High Priestess

With that, Harold Smith hung up.

Remo came up to the desk. "Good thing you said no."

"Why is that?" said Smith, returning the red phone to the drawer and closing it.

"Because there's no way I'm doing bodyguard duty on that Squirrelly Chicane. Whoever named her has her personality down pat. Every nut idea on the planet is in her personal collection."

"You seem to know her reputation quite well."

"Chiun's been talking about her a lot lately. I think he's developing a crush on her or something."

"I see," said Smith.

The terminal beeped, and Smith said, "Excuse me." He stared at the screen for a moment and muttered, "Odd."

"What's odd?" Remo demanded.

"Another Chinese body has washed ashore in Malibu."

"Must be some immigrant-smuggling scheme gone bad," said Remo.

"You could be right. Except that the first body was of a screenwriter who had been in this country some time. I have reason to believe he was a Chinese sleeper agent."

"What makes you say that?"

"Yearly deposits into his bank account from a Hong Kong bank. Yet the man claims income from the sale of scripts to various domestic film-production companies, and his IRS records do not jibe with my findings."

"Sounds circumstantial."

"Perhaps you might look into it," Smith suggested.

"No, thanks."

Smith looked up from his screen, his gray face tinged with phosphorescent green.

"I understood you were interested in an assignment."

"I am. Point me to a drug dealer or a serial killer, and I'll have them in the boneyard by sundown. Those two are already there. You don't need me."

Smith regarded his enforcement arm for a silent moment. The computer beeped again. Smith glanced at the screen.

"Another Chinese body," he remarked. "This one has been identified. Hmm. It seems he also has connections to Hollywood. A producer of films, although no credits are available."

"I hear ticket sales are down. Maybe someone's trying to thin out the competition a little."

"Unlikely," said Smith. "I sincerely hope that these bodies have nothing to do with Squirrelly Chicane's bizarre announcement that she is the new Bunji Lama."

"Me, too," Remo said hastily. "Well, gotta run."

"I will relay Dr. Gerling's opinion when I have it."

"Great, great," said Remo, shutting the door.

Smith stared at the closed door with a puzzled expression riding his patrician features. Remo was behaving more strangely than usual. He hoped it was nothing serious. Usually Chiun's behavior was the more worrisome. He made a mental note to consult with Dr. Gerling at day's end.

His computer beeped twice in warning, and Smith noticed it was precisely 11:59. Instantly he pressed the hidden stud that sent the CURE terminal slipping back into concealment.

At exactly two seconds past noon, Mrs. Mikulka knocked once and entered carrying a maroon tray.

"It's noon, Dr. Smith. I have your prune-whip yogurt."

"Thank you, Mrs. Mikulka," said Smith, who had trained his secretary to be almost as punctual as he. Two seconds was a tolerable variable. But just barely.

Chapter 14

Squirrelly Chicane missed her heart-shaped pink bed. She missed her tape deck and assorted Kitaro and Yanni tapes. But most of all she missed Remo Buttafuoco.

He had saved her life. The pot had to wear off before she realized what had really happened during her beach party.

And all day long bodies kept washing up on the beach.

She had asked Kula to throw them back, and he always did. He made a great bodyguard, even if he was forever complaining of having a humongous case of herpes. If Squirrelly asked him to do something, he did it. He was like a big faithful puppy dog. Once she caught him on his hands and knees drinking out of the toilet like a mastiff. That was probably why he was called a Mongrol.

Still, she missed Remo. But not as much as she missed sleeping in a real bed. The floor wouldn't have been so bad, but both Kula and Lobsang had insisted upon her sleeping on a shelf above the floor. They called it a kang, explaining that Bunji Lamas traditionally slept on a kang.

The trouble was, Squirrelly kept rolling off. Her back wasn't up to the ordeal. And every time she complained to Lobsang, he fed her a piping-hot cup of tea loaded with rancid melted butter. The man had absolutely no fear of cholesterol.

"There is a lady on the telephone for you, Buddha-Sent One," Kula announced through the closed door where he stood guard, vowing to lay down his life and his yaks and his herpes before any Chinese assassin could get past him.

"What lady?"

"She says she is the number-one lady."

"The number one . . . you mean the First Lady?"

"That is what I said, Presence. The number-one lady."

"That's the call I've been waiting for! Quick, be a good Mongrol and fetch the phone here."

Kula entered, handed over the cordless receiver and bowed himself out of the room. Just watching his contorted posture made Squirrelly's own back cringe.

"Hello?" she said excitedly.

"Squirrelly, this is the First Lady speaking."

"How'd it go? Did you get my visa?"

"Well, it took a real struggle. The Chinese authorities gave me the biggest runaround. First they said it was impossible to process your application in less than three months. Then they admitted they could, but they couldn't guarantee your safety from what they called counterrevolutionary elements."

Squirrelly frowned. "Funny how they turned on me so fast. We used to be such friends. So, how'd you coax them off the mark?"

"First," said the First Lady, "I threatened to revoke their preferred-trade status, then I pointed out that I headed the Presidential Commission on Tibetan Independence and if you, my official representative, couldn't go, then I was going."

"You didn't?" Squirrelly squealed.

"I did."

"And they gave in?"

"Caved in. Like a house of cards."

"I love it! I love it! When do I leave?"

"As soon as you want. Listen, it would be a good idea if you went to India first and got the blessing of the Dalai Lama."

"The cute little munchkin with the glasses? He's adorable."

"Make it very high profile. The higher the better. That way they won't dare mess with you."

"I'll give him a kiss for you."

"I'll be watching your progress on CNN. Gotta run. I have meetings all day long. Good luck!"

Squirrelly Chicane hung up the phone and immediately dialed a Virginia number.

"Mother, I'm going! This is so great. And listen to this, I'm going to pay the Delhi Lamb a courtesy call."

"Try not to sleep with him, dear. He's a religious figure."

Squirrelly made her voice chilly. "The thought never crossed my mind."

"But it would. The older you get, the more like your brother you seem."

"Just for that, no postcards from Tibet for you" And Squirrelly hung up. She leaned back on her hard kang, and wondered if there was some ecclesiastical law against two lamas getting it on. She would have to remember to ask Lobsang. He knew all that secret Buddhist stuff.

Chapter 15

The minister of state security entered Beijing's Great Hall of the People wearing his gray Mao suit and carrying his empty hands at his sides.

The premier of China in his own gray Mao suit sat with his hands folded. The premier nodded, indicating the empty chair to his immediate left. His eyes were heavy of lid, as if sleep beckoned. This seeming inattentiveness had fooled many a rival in the near past.

The minister of state security eased into the seat and waited for the premier to speak. They were alone in the Great Hall of the People. That did not mean that they were either unobserved or that their words would not carry to plotting ears. China was at a crossroads. She looked inward, but increasingly the outer world intruded. These were worrisome times.

"What news?" asked the premier in a diffident voice.

"From those who sleep, no word."

The premier's heavy-lidded eyes grew heavier still.

"Perhaps," he said, "their sleep will be long and restful."

"There is no reason to doubt this, Comrade Premier," said the security minister.

And by these oblique words, bland but carefully chosen, both men understood that their sleeper agents in California, across the Pacific Ocean, were either dead or incapacitated.

The silence between them grew long and heavy.

Presently the premier broke it. "Is the visitor who was expected still to come?"

"The visitor has elected to drop in on a relative she did not know existed before journeying farther."

"In times past, these two did not get along so well," the premier noted. "I wonder if this has changed."

"I have not heard."

The premier frowned. "Darkness piles upon darkness, and no one knows when the sun will rise."

"Perhaps the visitor will elect to remain in the house of her newfound relative and not journey farther"

"Can this be encouraged?"

"Anything is possible," said the security minister.

"This would be a good thing if it can be done correctly," said the premier, closing his heavy lids as if to surrender to sleep.

Seeing this, the minister of state security rose from his seat, knowing that the meeting had concluded. Without another word, he padded from the Great Hall of the People to communicate with his assets in India, who would be instructed to proceed with caution inasmuch as the wife of the United States President had taken a personal interest in the Bunji Lama.

Chapter 16

The FedEx trucks were parked in every available parking spot in the street before the impossibly ugly edifice the Master of Sinanju had dubbed Castle Sinanju when Remo Williams pulled up. Although he had a private blacktop parking lot large enough to accommodate more than a dozen cars, Remo had to park his blue Buick Regal on a side street and walk back.

"Christ," Remo muttered under his breath. "I hope Chiun hasn't gone on another Home Shopping Network binge."

The FedEx trucks sat very low on their springs, he noticed. The couriers were walking pretty low to their centers of gravity, too, as they tried to diver the small wooden crates without herniating themselves.

Then Remo remembered.

"The gold!"

He beat a courier to the door and opened it for him.

"I don't suppose you're M.O.S. Chiun," the courier said, puffing.

Remo took the boom-box-sized crate from the man with one hand. As if it had entered another atmosphere where gravity exerted less pull, the box seemed to become almost buoyant in Remo's hand.

"Nope, but I'm empowered to sign for him."

The courier wiped his brow with his blue uniform sleeve as Remo signed the voucher.

"What's in this thing anyway-lead diving shoes?" the courier grumbled.

Remo shook his head. "Dwarf star matter."

"Huh?"

"Dwarf star matter. Sometimes pieces of it fall to earth. They're so dense that a chunk the size of a basketball weighs as much as Detroit. In order to transport it they have to break it up into tiny pieces. The one in your box is the size of a shirt button."

"You're kidding me."

"I'd show you, but if it falls out of the crate, we'll need a crane to pick it up," Remo said.

"So how come you're handling that crate like it contained marshmallows?"

"I used to bench press dwarf star matter. It's part of my job training."

The courier passed the story along to his fellow drivers, and they began wondering aloud if Remo wouldn't mind carrying the other boxes in, since he had a knack for it.

Remo did mind, but not as much as he minded standing out on the front steps explaining dwarf star matter to twenty different people, all waving clipboards.

By the time Remo got every crate stacked in the inner hall, the Master of Sinanju had deigned to come down.

"Is this what I hope it is?" he squeaked excitedly. "Has my gold arrived?"

"What did you think those trucks were all about? And don't tell me you didn't notice them."

Chiun stopped at the bottom of the inner stairs, sniffed delicately and said, "You have been to see Smith."

"Says who?"

"Says the after-shave lotion clinging to your person. It is the scent that only he wears."

Damn, thought Remo. Chiun had him. Smith wore a cologne that had been discontinued in 1972, and he had purchased a thirty-year supply closeout for two cents on the dollar. "Okay," Remo said tiredly, "I admit it. I saw Smith."

Chiun narrowed his eyes. "About what?"

"Personal stuff."

"What is so personal that you cannot share it with the one who adopted you?"

"Get off my back, Chiun."

"You did not tell Smith about my sunlighting?"

"Rest assured, the name of Squirrelly Chicane did not pass my lips. Except once."

"What is this? What is this?"

"While I was there, the President called. He asked Smith if we could baby-sit Squirrelly in Tibet."

"And what did Smith say?"

"Don't sweat it. Smith said no."

"No? Why did Smith say no? Did he not think we were worthy of the task? Or did he think you were unworthy of so important a responsibility? Oh, Remo, your ineptitude has caused the house great shame."

"It has not. Smith didn't think the Bunji Lama was a CURE problem."

"No?"

"No. Now where do you want this freaking gold?"

"My gold is not freaking."

"This gold is. It weighs a ton."

"It would not be gold if it did not."

"Touche. So where do I put it?"

"I would prefer to have it placed in the meditation room where I may meditate on its fineness and superior quality."

"Don't kid me. You just wanna see that it's all there."

"That, too."

Remo started stacking the crates and carrying them upstairs, ten at a time, five balanced in each palm. He made it look easy. In fact, the balancing allowed him to bear the weight without breaking his forearms.

When all the crates were stacked in the meditation room, some spilling out into the hall, Remo said, "I'm going to bed. I'm bushed."

Chiun' s fingernails came together with a click, then disappeared into his generous kimono sleeves. "You are not going to open them for me?" he asked in a wheedling voice.

"No."

"Since you are tired, I forgive you."

"Thanks," said Remo, turning to go.

"Do not forget to shower. You smell like a white."

"I am white."

"It is only your skin that is white. It means no more than that the skin of the new Bunji Lama is white."

Remo paused at the door to his bedroom. "If Squirrelly Chicane really is the Bunji Lama, then I am a Korean."

Chiun called back, "Do not fall asleep too soon, for wisdom is upon you. Better that you meditate on the truths you have just enunciated."

Remo slammed the door behind him. The entire building reverberated for a full minute after.

THE MASTER REGARDED the closed door with its discordant vibrations for several moments in silence. His parchment face was a mask in which hazel eyes gleamed with an opaque light.

Padding into the meditation room, he ignored the crates of gold that his shrewd bargaining had earned.

Instead, he picked up the telephone and depressed the 1 button as he had seen his pupil do so often. Strange sounds came from the earpiece as the call was routed to a trailer park in Moore, Oklahoma, to foil tracing. Finally the ringing began.

The voice of Harold W. Smith came on the line. "Yes?"

"Hail, Emperor Smith. Greetings from the House of Sinanju."

"Master Chiun. What can I do for you?"

"Remo tells me he has been to see you."

"He has. He is concerned about these . . . er. . . seizures."

Chiun clutched the phone more tightly. "Has there been another?"

"No."

"This is good."

"Remo asked me to consult with one of the psychiatrists here," Smith said.

"That is not like him."

"I know, Master Chiun. But he seems unusually troubled."

"It will pass"

"It is to be hoped. I cannot allow my enforcement arm to be at large if he is suffering from some sort of multiple-personality disorder."

"Fear not, Smith. It is nothing of the sort. Remo is merely going through a phase. It will pass."

"And when it does, will Remo be the Remo we know?"

Chiun compressed his thin, papery lips and said nothing. It was a question he could not answer. Possibly a question without any good answer.

"Remo informs me that the matter of Squirrelly Chicane has been brought to your attention," Chiun said at length.

"I declined the President's request that we bodyguard her. It is not our problem."

"Even if some difficulty befalls her?"

"She is an American citizen exercising her prerogative to travel where she will."

"It occurs to me, O Emperor, that perhaps all Remo needs is a vacation."

"I would prefer that one of you remain on standby. Something may come up."

"Very wise, O Smith. Allow me to suggest that Remo be the one to remain standing by. He does that better than I."

"If you wish to take a vacation, by all means. Go."

"I have some property that I must return to my native village. But I do not wish to squander a vacation doing so, for it will be duty, not pleasure, that compels my journey."

"I fail to understand," said Smith.

Chiun's voice lifted. "Do you not recall in my last contract, the clause numbered seventy-eight?"

"Clause seventy-eight?"

"The clause that allows the Master of Sinanju to take leave when he will. Unpaid leave."

"You mean a sabbatical?"

"If that is the proper word, yes."

"By all means, Master Chiun, take a sabbatical."

"Your understanding knows no bounds."

And the Master hung up. Immediately he began packing. Only one trunk this time. The taxi driver managed it quite successfully, causing no damage and retaining his limbs.

Chiun did not awaken Remo. Nor did he bring his roomful of gold with him. There were things more important than gold. Not many, but a few.

One of the most important things was that Remo not accompany him to Tibet. For he might recognize it, and the consequences of that not even the gods could predict.

Chapter 17

High over the Indian Ocean, Squirrelly Chicane was cramming for her high-profile meeting with the Dalai Lama.

She sat cross-legged on an overstuffed cushion that was in turn placed on an exquisite Oriental rug. She swam in her saffron robes, but Lobsang wouldn't allow her to have it taken in by even the finest of Beverly Hills couturiers. Her maroon lama's miter cast a rhinoceros-horn shadow over the pages of her book, making the words hard to read by the overhead lights.

It was night, so throwing aside one of the window hangings on Kula's private plane wouldn't have helped.

It was a neat plane, Squirrelly thought. Like a flying barge. No wonder Kula called it his skyboat. If Cleopatra had lived in the twentieth century, she would have had one just like it.

They were on the last leg of their flight to Delhi. Or Bombay or wherever it was they were going.

When Lobsang had first explained that they were going to the holy land, Squirrelly had said, "We're going to Israel!"

They had looked at her funny. But then they always looked at her funny. They were still getting used to the idea of a Bunji Lama who was both white and female.

"To Buddhists," Lobsang patiently explained, "India is the holy land."

"I've never been to India," Squirrelly had said. "I don't think."

"It is a wonderful land, not only because it is the cradle of Buddhism, but because it is free. Unlike Tibet. "

"After I'm done, Tibet will be free."

"First you must relearn your faith."

"I brought my entire collection of Hermann Hesse and William S. Burroughs books."

The two looked blank. Cute but blank.

Squirrelly showed them her copy of Dharma Lion and after Kula has translated the title, Lobsang had smiled happily. They were so easy to please.

So Squirrelly had sat down to read. The funny thing was, her copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance had vanished. She knew she had brought it aboard. They had hardly let her bring anything. Lobsang had turned away most of her luggage, saying that her purpose as the Bunji Lama was to renounce the physical world.

They let her keep her stash of bhang. For some reason, they had no problem with that. That was when Squirrelly knew that she was going to really like being a Buddhist.

The more she read, the more it confirmed her sense that she had found the perfect spiritual identity in the perfect body. She was the Bunji Lama and she was still Squirrelly Chicane. It was better than sharing that Siamese soul with Mae West.

She liked everything she read about Buddhism. All people and things were in harmony, because everything that happened was predestined to happen. Therefore, no one ever screwed up in the cosmic sense.

"It's all scripted!" Squirrelly had blurted out in a moment of true epiphany. "It all connects!"

Of course, killing was prohibited. Yet no person or thing ever really died in the absolute Western sense of dying. Instead, a soul moved up or down the karmic ladder according to the life that had been led. So while it was bad to kill, no one should be punished for it. Karma would take care of everything.

Further, there were seven heavens and seven hells, instead of the harsh pass-fail Christian system. When you died, you dropped your body like last year's fashions. And when you wanted to pray, you spun a little gimcrack and it prayed for you.

Wonderfully balanced, unjudgmental and handsoff, it was the perfect belief system, Squirrelly decided.

And Buddhas. There were hundreds of Buddhas. As the Bunji Lama, Squirrelly was the reincarnation of the Buddha to Come, who was a really good Buddha to be because everyone looked forward to his return. As a Buddha, Squirrelly would be continually reborn into the world in order to regenerate it by relieving its suffering.

"This makes perfect sense to me," Squirrelly said, patting the dyed-saffron curls that peeped out from under her miterlike lama's cap.

Then the engine whine began to change pitch, and Kula came back from the pilot's compartment to say, "We have arrived, Bunji"

"Fabulous," said Squirrelly, going to a window.

She looked down and saw nothing. Literally. The earth below was like freshly washed blackboard.

"Where is the city? Where are the lights?"

"They are telling us that there are no lights," Kula said unconcernedly.

"What happened to them?"

"No electricity."

"How thoughtful. Conserving the lights at night when they're not needed."

"They are also forbidding us to land."

"Why?"

"The Hindu fear Beijing's displeasure."

"So what do we do?"

Kula beamed. "We land, of course. For we fear no one's displeasure but Buddha's. "

The landing was rough. The airport was without power, too. So there was no radar in the tower, no marker lights on the runways, and the boarding ramps were inoperative.

Squirrelly didn't care. The jet's flat tires could be fixed, and she didn't need a ramp. She took a puff of her roach and closed her eyes. But Kula pulled her back before she could invoke her newfound powers of levitation.

After they had rolled the air stairs up to the plane, Kula threw open the hatch. Squirrelly, trying to keep her maroon lama's hat in place, stepped out onto the top step.

First she noticed the crowds. There were none.

Then she noticed the smell.

"What is that awful smell?" she asked, pinching her nose shut and breathing through her mouth.

"What smell?" asked Kula.

Squirrelly yanked him out onto the step with her.

"That smell!"

"That is India."

"It smells like a cesspool," Squirrelly said in a nasal tone.

Kula nodded. "Yes, India."

Lobsang joined them, tasted the air with his long nose, seemed to find it acceptable and said, "We have landed in India!"

"Does it all smell like this?" Squirrelly asked, still holding her nose.

"This good?" asked Lobsang.

"This bad."

"Some of it is worse. Come, we cannot tarry. Chinese agents may be lurking about."

"Shouldn't we wait for the reception committee? Usually I get the key to the city when I land in a foreign capital."

"The key to New Delhi," Kula said, hustling her down the steps, "is not to remain here for very long."

There was a car waiting. It looked like some British model that had seen better days. Squirrelly got in the back and rolled up the windows. As the car left the airport, the soupy heat made her open them again.

For the remainder of the ride, she alternately rolled the windows up when the smell got to be too much and down again when the heat started wilting her hat.

New Delhi, even blacked out, was a mess. Traffic was a nightmare. A lumbering red bus almost sideswiped them. Wrenching the wheel, Kula swiped back, running the bus off the road and into a ditch where it rolled over three times before coming to a dusty halt on its side.

It seemed that every other bus they encountered tried to run them off the road.

"What's wrong with these bus drivers?" Squirrelly demanded huffily.

Kula shrugged his broad shoulders. "They live in New Delhi, are devout Buddhists and therefore have nothing to lose by dying suddenly. The odds of a better next life are overwhelming."

Beside her, Lobsang was talking. "Now, the Dalai Lama wears a pleasant face," he was saying. "Do not be deceived, Presence. He will be envious of your karmic station."

"I wonder if he'll remember me," Squirrelly murmured.

"From which life?"

"From this one. I met him at a party once. He was a very nice little man."

"When you met him that time, he failed to recognize you for the Bunji Lama, his ancient rival. Now it will be different. Beware the serpent behind the mask. He will appeal to your more trustworthy instincts. He will preach dangerous ideas."

"Like what?"

"Pacifism." The word was a short cobra's hiss.

In front Kula spit on the floorboard.

Squirrelly wrinkled up her gamin face. "Isn't that what Buddha taught?"

"Lord Buddha," Lobsang said in precise tones, "did not suffer under the iron yoke of communism."

And the brittleness in the close confines of the bus-dodging car made Squirrelly Chicane shiver and wonder what she had gotten herself into.

THE DALAI LAMA STOOD outside his temple in exile, surrounded by his retinue, when they entered the dusty hill town of Dharamsala, north of New Delhi, in the shadow of Mun Peak.

He was just as Squirrelly remembered him-a little man with merry but wise eyes behind aviator sunglasses. His robe was maroon. His retinue all wore saffron hats. Squirrelly remembered Lobsang telling her that the Dalai Lama headed the yellow-hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism. As the Bunji Lama, she was the head of the red-hat sect. Personally she would have preferred burgundy.

Walking with her ceremonial bronze dorje clutched in one hand, trying to keep her maroon miter in place, Squirrelly floated up the dirt road to where the Dalai Lama awaited.

The Dalai Lama stood with his hands clasped in prayer, his face a pleasant mask. He neither smiled nor blinked, nor did he otherwise acknowledge Squirrelly's arrival. Not even when Squirrelly stopped just six feet in front of him.

"What do I say?" she whispered to Lobsang.

"Say nothing."

"What's he waiting for?"

"For you to bow."

"So why aren't I bowing?"

"To bow would be to acknowledge inferior status."

"Listen, to get out of this frigging heat, I'd get down on my hands and knees and kiss his little saffron sandals."

"Do not bow!" Lobsang warned. "It is in this moment that your supremacy will be decided."

"Does a curtsy count?"

"Do nothing!"

So Squirrelly didn't curtsy. Neither did the Dalai Lama bow.

Then Lobsang spoke up. "Your Holiness, I present to you the forty-seventh Bunji Lama, presently occupying a body known as Squirrelly Chicane."

The Dalai Lama blinked. Members of his retinue craned their shaved heads forward as if seeing her for the first time.

"Is this the selfsame Squirrelly Chicane who was in Brass Honeysuckle?" asked one.

Lobsang looked to Squirrelly, at a loss for words.

"Say yes," Squirrelly murmured.

"The answer is yes," said Lobsang.

The stony faces of the regents of the Dalai Lama broke out into smiles of recognition. "It is Squirrelly Chicane!"

They began crowding around.

"Is Richard Gere well?" one asked.

"He's doing great," Squirrelly said, laughing. "Chants every day."

"What tidings from the lotus land of the West?" asked another.

Through it all the Dalai Lama stood impassive behind his mirror aviator glasses.

"He's not budging," Squirrelly whispered to Lobsang.

"He is stubborn," Lobsang advised.

"Yeah? Well, I know just how to break the ice. Here, hold this," said Squirrelly passing her dorje to Lobsang. Snapping her fingers once, she accepted a silk wrapped package from Kula. Untying the drawstring, she brought to light the gleaming Academy Award she had won for Medium Esteem.

"Check this out," she crowed.

"It is the icon of the long-lost Bunji Lama!" the regents gasped.

And to the astonishment of all, except Squirrelly Chicane, the Dalai Lama lifted his prayerful hands to his forehead and bowed not once, but five times low and deep.

"May I have your autograph, enlightened one?" he asked humbly.

After that it went swimmingly, Squirrelly thought. They retired to the Dalai Lama's personal quarters, where the regents shut the doors and they drank tea-thankfully without rancid butter-sitting face-to-face on cushions. The Dalai Lama admired Squirrelly's Oscar while she got a good look at his Nobel Peace Prize.

"Strange are the ways in which the Wheel of Destiny turns," said the Dalai Lama.

"I saw this coming, you know. I'm a Taurus. They have the best karma."

"Now that you are recognized as the Bunji Lama, what will you do?"

"Liberate Tibet. That's what I'm here for," said Squirrelly, admiring the Nobel. "How hard is it to earn one of these things, anyway?"

The Dalai Lama hesitated over his bowl of tea. "Why do you ask, Bunji?"

"One of these would look great over my mantel between my Oscar and Golden Globe. By the way, may I call you Delhi?"

" 'Dalai.' It means 'ocean.' My title means 'ocean of wisdom.' And yes, you may call me that if it is your desire."

"That reminds me. Let's dish, lama to lama!" Squirrelly leaned forward. "When we feel the urge, what do we lamas do?"

"We do nothing. To sublimate the lower urges is our purpose in this life."

"Exactly how long have you been sublimating?" Squirrelly wondered.

"All my lives."

"Okaaay. Tell me, if you couldn't free your people after forty years, how'd you snare this baby?"

"I earned the Nobel by keeping the peace. For my way is the way of nonviolence. Is that not your way, Bunji?"

"I've always been nonviolent. Not that it's been easy. Sometimes I wanna give my little brother such a smack."

"I am pleased to hear this. Aggression is not the answer to the problem of Tibet, for the Chinese are many, and Tibetans few and poor."

"Don't sweat the Chinese. I've handled them before."

"These words gladden my heart. For I am the last Dalai Lama. It has so been prophesied. After me there will be no more, and my people are beside themselves at the prospect. But now that the Bunji has returned, hope will spring anew. Perhaps in two or even three decades, Tibet will breathe the sweet air of freedom once more."

Squirrelly squinted under her fleece-lined lama's cap. "Two or three decades? I figure it'll take two or three weeks."

"Weeks?"

"Sure," Squirrelly said, ticking off her plans on her saffron-nailed fingers. "Two or three weeks to liberate Tibet. Maybe another week or so for a goodwill tour of the major villages. Six months to write the book. And three to film."

"Film?"

Squirrelly flung her arms wide as if to encompass the entire world. "Won't this make a great movie? Internationally famous American actress plucked from cosmic obscurity to liberate a downtrodden people. Talk about high concept!"

"I fail to follow your thinking, Bunji Rinpoche."

"Oh, I love it when people call me that. Listen, you have a really photogenic face. Wanna play yourself?"

"Play?"

"I may end up doing Lamb of Light as a musical, though. Like Evita. How good are your pipes?"

"But you are the Bunji. It is your destiny to rule Tibet-if the Chinese do not assassinate you first."

"They already tried that," Squirrelly said dismissively. "Now that I have the First Lady on my side, I'm protected. If anything happens to me, she'd have them nuked."

"You would not encourage a nuclear attack on China?"

"Not me. By that time I'll be well into my next life and as long as I didn't come back as a Chinese citizen, I probably wouldn't care."

A knock came at the door. The Dalai Lama perked up.

"Ah, it is dinner. We will eat and talk more. Enter."

Servants entered, bearing fragrant foods on silver trays.

Kula and Lobsang hovered nearby.

Squirrelly tasted the air. "Smells scrumptious. What is all this stuff?"

"That is tsampa."

"Looks like Maypo. What about this soup?"

"That is thukpa-noodle soup. Very tasty."

"Tibetan pasta? I love it!"

"Do not eat yet."

"Why not? Do we say some kind of Buddhist grace first?"

"We must await the food taster."

"Food taster?"

"It is a precaution in case of poison."

"Who would try to poison you? You're so sweet."

"You," said the Dalai Lama without rancor.

"Hey, give a gal a break. I'm a fellow Buddhist, after all."

The food taster came in, bowed to each of them, and, under the watchful eyes of Lobsang Drom, Kula and the Dalai Lama's retinue, and the horrified eyes of Squirrelly Chicane, lifted each bowl in turn and slurped up generous portions.

"Don't you feed this guy?" Squirrelly asked.

"He is kept in a state of perpetual famishment," the Dalai Lama explained, "so that he will not balk at the task before him."

After he had tasted everything, the food taster sat down and everyone looked expectant.

Squirrelly squinted at him. "What are we waiting for, this poor guy to die?"

"Yes," said Kula.

"Oh. How long does that usually take?"

"If the food has cooled and he still breathes, the food is unpoisoned."

"Oooh, I hate cold food."

"As the Bunji Lama, it is your sacred duty to renounce the temptations of the material world," Lobsang intoned.

"Hot food isn't a temptation, but a necessity," said Squirrelly, dipping a surreptitious finger into her tsampa. Maybe she could sneak a taste while everybody was waiting for the food taster to keel over.

Squirrelly had her tsampa-smeared finger tucked up under her chin and was about to go for it when the food taster turned a sickly green and keeled left. He began breathing in a labored fashion. This lasted not very long at all. Just until the death rattle.

After the color left his face for the last time, the others grew stony of visage. The retinue of the Dalai Lama glared at Lobsang and Kula, who glowered back. Kula fingered his dagger.

Squirrelly swallowed hard. "The food's poisoned, huh?"

"Yes," said Lobsang. "But whose food? The Bunji's or the Dalai's?"

The glaring and glowering resumed.

"Tell you what," offered Squirrelly, wiping her forefinger on the cushion, "why don't we just throw it all out and start over? I make a mean seven-bean salad."

"I will fetch the cook," said Kula, storming from the room.

The cook was fetched. He was a plump little Tibetan with a face like unbaked cookie dough. He trembled like a human pudding in a steady wind.

"Why did you poison the food, cook?" Kula demanded.

"I did not."

Kula brought his silver dagger up to the cook's throbbing jugular. "You lie! I slit the throats of liars."

"I did not poison the food! It was the Chinese man."

"What Chinese man?"

"He told me that my sister in Lhasa would be violated if I did not look the other way while he put something in the food."

"Whose food? The Bunji's or the Dalai's?"

"The Bunji's."

"You are certain?"

"I would not lie, Mongol," quavered the cook. "For I know you would slit my throat if I did this."

"Good. It is good that you told the truth," said Kula, abruptly yanking the cook's head around to slice his throat open.

"Why did you do that?" Squirrelly cried, turning away.

"I also slit the throats of traitors," said Kula, wiping his blade clean on the dead man's hair.

Squirrelly stared at the dead cook a long time. Then it hit her.

"They tried to kill me," she said in a dull, shocked voice.

"Yes," said Kula.

"We must find the compassion to forgive them," intoned the Dalai Lama.

"They tried to kill me again. Even with the First Lady on my side." Her voice was smoldering now.

"The Chinese are in truth demons," said Lobsang. "Demons without souls."

"Take your anger and transmute it into understanding," intoned the Dalai Lama. "Use your newfound understanding to bring about true harmony. Illuminate the Universe with your light."

Squirrelly Chicane rose from her cushion, her blue eyes stark. Lifting a trembling fist to the ceiling, she said, "This means war!"

"War is not the way of Buddha," the Dalai Lama said anxiously. "It is unworthy of one who is in truth a Living Buddha!'

"Well, war is the way of this Buddha!" Squirrelly vowed. "We're going to march in there and kick their yellow butts all the way back to Beijing!"

The Dalai bowed his head in sorrow.

"She is a fighting Buddhist, after all," Kula said in an emotion-choked voice. "It is better than I dared hope for."

Chapter 18

It was the end of the month and time to pay the bills that had piled up on Dr. Harold W Smith's Spartan desk.

The Folcroft bills were in the low five figures. It was possible to dispose of them with only a cursory glance at the various invoices, bills and utility notices.

That done, he took a deep breath and two Alka-Seltzer washed down by spring water from his office dispenser before looking into the CURE-related bills.

These-principally credit-card bills and other incidentals-were sent to a blind post-office box to which only Smith had the key. It was not an ideal situation, but he could not trust Remo, and certainly not Chiun, to remember to pay their own bills on time.

And regardless of how high these bills were, Harold W. Smith always paid them promptly. It rankled his frugal New England soul to spend taxpayer dollars on what often seemed frivolous items, such as Remo's quarterly car trade-in. But in the end it was a small price to pay to keep Remo and Chiun, if not happy, at least not disposed to complain often.

And he never, ever paid credit-card interest. Not in the days when it was a modest six percent and certainly not now that the credit-card companies had begun charging usurious interest rates.

The bills this month amounted to a surprisingly small sum, Smith was relieved to see. Less than fifty thousand dollars. This was down from the last quarter after Chiun had discovered the Home Shopping Network and splurged, seemingly, on one of every item offered over a two-week period, including two cases of a product inexplicably called Hair in a Can.

Smith took another gulp of Alka-Seltzer and examined the charges line by line.

In the card that was issued to Remo Buttafuoco, he noticed a round-trip airlines ticket for two. He wondered where Remo and Chiun had gone. Then he saw on the very next line a two-day car rental from a Los Angeles franchise of a well-known agency. The next item indicated the car had been serviced in Malibu.

Smith frowned. Malibu. Malibu. Why did Malibu ring a warning bell in his memory?

And then he remembered. The attempt on Squirrelly Chicane three days before in Malibu, and the waves of suspicious dead Chinese bodies that had been washing up on the beach ever since.

"What on earth..."

Face slack with concern, Smith went to his computer and checked the Bunji file.

Six bodies now. As he read the latest reports, he realized that the dead men had been killed in ways that were consistent with both Remo and Chiun's methods of operation. The disemboweled man might as easily have been eviscerated by a superhard fingernail as a knife. And those who had been found with crushed larynxes and faces jellied beyond recognition bore Remo's hallmarks. He should have recognized the signs before, Smith realized grimly.

Harold Smith picked up the phone and dialed Remo's contact number.

A sleepy voice answered, "I'm not home. Go away."

"Remo. This is Smith."

"Smitty, what's the good word? Or in your case, the bad one?"

"The word," Smith said stiffly, "is that I know you and Chiun were involved with the Chinese deaths in Malibu."

"Okay," Remo said without skipping a beat. "It's too early in the morning to lie. We were."

"Please explain the situation to me, Remo," Smith said coldly. "This was not an authorized operation."

"You'd better talk to Chiun. It was kinda his operation."

"I would like to hear it from you first."

Remo's voice turned away and lifted. "Hey, Chiun! Smitty's on the phone for you!"

"Remo, I said-"

"Chiun! You up?"

Silence.

Remo's voice came back. "Damn. Hold the phone, Smitty."

Smith gripped the telephone receiver with unshakable tightness as he listened to the faint sounds of doors opening and closing and Remo returning.

"He's gone," said Remo.

"I will hear your explanation first."

"You don't understand, Smitty. Chiun's really gone. Two of his trunks are missing, but the freaking gold's still here."

"Gold. What gold?"

"The freaking gold he got off those Mongols."

"Mongols? What Mongols? Remo, start at the beginning, please."

"How about I just cut to the chase and let's see where that takes us," Remo said unhappily.

"Go ahead."

"You know the story about the Tibetan monk who showed up on Squirrelly Chicane's doorstep and proclaimed her the Bunji Lama?"

"Yes."

"Well, first he showed up on my doorstep. Along with that Mongol, Kula. Remember him from the Gulf War?"

"Go on."

"Well, they asked Chiun to help them find the Bunji Lama!'

"Find? You mean-"

"Yeah, Chiun led them straight to Squirrelly. He went through a lot of hocus-pocus to set them up for the scam, but in the end he just turned on 'The Poopi Silverfish Show' and there she was."

"Poopi Silverfish?"

"No, Squirrelly Chicane. She was into one of her past-life rags, and Lobsang just lapped it up."

"Lobsang was the Tibetan monk?"

"You got it."

"Where do you fit into this, Remo?"

"Me? I was just along for the ride. Carrying luggage and collecting abuse. When the Chinese tried to hit Squirrelly, Chiun and I were there and we hit them first. That's about the only good thing that came out of the trip."

"I disagree," Smith said in a cold voice. "It would have been far better had Squirrelly Chicane been assassinated than she go through with her ridiculous scheme to insert herself into the Tibetan situation."

"Don't look now, but I think Chiun's gone and introduced himself into the Tibetan situation, too."

"You may be right, Remo," said Smith in a tight voice. "He called me yesterday and requested a sabbatical."

"He say where he was going?"

"Back to the village of Sinanju, was my understanding."

"That should be easy to check. Just dial 1-800-SINANJU If he's not there or expected, he's off to Tibet."

"One moment, Remo," said Smith, switching phone lines. He dialed 1-800-SINANJU, and a querulous old voice began speaking in Korean.

"I...er...seek the Master of Sinanju," Smith said in carefully enunciated English.

"His awesome magnificence is not here," the voice said, switching to formal but thick English.

"Is he expected?"

"He is not expected. Do you wish someone dispatched? Or a throne toppled?"

"Thank you, no, I will call later."

"Others give inferior service. Provide your telephone number, and the Master of Sinanju will return your call if you are found worthy of the honor."

"Thank you, no."

Switching lines again, Smith told Remo, "He is not expected in Sinanju. He must be in Tibet."

"Great," Remo groaned. "I don't know who to feel sorry for, the Tibetans or the Chinese."

"Remo," Smith said urgently, "it is imperative that Squirrelly Chicane not upset the balance of power in Tibet."

"Balance? It's a Chinese slave state. Where's the balance?"

"Here is the balance. Remo, Tibet is largely plateau. It is, in effect, the high ground of Asia. From there the Chinese look down upon India, which they consider an enemy. Tibet is a natural impassable barrier to the hostile forces beneath it. Also we know that the Chinese store some of their short-range missiles in the more inaccessible parts of Tibet. They consider the Tibetan question very sensitive and they are determined to hold on to it."

"So I see by the papers."

"Open revolt in Tibet could bring in Mongolia or India, which have religious ties to Tibet. If there is a new Sino-Indian conflict, Pakistan, China's ally and India's bitter enemy, will no doubt open up a second front. Pakistan is a nuclear power. You know what that means?"

"Yeah. Bye-bye, India. Damn."

"Leave for Tibet immediately, Remo."

"What happened to 'Tibet is none of our business'?"

"It wasn't and it isn't. But now that I know that the Master of Sinanju has triggered the chain of events now building toward crisis, it is our responsibility to interdict Squirrelly Chicane."

"What do you mean 'we,' white eyes?" Remo muttered.

Chapter 19

The night before she was to leave India for Tibet, the forty-seventh Bunji Lama could not sleep.

She tossed on her kang and dreamed wild dreams. This much the scriptures later recorded. What they failed to record was that chocolate-covered cherries as much as insomnia kept her from sleep.

She sat up, too enervated for rest, and with her perfect teeth-indicating her high state of spiritual evolution-she broke the outer chocolate shell and sucked the sweet nectar that was within.

From time to time she hummed to herself. Often she sang softly.

"I am the Buddha. The Buddha is me. I found myself under the bodhi tree. Don't cry for me, Pasadeeenaaa."

Outside the Dalai Lama's Dharamsala abode, the Tibetan exile community gathered around, spinning their tassled prayer wheels in their hands. Those who understood English translated for the others.

"The new Bunji Lama sings as sweetly as any woman," it was said.

"Move over, Evita," the Bunji was heard to sing.

This was not so easily translated, and became a point of much contention to Buddhist scholars in the next century.

"Bunji! Bunji!" they cried. "Give us your blessings, O Bunji!'

Squirrelly Chicane heard the calls, but did not understand the words. She did not need to understand. It was her public calling, her new public, and she could not ignore them.

Swathed in her saffron robes, her peaked lama's cap making her seem taller than her diminutive dancer's stature, she stepped out onto the great balcony where the Dalai Lama held his audiences.

She was blowing kisses to the wild approval of the crowd when Lobsang appeared at her side.

"What are they saying?" she asked.

"They wish only to drink in your wisdom, Buddha Sent," Lobsang said.

"I'll pontificate, you translate," Squirrelly said. Lifting her voice, she said, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life."

Lobsang recast the words into Tibetan and then Hindi.

"Squeeze the day!" Squirrelly added.

The crowd gasped. They began to prostrate themselves, throwing their bodies to the ground and bumping their foreheads on the dirt. It looked wonderfully aerobic.

"They are with you, Bunji," Lobsang said.

"Great! Tell them-oh, tell them life is just a bowl of cherries."

Lobsang translated. The prostrating abruptly ceased. Blinking, dubious eyes lifted toward the Bunji Lama.

"What's wrong?" Squirrelly asked.

"They do not understand cherries."

"What's to understand? A cherry is a cherry."

"They are poor and have never seen a cherry, much less eaten one."

"Then tell them life is a bowl of tsampa. "

After Lobsang translated this, a sea of foreheads began bumping the ground again.

"You know," Squirrelly said as she basked in the strenuous worship of her new public, "I can see an exercise video coming out of this-Bumping with the Bunji."

WHEN THE SUN CAME up, the gilt palanquin of the Dalai was brought from storage. The Tibetans wept to see it. It had been used to bear the Dalai into exile and now it was to carry the greatest lama of all time back to Lhasa, where she would seize the lion Throne and cast out the cruel Han Chinese.

They lined the road leading to the mountain pass. All the way to the border they stood side by side like human flowers.

Some were fortunate enough to witness the Bunji emerge from the house of the Dalai Lama. They gaped to see the Dalai prostrate himself six times to the Bunji and the Bunji did not bow back once.

Then, with stately majesty, the Bunji stepped into the palanquin, and the bearers lifted it with not a grunt of complaint.

It was as if the Bunji weighed less than a snapdragon.

The palanquin lurched forward. A ferocious Mongol walked ahead of it, glowering and searching the faces of the crowd for would-be assassins. He carried high the saffron parasol of the Dalai Lama, signifying that a torch had been passed to a new spiritual leader.

The regent of the Bunji strode beside the palanquin. Lobsang Drom walked proud with his head held high, but no one had eyes for him.

All eyes were fixed on the Bunji Lama.

"The Bunji has as sweet a face as any woman's," it was said. All noticed the Bunji's saffron robes. Even the Bunji's nails, long and tapered, were saffron. Truly, people whispered, this was the god-king of the old days returned.

As the palanquin moved closer to the border, the crowds began to follow. They formed a tail, a thousand people long. They were Tibetans and Indians, Khampas and Nepalese.

In their individual languages, they cried out their joy and their hopes.

"Bunji Lama zindabad!" cried the Indians in Hindi. "Long live the Bunji Lama."

"Lama kieno!" shouted the Tibetans. "Know it, O Lama!"

"We're gonna kick Chinese butt," the Bunji shouted back, and although no one in those days knew what it meant, the cry of the Bunji Lama was taken up by the lips of all worshipers, regardless of nationality. Apart for centuries, they were united by the Light That had Come.

"We're gonna kick Chinese butt!" they chanted over and over, few understanding their own words.

"Your people are with you, Presence," Kula the Mongol boomed out in his thunderous voice.

"This," the Bunji was overheard to say, "is only the first reel."

INTO THE MOUNTAINOUS frontier of what the Chinese authorities called the Tibetan Autonomous Region, a man came running. He wore the dark turban and bushy beard of a Sikh hill man.

Panting, he approached the checkpoint where People's Liberation Army border troops guarded the narrow pass that the Dalai Lama had taken into ignominious exile decades before. Beyond it lay the snowy dome called Mt. Kailas, and at its foot the impossibly blue sky-mirrors of Lakes Manasarowar and Rakas Tal.

For over an hour the nervous PLA soldiers detected a growing mutter to the west, very disturbing to the ears. There were rumors of the Bunji Lama's return, but being Chinese, they knew not what it meant.

"Do not shoot! Do not shoot! I am Han! Like you, I am Han!"

The Han soldiers of Beijing held their fire. The hill man came ripping off his beard and turban to show that he was of their blood and color. A Chinese.

"I am Wangdi Chung," he said, puffing. "And I have failed to poison the Bunji Lama. She comes."

"She?"

"It is a she."

The soldiers of Beijing looked at one another in puzzlement. One woman. What was the difficulty? She would be taken into custody if her papers were not in order. And since the soldiers of Beijing were simple farmers' sons and could not read, the Bunji Lama's papers could not possibly be in order.

"You do not understand, you stupid turtle eggs!" Wangdi Chung cursed. "The Bunji Lama is followed by a thousand adherents."

The soldiers looked at one another again. There were three of them. One, the sergeant, was in charge of the other two. Each man had a Type 57 assault rifle and a side arm. The sergeant had responsibility for their bullets. He went to the steel ammunition box and checked the number of rounds. It was very low. He came back to report this to the agitated Intelligence agent.

"There are enough bullets to kill the Bunji Lama and twenty or twenty-five others if no round goes astray."

"If you kill the Bunji Lama, we will all be torn limb from limb," warned Wangdi Chung.

The soldiers of China laughed. In their years in Tibet, they had not known a Tibetan to do more than curse at an offense.

"They are Buddhists. They will not fight."

"Walking before them is a Mongol warrior as fierce as any I have ever seen."

"One Mongol?"

"One Mongol."

The faces of the Han soldiers said that was different. Very different.

"We do not have enough bullets to stop a Mongol," the sergeant said, looking at his bullets unhappily. "But what can we do? If we abandon our post, we will be executed and our relatives will be sent the bill for the very bullets that execute us."

The soldiers fretted and discussed their conundrum, while down in the hot plains of India, the mutter of human voices grew and swelled and began echoing off the mountains. It took the form of a woman singing:

"I am the Buddha, The Buddha is me. Predestination is the place to be!"

"We're gonna kick Chinese butt!" chorused a thousand voices.

After Wangdi Chung translated the English threat into Chinese, the soldiers of Beijing shot him dead and fled into the mountains.

And in this fashion did the historic train of the Bunji Lama enter the mountains that ring Tibet, and Tibet itself.

THE MINISTER of state security debated with himself the best way to communicate failure to the premier of China as he waited for the operator to connect him with the Great Hall of the People.

There was nothing in Mao's Little Red Book that fitted the circumstance. Or if there was, he could not find it.

Presently the smoky voice of the premier came on the line. "What is it?"

The security minister hesitated. He must do this clearly yet diplomatically, for the telephone line might have unwelcome ears.

"Speak!"

"When the old gentleman on the border lost his horse, who could know that it was not actually good fortune?" the security minister said, hoping that a Confucian epigram did not offend the premier's ears.

To his surprise, the premier responded with a Confucian epigram of his own. "The head of the cow does not fit the mouth of the horse."

The minister of state security searched his mind for a suitable rejoinder. "When one enters a place, he should follow the customs thereof," he said.

"Ah," said the premier. "I hear thunder out of a clear sky. How many follow the red hat?"

A direct question. He gave a direct answer. "One thousand, two thousand. It is difficult to know how to accommodate so many visitors under my current instructions."

There it was. Out in the open. The minister of state security waited for the reply.

"How many cameras record these events?"

"Cameras?"

"Television cameras."

"None."

"Ah," said the premier. The pause on the line was marked by the premier's slow, labored breathing. It was said that excessive tobacco smoking was the cause. Already the buzzards of the politburo were gathering about the premier, and his life was not yet spent.

"Do you remember the old proverb, 'Kill a monkey to frighten the chickens'?"

"Yes."

"I knew you would," said the premier, who then terminated the conversation.

The minister of state security listened to the buzz of the dead line for a full thirty seconds before he replaced it with a trembling hand.

Here in his office-one of the most powerful in Beijing-he would have to come to a most difficult decision.

It was one thing to arrange for a poisoning on Indian soil and cast suspicion on a rival lama. It was another to engineer the death of the Bunji Lama on Tibetan soil. If things went badly, blame would attach itself to the state security ministry. And the storm that was gathering promised to move across international borders.

No piece of paper, no whisper of conversation, could lawfully prove that the premier of China had ordered this thing to be done.

Yet it must be done, or the minister of state security would lose the support of the most powerful man in all of China-even if they whispered that he had the life expectancy of an elderly rabbit.

It was a difficult thing, this not knowing what to do.

Chapter 20

The Bunji Lama had a splitting headache as her palanquin was borne through the Gurla Pass and into the mountains. Every two or three hundred feet she called her train to a halt and went behind a rock to regurgitate the contents of her stomach.

"Look how the Bunji shows us that she understands our suffering," the followers of the Bunji Lama whispered. "She has willed herself to share our pain."

It was later so written into the scriptures, but in the early hours of the Bunji Lama's return to Tibet, her sufferings were constant. So were her complaints-although the scriptures made no mention of these things.

"Anybody got any Excedrin extrastrength?" the Bunji called out as she was helped into her palanquin, whose goldfringed roof protected her from the harsh sun and elements.

"You must overcome all suffering," Lobsang Drom cautioned.

"What's wrong with me? I can't keep down food, and my head feels like some heavy-metal moron mistook it for a bass drum."

"Altitude sickness," explained Kula, pounding his chest. "You are breathing the sacred air of the Himalayas. It is good for you."

"I feel like I'm gonna die!" Squirrelly Chicane moaned, throwing herself onto her silken cushions.

"If you die," warned Lobsang Drom, "you will only have to make this journey again in your next life."

"Don't remind me," Squirrelly said, burying her head under a mountain of pillows. "I gotta do something about this headache."

The palanquin began bumping along mountain trails again, and the procession followed, a thousand voices lifting in prayer and a thousand prayer wheels spinning and spinning.

"Om mani padme hum, " they droned.

"Tell them to stop," groaned Squirrelly.

"We cannot. They must pray to ward off the mountain demons and the Chinese."

"Who's the Bunji Lama around here-you or me? Tell them to stop."

"It is impossible," said Lobsang stubbornly

Squirrelly opened her bloodshot blue eyes and sat up. Her stomach jumped. She hadn't felt this bad since she'd crossed the mystic midlife barrier.

"For a bit player, you act like the director," she said.

"You have much to learn, O Bunji."

The face of the Tibetan looked altogether too smug, Squirrelly thought. She rummaged around in a tiny purse. Maybe there was some aspirin there. She found no aspirin, but there was a half-smoked cigarette, squeezed in a gold roach clip.

"Anybody got a light?" she asked, sticking the butt out of the palanquin.

A helpful Tibetan man trotted up and tried to light it on the run. He was using some kind of tinderbox. It took three minutes, but the cigarette began smoldering fitfully.

Squirrelly smoked her way up into the rarefied air of the roof of the world and tried to concentrate on the task at hand.

She had a first act. That was perfect, except for this altitude-sickness crap. The third act would work itself out. How hard could it be to talk the Chinese into being reasonable? They were Buddhists, too. Closet Buddhists, maybe, but Buddhists to the bone. It was in their blood.

But here she was three hours into what would have to be the second act, and so far all that was happening was a blinding headache and a lot of vomiting.

Audiences wouldn't sit still for watching Squirrelly Chicane actually throwing up in Technicolor. A little suffering went a long way, entertainment-wise.

"Maybe I'll keep the headache and cut all this vomiting."

"You must clear your body of all distractions, Bunji," Lobsang intoned.

That was another thing. She needed a male lead. So far, all she had were character-actor types. If only that yummy Remo had come along. He would have been perfect.

Maybe, Squirrelly thought, if nothing better presented itself, she would expand his part. Write him into the screenplay. Of course, there was no way he was going to be in the book. But audiences would understand if she took certain liberties in order to dramatize events.

But who the hell could play him? Richard Gere? Not intense enough. Steven Seagal? Rumor was he was a rammer. Squirrelly Chicane did not play opposite rammers. Ken Wahl had the right look, but his career had gone so far south the joke was he slept with the penguins. And Fred Ward was losing his hair, for goodness' sake.

It was, she decided as the sickly sweet smoke made her pounding head feel as big as a weather balloon, going to be a huge problem.

THERE WERE TANKS waiting for them at the bottom of the mountain. T-64s with the red star of China on their turrets.

Stony-faced soldiers in olive drab stood blocking the roads, their AK-47s held before them, spike bayonets fixed.

Squirrelly discovered this when Lobsang reached in and shook her awake.

"Bunji. The hour of reckoning has come."

"The what?" Squirrelly said dreamily.

"The climax."

"Oh, I love climaxes," Squirrelly said, turning over and crushing her face against a pillow. "Did I come?"

A strong hand reached in and pulled her out by her hair. She stood in her slippered feet, her maroon lama's cap squashed down on her head.

Squirrelly lifted the lamb's-fleece fringe off her forehead so she could see.

She saw Kula, looking grim.

"Is that any way to treat a lama?" she said.

"We will face the Chinese together."

Squirrelly looked in the direction of the Mongol's sideways glance. She saw three tanks and the soldiers.

"What do I do?" she whispered.

"You will know," said Kula.

An official-looking man in a green uniform advanced, flanked by two soldiers in PLA olive drab.

"I am PSB man. Public Security Bureau," he said. "You are Squirrelly Chicane?"

"I have a visa."

"I will see your visa."

Squirrelly dug it out of her purse.

The PSB man looked at it carefully and said, "I must search your belongings for contraband."

"All I have," said Squirrelly, smiling her best curl-their-toes smile, "are what you see here. My palanquin and a few close personal friends." She waved airily in the direction of her train, whose numbers seemed to reach back to the horizon.

"Do they have entry visa?"

"Permission was given for the Bunji to be accompanied by her retinue," Lobsang pointed out.

"All these?"

"Hey, I'm planning a really big production," Squirrelly said quickly. "I need crew to scout locations, set up liaisons and research local costumes and exteriors. By the way, do you happen to know where we can find some really good Tibetan sound stages?"

The PSB man looked at her with the bland expression of someone who understood little and feared to lose face. "I will examine belongings now," he said.

Squirrelly waved him to her palanquin, where her few belongings were. "Feel free."

Soldiers rushed up and used their spike bayonets to poke among the cushions. Finding nothing, they started spearing them and hurling them away.

"Hey! Be careful! That's my best palanquin"

She was ignored. Behind them the train of the Bunji Lama stood somberly and spun their prayer wheels.

Surreptitiously Squirrelly signaled them to spin faster.

The prayer wheels cranked in agitation, varicolored tassels becoming blurs.

Squirrelly smiled. This was great. Look at that backdrop. The wedgewood sky. The cast of extras. It was the perfect panoramic wide-angle-lens shot. This wouldn't be just another Squirrelly Chicane movie. This was going to be an epic. Maybe the last of the epics. She could already smell the box-office dollars.

Suddenly the PSB official flung her purse to ground. He was holding her roach clip. It squeezed the burned-down butt of her last reefer. Digging farther, he came upon her stash of bhang.

"Contraband!" he barked.

"Oh, give me a break," Squirrelly snapped. "It's less than an ounce. Personal use. Savvy?"

The PSB shouted something in Mandarin and waved for the skirmish line of soldiers to advance.

"What did he say?" Squirrelly asked Kula.

Kula gripped his bone-handled knife and hissed, "He has ordered our arrest."

"Arrest?"

"We are to be taken to prison."

"Prison?"

Windburned eyes narrowing, Kula unsheathed his silver dagger.

Squirrelly knocked it from his hand. "Are you crazy?" she spat. "Put that thing away."

"We will not be taken by Chinese," Kula said through tight teeth.

"Don't go Klingon on me. Don't you see this is perfect? The misunderstood and cruelly persecuted Bunji Lama is summarily hauled off to prison. That's our second act!"

Chapter 21

On the outskirts of the frontier town of Zhangmu, just inside Tibet, Remo Williams stood by the side of the NepaleseTibetan Friendship Highway waiting for an Isuzu WuShiLing to come by.

So far, all he had seen were the clunky old green Jiefeng trucks. He was starting to think he'd have to settle for a Dongfeng, which, according to the hitchhikers' guidebook he'd picked up in Hong Kong, was not as roomy as a WuShiLing, but definitely faster than a Jiefeng.

Normally Smith's connections could get Remo to almost any spot on earth. But the Chinese had cut off Tibet's few commercial airports, sealed its borders to foreigners, and only necessary commercial truck traffic was passing through ground checkpoints.

Remo had checked in with Smith when he reached the Hong Kong airport.

"There are reports the Bunji Lama has crossed the border of Tibet," Smith had told him, his voice grim, "followed by a train of upward of a thousand pilgrims.

"Any word of Chiun?"

"No," Smith had said.

"Maybe you should call 1-800-GENGHIS. "

"I beg your pardon?"

"Boldbator Khan has an 800 number of his own."

"You are joking."

"I called it myself."

Over the miles of intangible phone line, Remo could almost hear Harold Smith mentally debating whether or not to accept Remo's word.

"Can't hurt to call," Remo prompted.

"One moment," said Smith.

He came back a moment later, saying, "The line is busy."

"Must be a run on looting and pillaging," Remo said dryly. "But it was Boldbator who hired Chiun to find the Bunji Lama. Maybe he's trying to chisel another roomful of gold to save her from the Chinese."

"And there is no doubt if Miss Chicane and her entourage have crossed the border, PLA units will be sent to intercept them," Smith said tightly.

"So what do we do?"

Smith was silent a moment. "Change your plans. Do not fly to New Delhi. Go to Nepal. From Katmandu you can enter Tibet and reach any number of points as developments warrant. Contact me when you arrive."

In Katmandu, Remo had called Smith again.

"Squirrelly Chicane has been arrested by the Chinese authorities," Smith reported. "It just came over the wire."

"So much for the First Lady's guarantee."

Smith cleared his throat unhappily. "I believe the charge is drug possession. This could be extremely embarrassing for the First Lady."

"Can't have the First Lady embarrassed," Remo said. "Congress might faint dead away. So what do I do now?"

"Miss Chicane has been taken to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Cross the Nepalese border on foot. Once you bypass customs and Public Security Bureau posts, it should be easy to hitchhike to Lhasa along the Friendship Highway."

"Hitchhike? Is that the best you can do?"

"Unfortunately, yes. In Lhasa, make contact there with Bumba Fun."

"Who's he-the local Bozo the clown?"

"Bumba Fun is a member of Chushi Gangdruk. Tibetan resistance."

"The Tibetans have resistance fighters? How come I never heard of them?"

"Because when they are successful," Smith said dryly, "the Chinese occupation suppresses news of their exploits, and when they are not they are tortured and executed in secret. Bumba Fun will be your guide."

"I don't need a guide."

"Do you speak Tibetan?"

"No."

"Can you pass for Tibetan?"

"You know I can't. "

"You will need Bumba Fun."

AND SO REMO now on a dusty road on the outskirts of a truck depot just inside Tibet waiting for a modern WuShiLing, or at least a semimodern brown Dongfeng. But definitely not a Refeng truck, because the guidebook had warned him they were slow and breakdown prone, and there was hardly any room in the cabin for the driver, never mind a passenger.

After two hours of nothing but Jiefengs, Remo gave up. The next Dongfeng or Jiefeng that came along, he decided, was his. He just hoped the driver had bathed some time in the past six months.

The next truck turned out to be a shiny new WuShiLing, so Remo figured his luck was starting to change.

Following the guidebook's directions, Remo popped his thumbs up, stacking his fists while making butter-churning motions.

The driver brought his truck to a screeching, dusty halt. He had a wise old windburned face with merry eyes. He might have been thirty; he might have been fifty. The harsh mountains aged people mercilessly. He wore a tight-fitting winter hat with hanging earflaps. When he stuck out his tongue in greeting, he reminded Remo of a middle-aged fourth-grader.

"Lhasa?" said Remo.

"Shigatse," said the driver.

"Is that near Lhasa?" asked Remo.

"Yes, yes. Only one, two hundred mile nearby."

"Close enough for government work," said Remo, climbing in.

The driver got the truck in gear and asked, "What your name?"

"Remo."

"Re-mo. Good name. No other name?"

"Buttafuoco," said Remo.

"It is a proud name."

"Back in America you can't hardly go a day without hearing it."

"Journalist?"

"I'm with the Socialist Workers' Weekly."

The driver spit.

"But I'm really a CIA agent," Remo added.

The driver gave his chest a pound that made his earflaps dance. "CIA good. Kick Communist behind. Why you go Lhasa? Much trouble there."

"I got a date with the Bunji Lama."

"Tashi delek."

"What does that mean?" asked Remo.

The driver laughed. "Good luck. Good luck to you and Bunji Lama. He-he-he-he."

The road was a snake track. Every road in Tibet, it seemed, was a snake track winding in and around towering mountains, scarps and snowcaps and then dropping into valleys that were yellow with mustard and lush green gorges.

Mostly, however, Tibet was a place of mountains. Every time they put a mountain behind them, up ahead loomed three or four new snowcaps. It was like driving through a video-game landscape of repeating horizons, except these were not monotonous but breathtaking in their sheer endlessness.

Remo had never been a big fan of mountains, but he couldn't take his eyes off these.

The driver double-clutched like a madman, taking hairpin turns with a reckless joy. Several times Remo was sure the wheels on his side were spinning over thin air. He kept one hand on the door handle in case they went over and he had to jump free.

The road degenerated to gravel, and in other places was a narrow passage through the remains of a longago rockslide. The wreckage of abandoned cars and trucks rusted along the side of the road. The ones that had gone over a too-narrow mountain pass lay smashed among the boulders.

The terrain became barren, windswept, inhospitable.

The air grew thinner. Remo adjusted his respiration rhythms. In Sinanju, breathing was all. Correct breathing, which Chiun had taught him, powered the human machine, turning every cell in the body into a miniature furnace of limitless potential.

Remo slowed the cycles of his breathing, extracting more oxygen with each slowed-down breath. He had dealt with high altitudes before, in Mexico City and elsewhere. But Tibet was the roof of the world. Its mountains were higher than any others. He hoped he could function normally on the lean mixture of Tibet's thin air.

After two hours the throbbing in his oxygen-deprived brain subsided. It was a good sign.

"When do the mountains stop?" Remo asked at one point.

The driver gestured vaguely in the direction of the incredibly blue sky. "Mountains never stop. Go up to sky. Go on forever."

From time to time the driver had to slow to allow a yak herder and two or three black hairy yaks to pass by. Once they flew around a corner and ran into a knot of goats. The goats scrambled up the mountains, jumped off the cliff and dodged every which way.

The driver laughed as if he thought it was the funniest thing on earth.

Looking back, Remo saw, miraculously, no goat roadkill. They had all survived. Even the ones that had jumped had landed on ledges and were now pulling themselves up again.

"How many I get?" the driver wanted to know.

"None."

The driver slapped his steering wheel so hard it should have broken. He grinned. "I best damned driver in Tibet."

"That's what scares me," Remo said glumly.

THEIR LUCK RAN out as night fell. Up ahead flashes illuminated the mountains, throwing them into momentary relief. It was as if God were taking flash pictures.

"Maybe Chinese tanks," the Tibetan muttered.

But it wasn't, they saw as they drew into a valley. It was an electrical storm. The sky blazed and sizzled. Thunder came cannonading toward them, bouncing off mountains that acted like natural amplifiers.

Then the rains came, falling in drumming sheets that made the windshield swim and driving impossible for any reasonable person.

In response, the Tibetan driver pressed the accelerator harder.

"Pack it in!" Remo shouted over the engine roar. "Pull over!"

The Tibetan shook his head. "No. River ahead. We can make."

"Are you crazy? Even if you can see the river, it's gotta be choked by all this rain."

Before Remo could stop him, the driver bared his teeth like a wolf and gunned the engine.

The truck roared ahead-and suddenly the color of the water on the windshield turned sloppy brown. The vibrating chassis abruptly settled down.

"We reach river," the driver said, pleased with himself.

The wheels were throwing up muddy water and complaining. Then all of a sudden they stopped.

Remo cracked his window and stuck his head out. His hair was immediately plastered to his head.

He saw that they were floating downstream. The truck was turning a slow circle as the torrent bore them along.

"We're afloat," he told the driver after getting the window cranked up.

"Good. Save gas."

"What if we sink?"

"Can you swim?"

"Yeah."

"Good. I cannot. You must rescue me."

They floated along two or three miles until they struck a rock and the truck reeled and tipped over.

Remo was ready. He got his door open and pulled himself out. Then he reached in and hauled the driver out by his greased hair. The man was already covered with mud.

Remo got him up across his shoulder in a fireman's carry and jumped onto a rock. There were other rocks by which he could make his way to shore.

After letting the driver down, he said, "Nice driving."

"Truck will dry off by winter," the driver said unconcernedly. "We walk rest of way."

"How far?"

"In rain, twice as far," said the driver.

"That's too far," said Remo. But there was nothing else he could do. They started off.

Heads down, eyes squeezed tight against the downpour, they walked more than an hour through slashing rain that quickly made agitated ponds in the arid plateaus. The thunder was constant. Fortunately the lightning was far to the north.

"Won't this rain ever stop?" Remo grumbled.

The driver shrugged. "We have saying-humans say that time passes. Time says that humans pass."

All at once the rain stopped. The lightning and thunder continued. The air had a cleanness to it that Remo, who'd spent most of his life in American cities, rarely tasted.

As he walked, Remo willed his body temperature to rise. Steam began escaping his clothes. After twenty minutes of walking, he was bone-dry.

"Tumo. Good," said the Tibetan approvingly.

"Tumo. What's that?"

"Lamas use it. Make body warm, dry off fast. You smart American."

"Not bad for a white eyes, huh?"

"What you talk? You not white eyes."

"What do you mean?"

"White eyes gray or blue. Your eyes good color. Brown."

"Someone must have steered me wrong," Remo muttered.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, they topped a rise and suddenly they were standing on the brink of an unexpected valley. There was a city down in the valley. Here and there people stood on the roofs of stone houses and the larger buildings.

They were black silhouettes against the intermittent lightning flashes. The electrical storm was coming in.

"Don't those people know enough to get out of the storm?" Remo asked.

"They cannot help themselves. Chinese make them do it."

"Make them do what?"

"Make them catch lightning."

"What do you mean-catch the lightning?"

"Chinese make examples of some Tibetans who displease them. If they catch lightning, they die. If they don't, they live."

The rumble of thunder drew nearer.

"What if they refuse?" Remo asked.

"Entire family killed before their eyes," said the Tibetan sadly. "Man who refuse get bill for bullets used to execute family. It is Chinese custom."

"Maybe it's time to introduce a new custom," said Remo, starting down off the plateau.

Chapter 22

It was written that when the Chinese oppressors confronted the Bunji Lama, the Lamb of Light did not resist them, but allowed herself to be taken by skyboat to the Drapchi Prison in Lhasa.

Not all of her train were taken to Lhasa. Only the Bunji and her immediate retinue. Some say the rest were driven back to the holy land. Others that they were divided into Indians and Tibetans. And as the Indians trudged back to their homeland, the rattle of guns punctuated by grenade explosions and screams smote their horrified ears. After which came a profound silence, and the air filled with the metallic scent of blood.

Being devout Buddhists, they held their anger deep within them and continued their homeward journey.

The truth was never learned. The scriptures recorded only that when the Bunji Lama returned to Lhasa, she arrived on the wings of a Chinese skyboat and no Tibetan who toiled in the fields or in the machine shops knew that the Buddha-Sent One had come at last.

SQUIRRELLY CHICANE took one look at her cell and said, "You have got to be kidding!"

She whirled and got up on her tiptoes, hoping to lord over the heads of the soldiers of China.

"If you don't get me better accommodations, the First Lady is going to hear about this. And don't think she won't."

"This best cell in Drapchi Prison."

Squirrelly looked at the cell again. It was a box. Stone walls. Drippings. Sand on the floor. Not even straw. No toilet. No running water.

"Does this look like the kind of place you'd throw a Bunji Lama, the Bunjiest Lama who ever walked the earth?"

The soldiers looked at one another, their glances unreadable. And unceremoniously shoved Squirrelly Chicane into her cell. The iron-barred door was slammed shut, and the key in the lock was turned. It took two grunting guards using all their strength to turn it.

After they had gone, Squirrelly took a deep breath and said, "Yoo-hoo. Kula. Can you hear me?"

"I am in cell."

Lobsang droned, "I am in a cell, as well. It is cold."

"Listen, we gotta escape."

"Escape?" Kula grunted. "Bunji, you insisted that we submit to these Chinese demons."

"And we did. Okay, I've got my second act now. But I don't like the accommodations. What is this bucket? Oh, peeew. It stinks."

"The Bunji is very fortunate to have a bucket," Lobsang said dolefully. "I will have to go in the sand that is for sleeping."

"Try to hold it in, because we're blowing this Popsicle stand."

"How, Bunji?" asked Kula. "These doors are very stout."

"So? You're a big, strapping Mongrol. You're even stouter. Don't tell me you couldn't bust out if you put your mind to it."

"All things are possible," Kula admitted, "if they are predestined."

Squirrelly summoned up her best little-ol'-me Southern-belle accent. "You can do it, Kula. I know you can. Listen, you get us out of here and you can be my costar. Of course, you won't actually play yourself. Lord knows you're a hunk, but I've seen you act. Strictly wood. Maybe Richard Gere, if he bulks up, can pull it off."

"I do not understand your words, O Buddha Sent. What is it you wish me to do?"

"Get us out of here. Please. The Bunji will bless you a thousand times if you succeed."

Squirrelly listened as the big Mongol began throwing his shoulders against the ironbound door. It shook. In fact, the entire corner of the prison shook. But the door held.

"I have failed you, O Bunji. Forgive me."

"It was meant to be," said Lobsang.

"Don't sweat it," Squirrelly said. "I have a B-plan. When they let me make my call, I'll just dial the First Lady. She'll pull the strings that'll get us out of here."

But when Squirrelly later asked a passing turnkey when she would be allowed to place her phone call, the man only laughed.

"You come back here! I know my constitutional rights. I'm entitled to call my lawyer. I'm an American citizen and an Oscar winner! You hear me?"

Chapter 23

No prayer wheels spun in the hill village of Tingri as Kelsang Darlo stood on the tin roof of his humble stone house in which his family cowered. Kelsang Darlo refused to cower.

Someone had stolen a box of grenades from the hated People's Liberation Army garrison, a former monastery. It was Chushi Gangdruk. Everyone knew it was Chushi Gangdruk. But no one knew who belonged to the Chushi Gangdruk except for those who belonged.

This way, no Tibetan who was not Chushi Gangdruk could give up those who were.

So when the Chinese captain, Ran Guohua, had failed to obtain by torture the whereabouts of his missing grenades from the people of Tingri, he had not given up. He had simply waited for the thunder.

It was spring, the season for thunder and lightning and slashing rain, so Captain Guohua did not wait long.

With his soldiers surrounding him protectively, he had gone house to house, not to search this time, but to pick ten men. Good Tibetans. Men of families who would be missed.

And as the thunder grew louder and more fearsome, he made the ten innocent men climb to the roofs of their own houses to catch the lightning.

It was not the first time that good men of Tingri had been made to catch the lightning. The last time, five had done this and two had died. This time the offense was much greater. Captain Guohua understood that the stolen grenades would be used against his own troops if they were not soon found.

And so ten men were forced to stand exposed to the elements, enduring first the slashing rain. When the rain was over, all ten stood unbowed, their faces wet with a clean fresh rain that masked the shame of their tears of frustration, before the terrible lightning.

And no prayer wheels spun to entreat mercy. The Chinese had smashed them and made the people of Tingri melt down their brass for cannon shells and other violent objects. It was a sacrilege. It had been an unending sacrilege since the Iron Tiger Year so long ago.

If Lord Buddha saw to it that he should drop his body, Kelsang Darlo prayed that his wife and children would be spared further indignities. He tried to understand the soldiers, who were only doing the bidding of the captain, who in turn was only doing the bidding of the leaders in Beijing. But there had been rapes. The young women of Tingri had been offered work, paying work, to be trained as nurses for the PLA. On the first day they were raped.

Later, it was true, they were given nurse training. Those who did not take their own lives became good nurses, but very sad and silent in their duties. It was not like a Tibetan maiden not to be full of life and laughter. But this was the lot of Tibet since the Chinese had come.

A crackling bolt of lightning forked down from the blue-black northern sky. It struck two mountain peaks at once, creating a great spectacle of light.

The thunder came twenty seconds later. It made Kelsang flinch. He feared the thunder more than the lightning.

But he feared the wrath of the green soldiers of China most of all. The lightning struck blindly and without malice. Lightning did not punish. It did not ravish young women. It was only doing what Lord Buddha intended lightning to do.

Kelsang found himself praying for the lightning to strike the Chinese, and the thought made his heart sink in sadness. It was not his way to wish harm on any man. But the hardships the Chinese visited upon his people had shattered his faith.

He found himself praying to other gods-the protectors of the faith, Lhamo, Gonpo and Yama, Lord of Death. Perhaps one of them would take pity on him.

Another bolt appeared. This time to the south, behind the plateau.

Illuminated against the bolt was the figure of a man. Tall-too tall to be a Tibetan or a Chinese. The lightning struck thick and hot, and it lasted long enough to show the man clearly as he came down off the plateau.

He came bareheaded, Kelsang saw, and his clothes were thin and insufficient for the chill Tibetan night. His hands were fists and the wrists were very thick, like lengths of wood.

Kelsang looked down. Two Chinese soldiers, their faces hard under their green helmets, were pointing their assault rifles up at him.

They yelled at Kelsang to keep his head high, so the lightning would know where to strike. Unless he wished to tell the truth now.

There was no truth in Kelsang Darlo, so he lifted his head and looked to the south.

Another thunderbolt came and picked out the thick wristed shadow. Perhaps he was some hermit come down off the mountains to seek shelter from the storm. A monk, possibly. He would be a very sorry monk when the Chinese caught him, Kelsang thought.

Yet the man was coming undaunted, purposeful and proud. The way his grandfather had walked down the valley in the days when Tibetans were masters of their own land. It was good to see a man walk as if there was no fear in his heart. Tibet had been so long bereft of such men.

Who was this unafraid one? Kelsang wondered.

The next bolt struck to the west. Something exploded, and Kelsang turned. A roof smoldered. And in the pile, a black shape that had been human a moment before gave off smoke and a sweetish charcoal odor that soon came to Kelsang's nose.

Kelsang recognized the roof. It belonged to Paljor Norbu, a simple barley farmer. A good man. Perhaps his next life would be happier, Kelsang thought sadly. He had not been the same since his only daughter, a nurse, had walked off the mountain before the eyes of the entire village.

A wailing coming from under the burning roof reminded Kelsang that there were those who had still to contend with this life.

The next peal of thunder came from very far away. As did the next. East. And then north. Then east again. It seemed that the storm was changing direction. Perhaps, Kelsang thought, only one would catch the lightning this bitter night. Perhaps he would live.

The soldiers of Beijing thought so, too. They began to mutter to themselves. They still had no answers. The captain would punish them if the truth was not uncovered, and if the captain did not, surely the lost grenades themselves would inflict their own punishment at a later, unexpected time.

Then, just as Kelsang began to breathe more easily, he felt the hair at the back of his neck rise and the unmistakable warning tang of ozone filled his nostrils.

The lightning! It had found him. It was coming.

There was no time to think and no possibility of escape. In the millionth of a second it took for his senses to react to the knowledge of impending lightning, Kelsang's brain could only process the certainty of death.

He had no time feel fear or remorse or any emotion. There was only time to die.

A brilliant blue-white light stabbed through Kelsang's closed eyelids as if they were red-tinted glass. The thunderbolt struck with the force of a thousand blows. It seemed to strike his chest like a stone fist that exploded the air from his lungs and knocked him off his feet.

The thunder smote his ears. He was surprised he could hear the thunder. He should be dead. Was he dead? Sometimes men survived lightning. Sometimes it did not kill at once.

Kelsang thought his eyes were open. But all the world was blue-white. Was he dead or just blind? He felt a pain in his lungs, and the quick, sharp intake of his next breath brought pain. He breathed!

Blinking the harsh lightning light from his eyes, Kelsang tried to feel his body.

"Give me your hand, pal," an alien voice said. It was a man's voice, speaking English, a language Kelsang knew imperfectly.

Blindly Kelsang lifted one hand and felt a wrist. Hard, thick, as solid as a yak's horn. The hand grasped his with firm strength, and Kelsang was yanked to his feet.

The blue-white had gone from his eyes, and in the darkness a hard, humorless face looked at him. It was white and strong like a skull sheathed in porcelain flesh. The man wore simple black clothes. His eyes were deep and dark and without human warmth.

Behind him a fork of lightning seared the night sky, throwing the white man wearing black into relief.

The thunder, when it came seconds later, reminded Kelsang of the man's voice-low, threatening, awful in its muted power.

"Who-who are you?" Kelsang stuttered.

"Doesn't matter. Go home. Protect your family."

And the man stepped back into the darkness. Kelsang watched him go. He shifted from man to shadow to something that seemed to be there and then wasn't.

Kelsang did not go inside his home. He tried to follow the strange white man. In the darkness he tripped over the bodies of the PLA soldiers who had forced him to stand on his roof and brave the elements.

At first Kelsang thought that the soldiers had been relieved of their heads and their helmets had been placed on the stumps of their necks to hide the gory wounds.

But when he looked more closely, Kelsang saw that something had come down with great force on the tops of the helmets, driving them down with a dread force that squeezed their soft human heads into the ridiculously small confines of their helmets.

Kelsang looked for the footprints of the man who had done this awesome thing-the same one he now realized who had struck him with preserving force, carrying him out of the path of the lightning bolt.

There were no footprints. The ground was soft and muddy from the rain. But there were no footprints save for his own and those of the dead soldiers.

Still, Kelsang searched the village for the being who had done these miraculous things.

He found more soldiers. Dead. Dead in horrible, impersonal ways. Heads twisted around backward. Arms torn and flung aside.

Yet none had screamed out as death overtook him.

Even as he thought this, Kelsang heard a man scream. Loud and long. He ran toward the sound.

And there he found Captain Ran Guohua on his knees.

The white man stood over him. It was a joyous sight. The captain on his knees, his head bowed, mouth open in anguish. The white man was simply holding the captain by the back of his neck, somehow exerting enough pressure that the captain's legs refused to move and his arms hung limp in his lap.

As he watched, the white man gave the captain a final wrench, and the captain simply gurgled.

A hand snapped down edge-on and sheared the captain's twisted face off as cleanly as if a broad blade had dropped. The implacable one released the captain's dead carcass, and it fell forward into the mess of its detached face.

Gingerly Kelsang approached the white man. "Jigme."

The white man turned his expressionless face. "What's that?"

"I call you Jigme. In my language, it means 'dreadnaught ' You are the dreadnought who cannot be stopped. Where you come from, Dreadnought?"

The white man pointed toward the mountains to the southwest wordlessly. He seemed preoccupied.

"It is said that among those mountains is the abode of Gonpo," Kelsang said in a trembling voice. "Are you Gonpo?"

The man did not answer directly. "I need to get to Lhasa," he said.

"There are horses."

"No cars?"

"We are poor village. Only Chinese have jeeps here."

"Show me the Chinese jeeps," said the white man, who might not be a man after all.

AS REMO WILLIAMS followed the Tibetan whose life he had saved to the other side of the village, people began pouring out of their houses. They saw the dead Chinese soldiers scattered about like so many shattered puppets. The sight made them cry out.

The Tibetan called back to them in his native language. Remo understood almost none of it. Just two words. Gonpo and Jigme. He wondered who Gonpo was supposed to be. Probably some Himalayan legend. The abominable snowman or the local Hercules.

The farther he walked, the more of an entourage Remo acquired. People were crying, reaching out to touch him, pleading and begging him in words that were unintelligible but voices that were universal in tone. Remo kept walking. It was a long way to Lhasa. He had no time for this.

"They want to know if you are really Gonpo," the Tibetan said.

"If it makes them feel better, tell them yes."

"Are you Gonpo?"

"Do I look like Gonpo to you?"

"You look like Gonpo wearing the body of a chiling. "

"Maybe that's what I am."

"I will call you Gonpo Jigme, then. Gonpo Dreadnought."

And the word was passed back to the other.

"Gonpo Jigme. Gonpo Jigme," they began chanting.

There were no Chinese soldiers at the local garrison. Their jeeps sat idle. Remo picked one, hot-wired the ignition and got the engine going. He loaded extra cans of gas in the back and started off.

The locals ran after him. Remo had to drive slowly in order not to run them down.

"Will you come back, Gonpo Jigme?" one called.

"Doubt it."

"Then who will save us from Chinese reprisals, Gonpo Jigme?"

"Pick up the weapons the Chinese dropped and save yourself."

"We cannot kill the Chinese. It is not our way."

"Then hunker down for a long occupation," said Remo, seeing a break in the mass of people and flooring the gas.

The Chinese jeep surged ahead and soon left the running crowd behind.

Eyes bleak, Remo pushed on north into the endless mountains that seemed to be calling to him.

The strangest part was, they started looking familiar. And Remo had never been in Tibet before.

Chapter 24

Lhasa held its breath.

Everywhere it was whispered that the Bunji Lama was coming to Tibet. No one knew when or where. It was said by some that the Bunji Lama has already been spirited into the city itself. No one could confirm this.

All eyes went hopefully to the Potala, the great 999-room fortress-temple that had been the abode of the Dalai Lama in greater times. It was there that the Lion Throne awaited the future ruler of Tibet. The Dalai Lama had not reclaimed it because he possessed the wisdom to avoid falling back into the toils of the Chinese occupiers. The Panchen Lama had not claimed it because he knew that the Chushi Gangdruk would assassinate his treasonous bones if he dared.

Only the Bunji Lama had the courage to take the throne. All Tibet knew this. The people of Lhasa knew this very well. They also knew that if the Bunji Bogd dared to claim the rightful throne, the Chinese would not react well.

And so Lhasa held its breath and cast uneasy eyes toward the sprawling whitewashed Potala perched high on Red Mountain.

No one was watching the road when the old man rode into the outskirts of the city. He was very old yet black of hair, and sat on his pony like a raven in his red robes, his slitty eyes casting about with a narrow, smoldering anger as they fell upon the shattered lamaseries and other evidences of destroyed traditions.

"They have crushed this place," he muttered under his breath, and there was no one to hear his complaint.

The old man was spotted by a Chinese soldier, who saw at once that he rode a gray pony with a black muzzle. Legend had it these were the strongest of Tibetan ponies, and the Chinese soldier fancied the pony for himself.

And so he unlocked his Type 56 assault rifle and approached the old man with the weapon pointed at him.

"Stop, old one."

The old man pulled back on his reins. The pony stopped and began flicking its tail like a fly whisk.

The soldier demanded the man's name. "Kayrang gi mingla karay sa?"

"Nga mingla Dorje sa."

"Kayrang lungba kanay ray, Dorje?" Where are you from, Dorje?

"Nga Bowo nay yin." I am from Bowo.

"It is forbidden to enter Lhasa," the soldier snapped. "I will have to confiscate your pony."

"If I cannot enter Lhasa," said the old man who called himself Dorje, "I will need my pony to return home."

"You cannot return home until I first confiscate your pony."

"It is not my pony," the old man pleaded, "but my son's pony. He will whip me if I lose him."

"Would you rather be whipped or go to Drapchi Prison?" the soldier countered.

"I would rather do neither," the old man said gently.

"Then you will do both, stubborn one!" ordered the soldier, pushing the barrel of his rifle into the old man's stomach.

"I will do what you say, for I am an old man and defenseless against a strong young soldier such as you."

With an impatient swing of his rifle muzzle, the soldier motioned the old man to enter the city limits. He walked several paces behind the whisking tail of the gray pony, prepared to shoot the old man in the back if he attempted to flee, and trying not to step on the fresh dung the pony was inexplicably beginning to drop in profusion.

It was very strange. Whenever he watched his feet, the way was clear. But as soon as he turned his attention elsewhere, the dung was suddenly soft under his boots.

Perhaps, the soldier thought, this man was one of the old Bon magicians who still roamed the northern solitudes. It was said they could do strange and terrible things. Freeze a man in his tracks. Scorch his sight. Call down shangshang birds. The soldier noticed that the hair on the old man's head lay close and intensely black. It was not like hair, but resembled dry black snow.

A shiver of supernatural fear ran up the soldier's spine, and thereafter he dared not take his watchful eyes off the man's back. No shang-shang would sink its fangs into his throat, if he had to walk through all the dung in Tibet.

Thus did the Master of Sinanju come into the city of Lhasa, alone and unsuspected.

Chapter 25

Remo fought to keep his eyes on the road. It was not easy. Sometimes there was no road. He was on his third tank of gas, it was coming up on dawn, and he had no idea where he was, other than somewhere on the winding road to Lhasa.

All around him were mountains. Snowcapped, misty, eternal and hauntingly familiar mountains. Back in the world-he was thinking of the U.S.A. the way he had in his Vietnam days-Remo walked confident and unstoppable through almost any situation he encountered.

Here, for the first time since he had come to the sun source, he felt small, insignificant, unimportant.

And he was getting nowhere.

So he kept his eyes on the elusive, twisting road and tried not to think of how tiny he felt in this alien but eerily familiar land.

Most of all he tried not to think of what he had seen back in that Tibetan village.

Remo had not come to Tibet to save it. He had a simple mission. Find Chiun. Find Squirrelly Chicane. Drag them both back to the world, hopefully without causing any international complications.

Tibet wasn't his problem. Not that he didn't want to see it liberated from Chinese occupation. But the country was huge, infested with dug-in PLA troops, and most of all the Tibetans were docile to the point of gutlessness. Their religion forbade violence, so they accepted their conquerors and put their faith in faraway, impotent religious figures. Remo felt sorry for them. But if they didn't want to fight for their freedom, that was their problem, not his.

He could only think of what would happen if the PLA suddenly showed up in the Rockies. The Chinese would not last long against ordinary Americans, even armed with pistols and hunting rifles.

Freedom. You want it, you have to fight for it. But Remo had not come to Tibet to fight for its freedom. That wasn't the mission. That didn't mean he wouldn't inflict a little pain along the way if the Chinese pissed him off, but he wasn't going to make a point of it. That village had been a fluke.

Remo was freewheeling down one of the rare straightaways on a mountain that looked like every other mountain for the past two hundred miles, his engine off, when he heard a sound from his past.

Thunk.

Low, hollow-but unmistakable. In Nam it used to trigger his adrenals and cause him to instinctively duck. It was the sound of a round being dropped into a mortar tube.

Remo eased down on the brake. The jeep jerked to a stop. And a hundred yards in front of the jeep's steel bumper, about where he would have been, the round struck. Exactly where the whistle of the falling round told him it would.

Sand and gravel gushed up. Stinging bits struck the windshield and rattled along the hood and frame of the jeep.

Remo gunned the engine, swerved around the smoking crater and made the bottom of the mountain before his attackers could get organized.

In the side mirror he caught a glimpse of tiny figures hunkered down on a ridge. They were too far away to make out, Chinese troops or Tibetan resistance, it was impossible to tell.

If they were Chinese, he was in trouble. They would have radios. But he had a head start.

Remo piloted the jeep through a valley between mountain scarps that was yellow with poppies. It looked exactly like a a scene out of The Wizard of Oz. Somewhere up ahead, he heard the lazy ringing of bells, and Remo wondered if he should try to avoid it.

Farther along, the road simply disappeared, and he found himself running along dry pastureland. That made up his mind. The only way to reach Lhasa was to stay on the road to Lhasa. He had to find the road again.

Checking his side mirror for pursuit, he steered toward the pleasant ringing.

The ugly black shapes of yaks began to appear. Tin bells around their necks made the bucolic sound.

Two yak herders in dusty robes were tending the herd. They looked in Remo's direction with hard, care-worn eyes that held absolutely no welcome.

Yet as Remo drew close, they broke out in applause. The clapping was not exactly hearty, but it was steady. Remo pulled up beside them.

"Lhasa?" he asked.

The two yak herders stopped clapping. They looked at Remo, noticed he was not Chinese and seemed bewildered.

"Lhasa?" said Remo again.

They just stared. Then Remo remembered the Tibetan guidebook on the passenger seat. He thumbed through it a moment and read carefully, "Wo dao Lhasa. I'm going to Lhasa."

Abruptly the two men turned their backs on him and walked back to their yaks, calling over their shoulders something that sounded like "Bu keqi!"

"What'd I say?" Then Remo realized he had been reading from the Chinese section of the guide. They had said the equivalent of "What are you waiting for?"

Frowning, Remo drove on.

Farther along he spotted smoke. And then round black tents. They reminded him of the felt yurts of the Mongol herdsmen, which they called gers. These were smaller. They were scattered around the dun-colored pasture like black beehives. Yaks and a few ponies grazed in the open spaces. Remo saw no people. The only sound was the laughter of children playing.

Remo slowed the jeep as he approached. There was no telling what kind of a welcome he'd get. Heads began poking out of the tent flaps, and the children playing in the dirt with great hilarity suddenly scampered from sight.

"Nice welcome," he muttered. "I feel like the local welcoming committee leper."

In the middle of the sprinkling of tents, Remo shut down the engine and tried his luck with Tibetan.

"Tashi delay!" he shouted.

The heads sticking out of the tents were followed by thick bodies. The men of the village gathered around him. They stood impassive and stony faced. After a moment they began clapping.

"Tujaychay," he said, by way of thank you. The clapping subsided. The Tibetans began returning to their tents.

"Wait! Nga Lhasa dru-giy yin. I'm going to Lhasa."

"Kalishu," a voice said.

Remo looked it up. He had just been told goodbye.

"Great," he muttered. "Anyone here speak English?"

No response.

"Inji-gay shing-giy dugay?" he said, repeating the question in his best Tibetan.

His best Tibetan was obviously not good enough. No one replied.

"I gotta reach Lhasa. I have a meeting with Bumba Fun."

"Bumba Fun!" a female voice cried. "You seek Bumba Fun?" Remo turned in his seat. A young Tibetan woman was pushing out of one of the big round tents. She wore a native costume of many layers-an apron over a long sleeveless dresslike garment the color of charcoal and over that a white blouse. Her hair hung in tight black braids around a pleasantly bronze face.

"You speak English?" Remo asked.

"Ray. Yes."

"Then why didn't you say so?"

"Why you not say looking for Bumba Fun?" she countered.

"Good point. How do I get to Lhasa?"

"Drive north to purple shadow at base of mountain."

"Which mountain?"

The girl pointed north. "That mountain. It called Nagbopori. That mean Black Mountain."

"Okay. Got it. After that?"

"Drive up mountain then down mountain. Keep driving up and down mountain until reach Lhasa."

"Same mountain?"

The girl shook her braids. "No. Many mountain. Take you one day if gas last, never if it run out or tires break."

"Okay. Great. Got it. When I get to Lhasa, how do I find Bumba Fun?"

"Turn jeep around, drive up mountain then down mountain until you come back here. Then I take you to Bumba Fun."

Remo blinked.

"Bumba Fun is here?"

"Ray. Yes."

"Then why don't I just skip the Lhasa part and you take me to meet him here and now?"

The Tibetan girl frowned. "You not go to Lhasa?"

"I need to see Bumba Fun more."

"You could see Bumba Fun in Lhasa, too."

"How can I see him in Lhasa if he's here?"

"Bumba Fun in Lhasa and here also," the girl said.

"Are we talking about the same Bumba Fun?" Remo wanted to know.

"How many Bumba Funs you know?"

"I don't know any. How many are there?"

The girl scrunched up her face. "Fifty, maybe sixty Bumba Funs."

"How do I know where I find the right one?"

"All Bumba Funs are correct." The woman looked at Remo with about as much puzzlement, Remo figured, as he was looking at her. Finally she said, "You go to Lhasa to see Bumba Fun or you see Bumba Fun here?"

"I'll settle for the local Fun," said Remo, getting out of the jeep.

"Come this way," invited the girl.

"Why did everyone clap when I drove up?" Remo asked, just to keep a fascinating conversation going.

"At first they think you Chinese."

"Tibetans applaud the Chinese?"

The girl shook her braided hair. "Beijing insist when Chinese come, we clap to make them feel welcome even though in our hearts we want for ravens to pluck out their eyes."

"Oh."

"We call it the clapping tax."

The girl took him to a tent on the outskirts of the village and swept the entrance flap aside.

"I present to you Bumba Fun," she said.

Remo stepped in. The interior of the tent was thick with a smoky buttery odor he associated with Lobsang Drom. It was dark. There was light coming down from the smoke hole in the center of the tent roof, and it made a bright circle. Around the edge of the circle was shadow mixed with stale yak dung smoke hanging still in the air.

The man seated outside the circle of light looked old. He was big, and reminded Remo of a Mongol, except for the turquoise buttons in his earlobes and the bright red yarn interwoven in his thick hair. He looked up with one brown eye like a tiger's-eye agate. The other eye was a blind milky pearl.

"What your name, chiling?" he asked.

"Around here they call me Gonpo Jigme," Remo told him.

Behind him the Tibetan girl gasped. Bumba Fun opened his good eye to its widest.

"You have come down off Mt. Kailas to liberate Tibet?" said Bumba Fun.

"Actually I'm just here to-"

A commotion penetrated the tent. Engine sounds. Yelling. Remo couldn't understand a word.

"The Chinese come!" the girl cried. "They will see the jeep and punish us all."

"I'll handle this," Remo said, pushing out of the tent. "They want me, not you people."

The girl got in his way, her bronze face pleadingly stubborn.

"No! No! You must hide. They must not find you here."

"You forget, I'm Gonpo Jigme."

She put her hands on his chest. "That what I mean. If you kill them all, there will be reprisals. More Chinese come. You must hide. Please!"

Remo hesitated. "What about the jeep? It's stolen."

"We will explain away jeep. Now, quickly. Hide."

Remo ducked back into the tent. He sat down and waited.

"So," he said, "you're Bumba Fun."

"And you are white," said Bumba Fun.

"Sue me."

Bumba Fun stared at Remo with his unwinking tiger's-eye orb and said, "The god does not ride you."

"What god?"

"Gonpo. Also called Mahakala."

"Never heard of him."

"He is known as the Protector of the Tent. You do not know this?"

One ear attuned to the harsh sound of an arriving mechanized column, Remo shrugged. "News to me."

"You are not Gonpo Jigme."

Remo had no answer to that. Instead, he said, "And you're probably not the Bumba Fun I'm looking for."

"Perhaps. But I am the Bumba Fun you have found."

Outside there were voices, high-pitched Chinese shouts and the more subdued strained replies in Tibetan.

Remo crept to the tent flap and peered out.

In the center of the tents, a contingent of Chinese soldiers in PLA green were hectoring the assembled nomads. They took it meekly, with heads bowed low. One Tibetan acting as a spokesman was trying to reason with the PLA commander, whose dark eyes looked as if they had been sliced into his doughy face with the edge of a bayonet. Although Remo couldn't understand a word on either side, he caught the gist of the exchange from the way the commander kept pointing to Remo's abandoned jeep.

In the background other soldiers were going tent to tent, routing out the women and children.

"It's only a matter of time before they come here," Remo told Bumba Fun.

"And it is only a matter of time before they begin shooting until they have their thief."

"Look, this is my problem. Why don't I surrender myself and take my chances?"

"It is a good plan," said Bumba Fun, getting up. "But I will try to reason with them first."

Bumba Fun stepped past Remo and emerged into the light.

He spoke up. The Chinese commander whirled at the sound and pointed at Bumba Fun. PLA troops jumped into action, grabbed Fun and pushed him along with kicking boots and slapping hands.

Remo almost jumped out at that point, but decided to let Fun play out his hand. It was his village. He knew what he was doing.

They made Bumba Fun kneel at the commander's feet by striking him on the shoulders with their rifle butts. The old man went down without resistance.

The soldiers surrounded him. All around them the people of the village watched with the drained faces Remo had seen all over Asia.

It was an interrogation, with the commander screaming, Bumba Fun answering meekly, and Remo clenching his teeth and fists, wanting to jump in.

As he watched, his mind counted the soldiers, factored in the number of weapons and the surest and softest targets. He could take them out. Easy. But with all the women and children standing around, there would be friendly casualties.

Then, in the middle of a screaming tirade, the PLA commander pulled out his side arm and shot Bumba Fun in his bad right eye.

AK-47 rifle muzzles followed the body down, and abruptly, at a sharp order from the commander, swung outward in a circle to menace the cowering villagers. Women clutched their children. Children clutched their mothers' skirts. Men stepped in front of their loved ones.

The commander barked out another order that caused rifle safeties to be latched off.

And seeing what was about to happen, Remo came flying out of the tent, his face a tight white mask of fury.

Chapter 26

The Master of Sinanju kept his papery face stiff as he was escorted through the grim stone walls of Drapchi Prison.

It was a substantial place, much larger now than it had been before the Chinese came. Yet its harsh outlines were the same-a low, one-story structure with thin notches cut in the stone instead of windows. It would have been difficult to breach, for the guards were many and heavily armed.

But the guards, for all their stern purpose and clumsy rifles, were charged with keeping prisoners within. That was their first duty. Their second was to hold the prison against resistance fighters determined to liberate Tibetan prisoners.

When the tiny old man with hair like coal dust on an egg was brought to their gate, a Chinese soldier came out and began an argument over who would take possession of his sturdy gray pony, the guard who had arrested him or the keeper of the gate.

The Master of Sinanju listened frozen faced to their foolish argument.

"This pony belongs to me," insisted the soldier who had arrested him.

"And I outrank you," returned the other. "So it is mine."

The outcome was ordained by rank, but the arresting soldier was stubborn. He only gave in after the superior officer showed superior stiffness of neck.

The arresting soldier trudged off to clean his befouled boots, and the superior officer, a captain, took the pony's reins and led it into the gate, which closed after them with a brassy clang.

Chiun rode serenely on the pony's back, having gained entrance to the impregnable Drapchi Prison by the oldest subterfuge known to man. He was pleased that it still worked on the Chinese, even though the Trojans had tattled its secrets to every idle ear until even the whites knew it.

Inside, the Master was made to dismount, which he did silently. The pony was taken away. It had served its purpose, even if it had cost three gold coins to purchase in the border town of Rutog. The captain, obviously interested only in the pony, handed Chiun off to a mere turnkey.

"Come!" the turnkey snapped.

With feigned meekness, Chiun obeyed. He walked through dank corridors, each with doors that had to be unlocked and locked again when they came to them. The Master of Sinanju took careful note of the way. And of the half-starved faces that sometimes peered through brick sized holes in the cell doors.

The cell that awaited him was bare and windowless. The door was shut. A key turned noisily and was withdrawn.

Chiun waited until the last footfall had faded beyond the last closed door. Then he lifted his voice.

"I seek the Bunji Bogd."

Voices came at once. "The Bunji! The Bunji? Is the Bunji here?"

"Silence, Buddhists. Let your Bunji speak!"

"Is the Bunji among us?" a voice asked anxiously.

"Silence! The Master of Sinanju speaks!"

Silence came. A murmur remained. The Master of Sinanju closed his eyes and sharpened his ears. He counted heartbeats, listening to their individual throbs. None beat with the sound that belonged to the Bunji Lama, whom he had plucked from relative obscurity, nor of Kula the Mongol or Lobsang the Tibetan.

They were not here. Not in this wing. He would have to search them out. Here the difficulties might begin.

The cell door was very simple yet exceedingly stout. An aged wood bound in iron. There was no way to reach the tongue of the lock and no way to destroy the lock without the sound raising an alarm, he saw. The hinges were set on the other side, and iron hasps bolted to the wood held door and hinge as one.

The Master of Sinanju extended his balled fists, revealing the long Knives of Eternity that were his carefully maintained, implacably sharp fingernails. Hardened by diet and exercise, they were more supple than horn yet sharper than the keenest blade.

Curling three fingers and a thumb back, he laid the longest of the nails against the topmost iron strap and began to file away the bolt heads. It could be done more quickly than this, but not without making warning sounds.

Slowness ensured silence. The bolt heads began dropping off, revealing smooth, shiny spots against the black iron.

He caught each one in his free hand and tossed it back into the sleeping sandpile, where they landed with tiny mushy sounds.

When the last bolts had been sheared, the Master of Sinanju peeled the iron strap from the wood with his fingers. The metal groaned in slow surrender.

After that it was a simple task to insert a fingernail against each shiny exposed bolt and push it outward. The falling bolts squeaked, then made rude clickings on the stone floor. In short order the door was no longer secured on its hinges. The Master of Sinanju simply pushed it outward, the lock tongue coming out of its socket like an old tooth.

Out in the dark corridor, illuminated only by an unshaded twenty-five-watt light bulb, the Master of Sinanju spoke up. "Who here yearns for freedom?"

"I do," a man hissed.

"And I!" said a second.

"We all yearn for freedom," insisted a third.

"Who will fight for his freedom if released?" Chiun demanded.

Silence.

"Fighting is not our way," the second man said dully.

The Master of Sinanju shook his blackened head. "Buddhists," he said under his breath, and padded for the corridor. He would have to find another way.

Chapter 27

There were exactly thirteen PLA cadres, and two of them died with Remo's hard index fingers plunging in and out of the backs of their skulls before any of the other eleven became aware of the white-and-black blur suddenly in their midst.

The sound of faces falling into the dirt went unheard over the screaming of Tibetans who feared Chinese bullets. Remo planned it that way. The more cadres he took out before they knew he was there, the quicker he could get this over with. And the more lives he could save.

But one of the dead soldiers had his finger tight on his rifle trigger. Going down, a reflex caused it to tighten.

The AK-47 burped bullets and percussive sound. Dust and earth kicked up in nervous gouts.

That was enough to bring every head turning in Remo's direction, including that of the PLA commander with the knifeslit eyes.

Ignoring the swinging muzzles, Remo moved in on him. It was sloppy tactics, but he had succumbed to anger. Twenty years of training, and he was being driven by fury like some rank amateur.

The commander snapped up his Tokarev. Remo weaved past his first wild shot. Remo let him have that shot. It wasn't worth dodging, but his body, reacting automatically to the concussive shock of the bullet coming out of the barrel as it rode a wave of exploding gunpowder, swerved wide of its own accord. Even anger couldn't suppress that aspect of his training.

Toes digging in with every step, Remo swept back in line. One fist came up. He popped his first two fingers.

They entered the commander's skull via his wide-with-shock eyeballs, and when Remo snapped his hand back, there were two black grottos under the dead man's suborbital ridge that issued thick black cranial blood.

Rounds began snapping about Remo. Twisting, he started to dance. It looked like a dance-a wild jerky dance the human body makes when hammered by bullets from all directions.

The Tibetan girl cried out in anguish. She thought the bullets were knocking Remo, not dead but mortally wounded, around in a mad circle.

The Chinese thought so, too. They were shooting directly at Remo as he flung his arms and legs about with wild abandon, certain their bullets were breaking off chips of human bone from his unprotected limbs.

Their eyes didn't see that the bullets were passing harmlessly through the web Remo was creating with his blurry limbs. They couldn't read bullets in flight. And not having eyes trained to track a bullet the way Remo's eyes could, they didn't see Remo's fingers and toes as they lashed back.

Stuttering rifles cartwheeled out of clutching hands. Kneecaps exploded under the impact of hard toes that were capable of denting steel I-beams. The flat of a white hand swept toward two soldiers who stood shoulder to shoulder, concentrating their fire, and when it passed through their necks, the soldiers simply stopped firing.

They stood rigid for a moment. Then their arms dropped. Their rifles fell from nerveless fingers, and their knees buckled.

Only as they began tipping over did their perfectly severed heads tumble off the spurting stumps of their necks.

It happened in less than the span of a minute. In that time the frightened Tibetan nomads who had turned their faces from the slaughter of the white man they knew as Gonpo Jigme were drinking in the stupefying spectacle of Gonpo Jigme destroying a dozen of Beijing's most ruthless soldiers.

"The god rides him!" the Tibetan girl shouted in English. "Lha gyalo!" she added in Tibetan.

Remo allowed three PLA soldiers to track him with their rifles, absolutely without fear for himself. He knew that a rifle was only a longer, slightly more modern version of the medieval contraption called a pistol. Rifles held no terrors for him.

The minute the tracking muzzles followed Remo to a place where no one else stood exposed to the line of fire, Remo stopped, reversed and pivoted on one foot.

His other foot, lifting high, relieved the pair of their weapons with such sudden irresistible force that their arms came out of their sockets with meaty sucking sounds mixed with the snapping of tendons.

Remo crushed their skulls the instant they were down on the ground, howling in their pain and confusion.

That left three. They had exhausted their ammo clips and were yanking the empties out.

It was too easy to take them out then. But Remo did it anyway. He stepped up and said, "Let me show you how to play pong. "

Remo's hands were suddenly up and on either side of one soldier's head. They came together as if he were clapping once sharply.

Pong!

The man fell with his head suddenly more vertical than horizontal.

Remo caught a second man the same way.

Pong!

That PLA man's head erupted like a volcano when the pressure separated the fused bone plates at the top of his skull and a blood-and-brains gruel squirted skyward.

Remo broke the last man's heart with the heel of his palm. It struck the protecting rib cage, and the splintering ribs compressed the heart muscle until it burst like a red balloon.

When the last of the dead lay in the dirt, boots jittering, throats gurgling and brains dying, Remo surveyed the scene.

No Tibetans had died. It was a bonus. He had figured on some unavoidable friendly casualties. The erupting of the first PLA cadre's assault rifle had worked in his favor, not against it.

Remo knelt before the slumped form of Bumba Fun. He touched the old man's neck, found the carotid artery. It was flat. The man was dead. There was no bringing him back.

Behind him the familiar voice of the Tibetan girl whose name he still didn't know reached Remo's ringing ears.

"You are truly Gonpo Jigme," she breathed.

Remo turned. "He told them he stole the jeep, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

Hands flat on her apron, the girl looked puzzled. "It was his job. He is Bumba Fun."

"I needed to talk to him," Remo said angrily.

"You may speak with the Bumba Fun in Lhasa."

"How do I know he'll be the right one?"

"Bumba Fun is Chushi Gangdruk depung. That mean general. All Chushi Gangdruk generals call themselves Bumba Fun to fool stupid Chinese. They capture Chushi Gangdruk depung, and do tortures. And he always tell them his general is called Bumba Fun. Chinese go kill first Bumba Fun they find, think they have killed Chushi Gangdruk leader. This way Bumba Fun never die. Bumba Fun immortal. Chushi Gangdruk fight on."

The girl looked toward the slumped corpse of Bumba Fun. Her chin began trembling. Tears started in her eyes. She fought them back. In the end she won. No tears came.

"He didn't have to die," Remo said bitterly. "I could have handled it."

The girl lifted her chin proudly. "It was his duty to die. He was Bumba Fun."

Remo looked around. The nomads were staring at him with strange expressions on their windburned faces. They were edging closer, as if afraid to approach without permission but too fascinated not to try. They ignored the fallen Chinese weapons.

"The Chinese are going to miss this unit," he said. "You'd better pack up your tents and move on."

The girl shook her head stubbornly. "If we pack up tents, Chinese will not know who to punish. Punish others. We stay. If punishment come, we will be prepared. "

"Are you crazy?" Remo exploded. "You'll all be slaughtered."

"And we will come back in another life to resist the Chinese, to die again and again if our karma decrees it necessary."

"What good will that do?"

She lifted her chin defiantly. "Perhaps if enough Tibetan die, the world will begin to care about Tibetans."

Remo had no answer to that. "Look, I need a guide to Lhasa. How about you come along?"

"I cannot. Must stay."

"And die when the PLA catch up to you?"

"It is my duty. You see, that man was my father. I must take his place now."

"Have it your way," said Remo. He went over to the jeeps and trucks and disabled them with quick strokes that unerringly found fatigue spots in metal and vulnerable points elsewhere. He gathered up the rifles, snapping barrels like bread sticks with his bare hands.

When he was done, there wasn't a usable Chinese weapon or vehicle in the camp.

Remo climbed back into his jeep and started the engine. He remembered something.

"What did you mean when you said, 'The god rides him'?" he asked the Tibetan girl.

"You are Gonpo Jigme. Do you not know what is meant?"

"No," Remo admitted.

The girl lowered her eyelashes demurely. "Then the god no longer rides you. When Gonpo Jigme returns, you will know."

Remo sent the jeep around in a circle, pointed it toward the mountain that stood between-him and Lhasa. He sat, engine idling, and looked at the girl for a long moment.

"Hey, kid. I don't know your real name."

"Bumba Fun," said the Tibetan girl, waving him away.

Remo put the camp behind him, his face hard. He drove arrow straight toward the purple shadow at the base of the mountain the girl had called Nagbopori. It seemed to call him. But the faster he drove, the farther away it seemed to get. It was like a big granite mirage, always receding.

Remo finally reached it by nightfall. By then the purple shadow had turned black, and he barreled into it. It proved to be a needle-thin cut through one side of the mountain.

From somewhere above, he heard the huffing of a helicopter gunship and pulled into the lee of the declivity until the gunship had passed overhead.

Not long after, he heard the whuff and thoom of air-to-ground rockets thudding into the earth not many miles to the south.

"Damn!" he breathed.

Remo pulled over and went up a cliff side like a spider.

Reaching the flat top, he could spot flashes of light in the general direction of the nomads' camp. The night seemed to quake with each impact. When it finally stopped, there was only the faraway whirring of the main rotor.

When the gunship returned, it was a fat silhouette against a low smoldering fire on the pastureland.

"You bastards," he said in a too-soft voice. "They were only herdsmen."

Remo picked up a rock and stepped into view. He waved his arms.

The gunship pilot spotted him. Curious, he sent the ungainly craft sweeping in Remo's direction.

Remo dropped his arms and pitched the rock with a deceptively casual throw. The rock left his fingers moving at nearly seventy-five miles per hour.

It struck the gunship pilot in the face doing one-fifty, after punching a perfectly round hole in the Plexiglas windscreen.

The gunship shuddered as the hands and feet at the controls clutched up in death. It began to whirl in place like a confused Christmas ornament on a string.

The surviving crew scrambled to haul the dead pilot off his seat and regain control of the ship.

They had about as much luck doing that as they had in surviving the fiery impact that followed, when the spinning tail rotor struck a rocky escarpment and the big craft disintegrated in a boiling ball of flame.

Which was to say, none.

Remo climbed back down to his jeep and bored through the endless Tibetan night, wondering who Gonpo Jigme was supposed to be. He knew one thing for certain. He was no more Gonpo Jigme than Squirrelly Chicane was the Bunji Lama.

Chapter 28

For a day the forty-seventh Bunji Lama, incarnation of the Buddha to Come, endured the want and privation of Drapchi Prison stoically. She meditated in her cell. She sought higher consciousness. But none was forthcoming. Despite the pain she was forced to endure, she never gave up hope.

"Low," Squirrelly Chicane was hollering through her cell door, "if you won't let me make my call, give me back my stash."

Her voice reverberated down the dank corridor. If ears heard her plaintive plea, no voice responded.

"How about that roach? It's almost used-up anyway."

Silence followed her echoes.

"I'll settle for one of those hallucinogenic toads that you have to lick," Squirrelly said hopefully.

When the last echoes died away, so did all hope. Squirrelly sat herself down on the pile of sand that was her bed, moaning, "I can't believe this. I came all this way and I'm reduced to begging for a lick of a toad."

Clapping hands to her saffron shag, she added, "Won't this headache ever go away!"

"Embrace the pain," Lobsang Drom droned. "Transcend the pain."

"You try transcending this pounder!"

"Her Holiness must set an example for the other prisoners," Lobsang reminded her. "By suffering, you work to relieve the sorrows of the world."

"My Bunji butt! I want out of this hellhole. The storyline is dead in the water. I can see the audience going out for popcorn right now. And not coming back. The critics will murder me."

"The Bunji Lama is above all earthly criticism," Lobsang intoned.

"Tell that to Siskel and Ebert! I can just hear the fat one now. 'Squirrelly Chicane should have stuck with the kind of films her audience is used to seeing her in. Blah blah blahs Like he knows his buns from a bagel!"

Suddenly the lock began to rasp and grate.

"Who's there?" Squirrelly hissed. "Am I being let out?"

"It is I, O Bunji," said a squeaky voice.

"I who?"

"The Master of Sinanju has come to liberate you," the squeaky voice said.

Squirrelly lifted up on her supple toes and tried to look out the tiny cell-door window. She saw nothing but dank corridor.

"I don't see anyone," she complained.

"Who are you talking to, Bunji?" asked Kula worriedly.

"It's that little guy. Sinatra."

"The Master of Sinanju has come to liberate us!" Kula exclaimed.

The key in the lock continued to grate.

"Forget it," Squirrelly said. "It took two of them to lock it, and they left the key in because it'll probably take six of them to unlock it."

The lock squealed with a metallic complaint.

And to Squirrelly Chicane's utter astonishment, the cell door creaked open.

Standing there was the wispy Korean. He wore black. The top of his formerly bald head was black, as well.

"Did you grow hair?" Squirrelly asked.

"It is a disguise," said Chiun dismissively. "Come. We must free the others."

The keys had not been left in the other locks. Chiun knew that the sound of the stubborn locks might have carried. Delay could be dangerous. First he went to Kula's door and examined the hinge pins. They were as thick as rifle barrels. Strong. But also large. Sometimes a large obstacle was more easily defeated.

Kneeling, he struck the lower pins with the edge of his hand. A short, sharp blow. The hinges came apart like a log split by an ax. The top pin surrendered in like fashion.

Impatient, Kula pushed the door outward and set it aside.

The other door hinges were no less resistant to the skills of the Master of Sinanju.

After Lobsang Drom had emerged, Squirrelly Chicane threw her maroon lama's cap into the air.

"This is great! This is great. This is the reel I've been waiting for!" Squirrelly bent and kissed Chiun on the top of his head, saying, "I wish you were tall, dark and handsome, but hey, by the time they cast the part, maybe you will be."

"What is this woman railing about?" the Master of Sinanju asked Kula. The big Mongol shrugged, a resigned who-can-fathom-the-mind-of-a-white-lama shrug.

Squirrelly noticed a strange taste on her lips. She wiped them, and there was a smear of black on her saffron sleeve. "What is this stuff?"

Chiun ignored her. "There is no time to dawdle. We must get past the Chinese guards"

"Just get me to a telephone. I'll have the Marines here in no time."

THERE was only one telephone in all of Drapchi Prison. It was a desk model in the office of Colonel Fang Lin of the ministry of state security, in charge of Drapchi Prison.

Right now he was using it to talk to Beijing.

He was having a hard time getting through to Beijing. More specifically, getting through to the minister of state security. It had been on the minister's orders that he had thrown the internationally recognized Squirrelly Chicane into a cell and denied her any contact with America. Now he wanted further instructions.

If only the minister of state security would take his call.

He had been trying all night. He had left messages. None had been returned. Colonel Fang was beginning to get the message: Squirrelly Chicane was a tiger he would have to ride without further instruction. His original orders were simple. Imprison the would-be Bunji Lama until further notice. No food. No water. No contact with the outside world.

The orders were fixed. He could not deviate from them without bringing great reprimands down on his own head.

No food, no water, no contact. In time, if those orders were not countermanded, Squirrelly Chicane would perish of starvation. Blame would be attached to Colonel Fang for not exercising initiative and common sense and preserving her life.

As Colonel Fang hung up the still-ringing telephone receiver, he shook a slim cigarette out of his last box of Pandas. The supply plane was late again. No doubt there would be no contact with Beijing until the Bunji Lama had expired.

As he smoked, Colonel Fang tried to fathom the Byzantine reasons for the security minister not returning his messages. He could only guess at them, but he had been with the PLA for twenty years. He understood how things worked, even if the why was often elusive.

The security minister had received his orders from the premier of China himself. They were stark orders. The security minister had related them to Colonel Fang, and then possibly went on an unexpected vacation. Or arranged for trouble with his office telephone. Phone outages were common in Beijing.

The Bunji Lama would die in Drapchi Prison, and Colonel Fang would receive the blame because if she did not die in Drapchi Prison, the premier would blame the minister of state security, who would in turn blame Colonel Fang for not carrying out his orders to the letter.

It was a typically communist way of dealing with unpleasant duties. And Colonel Fang had grown to hate it.

He smoked furiously, one eye half-closed in sly rumination. On his desk stood the gilt statuette confiscated from the American lama in the hope it was made of true gold. It was not. Still, Colonel Fang had decided to keep it. He had always dreamed of winning an Oscar.

Now who among his underlings could he inveigle to take the blame for the inevitable international storm?

AT THE FIRST SET of control doors, there was a PLA guard standing at attention, chin high, eyes all but concealed by his low green helmet.

The Master of Sinanju waved to those who followed to remain behind and then he padded toward the lone sentry.

The sentry heard nothing of his approach, of course. How could he? He was a dull-witted Chinese, and a steel helmet covered his unhearing ears.

So when the rifle left his clenched hands, skinning his trigger finger, the guard was quite surprised to look down and see an ancient Korean standing not two feet in front of him and below his normal line of sight, holding the rifle.

Snarling a pungent curse, the guard reached down to recapture his precious assault rifle. The rifle suddenly dropped from the old Korean's grasp to clatter on the stone floor. He bent at the waist.

This brought his helmeted head within the reach of those long-nailed fingers. One nail swept up and traced a quick circle, using the rim of the steel helmet as a guide. The guard never felt the sting of the nail that scored through skin and skull bone.

With a sound like a champagne cork popping, the top of the guard's head jumped straight up, helmet and all.

These sounds were strange in the guard's ears. A quick rasp against skull bone and the noise of a cork popping. The top of his head felt odd.

Something was wrong. He reached up to touch his helmet and felt something warm and throbbing like a great organ.

Then he saw his helmet drop into the line of his vision to join his rifle on the floor. The inside of the helmet was like the inner portion of a halved coconut. Except instead of white coconut meat, he saw raw red bone.

And he knew.

The stabbing fingernail that burst his pounding heart was a mercy.

Chiun took the iron key from the belt of the quivering Chinese guard and unlocked the control door. Then he beckoned the others to follow.

Squirrelly took one look and shut her eyes. Kula paused to claim the assault rifle. Lobsang sniffed, "It is wrong to kill"

"It is wronger to die at the hands of oppressors," retorted the Master of Sinanju.

Three times they encountered guards. Each time the Bunji Lama and her entourage were made to stay back until they heard an ugly sound as of a great cork popping. They learned not to look as they stepped over each fallen PLA soldier.

COLONEL FANG HEARD a hollow popping sound and sat up in his hard wooden chair. His precious cigarette was almost exhausted, so he snuffed it out on the bare desktop and went to the door.

Through the frosted glass in the door, he saw a short shadow. It looked Tibetan. No Tibetan should have been walking unescorted through Drapchi Prison.

He reached into his belt holster for his Tokarev pistol, unlatched the safety and debated with himself whether or not to shoot through the valuable glass. It had been exceedingly difficult to requisition a door with a frosted-glass panel from Beijing, so he decided against it.

Instead, he flung open the door.

There was no one standing there when the door stood open.

The shadow had been there a second before. He was sure of it. Startled, Colonel Fang shut the door. The shadow had returned. He flung open the door a second time. No shadow. No little figure. It was baffling.

He pushed his square head out of the door. The act cost him his life. Without warning, long-nailed fingers grasped his collar with irresistible force, pulling him down.

Colonel Fang felt something sharp run across his forehead, cutting a thin swath through the hair at the back of his skull. He heard a very distinct pop.

After that the strangeness became stranger still.

There was a bald spot in the back of Colonel Fang's head. He knew it intimately, having watched its progress over the past two years of his life through a facing arrangement of mirrors.

Like some discarded coconut husk, the unmistakable bald spot landed at Colonel Fang's booted feet, along with his scalp. It was, he thought with a nervous mental laugh, as if the top of his head had come off.

The thought stayed with Colonel Fang long enough for him to faint. He never came out of that faint because when his face smacked the floor, his brains slopped out of his exposed skull like so much scrambled eggs.

"YUCK!" Squirrelly said, stepping over the fallen colonel. "Couldn't you have done this in a more PG-13 way?"

"There is your telephone," said the Master of Sinanju, gesturing toward the dull black desk instrument.

"Great. Hang on."

Scooping up the receiver, Squirrelly dialed the country code for the U.S.A., then the Washington, D.C., area code and finally the private number of the First Lady.

The phone rang. And rang. And rang.

"She's not answering! What's the matter with her?"

"Perhaps she is asleep," Chiun suggested.

"She can't sleep! She's the First Lady. The First Lady never sleeps!"

"She is sleeping now," said Kula.

Squirrelly hung up the phone and placed the back of her hand to her forehead. "Let me think. Let me think. Who do I call? Not Julius. He'll want to dicker for a percentage. Not my mother. I wouldn't give her the satisfaction. I know, I'll call Warren."

The rotary dial whizzed, and the line rang only once.

"Hello," a bored voice drawled.

Squirrelly grinned in relief. "Warren! I knew you'd be awake."

"Squirrelly."

"The very same. And guess what? I'm in Tibet."

"I read that. How is it?"

"Not so hot. To be perfectly frank, Warren, I'm under arrest. But don't worry. I just escaped."

"Everyone should escape once in a while. Escape their insanity. Escape the taboos of an unenlightened age."

"I need your help, Warren."

"Name it."

"Call Schwarzenegger"

"Schwarz-"

"And Stallone. Try Seagal, Van Damme and any other hunky muscle type you can think of. Tell them to come running. I need to be rescued. Big-time. A real Technicolor Hollywood rescue."

"I thought you said you just escaped."

"I said," Squirrelly said, her voice going steely, "I just escaped prison. I didn't escape the country. Will you listen for once? I need a big splashy rescue. Tell them we're going to liberate Tibet from the evil Chinese."

"I thought they liked you, Squirl.''

"We're having creative differences, okay?"

"Sooo . . . you need help? My big sister who has all the answers?"

"Yes, Warren, I need help. Liberating Tibet is no two-week shoot. You should see the size of this place. And the mountains. It's positively crawling with mountains."

The drawl at the other end of the line grew oily and ingratiating. "If I make these calls, what're you gonna do for me?"

"Okay. Okay. I can see where this is going, Warren. You wanna be low lama? You got it. You wanna be Tibetan ambassador to Tahiti? I can arrange that."

"What do the Tibetan girls look like?"

"Short, round and not your type."

"Okay, then I want you."

"Cut it out, Warren."

"You, or I hang up."

"You wouldn't do that to your own sister."

"I've run out of erotic experiences. It's you or I slash my wrists."

"Warren, be my guest. Slash your wrists. Enjoy." And Squirrelly slammed the phone down. "I hope you come back as a sexless worm in your next incarnation, Warren!" she added for good measure.

When she turned, the others were staring at her with round, dubious eyes.

"Don't look at me like that!" she fumed. "You can't pick your relatives, you know."

Kula beamed. "Such wisdom from one who has been Bunji Lama for only three days. Truly the Chinese have no chance against us."

"And we will have no chance if we do not leave this place before alarms are raised," warned Chiun in a stern tone. "Come."

On the way out Squirrelly grabbed her Oscar off the desk.

Chapter 29

The word was flashed from Lhasa to Beijing by military radio: "The Bunji Lama has escaped."

It reached the ears of the premier of China by coded telegram.

In his office in the Great Hall of the People, where the air hung thick and stale with tobacco smoke, the premier smoked furiously as he read the telegram slowly. And then again. Once it had been committed to memory, he used the burning end of his cigarette to set the sensitive telegram alight.

He placed it in the porcelain ashtray in one corner of his desk and watched the edges brown and darken to black as the leaping orange flames danced and consumed the sheet. When it was a delicate ball of unreadable paper, he crushed it to ashes with tobacco-stained fingers so callused they felt none of the dissipating heat.

Only then did he call the minister of state security.

The line rang and rang. Finally an operator came on to report that the line was not currently in working order.

"By whose order?" asked the premier in a hoarse voice.

The operator obviously recognized the voice of the highest authority in the People's Republic of China.

His voice squeaked as he replied, "By order of the minister of state security."

"Get me the minister of public security."

When the correct voice came on the line, the premier issued gruff orders. "Have the minister of state security brought before me without delay."

"In irons?" the minister of public security asked hopefully.

"No. But have irons ready."

The minister of state security arrived within fifteen minutes. He was ushered in looking ashen and wiping his high brow.

"Sit."

The security minister sat. With a casual wave of two fingers that vised a smoking cigarette, the premier waved the security guards to shut the door. He did not have to stipulate that it should be shut as they left. It was understood that this was to be a very private conversation.

"The Bunji has escaped Drapchi Prison," the premier said without preamble.

The minister of state security showed quickwittedness. He jumped to his feet and announced, "I will have those responsible shot for dereliction of duty."

"You are responsible."

"But I have been in Beijing all along and out of touch with Lhasa"

"And now you will go to Lhasa and resolve this unpleasant matter."

The security minister, relief in his voice, started for the door. "At once, Comrade Premier."

"Sit. I have not yet told you how you will accomplish this."

The security minister sat down hard. He waited.

"You will not go alone," the premier said in a voice so low it was almost a purr.

The security minister nodded.

"Paper cannot wrap up a fire," the premier said, lapsing into Confucian epigrams. "This cannot remain secret for long."

"The populace has already begun to talk openly of the Bunji's return. They grow restive."

"There is a Western saying," the premier said. "I do not recall how it goes. It is something along the lines of using a flame to fight a conflagration."

"Fighting fire with fire, is what they say."

The premier wrinkled up his bulldog face. "They say it without grace. When you go to Lhasa you will take with you a flame with which to battle this conflagration. Do you know what I mean by this flame?"

"No," the security minister admitted.

The premier eyed his cigarette tip and blew upon it. It flared up red and hot. "It is a small flame," he purred, "and it has not been smoldering long. Therefore, when it flares up it may be an unexpected thing. Perhaps this tiny flame may come to quench the larger conflagration with its purifying heat."

The security minister considered. "The Tashi?"

The premier of China nodded solemnly. "The Tashi."

"Is it not too soon to introduce the Tashi into Tibet?"

"Let us hope," the premier said in a very low voice, "that it is not too late."

Eyes strange, the minister of state security rose to go.

"One last item," the premier said softly.

The security minister turned, face quizzical. "Yes, Comrade Premier?"

"The unworking telephone was a clever subterfuge. I will have to remember it when the vultures of the politburo sink low enough to be picked off in flight."

IN A PALATAL HOME not many miles west of Beijing, the Tashi sat meditating on a platform that raised him so far above the polished cherrywood floor that he could look down upon even the tallest of his manservants.

His feet were tucked under his saffron-robed body, out of sight. His eyes, very bright yet very wise, were resting upon the pages of a very old book. It was one of his few pleasures, reading these old books.

Television had been banished from the house of the Tashi as a possibly corrupting influence. It was the only thing the Chinese leadership had denied the Tashi. He did not resent this, although television excited his curiosity wonderfully, from the stories he was told by his servants.

So the Tashi turned the pages with short fingers that had never known toil, not even here in the workers' paradise in which he now resided and bided his time, for the hour of his glory was soon to come, the Chinese continually assured him.

It had been a long time already. Perhaps the Chinese, not being followers of Buddha, looked upon time differently than he did. But he tried to be patient because he was the Tashi and it was his responsibility to await the correct astrological conjunction that would presage the fulfillment of his destiny.

The double doors pushed inward, and a servant entered, stopped and prostrated himself in the correct fashion, dropping on his stomach and touching his head to the sumptuous rug.

"Speak," said the Tashi in a voice as sweet as honey.

"The hour has come, O Tashi"

"What is this?" asked the Tashi, closing the heavy book on his silken lap.

"A fei-chi awaits to bear you to holy Lhasa, O Tashi."

The Tashi blinked bright brown eyes at the grating Chinese word, meaning "thing that flies," that spoiled the cadences of his servant's perfectly enunciated Tibetan.

"I am ready," said the Tashi, laying the book aside and coming to his full height. With resolute chin and stern expression, he waited for his strong servant to come to lift him down from the high platform on which he stood.

Chapter 30

No mortal eye witnessed the escape of the Bunji Lama and her protectors from Drapchi Prison, but the scriptures duly recorded that this miraculous feat was accomplished with great stealth in utter darkness. And while many oppressors died, they died quietly, oblivious to the doom that stole upon them, which was a blessing and unquestionably the result of the Lamb of Light's infinite mercy.

"MAYBE WE SHOULD SHOOT a few of these guys," Squirrelly Chicane muttered as she slipped out of the gate to Drapchi Prison in the impossibly silver Tibetan moonlight. The Milky Way overhead appeared close enough to touch.

"Why?" demanded Kula, who walked with an AK-47 assault rifle in each hand as if they were toy pistols.

"Because this isn't very dramatic," Squirrelly said.

"Dramatic?"

"We're just stepping over bodies," said Squirrelly, stepping over a PLA body. "Look at these guys. Not a mark on them. It won't translate to film. It's too unrealistic."

Kula waved Squirrelly to wait. Up ahead the Master of Sinanju was at work. "You asked the Master of Sinanju to separate no more Chinese from their skulls."

"But I didn't say for him to let the rising action go flat."

"You speak in riddles, Bunji!'

"Call me Buddha Sent. I like that better. It's more cosmic. And a little gunfire will keep the audience from going to sleep in their seats."

"You are going to give an audience?" Kula asked, puzzled.

"No. I want to have an audience. All this creeping around reminds me of Hudson Hawk. We need a North by Northwest scene."

"I understand," said Kula. Seeing the Master of Sinanju beckon in the darkness-and only because the old Korean chose to be seen-he urged the Bunji Lama ahead.

In the darkness Kula told Chiun, "The Bunji has a vision. She says we are to go north by northwest."

"This is not a good plan," said Chiun.

"But she is the Bunji."

"Call me Buddha Sent."

"Northwest of here is only mountains, and beyond them lies Chamdo and those who live there," said Chiun.

Kula made a face. "Khampas," he grunted.

"What are Khampas?" Squirrelly asked.

"Hill fighters," said Chiun. "Bandits."

"Sissies," said Kula. "They wear red yarn in their hair and think they are like Mongols," he added for Squirrelly's benefit.

Squirrelly said, "Actually they sound kinda neat."

"It is the destiny of the Bunji Lama to claim the Lion Throne," Chiun interrupted. "Nothing must hinder this."

"Yes. Yes. The Lion Throne. Point me to it!"

"There," said Chiun, pointing toward Red Mountain.

In the darkness it was a sprawling white shape in the moonlight with many windows, but only one lit.

"What is it?"

Lobsang said, "Do you not recognize the Potala Palace, Bunji? The scat of your temporal power."

Squirrelly made an unhappy face. "No-should I?"

"It was said by your last body that you would not recognize the trappings of that previous life," Chiun reminded her.

Squirrelly squinted at the titanic shape. "Is that a trapping? Looks kinda big for a trapping."

"We will go to the Potala Palace," said Chiun.

There were soldiers abroad in the night. PLA regulars. PSB watchers. Plain-clothed Chinese. Tibetan collaborators.

They moved through the alleys of Lhasa, unseen. The people of the city slept fitfully. From time to time a jeep whirled past, showing haste but no urgency.

"The alarm has not yet been sounded," Chiun observed.

"Maybe we should sound it," Squirrelly said hopefully.

"What is this?" Chiun demanded.

"Look, we just busted out of prison with all the excitement of a cookout. Unless you're into splatter films. Which I'm not and wouldn't be caught dead in. Now we're moving toward the third act already, and the second act has been strictly wham-bam thank-you ma'am."

Chiun and Kula looked at her in the darkness.

"Don't you see?" Squirrelly said desperately. "Once I plant my tush on the Lion Throne, it's all over but the withdrawal. We can have a really pow Mass Saigon kind of finish."

The others looked blank.

"Look, I still haven't made up my mind if this is a movie or a musical, so bear with me. Okay?"

"Okay," said Kula, nodding uncertainly.

"If I grab the throne without a fight, it'll fall as flat as Ishtar. There's not enough struggle."

"The Tibetans have struggled for forty years. Is that not struggle enough?" wondered Kula.

"That's their struggle. I'm talking about my struggle. That's what this is about. My struggle. The Bunji Lama stands for strugglehood. Let them mount their own production if they want to glorify their personal frigging struggles."

A helicopter rattled overhead, and they fell silent until it had passed. Kula pointed his rifle muzzles upward and tracked it like a human antiaircraft gun. He did not fire. A warning fingernail prodding the small of his back clarified the decision for him.

Squirrelly continued. "But if the Chinese get wind that we're loose, what will they do?"

"Seek us."

"Exactly," Squirrelly said, clapping her hands. She was getting through to them. Obviously they weren't up on their film lore. "They seek us," she said. "We run. We hide and, after a good rousing struggle, we defeat them and I claim the Lion Throne. Me, Squirrelly Chicane, the sixty and sexellent Bunji Lama."

"How will we defeat them? We are outnumbered." Squirrelly leaned closer and dropped her voice conspiratorially. "I don't know. But when we get to that part, do me a huge favor?"

"Yes," said Kula.

"No," said Chiun.

"Let me do the rescuing. I have to save myself. That's absolutely mandatory. The heroine can't be saved by supporting characters in the climax. It just doesn't work. Look at The Rocketeer. They went to all that trouble to build up the hero, and in the end Howard Hughes pulls his fat out of the fire for him. Word of mouth got around, and people stayed away in droves."

"I have another solution," said Chiun.

"What?" asked Squirrelly.

"You will take a nap."

"Nap?"

And the Master of Sinanju reached up with two long-nailed fingers and claimed the Bunji Lama's consciousness with a careful tweak of a nerve the gods had placed in her neck for just this hour.

Kula caught the collapsing Squirrelly Chicane and laid her across his broad shoulder. "It is good that you did that, Master. For the strain had caused her to descend into unintelligible babbling."

"Her babbling was perfectly understandable," said Chiun, starting off. "That is why I found it necessary to grant her the gift of sleep."

"You understand her words?"

"Yes."

"Explain them to me, then."

"No," said Chiun, who only wanted to get the Bunji Lama to the safety of the Potala before the alarm was sounded in truth.

After that their true difficulties would begin.

Chapter 31

Remo knew he had made a mistake in bringing down the PLA helicopter gunship when he spotted a thin brown serpent of dust against the mountainous horizon.

The Nepal-Lhasa Highway was an undulating ribbon before him. He was trapped on it. There were no off ramps in Tibet. And here on one of the innumerable mountain passes there was only narrow road and vertical rock.

The serpent of dust could only be an approaching convoy; whether of commercial trucks or military vehicles hardly mattered. Foreigners were barred from Tibet. Chances were good Remo would be turned over to the PSB.

He downshifted. Maybe, Remo thought, he could reach the bottom of the mountain and hide the jeep somewhere in the rocks below before the mechanized column spotted him.

The trouble was, his jeep was also leaving a trail of thin dust that was sure to be spotted in the dying light of the day.

Remo sped toward a pass between two mountains, intent on his driving. The Sinanju skills, second nature to him, were extended even to driving a gas-guazling jeep. Through the vibrating steering wheel, he was aware of every pebble the tires rolled over, felt every suspension-punishing chuckhole and sensed where the shoulder of the road was too treacherous to support the weight of his vehicle.

The pass was a motorist's nightmare. Curving around the peak, it would narrow without warning, until Remo felt as if he were driving on air.

It was while negotiating one of these tricky curves that the PLA jeep coming in the other direction appeared. There was no room for two vehicles on the narrow road. And there was no time to pass, even if there had been a way to do so without one jeep crashing into the mountainside or plummeting off the yawning cliff.

They were on a collision course moving at nearly fifty miles per hour with no margin for error.

The driver of the jeep wore shock on his bone white face. He would be no help. Remo decided that since he was on his last tank of gas with Lhasa nowhere in sight, he had nothing to lose by driving off the side of the mountain.

The two jeeps closed. Remo held the road until the last possible second, then cut the wheel hard to the right.

The jeep went over the cliff.

Remo was already out of his seat and in midair. He was not going down the mountainside. He executed a back flip that looked as if it were being shown in slow motion and when he landed in the passenger seat next to the wide-eyed jeep driver, he barely made the springs bounce.

The driver, his eyes following the rear of the jeep Remo had just left, became aware of his passenger when a white hand as hard as bone took the wheel.

The driver cursed in Chinese and tried to turn the wheel. It wouldn't budge. The steering wheel might as well have been fixed.

The driver next tried to stomp the brake. Instead, something kicked his brake foot and stomped on the foot that was over the gas. The jeep accelerated.

It was mad. The road was too narrow and circuitous to negotiate at high speed. Especially with two people fighting for control of the steering wheel. Not that it was much of a fight.

The jeep rocked and bounced as if on a shaky track. Every time the nose seemed about to careen over the edge, miraculously it righted itself. And most maddening of all to the Chinese driver was the fact that the alien man controlled the steering wheel with only one hand!

The wild ride came to a halt with breath-stealing suddenness.

Without warning, the foot on the driver's foot that kept the gas pedal pressed to the floorboard came off and tapped the brake.

The jeep jarred to a stop as if it had struck an invisible wall. The driver did not. He kept going, through the windshield, over the hood and beyond.

The driver found himself scrambling for something to hold on to as his body reached the utmost forward impetus and gravity took hold of his stomach and clawed him earthward.

Having no choice, his body obeyed the call of gravity.

His stomach seemed to have stayed behind. Or that was his predominate thought as his helmeted head encountered a wall of stone, and no thought troubled his jellied brain after that.

Remo backed up, turned the jeep around and got back in the direction he had been traveling originally. He lost a little time but he had a fresh tank of gas. With any luck he might slip past the approaching mechanized column.

When it came into view, down on the plain, he changed his mind.

It was a tank column. Three dull green Soviet-style T-62 tanks were muttering along in a line, their domed turrets swiveling this way and that as if to threaten any lurking snipers.

In the lead tank a green-uniformed figure jockeyed the turret-mounted machine gun around and sent short bursts into anything that caught his attention. A trio of grazing yaks-the lifeblood of the Tibetan people-shuddered and bellowed and fell over, halfchewed tufts of grass spilling from their agonized jaws.

Moving on, the machine gunner noticed a twenty-foot seated Buddha carved into the side of a mountain. It looked very old. And to have carved it out of the granite face of a mountain at this oxygen-starved altitude had to have been the toil of years.

The machine gunner elevated his weapon and concentrated his face. The Buddha's face, element worn but placid, disintegrated in spurts of rock dust.

When his ammo belt ran out, the machine gunner calmly lifted a walkie-talkie to his face and began speaking.

The jeep had obviously been a scout, Remo realized. Maybe they were looking for him. Maybe not. But they were going to find him.

And they were going to regret it for the rest of their lives-a very short time.

CAPTAIN DOUFU ITUI of the Fourth Field Army was trying to raise the scout helicopter gunship that had been sent out on a punishment raid. There was no word of it. Or from it.

It was not uncommon for helicopters to falter in these unforgiving mountains with their rarefied air that made even the land-roving tanks gasp for oxygen. No doubt the craft had gone down. Probably an accident.

If not, it was the twice-accursed Chushi Gangdruk. Captain Doufu hoped in his heart that it would be the work of the Chushi Gangdruk. He had not been allowed to train his tank cannon on a Tibetan monastery since Beijing had allowed foreigners into Tibet. He was getting bored with shooting mere yaks and Buddhas.

And while it was true that there was a temporary cessation of the influx of foreigners into Tibet during the present uprising, still pictures had been taken of the surviving monasteries. To use them for target practice was frowned on by Beijing.

Nevertheless, it was conceivable one or two could be systematically reduced to rubble and an avalanche contrived or blame placed on the resistance.

Captain Doufu rode in the lead T-62 tank. It was risky, for there were mines buried in the roads from time to time. But previous tank commanders had learned to ride in the rear or middle tanks, and the Chushi Gangdruk had adjusted their tactics accordingly.

Captain Doufu had adjusted his tactics, too. The Chushi Gangdruk hardly ever blew up the lead tank these days.

He rode up in the dome-shaped turret, with the hatch popped open because even here a man needed all the oxygen he could muster. He carried, as did his men, a yellow oxygen pillow slung under one arm, with a clear plastic hose for nostril insertion in case he needed an extra burst of oxygen.

Captain Doufu was surveying the endless inhospitable mountains with his field glasses when the T-62 abruptly halted. He had not given the order to halt, so he yanked the glasses off his eyes and turned his head to vent his anger on the stupid driver.

The driver was looking back at him. He was pointing up toward the road ahead.

A man stood in the middle of the road, in front of the scout jeep he had sent on ahead. But the man was not the assigned driver. He was a white man with great round eyes and thin black clothes that made Captain Doufu shiver to think of being so unprotected here on the roof of the world.

"Advance," ordered Captain Doufu.

The T-62 lunged forward.

The man continued walking casually toward him. He showed no nervousness or agitation, unless one considered the way he rotated his thick wrists agitation. To Captain Doufu's dark, appraising eyes, it appeared that the man was warming them up.

But for what reason? He was plainly unarmed.

The tank crawled ahead, the two others following. They clanked along, remorseless and implacable.

The approaching foreigner continued on an undeviating path, so the driver naturally shifted away, intending to draw up on the man's right side.

The man instead shifted leftward, putting himself in the path of the short tank column.

The driver shifted leftward.

The man got in the way again.

Captain Doufu did a slow burn. Well he knew that in the decadent West the pictures of the lone Chinese counterrevolutionary whose name he could never remember had become famous for stopping a tank column by offering his fragile bones as a barrier.

"What do I do, Captain?" the tank driver asked.

"Drive on. He will step aside."

The tank crawled ahead slowly, its treads crunching loose gravel with an obdurate remorselessness that promised broken bones and crushed internal organs to any being foolish enough to stand up to them.

Except the man remained where he stood, thick wrists rotating like engine pistons warming up.

"Captain-" the driver said nervously.

"Drive on! He will leap aside!"

The tank continued crawling.

The 114 mm Smoothbore cannon barrel passed over the man's unflinching head, creating a long shadow that caused the foreigner's eyes to become like the sockets in a faintly smiling skull. The captain felt a chill of supernatural fear ripple along his stiff spinal column.

"What manner of foreigner is this?" he said gratingly.

The nose of the tank inched toward him, tracks ready to gnash and bite.

Abruptly the man dropped from sight.

"Captain!" the driver screamed.

"Drive on!"

The tank passed over the spot where the man had dropped from sight and progressed another four yards.

The clanking of the tracks changed their sound. The sound was unfamiliar to Captain Doufu, but it was a sound like surrender.

He looked over the side. All seemed well. He looked to the rear. And he saw, like two molting snakeskins, the unwound tracks of his very own tank lying flat in the dirt where the tracks of the next tank in line began to pass over them.

The meeting of track and tread was horrible. A grinding, snapping cacophony. The second tank threw a track and began to shift madly as the driver fought for control of his steel steed.

"Column halt!" Captain Doufu cried. But it was too late.

The third tank had not kept a proper interval, and it rammed the second tank. The colliding machines made a clang like the bell of fate resounding over this conquered land.

And suddenly something grasped Captain Doufu's ankles in a grip that made him drop his field glasses and shriek for his life as his ankles were crushed by what felt like squeezing machines.

He was yanked down, where he found himself face-to-face with the foreigner who held his own ankles in hands that looked human but possessed the awful constrictive power of iron clamps.

A hand released one ankle, and the relief was pure pleasure-until the releasing hand took Captain Doufu by his short black hair and rammed his head down into the hatch set in the belly of the tank. The hatch by which the foreigner had somehow penetrated the impregnable T 62 tank, after maiming its tracks.

The top of Captain Doufu's head encountered the hard ground under the tank. The ground won. Captain Doufu was no more.

REMO moves through the tank, taking out the driver by the simple expedient of reaching into the driver's compartment and yanking out the vertebrae that supported his neck with the ease of pulling a tree root.

That depopulated the first tank. Remo crawled down the belly hatch, moved low and got to the tangle that was the other two tanks. He eased up on the gas tank, popped a hole with his finger and struck two rocks together close to the trickle of escaping fuel. One spark flew. It was enough.

Remo was a dozen yards away and ahead of the explosion and accelerating across the pasture when the tanks went up.

The ball of fire rose like an angry fist toward the darkening cobalt of the sky. The light made the low thunderhead clouds glow resentfully red as if they were the source of the booming afterexplosions that seemed to fill the universe.

"That's for all the Bumba Funs who won't get to see a free Tibet," Remo muttered, reclaiming his jeep and driving around the steel tangles in which bodies writhed and blackened in the throes of the all-consuming fire of Gonpo Jigme's cold vengeance.

Whoever he was.

Chapter 32

Old Thondup Phintso walked the maze that was the Potala Palace, turning the great cylindrical prayer wheels that squeaked and squealed with each pained revolution.

Save for those in his personal quarters, the vast brass yak-butter lamps had guttered into silence, to be lit only when tourists came.

And save for Thondup Phintso, former abbot of the Potala Palace, now sunk to the status of a lowly tour guide, no one lived in the Potala anymore. Not since the Chinese had come with their loudspeakers and their propaganda and their wheeled vehicles that desecrated the land. Did they not understand that wheels wounded the earth and angered the gods? That the gods would one day exact a just revenge? Or did they simply not care?

The Potala had been stripped of its gold Buddhas, the rare tapestries, everything that could be melted down or used to decorate the homes of communists who had renounced materialism in word only. The Dalai Lama's quarters had been left intact, the calendar still marking the dark day on which he fled into exile. It awaited him. One day he would return. Until that day Thondup Phintso suffered the lot of museum guide, a title without meaning, a lot without joy.

He missed the eerie chanting of the monks that had gone on all the day and much of the night. He missed the amber glow of the great brass urns of yak butter and the pure white flame of sacrifice that had filled every room with a holy lambency.

Only the riotously painted walls remained of the days of enlightenment. Only the smell of yak butter and human sweat remained to fill his nostrils with remembrances.

Thondup walked the halls, spinning the prayer wheels, hoping the gods heard his entreaties. Each squeaking seemed to say, "Banish the Chinese. Banish the Chinese. Return the Dalai."

But the years had come and gone, and the Dalai remained in India. A good place. A holy place. But not his place. Hope was fading in the aging heart of Thondup Phintso, last abbot of the Potala.

There were days when he would have been prepared to accept the guidance of the Panchen Lama, who, although a vassal of Beijing, was still of the faith. But the Panchen Lama had died of suspicious causes in Beijing. A heart attack was the stated cause. But his relatives and even advisers had all died of heart attacks within days of this calamity.

Clearly Beijing had given up on that Panchen Lama. Now it was said that there was a new Panchen Lama. It would be many years until the new Panchen could be invested. More years, Thondup Phintso realized, than he had left in this life.

So he spun his prayer wheels and hoped for a miracle.

THE POUNDING on the great wooden entrance doors went almost unheard deep within the Potala. Yet it carried over the squeaking of the prayer wheels. The Chinese. Only the Chinese would pound on the hallowed doors like that. Only the Chinese would come in the middle of the night, with their uncouth accents and their impious demands.

Gliding like a maroon wraith, Thondup Phintso passed toward the entrance and threw open the great red doors.

He gasped at what his eyes drank in.

It was a Mongol, wearing the peaked cap of his race. Over his shoulders was slung a body, sheathed in saffron. And standing at his side, a Korean, very old, with young commanding eyes of hazel.

"Step aside, Priest," said the Mongol, gruffly pushing past. "Make way for the Master of Sinanju."

Thondup Phintso recoiled. The Master of Sinanju! No Master of Sinanju had trod the dust of Tibet in generations.

"What do you wish here? We are closed."

"Sanctuary, Priest," said the Master of Sinanju.

"The Chinese seek you?"

"Not now. But soon."

Thondup Phintso touched prayerful hands to his forehead. "Sanctuary is yours," he murmured.

The Mongol spanked the backside of the figure slung over his broad shoulders and said, "Where can this one sleep?"

Curious, Thondup Phintso craned his shaved head the better to see the insensate one's features. He caught a glimpse of shaggy hair dyed the hue of saffron and a face drained of healthful color. He blinked.

"A white eyes?"

"Restore your own eyes to your skull, Priest, and take us to the deepest, most secure room in this hovel," the Master of Sinanju ordered.

"This is the Potala, and the safest place is the Dalai's own quarters. But it is forbidden for any but the Dalai to take residence there."

The Mongol growled, "This is the Bunji Lama, pyedog!"

"The Bunji!"

"Quickly!"

Hastily Thondup Phintso threw the great doors closed and, taking up a yak butter tallow, led the way. The Bunji Lama! The Bunji Lama was here. There had been rumors, but Thondup Phintso paid the prattling of women and the idle ones no heed. The Bunji! He could not refuse the Bunji anything.

Not even, he thought to himself, if the Bunji did belong to the rival red-hat sect.

Chapter 33

The basalt black of the Tibetan night was shading to cobalt, and the snowcapped massifs of some unnamed mountain range were turning pink and orange with the rising sun when Remo Williams breasted the top of a rise. He stopped.

Below, in a green valley, lay the concrete sprawl of a small Tibetan city. It filled the valley. There was no way around it unless he backtracked or took to the mountains on foot.

It was not Lhasa. Lhasa, from what Remo had read of it, was a kind of Lamont Cranston Shangri-la. There was nothing of historical Tibet in the gray urban sprawl with its sheet-metal roofs and drab concrete uniformity below the mountains. Only the Chinese could have built such a cheerless place in the heart of the breathtaking Tibetan landscape.

Remo was debating what to do when something whistled over his head. His Sinanju-trained senses, fixing the trajectory by its sound, told him he was not in danger. He didn't duck. He looked up.

It was an arrow. A polished thing with a ravenfeather tail. The tip was not an arrowhead, but a perforated box. It whistled in flight.

Remo backtracked its flight with searching eyes.

A lone man stood on a cliff, looking down at him. Not Chinese. He looked vaguely Mongolian in his charcoal native costume. He wore an ornate teak box around his neck. And he lifted a hardwood bow high, as if in signal.

Remo had seen too many cowboy movies not to expect what happened next. Stale human odors were also coming to his nostrils.

On the hills surrounding him, a dozen or so similar figures came to their feet. They brandished bows, knives and oldfashioned rifles inlaid with silver and turquoise with fork rests made from antelope horns. They seemed to be waving to him, as if in warning.

The click was soft but distinct as the jeep's right front tire ran over a soft spot in the road.

Remo knew the sound, understood what it meant and threw himself forward and onto the engine hood. There was no time to brake. Not if he wanted to survive the next three seconds.

There came a whump. The jeep bucked wildly, then slammed back to earth, flattening the three tires the erupting land mine hadn't shredded.

The engine block had protected him from flying shrapnel. A cloud of acrid smoke and road dust mushroomed up, enveloping the jeep, now lurching toward the edge of the mountain pass.

Remo sprang from the hood, landed, rolled and came to his feet in a graceful series of motions as the jeep careened off the side of the mountain. It bounced off a succession of boulders before it stopped. The gas tank exploded with a whoosh that singed the air.

As the jeep crackled, tires melting, far below, Remo looked up. The Tibetans who had obviously planted the mine looked up and shrugged, as if to say, "We tried to warn you."

Remo lifted his voice. He had nothing to lose. He was surrounded. "Chushi Gangdruk?"

"Who you seek, chiling?"

"Bumba Fun." Couldn't hurt to ask, Remo figured.

"Which Bumba Fun?"

"I'll take potluck."

The Tibetan looked vacant.

"Tell him Gonpo Jigme is looking for him."

All around him, Tibetan faces broke apart in startlement. "You are Gonpo Jigme?"

"Yeah."

"We have heard you had come down from Mt. Kailas. Come, come."

Remo started up the sheer rock face. It was the easiest and quickest way for him to reach the man. But the hardy Tibetans, no strangers to scaling mountains, were amazed by the ease with which Remo scaled sheer rock. He seemed to literally float up the rock face.

Remo reached the man, who immediately prostrated himself on the ground. "I am Bumba Fun, O Protector of the Tent."

"Call me Gonpo," said Remo. "All my friends do."

The man got up. "We beg forgiveness for destroying your jeep, Gonpo. We recognized your white face too late to stop you except with our warning arrows."

"I'm headed for Lhasa," Remo said. "I need to get there fast."

"You go to cast out the Chinese enemies of the faith?"

"I go to find the Bunji Lama and pull her chestnuts out of the fire," said Reno.

"There are rumors the Bunji is in Lhasa, to be sure. We will take you through the city, but you must wear Khampa clothes."

"Khampa clothes?"

Bumba Fun struck his chest proudly. "We are Khampa. Fighters. Very fierce. Has Gonpo Jigme not heard of us?"

"Gonpo Jigme hears many things, retains very few," Remo said dryly. He had to hurry this along. No telling how much trouble there was in Lhasa if Squirrelly and Chiun were at large up there.

The other Khampas gathered around Remo and almost broke into knife fights over who would be privileged to donate articles of clothing to Gonpo Jigme. Remo settled it by saying, "Everybody donate one item."

So they started to fight over who would donate which item and which were of greater or lesser value.

In the end Remo was wearing mismatched yak boots with upturned toes, sheepskin pants with the fleece turned inside out and a wool chuba. Someone gave him a silver-fox turban. Nothing exactly fit and everything smelled. Remo slapped his body here and there to kill the fleas. Then he was ready.

"You take this," said Bumba Fun, removing the box on a cord around his neck.

"Don't need it."

"Charm box. Ward off Chinese bullets."

"Gonpo Jigme doesn't need charms to ward off bullets," Remo told him. "Now, let's go."

They had to walk. The jeep was burning nicely now. It had been running low on gas anyway.

"How far to Lhasa?" Remo asked as they started down into the valley.

"Less than a day's march," Bumba Fun told him.

"Good. Maybe I can hitch a ride."

"Any true Tibetan would be honored to give Gonpo Jigme a ride to Lhasa, but there is not enough room in the truck for all of us."

"I just need you guys to get me through this city."

"It is called Shigatse, and why does Gonpo Jigme speak English?"

Remo thought fast. "Because Gonpo Jigme took a vow not to speak Tibetan until Tibet was free again."

Bumba Fun translated this for his fellow Khampas. Grunts and nods of approval followed. Mentally Remo wiped his brow.

As they neared the city, music blared out. Remo had seen the loudspeakers posted throughout the town. And the music, martial and strident, was the Chinese national anthem, "The East Is Red."

Remo's face darkened in a frown. "Great. Now the whole neighborhood is going to wake up."

"It is a great day," agreed Bumba Fun.

Remo was wondering how they'd get through the city quietly when Bumba Fun gave a signal to his men. They pulled the box-headed arrows from quivers, nocked them and let fly.

The whistling startled crows, set dogs to barking and was guaranteed to alert any PLA or PSB cadres who happened to have retained their hearing.

"What are you doing?" Remo demanded.

"Announcing to the oppressors your arrival, O Protector of the Tent."

"Are you crazy?"

"The Chinese will run once they realize it is you, Gonpo."

"The Chinese will shoot us where we stand," Remo said flatly.

The Khampa shrugged. "If we are fated to die in your company, so be it."

"You screw this up, and I guarantee you'll come back as a yak in the next life," Remo warned.

The Khampa brightened. "Yaks are good. Give meat, milk and do hard work."

"A three-legged yak with no horns. And fleas."

The Khampa bowed his head. "Command us, O Gonpo, and it will be done as you wish."

"I gotta get through town without the Chinese getting suspicious."

"It will be done."

"Then I'm going to need to get to Lhasa as fast as possible."

"This can be done."

"And no screwups."

"What is a screwup?"

"A three-legged yak without horns."

"No such yaks will trouble your journey, O Gonpo. Await us here."

Remo got down behind a rock and waited. He hated waiting, but even dressed as a Khampa, he had an obviously American face, spoke no Tibetan and would stick out like a sore thumb.

He didn't have to wait long. There was an explosion. It was followed by a coil of black smoke. A siren wailed. The rattle of small-arms fire came and went.

"Damn. They screwed up."

A truck barreling back from town, overloaded with Khampas, made Remo think otherwise. He stepped out into the road and noticed that more Khampas were coming back than had gone in the first place.

"Where'd you pick these guys up?" Remo asked, jumping into the passenger seat, which had been reserved in his honor.

"Chushi Gangdruk everywhere," Bumba Fun said. "Chinese never know what hit them."

"They're all dead?"

"Most. Some may still be dying. It will not be long."

The truck turned around and barreled into town.

The city wasn't any more appealing up close than it was from above. Gray, uniform buildings clicked by. So did Tibetan faces. They were lining the road to wave to him. Most showed him their tongues. Occasionally Remo stuck out his tongue in return.

Along the way they picked up more trucks and the odd jeep, overloaded with boisterous Tibetans.

After they passed out of town, Shigatse resumed exploding. Remo looked back. Fires were starting.

"Why are they burning down their own city?"

"It was built by Chinese. Now that Tibet is free, they want to live in a city built by Tibetans."

"Tibet isn't free yet."

"It is just a matter of another day or two now that Gonpo Jigme rides with the Khampas and the Bunji Lama has come to claim the Lion Throne."

"I had my hopes set on blowing into Lhasa quietly."

"We will blow into Lhasa as quietly as we are blowing out of this city," Bumba Fun assured him. And someone let fly with one of the whistling arrows that seemed to serve no other purpose than to substitute for fireworks.

Remo settled down for the ride. At least he was starting to feel as if he was making progress.

The mountains still seemed to be calling him, though. That part bothered him. How could mountains call him? And why?

Chapter 34

Old Thondup Phintso could not sleep. He tossed on his bedding of old yak skins, dressed in the maroon robe he rarely doffed, wondering what it could all mean.

The Bunji Lama was a mig gar-a white eyes. With saffron hair. That at least was a good augury. But a white eyes?

It was said that the Panchen Lama had been discovered in far-off America and while the new Panchen was not white, it was the farthest from Tibet that a tulku had been found.

He could not sleep, ruminating on these things, and when the dawn came and the hated blare of the loudspeakers began issuing the tinny discord of "The East Is Red," Thondup Phintso threw off the yak skins and walked barefoot and agitated through the dripping coolness of the Potala.

He came to the quarters of the Bunji Lama. The heavy wood door, carried on the backs of serfs from faraway Bhutan centuries ago, was closed. He put his ear to the moist wood and heard no sound.

Carefully he pushed the door inward. The hinges did not squeak, as he knew they would not.

A shaft of rosy light slanted across the sumptuous quarters. He saw the kang and its bedding all disheveled and hesitated, his heart high in his throat.

Then he saw the Bunji.

The Bunji Lama squatted over the chamber pot, saffron skirts hiked over his thighs. His urine tinkled in a golden rill into the waiting brass pot. The Dalai's personal pot.

Thondup Phintso narrowed his eyes. Something was amiss.

The Bunji looked up, blue eyes flashing in annoyance. And from the Bunji's mouth issued a shrill exclamation. "Jesus H. Christ! Can't a Buddha have any privacy around here?"

And eyes widening in shock, Thondup Phintso hastily withdrew. Pulling his robes about him, he ran, feet smacking the stone flooring like solitary applause, for the great wooden doors.

It was sacrilege. The Bunji was not only white, but a woman. Such a creature could never be allowed to claim the Lion Throne.

As much as he detested the thought, Thondup Phintso would bring this sacrilege to the attention of the Public Security Bureau.

If terrible events resulted, he comforted himself with the knowledge that they, like all things, had been ordained from the beginning of time.

THE EASTERN REACHES of Tibet unrolled in a long yellow-green carpet under the flashing wings of the Soviet-built CAAC turboprop plane.