. No threat. No bluster.

And now his own high command, the cowardly toadies, were demanding to know what response he would make to this CIA assassin who was terrorizing Abominadad.

"Tell him," Maddas said at last, "I will make a response to the world once this infidel strangler is brought to my door. And if he is not, then I will demand the defense minister's head instead."

The aide rushed away. Beneath the black cloth covering his face, Maddas Hinsein smiled suavely.

That would keep them occupied. Maddas Hinsein would not be stampeded into war by one mere CIA assassin-spy.

Lifting his hands over his head, he snapped his fingers in an ancient syncopation and performed the dance of the seven veils in the privacy of his office, throwing his hips out with each snap and humming under his breath.

"Mad Ass Mad Ass Mad Ass," he crooned. "I am one crazy-assed Arab, and the whole world knows it."

But as the hours passed, the aides kept coming.

"More dead, Precious Leader. Strangled."

"We have searched everywhere, Precious Leader. The she-wolf is not to be found."

"The minister of the interior, Precious Leader, has been found in his quarters. Assassinated with a yellow cord."

"Do you not see what the Americans are trying to do?" Maddas thundered back. "They are trying to trick us into war. I will not have war on their terms, but on mine."

That had held them another hour while Maddas luxuriated in the feel of the fine abayuh, bumping and grinding merrily.

Then came a knock unlike any other. More tentative, more faint of heart. The knock of a fear-struck coward.

"Precious Leader," the quavering voice began. "What is it?" Maddas barked.

"I am very sorry to report this to you, but the Renaissance Guard surrounding your home has been decimated."

"They were the flower of Iraiti manhood, how can this be?"

"They were strangled, Precious Leader. Yellow silk knots about their strong Arab necks."

"And my family? Of course they have escaped while their noble defenders held their ground, spilling their very red martyrs' blood."

The silence brought Maddas Hinsein up from his couch. He yanked the abayuh hood from his face. Striding over to the door, he roared through it.

"I have asked a question!"

"I am sorry, Precious Leader. Your family is . . . dead."

Maddas' soulful eyes went round.

"My wife too?"

"I am so sorry," the aide sobbed through the wood.

"And her brothers, my brothers-in-law?"

"Gone," he choked. "All gone. It is a day of mourning. But fear not, the Americans will pay. We will scorch the earth under their heathen feet. The blood of your martyred family will sear their lungs. You have only to give the word and we will repay the aggressors in blood."

But Maddas Hinsein wasn't listening to his aide's grief-twisted voice.

He was feeling a coldness settle into his stomach and lungs.

"They want war," he said huskily. "The crazy Americans are trying to force me to attack. They must be insane."

Chapter 26

The Military Airlift Command C-5 Galaxy that carried Remo Williams from McGuire Air Force Base also carried a single cabled-down M-IA1 Abrams tank, the Army's latest. It was one of the last to be shipped in support of Operation Sand Blast.

The bulky vehicle left little room for Remo in back. But he insisted on riding in the cavernous cargo bay, sitting on a tatami mat so he wouldn't get engine oil on his fine silk kimono, which he had had altered to fit him by a dumbstruck tailor.

Remo sat in a lotus position, the drumming of the Galaxy's turboprop engines making everything in the cargo bay vibrate with soul-deadening monotony.

Early in the flight, Remo had found the vibration and absorbed it until his body no longer vibrated in sympathy with the great propellers. Only the neat edges of his mat did.

The flight was long and boring. Remo sat comfortably, the kimono fabric stretched tight over his lap. It hid his persistent erection.

Even though he had left most of the yellow scarves that had belonged to Kimberly Baynes-or whoever she was-behind at Folcroft, Remo couldn't get her out of his mind.

What would happen when they met again? He wanted her more than he had ever wanted a woman, but not in a good way. He lusted for her. Yet he hated her, with her many arms and twisted neck. And most of all he hated the thing that animated her. For Remo understood that Kimberly had died. Like a ghoulish puppet, Kali made her live again. And Remo would have to finish the job. If he could.

In the noisy back of the C-5, he closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. It helped push out the memories-of her burning-hot, sensual hands, her eager red mouth, her insatiable sexual appetite. Remo had feasted on sex while in her arms, and he knew as long as they both lived he could never rest until he returned to that feast-or destroyed the table.

But it made him wonder. Would he lose Remo Williams at the feast? And would the spark deep within him that was Shiva the Destroyer consume all that was his identity?

Remo shuddered. He had never felt so alone.

Closing his eyes, he slept sitting up.

And in sleep, he dreamed.

Remo dreamed of feminine hands with canary-yellow nails. The hands surrounded him. First they caressed. Then they pinched at his soft tissues between caresses. Remo lay on a bed, his eyes closed. The pinching grew spiteful. The caresses dwindled. But Remo had already succumbed to the latter.

As he lay helpless, the biting fingers began plucking the meat off his bones. Remo opened his eyes in his dream and saw that below the waist he was a skeletonized collection of gleaming red bones. He screamed.

And Kimberly Baynes, her face painted black, snapped one of his bloody femurs in two and fell to sucking out the sweet yellowish marrow.

The changing pitch of the C-5's engines saved Remo from his nightmare. He awoke drenched in sweat under the unfamiliar feel of silk.

The plane was descending in a long gliding approach. The whine of the dropping landing gear pierced his drowsy ears.

Remo remained in his lotus position until he felt the sudden bark and bump of the fat tires hit, as they bounced and then touched down. Momentum dying, the plane rolled to a slow stop.

Remo stood up. He faced the rear gate. The hydraulics began to toil, dropping the gate and admitting a hot blast of desert air.

When the gate had settled into a kind of ramp, Remo stepped out into the blazing sun.

A cluster of people stood awaiting him. Spit-and-polish Arabian soldiers who looked dressed for a parade and civilians in flowing white thobes.

And standing in front of them, his knotted brown hands clasped before the familiar red-and-brown robes of his clan, stood Sheik Abdul Hamid Fareem, ruler of Hamidi Arabia. Upon recognizing Remo, his long dour face broke into a pleased smile, his tufted chin dropping.

Remo stepped forward with the assured pride of a Master of Sinanju. This was his first encounter with a head of state as Reigning Master and he wanted to make a good impression. He tried to remember the proper Arabic words of greeting. It had been so many years since he and Chiun had first met the sheik. Now, what was the word for "hello"? Oh, yeah.

Remo stopped only a foot in front of the sheik. Giving a short bow, he said, "Shalom."

The sheik started. All around, Arabic voices muttered darkly. A few surreptitious hands pointed down to the impolite bulge at the white infidel's midsection.

The sheik forced his frozen smile to stay fixed on his weathered old face.

"Ahlan Wusahlan," he said. "This means 'welcome.' "

"I knew that," Remo lied. "Inshallah to you too." He remembered Arabs were always salting their sentences with inshallah. You couldn't go wrong with inshallah.

"Perhaps it would be better to speak English," Sheik Fareem ventured.

"Good idea," Remo said, wondering if he had gotten "hello" right.

"Am I to understand that you carry on the affairs of the House of Sinanju now that the Master of Sinanju known as Chiun no longer walks the earth?"

"I have that honor," Remo said gravely. He decided to keep his answers short so he sounded more like a Master of Sinanju. Inside, he was itching to cut through the B.S. But he was Master now.

"The bond that binds the House of Hamidi to the House of Sinanju is too strong to be broken by death," the sheik intoned. "Come, let us walk together."

Just in time, Remo remembered that it was Hamidi custom for men to hold hands when conversing.

The sheik reached out for Remo's hand. Remo quickly stuffed his hands into his sleeves. They walked. The sheik's entourage trailed silently.

Sheik Fareem led him to a nearby striped tent beside which two sleek Arabian horses stood tethered, walking very close. That was another thing about Arabs Remo didn't like. They did all their talking practically nose to nose.

Remo only wished his breath didn't smell like liver and garlic mixed with Turkish tobacco.

They entered the tent, the others remaining respectfully outside. Taking places on a Persian rug, they faced one another. Remo declined an offered plate of sheep's eyes, as well as a bubble pipe. The sheik indulged in the latter quietly for some moments before he resumed speaking.

"You still serve America?" he inquired.

"Yes."

"We would pay more," he suggested, fingering his beard.

Remo was no more interested in working for Hamidi Arabia than he wanted to eat sand, but Chiun had always cautioned him never to alienate a potential client. Remo might have the luxury of declining the sheik's offer, but one of Remo's successors might not be so fortunate.

In his mind he said, You old slave trader. Sinanju is for hire, not for sale.

Aloud he said, "This is possible. My term of contract with America will end soon."

"We would pay much for the head of the Arab traitor Maddas Hinsein," the sheik suggested. "He who dares call himself the Scimitar of the Arabs." Fareem spat noisily in the sand. "We call him Ayb al-Arab-the Shame of the Arabs-a renegade who hides behind women and children rather than face the consequences of his foul overreaching appetites."

"If I come into possession," Remo said with a slight smile, "I might just make you a present of it."

The sheik took a quick hit on his pipe, the corners of his withered lips twitching. Remo realized he was trying to mask a grin of amusement.

"You have come here at the behest of the U.S. government," Fareem resumed, "an emissary of which told me to expect you. How may I repay the debt between Hamidi and Sinanju?"

"I need to get into Kuran. And from there into Irait."

"Death awaits any American who ventures into either place."

"I bring death," Remo told him. "I do not accept it from others."

The sheik nodded. "Well spoken. You are a true son of your teacher. The House is in good hands."

"Thank you," Remo said simply, feeling his heart swell with pride lust as his stomach knotted in a sharp pang of grief. If only Chiun were here to hear the sheik's words.

"I will personally ride with you to the frontier and deliver you into the hands of the Kurani resistance. Would this serve your needs?"

Remo nodded. "It would."

"Then let us depart," the sheik said, laying aside his pipe. "Two horses await."

They stood up.

"Have you learned to ride a horse since you sojourned here last?" the sheik inquired.

"Yes."

A twinkle of pleasure came into the old sheik's wizened eyes.

"Good. A man who cannot ride is not much of a man."

"That's what they told me in Outer Mongolia, where I learned horsemanship."

Sheik Abdul Hamid Fareem frowned in the shadow of his ceremonial headdress. "They do not possess sound horseflesh in Outer Mongolia," he spat. "Only runt ponies."

"A horse is a horse," Remo said, adding under his breath, "Of course, of course."

The sheik gave the tent flap an impatient jerk, stooping as he stepped out. Remo followed.

"You will ride one of these beauties," the sheik said with pride, patting the flank of one white horse, who flared his pink nostrils in recognition. "They are the finest steeds in all Araby-which of course means the world. Are you man enough?"

Instead of answering, Remo mounted with a smooth, continuous motion that brought a slight nod of the Arab chief's ghurta.

The sheik took to his own saddle. He turned his steed around and slapped it with his reins. The horse plunged away.

Remo followed suit. They rode off into the desert, two warriors carrying on their shoulders the weight of thousands of years of tradition and glory.

Chapter 27

Maddas Hinsein refused to come out of his office.

All day long, the nervous aides kept coming.

"Precious Leader, the UN have announced a new resolution."

"I do not care. They make resolutions because they are afraid to fight."

"This resolution has condemned the entire Irait command structure to be hanged for war crimes."

"Let them declare war if they wish to hang me."

"Precious Leader, there is no word from our ambassador in Washington. It is the third day."

"Have the defector's family hanged as collaborators."

"Precious Leader, the UN have decreed more sanctions against Irait unless Kuran is immediately relinquished and Reverend Jackman is allowed his freedom."

This required thought. Maddas Hinsein pulled his abayuh around himself tightly. It always helped him to think.

"We can defeat their tricks easily," he said at last. "I hereby decree that Irait and Kuran have merged into a single entity. We are henceforth to be known as Iran, and these cowardly resolutions no longer apply to us."

"But, Precious Leader," he was told, "there already exists an Iran."

"Who are our mortal enemies," Maddas spat. "Let them eat the UN sanctions."

The aide had no answer to that. He went away. Maddas grinned, pleased with himself. Throughout his career, he had always found a way around the laws of the civilized world. Why hadn't he thought of this before? Yes, if there were two Irans, they could not level sanctions against one without leveling them at the other. It was a diplomatic masterstroke, almost as brilliant as the mustache decree. The world could no more denigrate him as an ignorant, untraveled Arab again.

Then came the news that even Maddas Hinsein could not ignore.

"Precious Leader."

"What!"

"Word has just come from the villa of your mistress, Yasmini. It was attacked. The guards lie strangled, the contents of their bowels heavy in their pants. It is horrible."

"They died defending their leader's mistress," Maddas returned stiffly. "Greater love has no Moslem than this."

"There is good news, Precious Leader."

"What?"

"Your mistress, she is safe."

Maddas stopped his heavy pacing. "Safe?"

"Yes, the Renaissance Guard must have beaten off the attack with their dying breaths. For when the change of guard entered the villa, they found your mistress still living. Unstrangled. Is this not a glorious day?"

Maddas Hinsein blinked his moist brown eyes several times, his brutal mouth going slack in the privacy of his veil.

"Where is she now?" he demanded hoarsely.

"We have brought her here to the palace, where she is safe, of course. She awaits your pleasure."

"One moment," Maddas Hinsein said, climbing out of his abayuh. He hastily stuffed it into his briefcase and carried it out of the office. He emerged, his other hand on the pearlhandled pistol dangling in a hip holster.

"Take me to my beloved Yasmini," he ordered.

The aide hastened to obey. Two Renaissance Guards fell in behind, at a respectful distance. Respectful, because they knew that President Hinsein was in the habit of shooting on the spot guards who inadvertently stepped on the backs of his boots.

The aide brought them all to a black door on a lower floor. It opened on one of the fifty-five bedrooms he used in rotation.

"In here," he said, grinning with pride.

"How do you know that the woman inside is truly my beloved Yasmini?" Maddas Hinsein asked slowly.

The aide's grin collapsed. Obviously the possibility was a new one to him.

"I . . . she . . . that is . . ." The guard steadied his nerve with a deep breath. "When the guard entered the house, she sat quietly, as if awaiting rescue."

"What has she said?"

"Nothing. It is obvious she is in shock from her ordeal."

"One last question," Maddas Hinsein asked, taking out his revolver and jamming it into the aide's Adam's apple. The heavy barrel fixed the man's larynx in place. "What color is her hair?"

Since his jammed larynx couldn't move, the aide simply shrugged. He hoped it was the correct response. Knowing the color of the President of Irait's mistress's hair was probably one of the punishable-by-death offenses. Like shaving or cultivating a mustache larger than the President's.

"You did not remove her abayuh?" Maddas asked.

The head shook in the negative. That was definitely the proper response, he knew.

The gun discharged and the aide shook all the way to the floor and after.

"That was your mistake, fool," Maddas Hinsein told the crumpled body.

Gesturing with his pistol, Maddas turned on his two guards.

"You and you. Enter and secure the prisoner."

The guards entered with alacrity. Maddas stepped away. If this was an assassination ploy, they would not emerge, and Maddas would run. If they did, he would have his answer to this puzzling turn of events. For one of Maddas Hinsein's deepest secrets was that he did not have a mistress. The abayuh-clad woman who sometimes sojourned in the suburban villa and sometimes in his own palace was none other than Maddas Hinsein himself. Many were the tricks of survival, he thought grimly.

The guards emerged. One said, "She is handcuffed, Precious Leader."

"Did she resist?"

"No."

"Stay here," said Maddas Hinsein, stepping in with his pistol leveled, just in case they were co-plotters. It paid to be careful. Every leader of bait in the last sixty years had died in office, and none had died in bed.

Maddas closed the door behind him.

The woman wore a black abayuh and veil that covered her face except for a swatch around the eyes. She sat demurely on a great bed, her long lashes lowered, her arms tied before her with heavy rope. Her head was oddly tilted to one side, as if listening.

Maddas paused to admire the cut of her abayuh. It was very fine. Perhaps he would add it to his collection.

"You are not my mistress Yasmini," he said, advancing.

The eyes looked up. They were violet.

"I know this because I have no mistress named Yasmini."

"I know," the woman said in perfect Arabic. Her voice was strange, somehow dark with portent.

"Before I shoot you dead, tell me how you know this."

"I know this," the woman said, "in the same way I know what fate befell your missing ambassador."

"What of the defector?"

"He did not defect. He was murdered. By an American agent. The same one who has been strangling your family and your advisers all over Abominadad."

"You have arranged to come here just to tell me this?" Maddas asked slowly.

"No. I have come to stir the Caldron of Blood. And you are my ladle."

And as Maddas Hinsein pondered those words, the prisoner stood up.

Maddas cocked his revolver. "I warn you."

The woman's abayuh began to lift and spread like wings, impelled by what, Maddas Hinsein knew not, but it was done with such eerie deliberateness that he held his fire out of stupefied curiosity.

The woman seemed to fill the room with her great black abayuh wings, and her shadow, palpable as smoke, fell upon him.

"Who are you?" Maddas demanded.

"I am your mistress."

"I have no mistress," Maddas barked.

"You do now," the woman said in American-accepted English. And both hands yanked off her veil, exposing tangled blond hair.

Maddas fired. Too late. A kicking foot knocked the pistol upward. The Scimitar of the Arabs never saw the foot strike. His eyes were on the two yellow-nailed hands that had emerged from hidden slits in the abayuh to untie the rope around her bound wrists.

The hemp fell away.

The revolver struck the floor and skittered into a corner.

But Maddas Hinsein's eyes were not on the weapon. He watched the eerie hands floating before the abayuh like pale spiders. They began clapping. The upper hands first, the lower ones joining in.

"What do you want of me?" Maddas croaked, mesmerized by those clapping hands. He licked his lips nervously. The sound in his ears stirred half-forgotten desires.

"It is not what I want of you, but what I can offer you," the strange four-handed woman whispered breathily as she drew close. The clapping hands switched off.

"What?" Maddas was sweating. But not with fear.

"I have come to spank you."

Maddas Hinsein's thick eyebrows quirked upward in time with his suddenly wet mustache like jumping caterpillars.

"I am yours, mistress," the Scourge of the Arabs intoned.

Then many hands were all over Maddas Hinsein, plucking his belt away, tearing at his pants, his underwear, and finally exposing naked skin.

They were busy, nimble hands. He felt helpless in their sure grip. Feeling helpless was a new sensation for Maddas Hinsein.

He wondered, as he was pushed onto the sumptuous bed, how this American woman knew his deepest, most secret desire. For Maddas Hinsein had not been properly spanked since he had become the Scimitar of the Arabs, and he missed it sorely.

The guards outside the room grinned at the slapping sounds emanating from within. It sounded as if their mighty leader were literally beating his mistress to death. The slapping went on forever. It was well known that Maddas Hinsein knew how to keep his women in line.

After a long time the ugly sounds of violence ceased.

A voice rose in protest.

"Please, do not stop," it implored.

One guard turned to the other.

"Do you hear?" he asked laughing. "She is begging for the corrective mercy of our Precious Leader."

The other did not join in.

"I think that is our Precious Leader," he muttered.

They listened. It was, indeed, the rumbling voice of Maddas Hinsein. He sounded unhappy.

A low woman's voice answered him. It was firm and unyielding.

Presently the door opened. A red-faced Maddas Hinsein stuck out his head. His eyes were shiny and wide. Sweat beaded his mustache.

"One of you take word to General Azziz," Maddas barked. "I want a tank column to attack the U.S. front lines. They will pay for the crimes committed against Abominadad."

A low murmur of sound drew him back in. The door shut. When it reopened, Maddas Hinsein had a change of orders.

"Use gas instead," he said. His eyes flicked back to the room. In a hushed tone, as if in fear of being overheard, he added, "Do it quietly. A quick strike and then retreat. Try not to bring the Americans down on our heads. I do not want trouble."

The door closed again. Through the heavy wood they could hear their Precious Leader's voice.

"I did as you bade, glorious one," he whimpered. "Now let the mighty rain of your discipline fall upon my penitent cheeks."

Relentless slapping sounds resumed.

The guards exchanged peculiar glances. They flipped a coin to see who would bear the strange message to the defense minister. They decided not to mention any of this.

Chapter 28

Remo Williams shifted in the saddle, trying for a comfortable position. Normally, this was not a problem. Remo was trained to endure pain.

But enduring mere pain was one thing. Riding long hours in the saddle, a hard leather pommel rubbing into his tender crotch, was another. He had hoped leaving all but one of Kimberly's scarves would lessen his predicament. No such luck.

The one scarf he had brought was stuffed deep up one kimono sleeve. So far, he had resisted digging it out. But he thought about it constantly.

"You appear unhappy of cast," Sheik Fareem muttered, inclining his predatory face in Remo's direction.

"I still grieve for my Master," Remo said quietly.

"After so many years? In truth, you are a worthy son. Would that I had a son such as you."

Remo said nothing. He remembered back to the days when he and Chiun had first encountered the sheik. There had been a dispute between the sheik and Chiun on one side and Remo and the sheik's worthless son, Abdul, on the other. Remo's assignment had conflicted with an ancient understanding Sinanju had with the Hamid family.

During the confrontation, Remo and Chiun had been forced into mortal combat with one another. Chiun had pretended to be killed, sparing Remo. Since that day, the sheik had believed Chiun dead. Such was his sense of honor that he worshiped the Master of Sinanju's memory and honored Remo's continued existence.

"Whatever happened to Prince Abdul?" Remo asked after a while.

"He cleans stables in a pitiful border town called Zar," the sheik spat. "Allah is just. But I have taken into my heart a nephew, the son of my wife's sister, to be my son in spirit. He is called Prince General Bazzaz. He has brought the House of Hamid both joy and pride, for he commands my army."

Remo nodded. "I've seen him on TV." He neglected to mention that the prince general looked like an operatic buffoon strutting around before the cameras and claiming that the U.S. forces were in Hamidi Arabia merely to "support" the frontline Arab units.

"If Allah is good to us," Sheik Fareem murmured, "we will meet him on the frontier. For he is now engaged in installing the best defenses money can buy along the front lines."

"Look forward to it," Remo said without enthusiasm, his eyes on a trio of camels that had darted across the path. They galloped like ungainly antelopes, speedy but awkward, spitting and snorting as they passed from sight.

His eyes noting the awkward bulge at Remo's crotch, the sheik wondered if all Americans were so lusty in their grief. It was truly a riddle.

They were stopped by a column of Arab soldiers a few miles south of the Hamidi-Kuran neutral zone.

Upon recognizing the sheik, the Arabs fell to their knees. Instead of bowing to the sheik, who sat astride his Arabian steed, they faced a different direction entirely and touched the sand with their palms and foreheads, muttered words escaping their lips.

"I thought Arabs were used to the desert heat," Remo said, watching the peculiar display.

To Remo's surprise, the sheik dismounted. Unfurling a small Persian rug, he likewise faced the same way, joining in the muttered praying. For that was what it was, Remo realized. They were facing Mecca.

Their oblations done, Fareem climbed to his feet. The others got up, then knelt again. This time at the sheik's feet.

Remo sat impatiently in his saddle. The soldiers addressed their king. The king replied formally. All of it went in one ear and out the other where Remo was concerned.

When they were done, the soldiers found their feet and formed an escort. The sheik remounted and they got under way once more.

"What was that all about?" Remo asked.

"They were concerned for my safety, alone in the desert," Sheik Fareem supplied.

"You weren't alone," Remo pointed out.

The sheik smiled. "That is what I told them. And that I had all the protection a man could need in the honored one who rode at my side."

Remo nodded, his eyes on the undulating landscape ahead.

He squinted. On the near horizon, a line of strange shapes appeared in the shimmering, quaking heat.

"What the hell?" he muttered.

During their journey from the base, they had skirted several military positions, including a line of American Bradley Fighting Vehicles draped in sand-colored netting arrayed in battalion formation. The American line had been the innermost bulwark. Oddly, it was also the largest.

Beyond that had been an Egyptian platoon, a Syrian squad, and other pockets, including a group of extremely morose Kuranis. Remo had asked the sheik why the strongest force had not been on the front line.

"Because it is the privilege of our fellow Arabs to defend and preserve Arab soil from the godless aggressor," the sheik had said proudly.

"You picked the right troops," Remo had replied politely, recognizing cannon fodder when he saw it.

The Hamidi defensive line was the smallest of these, Remo saw. Barely a squad of overdressed soldiers in braided powder-blue uniforms, clustered around traditional desert tents and an assortment of military vehicles, mostly APC's. There wasn't a single tank on the line, as Remo had expected, considering the estimated fifty thousand Soviet-made Iraiti tanks that lurked somewhere beyond the undulating horizon.

The Hamidi Arabian first line of defense was a string of sand-camouflaged trucks with open beds. They faced away from the neutral zone, as if poised for an immediate retreat.

Mounted on the flatbeds, their giant blades facing enemy territory, were the largest fans Remo had ever seen in his life.

They stood over twenty feet tall, gleaming blades protected by steel cages. Except for the size of the devices, they might have come off a Woolworth shelf.

"I don't believe it," Remo blurted out.

The sheik grinned his pleasure at the compliment.

"Awesome, are they not?" the sheik gloated. "Only a week ago, we had fans but half that size. My nephew, the prince general, conducted an inspection tour and saw the paltry blades and pronounced them inadequate to repel the Iraiti challenge. We have factories going twenty-four hours a day producing more. By autumn, the entire border-hundreds of miles long-will be so equipped."

"What good are fans against tanks?" Remo blurted out.

The sheik spat. "No damn good, by Allah. We do not fear Iraiti tanks. If the Iraitis send tanks, the Americans will bomb the hell out of them. It is their nerve gases that make even the most fearless of bedouins shiver in the hot sun. If they dare use their gases, we will blow them back into their cowardly faces. Inshallah!"

At the sound of that barked exclamation, a young man in an outrageous white uniform festooned with gold braid emerged from an air-conditioned tent.

"Uncle!" he cried, his dusky face lighting up.

"My nephew! Come, I have a great warrior you must meet."

As Remo and the sheik dismounted, Prince General Sulyman Bazzaz approached. He carried a bejeweled swagger stick and his radiant grin seemed like a hologram floating before his face. Even from a hundred yards away Remo could smell his after-shave. And he wasn't even trying.

"O long-lived one!" the prince general said, ignoring Remo. "You have come to see my handiwork."

"It is good, but it must wait. I must present an old friend of the Hamid family, the Master of Sinanju." The sheik indicated Remo with a flourish of his camel-hair thobe.

"Call me Remo," Remo said, putting out his hand. It was ignored. Remo tried to stuff both hands into his pants pockets, but the pocketless kimono resisted the gesture.

What a pain, Remo thought. I'm never going to get the hang of this diplomatic stuff.

"Who is this man?" the prince general asked in Arabic, eyeing Remo's hands with distaste. They were powdered by blowing sand.

"Look, let's cut to the chase," Remo said, abandoning decorum. "I need a lift into Kuran."

This brought a response from the prince general. "For what purpose?"

"He is on a secret mission for America," the sheik confided, drawing his nephew close to him with an insistent tugging on the prince general's braided sleeve. The two men huddled.

Remo folded his arms, but the swathlike kimono sleeves made it as impossible as pocketing them. He tucked them into his sleeves instead, feeling foolish as the wind kicked up, blowing powdery sand up his kimono skirt.

As the two Arabs talked, a whirlwind meandered by, seemingly coming from nowhere, a wavering column of whirling sand so dense it was impossible to see into its core.

No one paid it any special heed, although headdresses were pulled close to keep out the windblown grit. Interested, Remo watched the whirlwind blow past the position, dip into a shallow wadi, and carry airborne sand over the horizon.

When the two Arabs broke their huddle, the prince general stepped up to Remo and shook his hand with a loosefingered grip.

"I am delighted to meet an old friend of my uncle's. Ask and I shall grant your wish."

"How deep can you get me into Kuran?"

"As deep as you wish," Bazzaz said, surreptitiously wiping his right hand on the side of his immaculate thigh. "It is barren sand for hundreds of miles."

"Then let's go. I'm in a big rush."

Prince General Bazzaz led Remo and the sheik to a low-slung APC-type vehicle. It bristled with electronic sensors and spidery antennae. It might have been a NASA-surplus moon-rover.

"This is the perfect chariot for you," he said with toothy pride. "It is completely gasproof. It is German-made."

"Is that supposed to impress me?" Remo asked.

"Possibly. For you must understand that the Iraiti nerve gases are also made by Germans."

"The Black Forest must be hopping these days," Remo said.

"Not as much as Kuran is today. But we shall soon change that," Prince General Bazzaz promised, winking at his proud uncle, hovering nearby.

"Now you're talking," Remo said.

"Yes. Of course I am talking." The prince general looked puzzled.

"Skip it," Remo said wearily. "American slang."

The prince general and the sheik exchanged glances. They returned to muttering in Arabic. Remo wondered what they were saying, but decided it wasn't important enough to worry about.

"Is he CIA?" Prince General Bazzaz wondered, eyeing Remo. "I have heard they are not normal."

"No. You must forgive him. He is in mourning."

"He is a very lusty mourner," Prince General Bazzaz commented, noting the odd hang of the American's robe below the waist.

"I do not understand that either," the sheik admitted. "He has been that way for some four hours."

Bazzaz's eyes widened. "Truly? Perhaps he has Arab blood."

"Only Allah knows. Now, quickly, do as he bids. I do not relish being on the front lines."

The radiant smile returned to the prince general's well-tanned visage as he returned to Remo's side.

"All has been arranged. I will have my personal driver conduct you. Where do you wish to go? Exactly?"

"Abominadad," Remo said casually.

"Abominadad? You go to kill Maddas?"

"I wish."

"You wish what?"

Remo sighed. "Never mind. Let's get this caravan on the road."

"Truly." The prince general lifted his voice in Arabic. "Isma!"

A corpsman approached, looking more like a hotel doorman than a soldier. He listened to the prince general's rapid instructions with bright black eyes.

The prince general turned to Remo.

"It has been settled. You will be driven to the town of Fahad. We have resistance contacts there. You will find them on Afreet Street. Ask for Omar. He will get you into Irait."

"Great. Let's go."

The driver opened the side door of the APC for Remo.

He was surprised to find that the front seat was covered in white mink. The dashboard looked like Spanish leather.

"Let me guess," Remo asked the prince general. "This is your personal chariot?"

"Yes. How did you guess?"

"It's wearing the same perfume you are," Remo said, climbing in.

"It is Old Spice. I bathe in it daily."

The sheik drew up to the open door. He took Remo's hand in both of his. Before Remo could stop him, the old sheik kissed him twice. Once on each cheek. Remo let this pass.

"Salaam aleikim, Master of Sinanju," he said.

"Yeah, shalom to you too," Remo said.

Then a warbling siren jumped to life. It came from the prince general's tent. Every light on the APC's high-tech dashboard blinked and blazed like a Christmas tree.

"What the hell is going on?" Remo shouted.

"La!" Prince General Bazzaz shouted in a horrified voice. The sheik paled so fast his beard seemed to darken.

All over the camp, Arab soldiers jumped into rubberized chemical-warfare garb. Others, more brave, leapt for the trucks. Some manned the great fans. Others climbed into the cabs, where they shut themselves in, hitting dashboard buttons that engaged the great northward-pointing fans.

They roared into life, kicking up billows of obscuring sand and confirming for Remo what he had only begun to suspect.

It was a gas attack. And Remo was caught in the middle of it.

Chapter 29

In the darkness, there was nothing. No sound. No taste. No light. No heat. Cold was a mere recollection, not a palpable sensation. Only the memory of coldness and wetness and a bitter, bitter metallic taste.

Yet it was cold in the darkness. There was wetness. Water. It, too, was cold. But it did not feel cold because there was no feeling.

Somewhere in the darkness a spirit spark flickered. Awareness returned. Was this the Void? The question was unspoken. The answer nonexistent. Awareness faded. This was not the correct time. Perhaps the next time, he would try. Again. If there was a next time. If an eternity had not already crawled by since the last period of awareness.

As consciousness dimmed, a voice, female and discordantly musical, like a bell of basest metal, cut through the soundlessness of the abyss.

You cannot save him now. He is lost to you. He is mine. You are dead. Finish your dying, stubborn one.

The voice descended into low, diabolical laughter that followed his sinking mind into the blackest of pits that should have felt cold, but didn't.

Yet it was.

Chapter 30

Remo shut the APC door against the blowing sand. The dashboard was going crazy-gas-warning instruments, he decided. Either that or Old Spice had leaked into the electronics.

All around him, Arab soldiers flew into action. He was surprised at their discipline. Soon, every fan was roaring. The noise was like a million airplanes preparing for takeoff.

Prince General Bazzaz raced for a nearby helicopter. Its rotor roar blended with the rest. In a swirl of sand it took off, the sheik on board. Instead of retreating, however, the helicopter flew toward the north. Both members of the royal family were wearing gas masks. Remo was surprised at their apparent bravery.

Everyone had gotten into a gas suit by this time, including Remo's driver. Remo searched the cockpit for a mask of his own. He found one clipped under the dashboard. He pulled it over his head. It was a filter mask, with no attached oxygen tank. When he inhaled, the air smelled of charcoal, but it was breathable.

For several minutes the Arabs tended their fans, manually rotating them so their airstreams overlapped.

"Modern warfare," Remo grumbled. "Maybe next year they'll have automatic turning gears. Like K-Mart."

The helicopter quickly returned, blowing up more sand and adding to the confusion. Remo decided to wait for the sand to settle down before driving off. If anything, it got worse. Oddly, the sand seemed to be blowing back from the front lines, despite the fans' furious output. The blades were completely enveloped in dusty clouds.

Through the triple-paned windshield Remo could hear panicky exclamations in Arabic, none of which he understood.

Prince General Bazzaz fought his way through the gathering grit. He pounded on the door.

Remo opened it. "What's wrong?" he shouted over the din.

"We must retreat." His voice was muffled by his mask.

"Why? The fans are doing fine."

"The Iraiti are advancing. It is war."

"With tanks?"

"No, they have outsmarted us. They have fans too. And theirs are bigger than ours."

"You're joking," Remo exclaimed.

"I am not. This vehicle is needed for the retreat. I am sorry. You are on your own."

"Thanks a bunch," Remo said dryly.

"You are welcome a bunch. Now, please, step out."

"Not a chance," Remo snarled, gunning the engine.

The prince general jumped back. He wasn't accustomed to disobedience. While he was getting used to it, Remo slammed the door.

Turning, the prince general gave out a cry. The trucks started up. They advanced. That is, they went south, driving toward Remo, their fans blowing to beat the band, but doing nothing more to dispel the sandstorm.

Carrying Bazzaz, the helicopter lifted off in the swirl, turning its tail and flying low to the ground. And the truck line roared past Remo.

The dashboard gas sensors raised their screeching to a new level. Remo reached up under the leather and found a nest of wiring. He pulled them loose. The screeching stopped, although a few angry lights still winked.

"That's better," Remo muttered, sliding behind the wheel. He started the APC lumbering forward.

"Abominadad, here I come," he said.

Remo sent the APC bouncing over the dunes and wadis. Visibility soon dropped to zero. The color of the sandstorm slowly changed. It went from dun to a mustard yellow, until it resembled airborne diarrhea.

Holding the wheel steady, Remo relied on his natural sense of direction. He knew, somehow, that he was driving true north, and that was all that concerned him.

He didn't see the oncoming truck until its sand-colored grille emerged from the swirl like a shark with bad teeth.

It was a light truck, Remo realized. It was barreling straight at him, a goggle-eyed driver behind the wheel and canisters spewing the diarrhea-yellow gas mounted atop the cab.

"Screw him," Remo said, holding his course.

The heavy APC slammed into the truck without stopping. The grille caved in, its front tires lifting high. It tried to climb the APC roof, but its rear wheels lost all traction.

It bounced away, upsetting its twenty-foot rear-mounted fan. The cage crumpled when it struck sand. The blades chewed themselves to pieces against the mangled framework.

Remo wrestled the wheel around to get a better look at the truck. It lay on its side, wheels spinning. The fan lay several feet away. From the overturned cab, hissing yellowish billows of vapor spewed angrily. Remo glimpsed a battery of spilled gas cylinders, now no longer bolted to the dented cab roof.

The cab had been split open and a driver sprawled in the sand, holding his throat and gulping like a beached flounder.

His gas mask lay at his elbow, but he was too busy dying to look for it.

"Remind me not to crank down the windows anytime soon," Remo muttered, grateful for the sealed gas-proof vehicle.

In the distance, a line of similar trucks barreled south, as if impelled by their great fans. But the fans were pointed in the direction they traveled, pushing churning billows of gas ahead. Wind resistance pushed it back. The gas went everywhere except where it was supposed to.

"What the hell," Remo said to himself. "Juniper can cool his heels in Mad Ass's dungeon a little longer."

He sent the APC rolling after them.

Remo drew up alongside one, and pulling the wheel to the right, inexorably crowded the truck into the next one in line.

The drivers' peripheral vision was impaired by their gas mask goggles, so the first time they realized they were in trouble was when their spinning wheels rubbed one another.

At the speed they were traveling, that meant instant disaster.

Remo watched the first two trucks collide and spin away, tumbling, throwing off whirling fan blades and rags of gas.

They landed wrapped together in an impossible contortion of metal.

From that point on, it was just a matter of sideswiping each underweight truck with the armored APC until it tipped over or lost control.

After the last truck ate sand, Remo wrestled the APC north once more and played with the steering until his body told him he was attuned to magnetic north. The approximate direction of Abominadad.

He settled down for the ride, one thought uppermost in his mind.

How had Chiun done it all those years? The damn kimono was hotter than hell.

Chapter 31

Major Nasur Hamdoon was tired of shooting Kuranis.

He had been glad to shoot Kuranis during the early heady days of the reclamation of Kuran. Especially when the ungrateful Kuranis resisted being returned to the Iraiti motherland with their puny small arms, stones, and Molotov cocktails. Who did they think they were-Palestinians?

Did they not understand that all Arabs were brothers, and destined to be united? It was very strange. Nasur had expected to be welcomed as a liberator.

So when the liberated Arabs of Kuran turned on him with their pitiful weapons, Nasur indignantly shot them dead in the streets. The surviving Kuranis went underground. They planted bombs. They sniped from rooftops.

And the Iraiti troops under Major Hamdoon's command simply rounded up civilians at random and had them executed by various methods. Sometimes they were simply bled in the streets, their blood collected in glass beakers to be stored as plasma in the unlikely eventuality the Americans summoned up enough courage to attack.

This had been the good old days, Major Hamdoon thought unhappily as evening came to the Kurani desert. There had been many Kuranis to shoot and many excuses to do it.

Not now. Now he lived in his lone T-72 tank-practically the only safe haven in the entire country. In fact, it was virtually the only habitation in Maddas Province, as occupied Kuran was now called.

Perched high in the turret, Major Hamdoon trained his field glasses down the lonely trait-Kuran Friendship Road. It stopped dead only twenty kilometers south of here-the Hamidi Arabs having impolitely declined to pay for extension in the good old days when Irait battled Irug in another war of President Hinsein's creation. But for their stinginess, Major Hamdoon thought morosely, they would have been liberated as well. Major Hamdoon looked forward to their ultimate liberation. As he was based in the inhospitable marshy southern region of Kuran-now Irait's thirteenth province-he had had no opportunity to share in the redistribution of wealth imposed on fat, too-rich Kuran.

For there was nothing worth stealing in southern Kuran.

So Major Hamdoon bided his time and hoped the Americans would finally attack. That would provide the excuse to assimilate the corrupt and lazy Hamidi Arabs. And he would have plenty of U.S. Marines to shoot. Major Hamdoon had grown sick at heart from shooting fellow Arabs-even ones who had the indecency to make themselves prosperous while other Arabs went without.

A throaty engine roar pricked up his ears. It came from the south. He raised his field glasses. An unfamiliar squarish vehicle was coming up the Friendship Road-which was very interesting, since, technically, it went nowhere.

Major Hamdoon squinted through the field glasses, cursing the infernal dark. When the Americans made their inglorious but inevitable tactical mistake, he expected to plunder their night-vision goggles from their dead bodies. He had heard that they cost four thousand dollars each. That was five figures in Iraid dinars.

Moonlight caught and silvered a fast-traveling vehicle coming up the road. Major Hamdoon's heart quickened with anticipation. The vehicle was traveling without lights. It must be the Americans!

Reaching down into the hatch, he touched the turret-turning lever, sending the smoothbore cannon grinding toward the road. His tank lay athwart the road. The vehicle, whatever it was, could not pass.

His hand leapt to the cannon trigger. But on reflection, he held his fire. A 125-millimeter shell would no doubt ruin his expensive night goggles. He would intimidate the Americans into surrendering, instead. But he would not bleed them. Their blood was not good enough to sustain Arab lives.

The vehicle was low and wide and armored, Major Hamdoon saw when he turned on the gimbal-mounted spotlight.

"Halt!" he cried in thick, accented English.

To his pleased surprise, the vehicle obediently coasted to a stop. A door clicked open and a man stepped out. He was tall and lean, walking with an easy confident grace. He wore a long black garment like a Hamidi thobe or a Kurani dishdash.

He was no American, Major Hamdoon thought disappointedly. And he wore no night-seeing goggles.

The man drew near.

"What do you do here, effendi?" Major Hamdoon asked in Arabic.

To his surprise, the man answered in English.

"Help me out, pal. I'm looking for the town of Fahad. Know it?"

"Who are you?" Major Hamdoon asked slowly, puzzled because the man did not act like an aggressor.

"Just a nameless traveler trying to get to Fahad."

"I would know your name."

"Remo. Now, point me to Fahad, and while you're at it, get that tank out of my way." The man rotated his hands absently.

"You sound like an American," Hamdoon suggested in an unsteady voice.

"And you sound like an Arab with half a brain."

"Is that an insult?"

"Is Maddas Hinsein full of shit?"

"I asked my question first."

The American's thin mouth quirked into a smile. He did not flinch from the thousand-candlepower searchlight. His eyes simply squeezed down to nearly Oriental slits. They gleamed blackly, menacingly. Unafraid.

Major Hamdoon tapped the cannon control, dropping the smoothbore until it was pointing directly at the approaching figure's black chest.

"Are you prepared to die, unbeliever?"

"Not till you point me to Fahad."

"I will never do that."

Suddenly the American executed a kind of circus flip. He tumbled into the air, to land, perfectly balanced, on the cannon's long bore.

This was an eventuality that Major Hamdoon had not been prepared for at the Iraiti Military Academy. If he fired, he would miss completely.

So Major Hamdoon did the next best thing. He threw the turret-turning lever back and forth wildly.

The turret jerked right, then left, then right again.

The American walked up the barrel to the turret with breezy assurance. He didn't bother lifting his arms to balance.

Major Hamdoon hastily tilted the searchlight into his eyes.

The man simply ducked under the cone of light. Casually he plucked Hamdoon from his perch. He did this with one hand, without even disturbing his balance. This impressed Major Hamdoon, who had understood that Americans were inept in all things--except making movies.

"Hi!" he said. "Want me to repeat my question?"

"It will do you no good," Major Hamdoon said stiffly. "I am a Moslem. We do not fear death."

The man's hand jumped out. Two fingers struck the searchlight glass. It was very thick. Still, it shattered into fine glassy gravel. Sparks flew. Something sputtered and burned.

"Please do repeat," Major Hamdoon said in his most polite English.

"Point me the way to Fahad."

The major pointed north up the Friendship Road. "It is back that way."

"How far?"

"Less than seventy kilometers."

To Hamdoon's horror, the American frowned. "How many miles is that?" he asked.

"As many as you want," the major said, not understanding the question.

"I love a cooperative Iraiti," the American said pleasantly. "Now, get this pile of junk out of my way."

"Gladly. In return for a favor of equal value."

A slow smile crept into the American's face. In the failing light, his eyes floated like evilly glowing stars in the skulllike hollows of his eyes.

"Sure," he said laconically. "Why not?"

"I will trade you this information in return for your best pair of night-seeing goggles," Major Hamdoon said boldly.

"Why do you want them?"

"So I can see the Americans when they come."

"I got news for you, pal. They're here."

The Iraiti looked momentarily confused. "But there is but one of you."

"One's all that's needed. Now, move that tank."

"I refuse until you give me something for my eyes that will turn night into day."

"You mean day into night," the American said.

"Yes, I mean that," Major Hamdoon said, wondering how he had gotten the American words for "day" and "night" confused for so long.

Then the American lifted two fingers of one hand and drove them into the major's eyes so fast there was no pain. Only sudden blackness.

And as the major fell into the sand, wondering what had happened, the American's cheerful voice rang through the night that would last to the end of Nasur Hamdoon's days, saying, "Don't sweat it. I'll move the tank myself. You just enjoy the view."

The town of Fahad was virtually a ghost town when Remo rolled into it hours later. Dawn had come by this time. He had encountered minimal resistance along the road. Just the occasional two-man patrol in Land Rovers.

After ascertaining from the first two of these patrols that he was indeed on the correct road to Fahad-and by the way, he could consider himself a prisoner of the Iraiti Army-Remo didn't bother to leave the APC to break any Iraiti necks. He just ran them down where they stood.

The more he did this, the more impressed he was by German engineering. The APC barely gave a bump as it passed over the bodies. And either they were slow to scream or the soundproofing was excellent too.

As he lumbered through the town, Remo made a mental note to look into a German model if he ever had personal need of an armored personnel carrier.

Fahad had been virtually picked clean, he saw with disgust. Some buildings still stood. None had glass in them. Only a few windows had actually been broken by violence. They had simply been removed, sashes and all.

Remo looked for street signs. There were none.

"Damn. They even took the frigging street signs. How the hell do I find Afreet Street?"

A woman in an ebony abayuh ran for cover when he lumbered around a corner. A child threw a rock that bounced harmlessly off his sandwich-glass windshield.

He saw no uniformed troops. But then, he saw hardly anything of human life of any persuasion.

In the center of town was a disturbed patch of dirt that had once been some kind of park. Remo could see the fresh stumps of date trees, evidently carried away to Iraiti lumberyards. The dirt was freshly turned.

"Don't tell me they took the grass too?" Remo wondered aloud.

In the middle of the park, a derrick reared up. Remo was surprised that it too had not been driven back to Irait. But as he made a circle of the park, he saw why.

A man in a white Arab costume hung from the derrick cable by the neck. It obviously served as the local gallows.

Remo braked and got out.

Cupping his hands to his mouth, he called out in English, "Anyone home? I'm an American. Friend or foe, come get me."

A moment passed. A bird squawked somewhere. It sounded hungry.

Then out of the hovels of Fahad, men, women, and children poured. The men were old, the women frantic, and the children, like children everywhere, excited by the commotion.

"Americans!" they shouted. "The Americans have come. It is the Americans."

"There's just one of me," Remo told the approaching stampede. This cooled them off faster than a water hose.

"There is only you?" an old woman asked, creeping from a doorway.

"Sorry. Look, I need to find Omar. Sheik Fareem sent me."

The woman pushed through the crowd. "Omar the freedom fighter?"

"Sounds about right."

"He is behind you, American who has come too late."

Remo turned. The only person behind him hung from a derrick, where a falcon alighted to begin pecking at his eyes. After a few pecks, the bird flew away. He was obviously not the early bird. That bird had taken Omar's eyes long days ago.

Remo addressed the crowd.

"How easy is it to get to Abominadad from here?"

A toothless old man said, "Can you read Arabic?"

"No."

"Then you cannot get to Abominadad from this Allah-forsaken place. What few street signs survive are in Arabic, and the way is long and winding and full of Iraiti dogs." He spat in the dirt.

"I gotta get to Abominadad," Remo said.

"If a man is desperate enough, anything is possible."

"Is that a hint of encouragement?"

"If one is willing to surrender himself to the Iraiti invader," Remo was told, "one might get to Abominadad from here. But only if one is valuable to the Iraitis. Otherwise they will carve your belly with their bayonets."

"Why would they do that?"

"Because they are bored, and they already know the color of Kurani entrails."

"Gotcha. Where can I find the nearest detachment of Iraitis? I need guys who speak English."

"There are Iraitis in the next town. Hamas. It was to Hamas that our young women fled, fearing rape. The Iraitis tortured some of the old women to learn where they went. Now they are dead and the flower of our womanhood are being defiled by these so-called Arab brothers."

"Tell you what, point me to Hamas and I'll see if I can't break a few Iraiti skulls for you."

"Done. But tell us, American, when will the Marines land?"

"They would have landed ten years ago if you'd let them. But now, I don't know. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never. But if I can get to Abominadad, maybe the Marines won't be needed."

Hearing that, the old woman turned to the others. "By the command of Allah, help this righteous American to find his way to Hamas."

The Iraiti checkpoint leading to Hamas consisted of a beige T-72 tank with a thrown track on one side of the road and a jeep up on blocks on the other. A reclining corporal snored on the tank's fender and another sat behind the jeep's tripod-mounted machine gun, smoking a Turkish cigarette that Remo could smell from three miles away. He was running with the air vents open.

Remo pulled up. The two Iraiti soldiers blinked in stupefied surprise as Remo emerged from the APC, clapping his hands to get their attention.

"This Hamas?" he asked. "Where all the women went?"

Their eyes noticed the bulge below Remo's waist, and the two Iraitis jumped to an instant conclusion.

"You are an American deserter?" one asked. The corporal on the tank. He looked sleepy.

"Maybe."

"You come to trade that fine vehicle for Arab women?"

"That's it." Remo said. "You got it exactly. Take me to the Arab women and it's yours. The pink slip's in the glove compartment."

The Iraiti in the jeep threw the charging lever on his .35-caliber. He sneered.

"You are too late."

"I am?"

"The women wore out three weeks ago. But if you are so eager to have sex with Arabs, we have a few men who can accommodate you."

Remo frowned. "How about we just skip that part and I just surrender?"

"You are not in control here."

"I have all of the secrets of the American offensive plans in my head. Just take me to someone in charge and I'll spill my guts to him."

"You will spill your guts to me or I will spill your guts into the sand."

"I'll pass," Remo said, moving on the jeep low and fast.

The startled gunner jumped into action. The perforated barrel burped, spitting fire in all directions.

Remo felt the shock waves of passing bullets fly over the back of his head. None struck him.

He came up under the startled gunner's nose and took hold of the wooden barrel-changing handle, gave it a twist, and the barrel fell into the front seat, where it set the upholstery smoldering.

"Did someone say something about guts?" Remo asked.

"I am not afraid of you," the gunner spat. "I am a Moslem. Moslems welcome death."

Remo gave the man the flat of his hand and something to thank Allah for at the same time.

"I hope you're happy now," he said after the gunner collapsed, his nose inverted and his brain full of worm tracks made by driven bone chips.

Remo went over to the tank. The tank soldier's legs were disappearing down the turret. Remo jumped up and caught them.

"I suppose you're a Moslem too," he called down.

A hollow voice echoed up from the tank's innards.

"Yes, but I am a death-fearing Moslem."

"Then you're not going to like what I'll do to you if I can't find someone in authority to surrender to."

"See Colonel Abdulla. He will accept your surrender. Gladly."

"Colonel Abdulla speak English?" Remo asked.

"As good as me."

"How many Arab women you wear out?"

"Too many to count. I am sorry I have left none for you, lusty one."

"Don't give it another thought," Remo said casually, pulling the soldier's legs in opposite directions. The splintering of his pelvic bone was louder than the soldier's anguished screams. It lasted longer too.

Colonel Jassim Abdulla was reluctant to accept Remo's unconditional surrender. He was in the middle of fornicating with a goat and was at a critical stage. To withdraw, or not to withdraw. It was a question that haunted Iraitis in peace as well as in war.

Remo, who had never seen anyone hump a goat before, had a question.

"Why are you doing that?"

"Because there are no more living Kurani men, and if I do this to my men, it would be bad for morale." The colonel's face was reddening with exertion.

By that, Remo took it to mean that Colonel Abdulla was one of the sexually misdirected Iraitis the late gunner had offered him.

The goat bleated in fear. Feeling sorry for it, Remo grasped one quivering horn and tugged. The goat slipped from the colonel's tight embrace with a slurpy pop! of a sound, leaving the colonel to pump his seed over the barren Kuran sand.

His eyes were closed, so he didn't notice that he was humping dead air.

When he was done, Colonel Abdulla came out of his crouch and noticed Remo's problem. His thick Maddas Hinsein mustache lifted with his grin.

"Why did you not mention your problem?" he said, pulling up his pants. "The goat could have waited. Goats make excellent how do you say it?-sloppy seconds."

"Pass," Remo said. "You don't seem surprised to find yourself face-to-face with an American," he added.

"The Americans are overdue. I know this. Why do you think I am busy making time with a goat? After the Marines hit the beach, there will be no more goats for Colonel Abdulla, alas."

"Spoken like an Iraiti with goatshit on his pecker. How about surrending-"

"Where are the rest of your Americans?" the colonel asked.

"Sorry to disappoint you, but there's only me."

The colonel's face fell. "You must be mad. I cannot surrender myself to one lone American. My Arab pride would suffer."

"You got it backward, Achmed. I've come to surrender to you."

"Why?"

"Don't ask me that question and I promise not to tell Maddas Hinsein when I see him in Abominadad that you like to bang goats."

The colonel gave this proposition serious thought.

"Deal," he said. He offered a hand that smelled of goat. "Shake?"

"No. How soon can you get me to Abominadad?"

His dark eyes going wistfully to Remo's bulge, the colonel sighed. "Long after your magnificent instrument has tired."

"Don't bet the war on it," Remo said glumly.

Chapter 32

Maddas Hinsein didn't hear the ringing telephone through the satisfyingly meaty smacking sounds. Then they stopped.

"Why do you deny me, my sweet?" he asked, lifting his face off the fluffy pillow, unhappiness writ large in his deep soulful eyes. They were in a torture chamber deep in the Palace of Sorrows, lying on a medieval iron bed. The spikes had been replaced by a mattress.

Poised above his naked beet-red behind, four hot-pink palms hovered. One disappeared from view. It returned, clutching a telephone receiver. The hand-its nails as yellow as banana peel-brought the mouthpiece to Maddas' unhappy lips.

"Attend to business first, and I will finish you after."

"Yes, O all-adept one," the Scourge of the Arabs said meekly.

Maddas' voice lost its submissive coloring. "Have I not told you I was not to be disturbed?" he barked into the phone.

"A thousand pardons, O Precious Leader," his defense minister replied in a shaky voice. "Our offensive has collapsed."

Maddas blinked. Of course. The gas attack. He had been having such a good time, he had forgotten he ordered it. In truth, he half-expected to die at any moment from U.S. blockbuster bombs, so he had left the operational details to his generals.

"What happened?" he wanted to know.

"The trucks fell over. Should we send more trucks?"

"No. Obviously they have larger fans than even our spies in Hamidi Arabia reported. Have all our spies recalled and executed."

"But that will give us no spies in enemy territory."

"No spies are preferable to wrong spies. Do this, or I will have your children hanged in front of your eyes."

"But I have no children. You are perhaps thinking of the previous defense minister's children, whom you had chopped up and served to his wife. Cold."

"Then I will have the previous defense minister's wife beheaded before your eyes," Maddas Hinsein bellowed. "Do this!"

"At once," the defense minister said crisply. He hesitated. "There . . . there is further intelligence, Precious Leader."

"Speak."

"Our brave forces have captured an American spy. He has promised to reveal all of America's attack plans."

"I have heard this before . . ." Maddas growled. "Man or woman?"

"Man. Definitely. He is one horny infidel, too."

"Is this man tall with dark hair and eyes, with wrists mightier than any Arab's?"

Thinking it was a trick question, the defense minister hesitated.

"Answer!" Maddas roared, unhappy that the delicious stinging sensation was deserting his overstimulated backside.

"Yes, Precious Leader. But how did you know?"

Maddas pushed the receiver aside with his chin. "You spoke truly. He has come."

"Never doubt me," Kimberly Baynes said sweetly. "All you desire will come to pass if you never doubt me."

He turned his mouth to the receiver again. "Have him brought to me."

"At once, Precious Leader."

Kimberly Baynes replaced the receiver on its cradle. She adjusted the black cords that kept Maddas Hinsein, absolute master of Irait and Kuran, spread-eagled and helpless on the four-poster bed. He lay on his stomach.

Maddas buried his face in the big pillow. "You may finish me," he said with a muffled sigh.

"The man who comes is an American agent."

"I know. Please, continue your patriotic duty."

"He is the one who tied the yellow scarves around the necks of your family and all the others now cooling their flesh in the Maddas Morgue."

"He will pay for this with his life," Maddas vowed. "No doubt he pretended to be a woman the first time because he is a cross-dresser. There is nothing lower. Except a Jew."

"No. There is a better fate in store for him."

Maddas lifted his head. "The best fate for a would-be assassin is to die as an example to other assassins who dream of taking my place."

"He is the finest assassin in the world. He could serve you."

"I have all the assassins I require. Now, please, my redlipped pomegranate. Continue."

"This one could strike at any enemy you name, fearless, without compunction, without any chance of failure."

Kimberly Baynes's words made Maddas Hinsein forget his stinging-backside.

"How can I control such a person?" he asked, interested.

"You need not. I will do that for you. For he is fated to be my soul slave forever."

"Just as long as you preserve your artful hands for the corporeal buttocks of Maddas Hinsein and none other."

"Of course."

A firm hand pushed his face into the scented pillow and the hands began their delicious rippling tattoo.

Maddas sighed contentedly. This was the good life. How could a man who felt this good not end up lording it over all Arabia?

Remo Williams was feeling good.

After he had convinced Colonel Abdulla to accept his surrender, there had been no delays. A helicopter had ferried him to a desert airstrip where a Sukhoi-7 airplane awaited him, its engines kicking up clouds of stinging sand.

Remo was escorted to a seat just behind the pilot's compartment and as an honored deserter was asked if there was anything he would like.

"Rice."

He said it more as a wish than expectation. But to his astonishment, a tin tray of cold rice was brought before him. He ate it greedily, using his hands.

He was feeling good. The hard part was over. Soon he would be in Abominadad. He had it pretty well worked out in his mind what he would do once he was there. They would take him to Maddas. He wouldn't take no for an answer. He would tell Maddas that he would give up his secrets only in the presence of Reverend Juniper Jackman and Don Cooder-so they would be witnesses that he was betraying his country freely and without torture.

Once they were all in the same room, Remo would take total control of the situation. Maddas would be his lever. They would all be flown to safety or Maddas would get it.

Maybe, Remo thought, handing his tray back to the uniformed orderly, Maddas would get it anyway. After what he had seen in Kuran, Maddas Hinsein deserved to be flayed alive and dunked in carbolic acid for a thousand years. Smith might not like it, but accidents did happen. Besides, he reminded himself, after this outing, he might not have to deal with Smith ever again. After he caught up with Kimberly Baynes in Hamidi Arabia, that is. He shoved that problem from his mind.

The plane came in low over Abominadad. From the air it looked like any one of a number of third-world cities. Most of it consisted of the cheap, poured-concrete high-rises Russia had put up all over the third world. The green domes of mosques and minaret spires added an Eastern seasoning. Here and there gas fires blazed over idling refineries. Irait controlled a quarter of the oil produced in the world, but UN sanctions had deprived them of chemicals needed to refine the crude.

Thus, Remo thought with pleasure, U.S. cars ran freely while in Irait no traffic flowed at all.

Remo's gaze was arrested by the crossed scimitars of Arab Renaissance Square, held aloft by Brobdingnagian replicas of Maddas Hinsein's thick forearms. He recalled a recent television report that claimed the hands were identical to Maddas' own-right down to the fingerprint whorls.

Noticing Remo's interest, an orderly boasted, "Those scimitars were forged by a famous German swordmaker and cost many millions."

"The Germans were certainly getting their share of Maddas' party," Remo muttered.

There was a military honor guard waiting to escort Remo to an armored car. Every one of them looked like a clone of Maddas Hinsein. There were fat Maddas Hinseins, skinny Maddas Hinseins, as well as the tall and short varieties.

Altogether, Remo decided, the quicker he got the job done and got himself out of Abominadad, the better. A uniformed official stepped forward. He looked like Maddas Hinsein's third cousin. "Welcome to Irait," he said stiffly. "I am the defense minister, General Razzik Azziz." He did not offer Remo his hand.

"Glad you could take me out of tourist season," Remo said dryly.

The man's eyes pinched tighter. He smiled officiously. But deep in his eyes Remo could read contempt for his offer to betray his own country.

Fine, Remo thought. Let him think that. At least until I pull this off.

The car whisked them from Maddas International Airport and under the same upraised scimitars he had seen from the air.

"I wouldn't want to be under those babies if there's an earthquake," Remo remarked as they passed under the shadow of the gleaming blades.

"They are as sharp as the finest blades in all the world," General Azziz said proudly. "They are the swords that will slice through world opposition, leaving all the universe disemboweled before Iraiti power."

"Catchy," Remo remarked. "You ought to have cards printed up saying that."

The defense minister went silent. Remo had expected to be pumped in advance of the meeting with whomever they were taking him to first.

"Where are we going?" Remo asked, remembering his plan. "I got a lot to say and I don't intend to waste it on flunkies."

"Our Precious Leader, Maddas Hinsein himself, has requested your presence in the Palace of Sorrows."

"Suits me," Remo said, frowning. This was easier than he had thought. He wasn't sure he liked that. Still, maybe it was the will of Allah or something.

The armored car slid down a ramp and into the bowels of the palace, a baroque stack of limestone and iron that seemed to hunker down as if expecting an imminent aerial attack.

In the basement, Remo allowed himself to be frisked. They had done this before he got on the plane, and again before he had gotten off. He hoped this would be the last time. No telling what these guys did with their hands. He had not been impressed by Arab hygiene.

This time, the soldiers discovered the yellow scarf of Kali he had tucked deep into one sleeve of his black silk kimono.

For some reason, this excited them. They began chattering in Arabic, waving the scarf under one another's noses.

"We must confiscate this," the defense minister said sternly. "For the protection of our Precious Leader."

"Fine by me," Remo said, eyeing the scarf. "But I'll want it back after the interview. It's a good-luck charm."

The look the Iraiti soldiers gave him told Remo that they expected there to be no "after the interview"-at least not for him.

Fine, Remo thought. Let them think that too.

They went up in an elevator, where black-bereted guards wielding AK-47's met them. Remo was surrounded and marched down a long corridor. At the end of it was a double-valved door of some dark, expensive wood.

Remo assumed this was the President's office. He figured this would all be over in an an hour or two. Three, tops.

Two guards stepped forward and threw open the doors.

Remo entered.

Two more guards stood at attention on either side of a wide bare desk, spines straight, chins up, their heads cocked back. Matched Iraiti flags framed the figure seated behind the desk.

Remo had to look closely to be sure, but the seated figure differed from the identically mustached guards in his bulllike physique. The other guys were too skinny. There was no doubt.

Remo was face-to-face with President Maddas Hinsein.

The self-styled Scimitar of the Arabs stood up, one hand going habitually to a pearl-handled revolver.

Remo suppressed a grin. A lot of good a six-shooter would do him when things got busy.

The doors closed behind him. Remo sensed the trailing guards deploying themselves in front of the door and at other strategic spots around the room. He waited until they were in position, noted each heartbeat for future reference, and stood with his hands hanging at his sides while the defense minister strode up to the President of Irait.

They whispered conspiratorially. Maddas Hinsein's face frowned like a chocolate bunny melting in the sun.

Defense Minister Azziz turned to Remo.

"You may speak to our beloved Maddas. I will interpret."

"Tell him I know everything about the U.S. attack plans," Remo said in a staccato voice. "I know the date and exact time the U.S. will strike. I know where they will cross the border and I know every air target on every Pentagon contingency plan."

Remo paused. The defense minister rattled off a few dozen words in Arabic. Maddas never took his intent eyes off Remo as he listened. He nodded once, shortly.

"I'm willing to give this up in return for two things," Remo added.

The words were translated.

"First," Remo went on, "I want safe haven in Irait. A nice home. A couple of women. No dogs. Good food. A car. A handsome salary. And a tax exemption. What I have to say is worth a lot to you people. I expect to be compensated."

Maddas absorbed the translation in silence. He brushed at his mustache thoughtfully. When it was over, he mumbled a curt statement.

"If you expect to reside in our country," the defense minister said, "our Precious Leader insists that you grow the proper mustache."

"I'm not through here," Remo broke in. "But the mustache is okay. What I have to say, I gotta say in front of Don Cooder and Reverend Juniper Jackman. Nobody else. They gotta take everything that happens here back to the U.S. with them."

The defense minister's eyes shot up. "Why do you demand this thing?"

"Simple," Remo said. "I didn't just up and decide to go over. I was with the CIA. Some bureaucrats in my government screwed me over. I want them to know what screwing me over costs. Maybe they'll be sacked when the shit hits the fan."

Maddas Hinsein's dark eyes flashed as he took in Remo's translated words. A faint grin tugged at his cruel mouth.

Remo smiled inwardly.

That's right, he thought. Swallow it whole, you dumb hairbag. When I'm done with you, they'll be calling you Dead Ass.

Remo let his smile come to the surface. "So what do you say? Do we have a deal or what?"

Muttering under his breath, Maddas Hinsein lifted both hands, palms upward. He sounded like a priest giving absolution, and not the brutal dictator that had brought the world to the brink of World War IIl.

The defense minister lifted his head from the huddle.

"Our Precious Leader agrees to all this. But he has one question to ask you."

Remo folded his arms. "Shoot."

"What is the significance of the yellow scarf you carried concealed on your person?"

That was the one question Remo hadn't anticipated. His brow furrowed.

"I got a wicked cold," he said at last, sniffing loudly. "It's sort of . . .an industrial-strength handkerchief. Yeah. that's it. A handkerchief."

And at that, Maddas Hinsein's belly shook with laughter. He threw his head back.

All around the room, the guards acquired quirked expressions. They did not know whether to join in or not. Maddas, hearing their silence, threw up his hands in encouragement.

The uproarious laughter traveled around the room.

Only Remo's lips were not touched by it. He didn't see what was so funny.

And then an inner door came open.

One guard was alert enough to catch the sudden movement. He went for his pistol.

But Maddas Hinsein beat him to the draw. A single shot split the guard's breastbone and splattered fragments of his heart muscle against the wall behind him.

That killed the laughter. To say nothing of the guard.

Remo was barely aware of this. For in his ears was a dull roaring. And in the doorway stood a woman in black, her familiar violet eyes radiant and mocking in the ragged eyeholes of her abayuh. Her two visible hands were clasped before her, fingernails yellow and vicious.

And from her seductive but unclean body emanated an odor that found his nostrils like invisible tentacles.

"Oh, no!" Remo coughed, feelings his legs go weak as water.

He slammed to his knees, fighting the scented tentacles of Kali with frantic hands. But it was too late.

"Prostrate yourself before me, O Master of Sinanju," Kimberly Baynes said triumphantly.

And Remo touched his forehead to the Persian rug, squeezing hot tears from his eyes.

It had been a trap. And he had fallen for it. Sinanju was finished.

"I'm sorry, Chiun," he sobbed. "I blew it. I meant to fulfill my promise. I really did. Now I'll never see Sinanju again."

Chapter 33

The President of the United States paced the War Room of the White House like a caged tiger.

He had been there ever since the first report of a nerve-gas attack on the Kuran-Hamidi Arabian neutral zone.

"We have to strike now," the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was saying. He was nervous. The Washington Post had run a page-one feature that said his career hung in the balance over the outcome of Operation Sand Blast. Since everyone from Capitol Hill to Foggy Bottom believed the Post, he knew it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy if it wasn't already true.

"I need more facts," the President bit out. "If this thing spills across borders, we have a real mess. The whole Middle East could go up. There's no telling how Israel will respond. No telling."

"We have the men, the might, and the machines," the chairman rattled off. "All we need is the word."

The secretary of defense piped up, as the President knew he would. The rivalry between the JCS and the DOD was legendary.

"I want to advise caution, Mr. President. The Iraiti forces are dug in deep, in secure defendable earthen berm positions."

"Exactly why we should bomb Abominadad," the chairman put in. "We don't even have to move our troops. A quick decapitation and it's all over. No more Mad Arab."

"Not with a million Iraiti under arms, poised to move south, Mr. President." the secretary countered. "I agree with the chairman of the JCS. We can take out Maddas and his command structure overnight. Destroy his forward tank units and dismember his logistical tail inside of a week. But I'm thinking past that. We're dug in with Syrian, Egyptian, Kurani, Hamidi, and other Arab forces. If we bomb, who's to say that it won't be every man for himself out in that desert? The Syrians would turn on us in a flat second if they saw this as the U.S. bombing Arabs."

"Nonsense. The Hamidis have been egging us on to launch a preemptive strike since this thing began. The exiled Emir of Kuran has given us carte blanche to conduct offensive operations on his own soil. Nerve gas, neutron bombs, anything."

"And everybody knows the Emir has written off his own country," the secretary shot back. "He's gone north, trying to buy up Canada. He doesn't care. And other Arabian forces are with us only because the Hamidis have paid for them in hard cash. They're virtual mercenaries. And stabbing allies in the back is practically an Arabian tradition. Look at their history."

The President cut in on the brewing argument.

"What are the casualties?" he asked testily. "I want to see casualty figures."

Both men got busy. They worked the phones. When they came back, their faces were surprised.

"No casualties on our side," the chairman reported.

"That's my understanding as well," the secretary added.

"After a nerve-gas attack?" the President asked.

"Reports from the field indicate that when the gas blew out of the neutral zone, the Hamidi first line of defense advanced."

"The Hamidis stopped the attack?"

"No, their advance was tactical. It was actually some sort of a reverse retreat."

"Reverse-"

"They cut and run," the secretary of defense said flatly. "Away from the gas. It was Sarin. Bad stuff. A nerve agent. Fatal in seconds."

"So what took out the Iraiti forces?" the President wanted to know.

"No one knows," the chairman admitted. "They just collapsed."

The President frowned. He was thinking about his one wild-card asset on the ground over there. The CURE card. He wondered if Smith's special person had had anything to do with this.

"Any further action?" he asked.

"No," the chairman said. "It's been four hours now. It appears they simply made a halfhearted probe of the Hamidi line and pulled back."

"I think they're cranking up the pressure over their damned ambassador," the secretary of defense offered.

The President shook his head. "And all we have to offer them is a corpse. It's as if they've guessed the truth and are retaliating."

"Maddas is just the type to react like that," the chairman said tightly. "I say we pound him flat."

The President frowned. "It makes no sense. He knew that this would be the start of war. Why did he make a half-assed move like this one? What could possibly be gained?"

"Maybe he had no choice," the secretary said.

"Say again?"

"Maddas knows he's outgunned. Maybe he was responding to pressure from his inner council. There have been some pretty strange reports coming out of Abominadad. Rumors of attacks on the Hinsein household. One has it that his entire family got it. They've always been conspiring against him. Maybe they made their move and he struck back. Maybe it was internal opposition. Whatever, he's a strongman. He's got to show his strength or he gets toppled. There's a lot of pressure on him."

"Possibly," the President thought. "What's CNN been saying?"

The secretary of defense went to a nearby TV and turned it on.

In sober silence they watched the procession of reports and rumors coming out of the Middle East, as presented by a sober anchorman whose jet hair resembled a licorice sculpture.

"In a statement issued by the newly renamed Iranian Foreign Ministry today-that's the Arab Iran, not the Persian one-the Iraitis have assured the relatives of Reverend Juniper Jackman that he is well and is enjoying his new status as a guest of the state. Abominadad promises this will continue, but hinted that the reverend's fate is linked to that of the still-missing Ambassador Turqi Abaatira."

"What are the media saying about the Jackman thing?" the President muttered.

"They're unanimous," the secretary of defense returned.

"They think you should nuke Abominadad for daring to kidnap a former presidential candidate."

"If I do that, Jackman buys the farm. So does Cooder."

"A lot of reporters are hot to move into Cooder's chair," the secretary said flatly.

The President grunted. The chairman started to speak, but a graphic came on the screen just to the left of the anchorman's coiffed head. It showed a dead-eyed man with high cheekbones.

"A new mystery tonight is the identity of the American defector Abominadad has claimed went over to their side today. Although his name has not been released, a statement from the Information Ministry claimed it was a major defection, with grave repercussions for the U.S. effort to isolate Iran."

"Which Iran do they mean?" the chairman demanded.

"The bad one," the secretary replied, thin-lipped.

"I thought they were both bad."

The President shushed them angrily. He was very pale as he watched the screen.

The image switched to the familiar Maddas Hinsein clone who read all his prepared statements and speeches over the air-because Maddas was too assassin-conscious to enter a TV studio, it was rumored.

The spokesman read his prepared text in droning Arabic. Crude English subtitles flicked on and off the screen under him.

"The defector," it read, "is known to be the premier assassin in the direct employ of the President of the United States himself. But no more. President Maddas Hinsein announced today that this assassin has now seen the criminality of the U.S. stance and has agreed to perform necessary services for Irait-I mean, Iran. From this day forward, our Precious Leader has proclaimed, no head of state who has aligned himself with the un-Arab forces arrayed against us can sleep safely in his bed. For the-"

The President shut off the TV with a savage stab of his finger. His face was sheet-white.

"Maddas must be really desperate," the chairman said. "Imagine trying to convince the world that we have hired assassins on the White House payroll."

No one spoke.

"We don't, do we?" the chairman said.

Behind the President's back the secretary shook his head no. But the President was unaware of this.

"We remain on stand-down," he said hoarsely.

"Until when?" the disappointed chairman demanded.

"Until I say otherwise," he was informed.

The President left the room.

The secretary and the chairman stared at each other.

"That last report really got to him, didn't it?" the chairman undertoned.

"You know how that crazy Arab gets his goat. The guy's a barbarian."

"Well, if I had a crack at him, he'd be like Attila the Hun."

The secretary of defense looked at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a single eyebrow raised questioningly.

"History," the chairman said.

The President went to the Lincoln Bedroom and lifted the CURE line with trembling fingers.

Harold Smith picked up on the first ring.

"Smith, I have just seen your special person on television."

"You have?" For once, the usually unflappable Smith sounded perturbed. That did nothing to reassure the President.

"I did. On a news clip out of Abominadad. According to the report, he has gone over to their side."

"Ridiculous," Smith said instantly.

"Maddas is saying that every pro-Kuran world leader had better watch out. He's Irait's assassin now."

"Sir, I cannot believe-"

"Tell me this, Smith. If he has gone over to the enemy, am I safe?"

"Mr. President," Harold Smith said truthfully, "if Remo has become a tool of Maddas Hinsein, none of us are safe. He could remove you from office while you sleep and no one could stop him."

"I see. What do you recommend?"

"Go to an unknown location. Remain there. Do not tell me where it is. I have to assume I am at risk as well. And I could be made to talk if Remo was bent on extracting information from me."

"Good thinking. What else?"

"If I can verify this report, you have no choice but to order the organization shut down. If Remo has gone over, all knowledge of CURE and our working relationship is at Maddas Hinsein's disposal. He could make it public. All evidence must be eradicated."

"Shut you down, Smith?" the President said, aghast. "You're my only hope of surviving this thing. You know this man. How he works. What his weak points are. How to reason with him."

"Let me look into this, Mr. President. Please stand by."

The line disconnected abruptly.

The next ten minutes were among the longest of the President's life. No post-midnight waiting for election returns had ever dragged by with such heart-stopping slowness. Presently the red telephone rang.

"Yes," the President croaked.

Smith's voice was grave, with the suggestion of a quaver in it. "Mr. President, I have seen a replay of the CNN report with my own eyes. It is my inescapable conclusion that this is no hoax or ploy. Remo has defected. I can only suspect the reasons. But for the sake of your own political survival, CURE must cease."

"My political survival be damned!" the President retorted. "It's my skin I have to worry about first. And the nation's survival. I want you ready to advise me. There must be some countermeasure to this guy."

"The only countermeasure I am aware of, Mr. President," Harold W. Smith said slowly, "died several weeks ago. I see no good options."

"Stay by the phone, Smith," the President ordered tightly. "I will be in touch."

Chapter 34

"So," President Maddas Hinsein said, after the video crew withdrew from his office, "this is the assassin who has committed murder all over my fine nation."

"He does not understand Arabic," Kimberly Baynes said.

Both of them were looking at Remo Williams.

Remo was looking at Kimberly Baynes with a mixture of desire and fear in his deep eyes.

Kimberly wore the abayuh, her face was uncovered, her blond hair cascaded over her shoulders. As she hovered near him, her hidden arms fluttered and disturbed the long lines of the abayuh with spidery grace. She had kept them hidden while the crew filmed Remo on display, and only removed her veil after they had gone.

"His eyes," Maddas told Kimberly. "I do not like the way he looks at you."

"He desires me with his body, but despises me with his mind," Kimberly said laughingly.

"He is too dangerous. He must die." Maddas reached for his revolver.

"No," Kimberly said quickly, one yellow-nailed hand intercepting Maddas' gun hand. "We have a use for him."

"What value can one man possibly have? Soon the Americans will know their finest assassin is under my control. That is all that is neccesary."

"You do not understand, Scimitar of the Arabs, this man is more powerful than your greatest division. He is the incarnation of the Destroyer, and in this form he will do anything I tell him to. Including eradicating the Hamidi Arabian royal family."

Maddas blinked.

"Would that not be fitting, O Precious Leader?" Kimberly said mockingly. "This man destroyed your family."

"And did me a tremendous favor," Maddas said quickly. "They were beasts, especially my wife's brothers. I am better off without them. And with you."

Kimberly smiled her blond smile.

"What does that matter?" she pressed. "Your generals know you have lost face. You must restore it. Why not loose this man upon your enemies, the Hamidis?"

"Because of all the forces arrayed on my southern border," Maddas Hinsein said truthfully, "only the Kurani Emir and the thrice-damned Hamidi itch for my skin. The Americans need provocation. The rest of the world follows their lead. But the Hamidis know that I covet their wealth and oil refineries. They know American staying power is limited." He shook his fleshy head slowly. "No, if I strike the Hamidi royal family, they will attack in turn. All of them will attack."

"So, you are a coward, after all."

Maddas flinched. "No Iraiti could call me that name and not be chopped into shish kebab," he flared.

"No Iraiti understands Maddas Hinsein as I do," Kimberly said. "If I disappear, there is no one strong enough to attend to your special . . . needs."

Maddas' dark features tightened in concentration.

And one hidden hand slipped from a slit in the black abayuh and roughly pinched Maddas Hinsein on the backside. He gave a little jump.

"Do not do that in front of the prisoner," he hissed, rubbing himself.

"Think of him as a tool. Just as I think the same of you."

Maddas Hinsein cocked a thumb at his broad chest. "I am the destined uniter of the Arabs."

Kimberly smiled. "And I am the only one who makes you purr. Your gas attack has failed. There has been no counterstrike. You are safe to strike again. This time in secret. Send this assassin to kill the one most dear to the sheik. It is a humilation he deserves."

"Agreed. But it will bring war down on my head. Is that what you want?"

"Yes," Kimberly Baynes said, drawing close to Maddas Hinsein like a black raven with a sunflower head. "War is exactly what I want."

Maddas looked aghast. "You want my ruin?"

"No, I want to see you lord of the Middle East, and if you obey me in every way, that is exactly what you shall be."

Maddas Hinsein furrowed his dark brow. His eyes went to those of the American assassin who was called Remo.

The man obviously worshiped Kimberly. He had obeyed her in every respect so far.

"How do we know that once he is free, he will carry out your will?" he asked at last.

"Very simply, Precious Leader. Because I will go with him."

"Why?"

"Because we are destined to dance the Tandava together."

"I do not understand. Is that an American word?"

"No. It is more ancient than even Arabic. And in time you will understand all."

"Very well. But do not spank him. You are my mistress now. Your ministrations are reserved for Maddas Hinsein alone."

"Of course. I only have hands for you."

Kimberly drew near Remo. Remo gritted his teeth. Sweat broke out over his face. Her nearness was unbearable. The way she swayed when she walked, the knowing, mocking light in her violet eyes. Hadn't they been blue before? He must have been mistaken. He wanted to run from her. He also wanted to push her down on the dirty floor and rut like animals.

But Remo did neither. He had been commanded to stand at attention, and so he stood, arms at his sides, his manhood at half-mast under his black kimono.

"I told you that you would come to me," Kimberly said in English.

"I came," Remo said dully.

"We are going on a trip together. To Hamidi Arabia."

"Yes."

"You know Sheik Fareem?"

"Yes."

Kimberly laid spidery hands on his shoulders, saying, "Tell me truly. Who is his closet relative?"

"His son, Abdul."

Cupping Remo's jaw, Kimberly turned his head around so their eyes met. "Then you will kill Abdul. Before my eyes. As a sacrifice to me. Do you understand?" "Yes." "Are you ready?" Remo's mind screamed no, but he was helpless. His mouth said, "Yes." But his heart told him that even the cold Void would be better than this living hell.

Chapter 35

Harold Smith tried to reason it through.

It made no sense, none of it. Why would Maddas Hinsein initiate a lame gas attack on the Hamidi Arabian front lines? It was as if he were trying to bait America into a war Hinsein could not possibly win.

His behavior was incomprehensible. He blustered and boasted and hurled desperate empty threats in a foolish attempt to forestall what the world thought was an inevitable all-out assault on bait now officially the Republic of Iran. That last decree, as nothing before it, told of the man's desperation.

Army intelligence dismissed the failed nerve-gas attack as the result of the usual confusion stress placed on a command structure when hostilities appear imminent. But Smith had run a thorough character analysis on Maddas Hinsein. He was fifty-four years old, nearly the top life expectancy of the average Iraiti male. A visionary, he would do anything to prolong his life and fulfill what he perceived as his destiny as the liberator of the Arabs.

He was not reckless, but ignorant. He had stumbled into this situation through miscalculation. It was not in his character to attack against such overwhelming odds.

And now he had Remo in his power. Somehow.

As the CURE terminal scrolled news digests emanating out of the Middle East, one report caught his eyes.

"My God," Smith croaked.

He read an AP digest of a rash of strangulations that had taken place in the Star in the Center of the Flower of the East base.

Two people had been throttled-an Arab motor-pool corporal and a U.S. servicewoman, Carla Shaner. They had both been strangled with yellow silk scarves. This fact was the cause of much speculation in the Arab press, inasmuch as yellow ribbons symbolized U.S. hostages. Infidel Moslem-hating elements in the U.S. armed forces were being blamed.

Smith ran an in-depth computer analysis of the incident. A picture emerged. A picture of a nameless non-Arab American woman who had strangled the U.S. servicewoman, stolen her uniform, and used it to gain entry to the base, where she subsequently strangled the Hamidi corporal and obtained a Humvee vehicle.

To what purpose? Smith wondered.

"To penetrate Irait," he said hoarsely in the shaky fluorescent light of his Folcroft office. "To incite the other side." And suddenly Smith understood why the Iraiti ambassdor had been strangled with a yellow scarf in Washington. That was simply phase one, designed to exacerbate U.S.-Irait tensions.

"Who is this woman?" Smith asked the walls. "What goal could she possibly have in doing this?"

He recalled with a brain-clarifying shock the pretext under which he had sent Remo into the Middle East. The Calley Baynes who had flown to Libya was also the woman pretending to be Kimberly Baynes. But who was she?

Smith shut off the news-digest program and went into the airline file. There, siphoned off the national network of travel-agency and airline reservation computers, lay the last six months' worth of passenger reservations.

Smith called up the Middle East runs and ran the name:

"BAYNES, KIMBERLY."

After a moment the screen said: "BAYNES, KIMBERLY, NOT FOUND."

He keyed in: "BAYNES, CALLEY."

Up came: "BAYNES, CALLEY."

Under the rubric was a record of a flight from Tripoli to Nehmad, Hamidi Arabia.

With a tight grin of triumph, Harold Smith logged off that file and began a global search of the name Calley Baynes.

His smile quirked downward. The computer spat out another "NOT FOUND."

"Odd," he muttered. He stared at the screen. The name was an alias. Why had she chosen it?

Smith reached into his in basket, where the FBI artist's reconstruction of the Washington strangler reposed. He stared at the face. It was a pretty face, almost innocent.

On a hunch, he keyed into the FBI nationwide alert for the true Kimberly Baynes-the thirteen-year-old girl who had been reported kidnapped from her grandmother's Denver house.

Up came a digitized photo of the missing poster. It showed a wide-eyed innocent young blond girl.

Smith placed the artist's sketch next to the screen. But for the more mature lines of the face, they might have been sisters. There was a definite familial similarity.

Smith executed a thorough check of social-security records, looking for any Baynes-family female cousins. He found none. There were none.

Smith called up the digitized photo once more. And this time he noticed that the missing poster noted a tiny scar visible on the chin of the real Kimberly Baynes.

A scar reflected on the FBI sketch too.

"How can that be?" Smith muttered. "There must be ten years' difference in their ages." As he stared, Smith noticed other too-close congruities. Too many to be coincidence.

Then it struck him. And cold horror filled his marrow. Suddenly everything that Remo Williams had said, the apparent nonsense about the Caldron of Blood and living Hindu gods, no longer seemed so preposterous.

These two-young girl and mature woman-were the same person.

And Harold Smith realized there was another way to spell Calley.

Kali.

"This cannot be," he said, even as he realized it was. He dug deep into his files, pulling up a long encyclopedia entry on the Hindu goddess Kali.

Harold Smith scanned the text. He learned that Kali was the terrible four-armed mother goddess of Hindu myth. Known as the Black One, she was a horrible personification of death and womanhood, who feasted on corpses and drank blood. She was, he read, the consort of Shiva the Destroyer, who was known as the Red One.

"Red One," Smith muttered. "Remo said Kimberly had called him that. And they would dance the Tandava in the Caldron of Blood."

Smith called up "TANDAVA."

"THE DANCE OF DESTRUCTION SHIVA DANCES IN CHIDAMBARAM, THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE," he read, "THUS CREATING AND RECREATING THE UNIVERSE OVER AND OVER."

He went to the Shiva file. Most of the information he knew. Shiva was one of the Hindu triad of gods, personification of the opposing forces of destruction and reintegration. His symbol was the lingam.

Smith input "LINGAM."

The definition was succinct: "PHALLUS."

And Smith remembered Remo's rather personal problem.

It was all, he decided, too much to be called coincidental.

Woodenly he logged off the encyclopedia file.

He leaned back in his chair, his gray eyes slipping out of focus.

"What if it's true?" he whispered, his voice awed. "What if it's really true?"

Stunned, he reached out for the red telephone. He hesitated, grimacing. What could he tell the President?

He turned in his big swiveling executive chair.

Out beyond the big picture window-his only window to the world during time of crisis-a bluish moon was rising over the liquid ebony waters of Long Island Sound. They were as black as an abyss.

Harold Smith was a practical man. The blood of his rock-ribbed New England ancestors flowed through his veins. Men who had come to a new world to carve out a new life. They had planted according to the almanac, worshiped in Spartan churches, and put aside family and farm when their country had called them to war and national service. Unsuperstitious men. Patriots.

But he knew in his heart that no ordinary power could sway Remo Williams to join the Iraiti side. He knew he had inadvertently sent Remo into the arms-the four arms, if his story could be believed-of an unclean thing that, whether or not she was Kali, possessed a supernatural power even a Master of Sinanju could not resist.

And he had lost Remo.

Now the world teetered on the edge of what Kimberly Baynes-if she truly was Kimberly Baynes anymore-called the Red Abyss.

No, Harold Smith realized, he could not tell the President. In truth, he could not do anything. He could only hope that some power greater than mortal man would intervene before the world was lost.

Harold Smith steepled his withered old fingers, as if in prayer. His dry lips parted as if to invoke salvation.

Smith hesitated. He no longer knew which gods he should invoke.

Finally he simply asked God the Father to preserve the world.

He was no sooner done than one of the desk phones shrilled in warning.

Smith turned in his seat. It was the multiline Folcroft phone. At this hour, it could be only one person.

"Yes, dear?" he said, picking up the phone.

"Harold," Maude Smith said. "How did you know it was me?"

"Only the director's wife would call at this hour."

Mrs. Smith hesitated. "Harold, are . . . are you coming home?"

"Yes. Soon."

"I'm a bit nervous tonight, Harold."

"Is something wrong?"

"I don't know. I'm uneasy. I can't explain it."

"I understand," Smith said in a comfortless voice. He was not good at this. He always had problems being warm. Even with his wife. "All this war talk."

"It's not that, Harold. I saw the strangest thing tonight."

"What is that?"

"Well, you remember those strange neighbors who lived next door. The ones who moved?"

"Of course I do."

"I thought I saw one of them not an hour ago."

Smith blinked, his heart racing. Remo! He had returned.

Smith took hold of his voice. "The young man?"

"No," Mrs. Smith said. "It was the other one."

"Impossible!" Smith blurted out.

"Why do you say that, Harold?"

"I . . . understood he returned to his home. In Korea."

"You did tell me that, yes. I remember now." Mrs. Smith paused. "But I happened to look out the dining-room window, and I saw him in the house."

"What was he doing?" Smith asked in a strangely thin tone.

"He was . . ." Mrs. Smith's somewhat frumpy-sounding voice trailed off. She gathered it again. "Harold, he was staring at me."

"He was?"

"I lifted my hand to wave to him, but he simply threw up his hands and the most ungodly expression came over him. I can't describe it. It was terrible."

"You are certain of this, dear?"

"I'm not finished, Harold. He threw up his hands and then he simply . . . went away."

"Went away?"

"He . . . vanished."

"Vanished?"

"Harold, he faded away," Mrs. Smith said resolutely. "Like a ghost. You know I don't put any stock in such things, Harold, but that is what I saw. Do you . . . you don't think that I could be coming down with that memory disease? Oh, what is it called?"

"Alzheimer's, and I do not think that at all. Please relax, dear. I am coming home."

"When?"

"Instantly," said Harold W. Smith, who did not believe in ghosts either, but who wondered if he had not beseeched the proper god after all.

Chapter 36

Abdul Hamid Fareem had once been a prince of Hamidi Arabia. He was proud to bear the name Hamid.

But pride alone is not enough to make one worthy of standing in line to be the next sheik.

Abdul Fareem had been disinherited by his father, the sheik of the Hamid tribe. He had been forced to divorce his good wife, Zantos, whom he had not appreciated-doing this by pronouncing the words, "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you," in the manner prescibed by Islam. Then he was forced to marry a Western woman of low morals, whom he did deserve.

The Western woman of low morals put up with him but three months as Abdul, exiled to Kuran, tried to scratch out a living as a moneylender. The white woman left when he had gone bankrupt. Lacking good judgment himself, he could hardly recognize a poor credit risk when he saw one.

When the Iraitis rolled over helpless Kuran, Abdul Fareem was the first to break for the border. And the first to find sanctuary.

He would have kept on going, straight for the emirates, but he had no money. Settling in the windblown border outpost of Zar, he earned a meager living as a camel groom. He let anyone who would listen know that he had once been a prince of Hamidi Arabia. And all had laughed. Not because they disbelieved his tale, but because they knew that fat Abdul Fareem had been of so base a character that even the right-thinking and kind sheik had disowned him.