Unite and Conquer

Eyeing Chiun's emerald-and-ocher kimono, Remo said, "I have a better idea."

He floored the Humvee. It surged ahead.

The oncoming armored column consisted of a toylike LAV followed by two light tanks. It slithered up the winding, mountainous road.

"We can outrun these guys," Remo said confidently.

As he accelerated, the Master of Sinanju reached out to hold on to the swaying machine. His balance was perfect. He could have remained comfortably seated through an ordinary turn. But the Master of Sinanju was familiar with his pupil's driving. He knew what was coming and didn't care to be flung from the vehicle.

Remo took the corner on two wheels. The narrowness of the road made that mandatory. Jerking the wheel hard to the right, he brought the wide Humvee all the way up on its right tires.

It was an impossible maneuver. Low-slung vehicles can't run up on two wheels unless they are out of control.

In a sense, Remo had thrown the heavy machine out of control. It would have crashed. No question of that. But Remo was master of his own body and balance, and as long as he could control that, he could control the hurtling juggernaut that was the Humvee.

At the apex of the turn, the Humvee was canted at an extreme perpendicular, running on rims of rubber. Chiun turtled his head between his thin-boned shoulders to protect it.

"Okay now," Remo said tightly.

In unison, they shifted left. The Humvee wobbled on its spinning tires, then like a gyroscopically controlled toy began righting itself in a smooth descent that looked like gravity taking hold but was really Sinanju.

When the left-side tires touched asphalt, Remo let the vehicle freewheel a hundred yards, then floored it again.

Behind them the armored column was laboriously turning around.

"They will never catch up to us," Chiun said with satisfaction.

"Not in a million years," Remo agreed.

A whistling came from behind, arced over their heads and landed with a bang that threw up dirt and clods of red soil.

They heard the cannon detonation somewhere in the middle of the whistle.

"They are shooting at us," Chiun remarked.

"Are they crazy? They don't know who we are. We could be on their side, or anyone."

"Yes, anyone driving a pilfered army jeep."

"They call them Humvees now."

"They are trying to stop their Humvee with whistles," said Chiun as another shell screamed over their heads. This one slammed into the road before them. It erupted in a shower of dirt and asphalt chunks.

Remo eased to a halt. Looking back over his shoulder, he threw the Humvee into reverse and stepped on the gas.

The machine responded, barreling back up the road and into the teeth of a tank gun.

"Why are you driving the wrong way?" Chiun asked without evident concern in his voice or face.

"Because I'm hungry, aggravated and most of all pissed off."

"And because of these temporary inconveniences, you have decided to commit suicide and are taking me with you?"

"I left out one thing."

"And what is that?"

"I know something these guys don't."

"Yes?"

"The effective range of a tank gun."

Remo stopped the Humvee two hundred yards short of the booming tank gun. A shell whistled overhead. Their eyes tracked it as if it were a silvery painted balloon floating by on a brisk wind.

A second shell boomed past, to join the one before.

Both tore up the road well beyond the Humvee. The detonations came only seconds apart, the second shell dispersing the dust cloud made by the first.

"If they want to knock us out with that thing, they'll have to back up another six hundred yards."

"And if they do?"

"We'll back up with them, but that won't happen.

"Why not?"

"Because in another minute they'll be out of shells."

It happened sooner than that.

No more shells boomed forth. Instead, the turret was popped, and a handful of Mexican soldiers armed with stubby Heckler ine guns came trotting up the road.

"I guess this is where we get personal," Remo said, leaving his seat.

Chiun also exited the vehicle.

The approaching soldiers fixed them in their sights and called, "Manos arriba!"

"You catch that, Little Father?"

"He is saying 'Stick them up.'"

"Must mean our hands," said Remo throwing up his hands because Chiun had taught him it brought the enemy closer.

It didn't work this time.

From the light tank a commanding voice called out one ripping word. "Disparen!"

Chiun started to say, "That means-"

The soldiers lit up their weapons, but Remo had already spotted their trigger fingers turning white the moment before the muzzle began flashing.

Chiun faded left. Remo dropped into a sudden crouch so the first vicious burst could pass harmlessly over his head.

They started moving in on their attackers.

There were only three. Their weapons had a high rate of fire, and clips began running empty.

It takes almost as much time to extract an empty clip and ram a fresh one into the receiver as it does to empty the first clip to begin with, Remo knew.

That was plenty of time when shooting at the unarmed or engaged in sporadic firefights from shelter. But it was fatally long when facing two Masters of Sinanju.

Remo arrowed up and ahead when the empty clip started dropping free. Less than a second transpired.

He had cleared the halfway point when the empty clip clinked to the roadway. He made a fist.

The soldier was whipping out a second clip from a belt pouch, and his speed was good. He wasn't taking chances even though he was trying to shoot an unarmed foe who had surrendered on command.

At the exact moment the soldier's fingers gripped the fresh clip, Remo's fist started up from his belt line.

It was a short blow. It struck the hovering gun barrel, which cracked off and jumped into the soldier's gaping mouth. The mouth shut reflexively.

It would have been comical except the metal fragment kept going, taking out the cervical vertebrae in the neck via a newly excavated exit wound.

The soldier dropped, and Remo turned to deal with a second soldier, who was popping bullets one at a time in an effort to conserve ammunition.

One at a time was easy. Remo struck a pose, making a teapot handle with one crooked arm so the first round had an empty space to pass through. The soldier kept trying to correct his aim, but Remo corrected his stance each time.

Stubbornly the soldier kept trying to perforate Remo's exposed chest, but the bullets only managed to speed by past his inner elbow. His face grew dark with rage as he put out snarling round after snarling round, wondering why his bullets insisted upon hitting a triangular patch of empty air instead of his taunting target. A triangle that seemed to grow in size with each shot fired through it.

He never realized the triangle was growing in size because he was so concentrated on his task he didn't sense the approach of two-footed doom.

"Can you say 'mandibular dislocation'?" Remo asked.

The soldier's response was to clench his teeth and redirect his weapon in Remo's direction.

So Remo showed him the harmless palm of his open hand before it slapped his jaw off its hinges to land in the dirt like a fresh-cut lamb chop.

When the soldier's remaining face hit the road, his dangling tongue hissed as it came into contact with a hot shell casing. He moaned.

Stepping up, Remo put him out of his misery with a hard heel that opened his skull like a cantaloupe.

He turned just in time to watch Chiun make a point about correct grooming. The Master of Sinanju was methodically flaying his antagonist.

The flayee seemed unaware of his plight at first. It was hard not to notice elongated strips of one's own flesh as they came off in long, thin peels, but the soldier's mind was obviously elsewhere.

Mistaking Chiun for a pushover, the soldier had dropped his submachine gun and pulled his combat knife out. It was a bad error in judgment. Chiun might have put him down with a quick blow otherwise, but the soldier gave him an irresistible opportunity.

"We don't have all day," Remo called over as the Master of Sinanju deflected a knife thrust and stripped the soldier's forearm skin on the return.

The soldier started to notice he was losing strips of hide. But he was game. He shifted hands. Chiun obligingly shifted hands, too.

The rest was a forgone conclusion. It was only one knife against ten fingernails.

Chiun extended a deadly sharp fingernail and parried every blow. The clash of tempered steel and flexible nail sounded like metal on horn. The thin, bamboolike nail gave just enough not to break.

The blade gave not at all. That was its undoing.

In the middle of a flurry of parries, the blade just broke.

The soldier heard the brittle snap and mistook the sound for imminent victory.

Grinning, he took a step back, preparing to plunge the blade into the old Korean's thin chest.

Then he noticed his blade was not sticking out from the handle anymore. A comical expression crossed his face. He looked down the way a man looks down when he hears the clink of a quarter falling out of his pocket.

The Master of Sinanju floated into the opening and inserted his fingernail directly into the man's navel.

Chiun turned his hand like a key.

The soldier's feet left the ground in his torment. He screamed and wailed, and as Remo stood off to one side with his arms folded, tapping a foot impatiently, the Master of Sinanju looked over his shoulder to see that Remo was paying attention.

Remo made a snap-it-up motion.

And Chiun turned the key the other way.

If right was pain, then left was oblivion. The soldier made a disordered pile of khaki at the Master of Sinanju's feet.

Padding back, Chiun made a show of displaying his bloodless nail, blowing on it the way a Western gunfighter blew gunsmoke from the muzzle of his Peacemakers.

And that was the end of the grooming lesson intended for Remo's benefit.

"Show-off," said Remo.

"I merely demonstrated techniques that will cease to be practiced if the next Reigning Master continues on the path of stubbornness."

The muttering light tank started up. It clanked toward them. The steel tracks rolled over the fallen, breaking their bones and shredding dead flesh.

Remo and Chiun patiently watched their oncoming doom.

At the last moment they casually stepped out of the way of the steel hulk, each going in a separate direction.

The driver was not happy with this. Jockeying the vehicle, he attempted to follow the Master of Sinanju. Walking backward, Chiun led him toward the side of the road.

Meanwhile, Remo slipped up to the back and gave one spinning track a hard kick.

The tank rolled off its track, leaving it behind like a discarded serpent of segmented steel.

After that the tank rolled in slow impotent circles.

"Jou are under military arrest, senores!" the driver said angrily once he got his steed stopped. He was peering out from a crack in his half-opened hatch.

"What's that?" Remo asked.

"I said, 'Jou are under military arrest.'"

"Can't hear you over the echo. You'll have to come out."

The soldier eased the hatch higher to see up the road. The rest of his column had continued on, thinking he had the situation under control. Now they were too far away to help him out of his predicament.

"I am not coming out," he said flatly.

"You can't arrest us until you come out," Remo said firmly.

"Jou are under arrest anyway."

"Fine. We're under arrest. We'll see you later. Come on, Little Father. This guy is too chicken to arrest us."

"I am not chicken! Jou come back here. At once!"

"Make us," taunted Chiun.

The tank driver popped his hatch all the way and came out clutching a Belgian-made FAL rifle.

"See? I am not afraid of gringos. As I say, jou are under arrest."

"Guess he's got the drop on us, Little Father."

"We are captured." And Chiun shook his aged head in mock defeat.

The soldier advanced, and Remo and Chiun awaited him, their hands loose-fingered by their sides.

"Stand steel!"

"I think that means stand-still," said Chiun.

"Jou are under arrest."

"You wouldn't know where we can find Subcomandante Verapaz?" asked Remo.

"Jou are Juarezista?"

"No. Verapaz owes us something."

"What is that?"

"His life."

"Hah! I do not know where the masked one is. But jou are both under military arrest."

"And you are under cardiac arrest," returned Remo.

The soldier didn't see Remo's hand come up like a striking serpent that threw his rifle skyward. Nor did he feel the malletlike fist of the Master of Sinanju strike his rib cage over his wildly beating heart.

The soldier felt the air go out of his lungs and his heart go into overdrive. Then he fell onto his back and lay there jittering until the heart muscle burst from the strain.

"That is how the Thunder Dragon blow is properly delivered," Chiun said to Remo as they walked back to the waiting Humvee.

"I'll take that over Fu Manchu fingernails any day."

"The day will come when the lack of talons will be your undoing."

"Not as long as I have you by my side, Little Father."

"That day, too, is coming," Chiun said aridly.

Remo said nothing. It was the truth. Nobody lived forever. Not even a Master of Sinanju.

Chapter 16

The president of the United States of Mexico had never seen such times. He had never heard of such times. His beloved Mexico had suffered much in times past. She had suffered incredibly. Sometimes, during the centuries since the conquest, it seemed that she was cursed to endure endless cycles of hope and desperation, desperation and hope. Every time the golden sun came within reach, she was cast down into perdition. Each time she had sunk into the lowermost depths of Hades, a ray of light would filter down to stir that cruel demon hope once again.

The straining toward the sun would resume, and so would the casting down into torment.

It was muy Mexican. It was quintessentially Mexican.

The president of Mexico knew that condundrum now. He felt it keenly as he paced his ruined office in the National Palace, fielding the frantic telephone calls as he saw through the shattered windows the city that was his capital lying in ruins under an ashy shroud.

It was a gray city now. Its whiteness was all gone. It was like the end of the world. Pompeii must have resembled this landscape. But Pompeii had never suffered so before being extinguished.

Mexico City suffered interminably, and the boon of extinction refused to come over it.

The initial earthquake had been the worst ever. Aftershocks ran as high as 6.9 on the Richter scale. This number was repeated over and over into his numbed ears. No one could say what that meant. Damage was extensive. Many of the same buildings that had been weakened in the 1985 convulsion were crushed once more. The dead were beyond counting.

Then after the earth had settled down, Popocatepetl had erupted in warning, and the earth shook anew.

Buildings that tottered precariously had fallen into rubble. The survivors, trapped but awaiting rescue, had been snuffed of all life. Fires not yet banked had roared anew.

Then came the ash.

Mercifully it had cooled somewhat while descending. It burned hair and blistered flesh, but did not consume. There were scattered fires as a result. But people could breathe the brown air if they held wet cloths to their faces. They could see if they blinked often enough.

The shroud of gray covered everyone and everything.

There was no escaping it for long because the aftershocks resumed soon after. People who had fled into their homes seeking shelter soon flowed back into the streets to brave the ashen rain rather than be crushed by stone and concrete and stucco.

And the fear that clutched at every heart took the form of an unanswerable question: Will Mount Popo truly erupt this time, raining lava and fire and meteors of death?

Meanwhile, the direct-line telephone to the National Center for the Prevention of Disaster kept ringing.

"Excellency, we have no power in San Angel."

"Excellency, there are looters in the Zona Rosa."

"Excellency, what do we do?"

To each of these pleas the president of Mexico could only offer soothing words of encouragement while inwardly cursing the cruel fate that had granted him the ultimate political power he had sought all of his adult life, only to precipitate the avalanches of NAFTA, devaluation, inflation, unemployment, rebellion and now earthquake upon his insufficient shoulders. It was more than his predecessor could have imagined. If only, he reflected, these things had transpired on the watch of the Bald One, now enjoying a comfortable but undeserved exile in the United States.

Then came a call that seemed to be delirium given voice.

"Excellency, this is General Alacran."

"Yes, General."

"Yes, it walks again."

"What is this?"

"The stone statue. From the museum. You will recall the rumors of her previous escape."

The president did. Vaguely. There had been whispers that the great idol had disappeared from the Museum of Anthropology only to be found at Teotihuacan some time later, broken and shattered. It had been a national treasure in a nation in which the dominant culture and the subservient culture had been smelted together in a kind of schizophrenic amalgam.

"The city lies is ruins and you talk to me of statuary? We will find it later-if there is a later."

"She is not missing, Excellency. For I have found her."

"Then what is the problem, Alacran?"

"She is on the Pan American Highway. She is walking. She is leading a veritable army of indios. They walk half-naked and singing, casting their crucifixes under the feet of the idol."

"The stone statue walks like a man?"

"No, Excellency. Like a god. It is like nothing you can imagine. If my sainted mother, who was Aztec, could see it now, she would swear that the old gods of Teotihuacan had returned to this land."

"You are drunk!" the president accused. "Are you drunk?"

"Before God, I am not drunk. I have film. Cameras do not hallucinate."

"If the earthquake has liberated the old gods, then that is beyond the scope of my duties. I preside over a nation of men and must see to their mortal needs. I will view this film another time. Thank you for your report."

"There is more, Excellency."

"Speak. I listen."

"I ordered rocket attacks against this walking Coatlicue."

"Why?"

"Because I do not believe in the gods of old Mexico. Thus, I surmised it was something to be suppressed."

"Pray continue."

"The antitank rockets failed. The machine guns were to no avail, either."

"How can this be?"

"The indios threw themselves before this living Coatlicue with great abandon. They were slaughtered by the rockets and machine-gun bullets. You should have seen the blood. Madre! It is river. And the flesh and the bones. They litter the highway as if it were the road to a slaughterhouse."

"Enough," said the president, sickened by the things his dark Mexican imagination brought before his eyes.

"The indios worship Coatlicue. They will do anything for her. And they are thousands strong. This is a dire security threat. As even now the subversivo Verapaz is reported headed this way."

"Yes, yes. I see. Tell me, General. What do the indios do at this moment?"

"They feast."

"Where do they find food on the highway?"

"They find food among the slain," said the general, whose voice very suddenly sounded sickened, as well.

"If they move, inform me."

"And if they do not?"

"If they do not, we will deal with them some other way than slaughter. There is death enough in our country this night."

"I fear that death has only begun to dance across the face of Mexico, Excellency."

Chapter 17

By the time night had clamped down and the drunken Mexican moon had climbed into the night sky, the Extinguisher abandoned his borrowed vehicle and took to the jungle.

He was in his element now. The jungle was his realm. Long ago the Extinguisher had experienced his baptism by fire in the war-torn jungles of Southeast Asia.

Pausing by a pool, he blackened his angular face with camo paint until it no longer shone. His Hellfire supermachine pistol hung from a Whip-it sling under his right armpit. His backup pistol gleamed snug at the small of his back. A Randall survival knife was jammed into one boot.

As he moved, he clinked. But that was okay. In the jungle it was good to clink. Clinking was not a jungle sound, but clinking would scare off predators. The Extinguisher had no quarrel with the natural predators, only the two-legged ones. He preferred to avoid the natural ones.

Especially jaguars.

Tucked into his war book was an article ripped from the library copy of the World Book Encyclopedia. It was all about jaguars. They were a cat to be respected. The Extinguisher had no interest in crossing fangs with any jaguar.

And so he clinked with each step.

As the night deepened, it grew cool, then cold. Spring was still weeks away. But this was the Lacandon jungle. The Extinguisher had expected warmth. His Intel said nothing about pine trees and damp, chilly jungle breezes.

His nose began to go numb. And his ears.

"Son of a bitch!" he hissed. "I'm freezing my tailbone off here."

Reaching into a slash pocket of his black combat suit, he extracted the black balaclava that protected his identity when he was in full-Extinguisher combat mode. He drew this on. It muffled his entire head, except for a V-shaped slit that framed his icy blue eyes.

Soon the warm wool absorbed his body heat, warming his cool skin in return.

The Extinguisher moved on.

There was a calculated risk to wearing the feared mask where the ski-masked forces of the insurgent Juarezistas were being hunted. But since the Extinguisher was one of the hunters, that shouldn't matter.

Maybe he would stumble across one of the unlucky bastards, take him hostage and extract the whereabouts of Subcomandante Verapaz from his trembling body.

The mission would go a lot more smoothly with better intelligence, he reflected. God knew there wasn't a lot of raw Intel to be found lying around in the jungle. It was worse than fucking Stomique.

The night wore on, and the Extinguisher grew thirsty. Reconnoitering the area, he found a pool of water. He looked it over with the aid of a penlight. Not brackish. It didn't seem poisoned. He scooped up a cupful with a tin cup taken from his rucksack. Into this he dropped two haldozone tablets. He let the water sit awhile, then drank his fill.

Then the Extinguisher moved on.

After a while, he realized he had to take a whiz real, real bad. No problem. There were plenty of trees.

The Extinguisher was in the act of relieving himself when the ominous click of a hammer drawing back reached his sensitive, battle-honed ears.

Warily he looked right, then left.

As the warm stream petered out against the base of a fluted mahogany tree, he saw why he had heard it with such distinctness.

There was an FAL rifle pointed at his right temple and another pointed at his left. Behind them loomed two men in uniform.

Hard words rattled at him. He froze. They were repeated. The language was Spanish but spoken so fast nothing registered. Nothing sounded like the phrases he had memorized from Wicked Spanish for the Traveler.

He wondered what to do-zip up or raise his hands?

He decided to zip up first. The Geneva Convention must cover this situation. Somewhere.

It was the wrong move. A rifle swapped ends and slammed into the back of his skull. That was actually good. The wool balaclava protected his scalp.

Unfortunately there was no protection for his abdomen, which took the full brunt of the follow-up blow.

"Ooof!"

The Extinguisher went down, hands scrambling for his Hellfire pistol.

A hard boot stamped his wrist, pinning it to the ground. A hard knee leaned over two hundred pounds of soldado weight against his opposite elbow.

"Bastard! Get off me! You want to break something?"

A hand snatched away the balaclava, unmasking him.

A light seared his eyes. He tried to turn away, but strong fingers seized his hair, yanking his head around. The light held steady.

Beyond the light there were only man shadows.

"You could have let me zip up, damn it!" he cursed.

The men muttered something in Spanish.

"Habla Espanol?" one asked.

"No savvy," he said. "No comprendo."

While the boots and knees held him to the cool ground, other hands reached in and stripped him of his gear.

"Look, anybody savvy English?"

Someone spit in his face.

That was a mistake. No one spits in the Extinguisher's game face.

Twisting, he angled one knee between the legs of his tormentor. He moved it a short distance, hard and swift.

"Hijo de la chingada!" a man screamed, clutching himself.

In any language the meaning was plain.

The rifle stocks began raining down on his head after that, and for the Extinguisher the night and the jungle and, most merciful of all, the thudding, pounding, relentless pain all went away.

Chapter 18

The first startling word reached Comandante Efrain Zaragoza in Chiapas Barracks by field telephone.

"Sir! We have captured Subcomandante Verapaz."

"Alive or dead?"

"Alive."

"How do you know he is Verapaz? Has he confessed?"

"No, he is unconscious. But it is him. He has blue eyes."

"Verapaz has green eyes."

"So they say. But his Juarezistas are all indios. They possess brown eyes. Therefore, it stands to reason that this blue-eyed masked one is Verapaz himself, and not one of his insurgentistas. "

It was typical Mexican logic. A triumph of desire over evidence. But it sounded logical to the zone commander, so he ordered the prisoner brought to Chiapas Barracks while he called the excellent tidings up the line until he reached the Interior Ministry General Jeronimo Alacran in the beleaguered Federal District.

It was a miracle that the connection went through. It was a miracle whenever the connection went through on a good day, never mind on this night of turmoil when aftershocks could be felt all the way to Chiapas and the brownish haze in the evening air spoke of troubled winds from the north, carrying the cooling ash of Smoking Mountain.

"You are certain of your facts?" General Alacran demanded.

"He wears a ski mask and possesses blue eyes."

"Verapaz's eyes are green," the general said stubbornly.

"Do we know this for a fact?"

"Our intelligence indicates this. And there are photos in magazines."

"Photos in magazines show colors imperfectly," the zone commander pointed out in a reasonable voice. "Perhaps he wears colored contact lenses when he poses for the press. After all, what manner of man possesses eyes the exact hue of the quetzal bird's plumage?"

"This is an excellent point. And you are very clever to offer this theory. My congratulations. Keep your prisoner safe, for I have already dispatched Colonel Primitivo to Chiapas to deal with this Verapaz."

"This is unnecessary. I have Verapaz in my custody."

"No, you do not," returned General Alacran. "You never had Verapaz."

"But I have him now. He sleeps off the blow that brought him to heel."

"I will repeat myself. You do not have Verapaz. You never had Verapaz. And when Colonel Primitivo arrives, you will surrender this prisoner you do not have and never had."

"But," Comandante Zaragoza sputtered, "what about my credit?"

"You may have the credit if you wish to accept the blame for what follows," the general said coolly.

"What blame?" asked Zaragoza.

"If you would know the blame, you must accept the consequences that attend this knowledge."

"I prefer no blame and no credit, if that is okay with the general," the zone commander said hastily.

"The general finds you a wise man. One who understands that we never had this conversation."

"What conversation?" said the zone commander, realizing even as he terminated the connection to Mexico City that there were worse things in life than losing credit for a duty fulfilled.

Among them, losing one's life, which was shortly to be the fate of Subcomandante Verapaz, the mysterious one of the chilling blue eyes.

COLONEL PRIMITIVO HEARD the excellent news over his field telephone.

He drove the lead LAV. He always took point. He prided himself on taking point. He would not lead men where he would not go himself first.

And in the pursuit of his duty, Colonel Primitivo would enter Hell itself. Not just any hell. Not the hell of his Spanish forebears, but the awful Aztec hell called Mictlan, where the dead had their bones sucked of their sweet marrow by demons.

Colonel Primitivo was unafraid to enter that hell.

So he did not shrink from tearing along the highway that wound through the Lacandon forest that was, although considered Mexican soil, nevertheless enemy territory.

THE PRISONER WAS LOADED into a wooden coffin.

This made perfect sense. He was soon to die, and since the prisoner in Chiapas Barracks was destined to become henceforth a state secret, what better way to conceal the still-living but certainly short-lived body than to load it into a coffin?

Colonel Primitivo blew into the barracks at the head of an armored column. He trailed a choking cloud that this night was more ash than road dust.

The air was becoming difficult to inhale comfortably. Much like the air of Mexico City on a humid summer's night.

Colonel Primitivo snapped a salute. "You have something for me?"

His mouth tight, Comandante Zaragoza motioned to the waiting coffin lying on the ground.

"Dead?"

"That is up to you," he said smoothly.

The colonel nodded. He ripped out a sharp command, and the coffin was loaded into the back of the lead LAV. The rear door clanged shut.

Engines rumbling like drag racers before the checkered flag, the colonel's unit turned like a land dragon and vanished into the jungle night.

"Well, that is done," said Zaragoza, who would have felt much better about the end of the Verapaz matter had it not been for the regrettable lack of credit and the fact that word coming out of the capital bespoke a crisis far worse than the others of recent vintage.

They were saying in the capital that there had been no earthquake. Only a minor spewing of Mount Popocatepetl.

That was very bad to hear. When there was a crisis in the capital, the official line was invariably that were was no crisis. Denial mated with deniability. It was very Mexican.

Now they were saying there was no earthquake when news broadcasts clearly showed the damage and the dead and the unbelievable hellish anguish of it all.

Comandante Zaragoza shuddered at the thought that there might no more be a Mexican government after these calamitous events.

Chapter 19

The Extinguisher heard the raucous jungle sounds coming as if through a haze. He opened his eyes. They saw nothing. Only darkness.

Was he blind?

He felt confined. His head hurt. He moved it. It pounded. He moved it the other way, and although his eyes were open and he saw only darkness, the entire world of darkness spun and spun and spun until in his pain, he stopped biting his cheek and let out a wounded howl.

"What the hell is going on?"

He was in a box. It opened.

A lid clapped to one side, and he saw stars. Real stars. Shadowy heads intercepted the starlight, and dark eyes looked down on him without warmth or fear.

"Let me out of here," he said, grasping the box's edges so the lid couldn't drop back.

A rifle barrel was pressed to his chest. He subsided. He still lived. There was always opportunity to fight if he could find no other way. He made his voice flippant.

"What's shaking, compadres?"

"Subcomandante Verapaz," a man hissed. The Extinguisher recognized the silver stars of a Mexican colonel on his shoulder boards.

"I'm not Verapaz. I'm the Extinguisher."

"Que?"

Searching his mind, he recalled the nom de guerre he'd heard back in the city.

"El Extinguirador."

More heads came into view. Everyone wanted to see the dreaded Extinguisher now. That was good. It meant he had their attention. Soon he would have their fear. After that he would hold their miserable Third World lives in his capable hands.

Hands reached down to pull him out. He surrendered to them.

They stood him on his feet. He swayed. The fresh air made his skull hurt. He looked around.

The first thing he noticed was the long wooden box he had just occupied.

It was a coffin.

Cracking a smile, he said, "It'll take more than a pine box to keep the Extinguisher down."

The colonel stepped up to him while two others held him on his feet. "Jou call yourself the Extinguisher. Why?"

"That's who I am."

"Your true name, then."

"Blaize. Blaize Fury."

"Jou lie!"

"I am Blaize Fury, dillweed. Get used to it."

"Blaize Fury is a fancy. A hero in books."

"That's what I want my enemies to think."

The colonel looked him up and down. "Jou are a military man, senor?"

"I'm a warrior born, forged in hellfire and baptized with gun smoke."

"I have read many of the adventures of Blaize Fury when I was jounger. Jou are not Blaize Fury."

"Prove it."

"When I was jounger, Blaize Fury was my age. I am over forty now. Jou are jounger than twenty-five, if my eyes see not lies."

"Blaize Fury is ageless. He is eternal. The Extinguisher will fight evil as long as there are good fights to be fought."

"Senor Blaize Fury served in Vietnam," the colonel shot back. "With the Green Berets."

"So?"

"If jou are Blaize Fury, then jou were a Green Beret."

"I'm not saying I was or I wasn't."

"If jou are a Green Beret, Blaize Fury, what is-"

Brow furrowing, he consulted an aide in low Spanish.

"Emblazoned," the aide whispered in English.

"Yes. What is emblazoned on the flash of the Special Forces beret?"

The Extinguisher thought quickly. His mind raced.

"That's easy. A service knife between crossed arrows."

"No, that was the later flash. I refer to the original flash. Blaize Fury was one of the first Green Berets. He wore the flash before it was changed."

"I don't remember," the Extinguisher said. "It was a long time ago. I fought many battles since then."

"Jou lie! The flash was the Trojan Horse. Jou would know this if jou were truly El Extinguirador. But jou are not. Jou are too young. Jou are a fake, a fraud and, most damning of all, jou are really Subcomandante Verapaz. Now we know your secret. Jou are a renegade American."

"I am a citizen of the world. And I'm not Verapaz. "

"Jou have the blue eyes of Verapaz."

"Recheck your Intel, salsa breath. Verapaz has green eyes."

"A low trick. Jou wear colored eye lenses to make your blue eyes green for photo opportunities. We are chasing after a green-eyed man when all along they were blue. Your deceptions are exposed, and your life is at an end."

"You can't kill the Extinguisher. He will refuse to die."

A hard hand slapped out, rocking the Extinguisher's head.

He spit blood. "Do your worst, Mexican."

"I will do my worst. I find jou guilty of subversion, insurgency and treason and sentence jou to be stood up against a tree and shot dead for your sins and your crimes against the sovereign government of Mexico."

They hauled him over to a pine tree, slamming him against it. The rough bark bit into his back.

All of a sudden the situation looked grim.

"Look, it's not what it looks like," he said quickly. "I'm here to wax Verapaz. Just like you."

"A likely story."

"It's true."

"Who do jou work for, then?"

"The United Nations."

And the soldiers of Mexico laughed, the colonel most boisterously of all.

"That is not even a preposterous lie. It is unbelievable. UN soldiers are not allowed to shoot in combat. Not even in self-defense. Jou expect me to believe the blue helmets employ assassins?"

"It's the truth. I'm unofficial right now. On probation. But as soon as I nail Verapaz, I have a job."

"A yob? The Extinguisher does not require a yob. He fights for freedom and yustice everywhere. He takes no pay. Like how you say? El Lanero Solitario. "

"Never heard of him."

An aide whispered in the colonel's ear.

"Jou have never heard of the Lone Ranger?" the colonel said.

"Up yours, Tonto. Besides, that's in books. This is real life. I gotta do it the way I'm doing it."

"And jou will do it no more because now your miserable life is at an end."

The firing squad was assembled. Five men. Their rifles were a motley mixture of Belgian FALs and carbines. No last words were solicited, and they didn't even offer him a blindfold.

"Ready," said the colonel.

The rifles came up. "Aim."

The rifle barrels fell into line. Sweat oozed from the Extinguisher's forehead. This was it. This was real.

"Fire! " shouted the colonel at the top of his lungs.

His heart in his throat, the Extinguisher shut his blue eyes and hoped they all somehow missed.

After all, this was Mexico, and the FAL wasn't exactly the best rifle money could buy. Scuttlebutt was they were subject to wickedly fierce muzzle jump.

Chapter 20

The lush mountains of the Sierra Madre del Sur lay enshrouded before them, unseen yet palpable, silently calling out in the old tongues, summoning back the scattered Zapotec and Mixtec nations to reclaim the land of their ancestors.

High Priest Rodrigo Lujan heard the mountains call to him, but if his ears heard the past, his eyes saw the future.

The future walked clothed in basalt flesh. The future was named Coatlicue, she who strode like a stone elephant, ponderous but beautiful. But she had changed.

Glints of gold and silver showed in her rude flesh. They had begun appearing after they had left the capital. Miraculously.

It was the third miracle. The first was the Reawakening.

The second Lujan had dubbed the Miracle of the Crosses.

This manifested itself as the followers of Coatlicue flung their pagan gold-and-silver crucifixes in her path, that she might crush them and banish the false religion from the land.

Coatlicue's clawed feet blindly pressed them into the asphalt, leaving deep cruciform impressions in the ground.

But when Lujan looked into these, the impressions were empty of metal. Every cross pressed into the holy soil left a distinct mark but mysteriously vanished.

That was when the glints began to appear. This miracle Rodrigo Lujan called the Absorption.

As Coatlicue strode tirelessly on, the gold and silver seemed to emerge from her skin like holy eruptions. At two points that he could see, actual crosses surfaced, proving forever his surmise that Coatlicue was reclaiming the very gold idols the Spanish pillaged and recast into their own religious icons. No more. The gold and silver was destined to return to its original purpose. High Priest Rodrigo Lujan vowed this.

Now, as she rested from her inexorable walk so that her followers could eat, Coatlicue had a question.

"Why do you consume your fellow meat machines?"

"It is the way of old Mexico," Rodrigo Lujan explained, picking a shred of calf meat from his teeth. "In the old days war parties raided rival cities, taking hostages. Often of royal blood. These were sacrificed to keep the universe in motion, after which the flesh and tasty organs were eaten."

"The universe is a dynamic construct of electromagnetic forces, cosmic dust and the nuclear furnaces called suns if they are near and stars if they are not. Killing insignificant meat machines can have no direct effect upon its workings."

"But this is our most sacred belief. The flesh of enemies gives us power."

"Consuming animal flesh does fuel the body and impart the stored nutrients of the consumed," Coatlicue admitted. "Although given the long gestation and childhood periods of human meat machines, this is an inefficient allocation of resources.

The proteins absorbed by this practice are more easily obtained from four footed meat machines and plants. If humans cannibalized other humans on a steady basis, in time the population would be depleted until humans were forced to eat other things or die off as a species."

"Perhaps this is what did in the Toltecs," Lujan said thoughtfully.

They were in Oaxaca State now. The drab helicopters buzzed the horizon, but no longer approached to do harm. All they did was record the earth-shattering migration with their cameras. This was good. It would communicate fear and dread to the doomed civilized cities now reeling under their own unsupportable weight.

"Coatlicue, I tell you as a man who has never eaten human flesh before this day, I am reborn. My Zapotec spirit soars. My muscles quiver with delight. I feel a strength greater than any since human meat has passed into me."

"This is not explainable by the mere consumption of human flesh whose proteins are inferior to those of lower animals."

"I say it is true. I feel invincible!"

"Your heart rate and respiration show a 7.2 percent increase in efficiency therefore I must accept your claim. "

"Good. Good."

"And because I believe you, I will do the same. For I will need all resources obtainable to survive the present situation."

Rodrigo Lujan took an involuntary step backward. He bumped into a prostrate man. The man was on hands and knees, bowing in the direction of the stone golem that spoke a language he did not understand, but had the shape of a Mexican goddess.

Lujan reached down and, taking the man by the hair, exposed his reverent face.

"You look Chichimec," he said.

"I am Chichimec. My name is Pol. "

"Chichimec, your Mother desires to know you better."

"I thrill to serve her."

"Let me instruct you that you may best serve her. Place your fine skull at those formidable feet that she may test your faith."

The man scuttled forward on all fours.

"Coatlicue, I worship you," he said in his native tongue.

"He is saying you must eat him," Rodrigo told Coatlicue in English, a tongue not understood by the Chichimecs.

The ophidian heads angled down to fix upon the willing victim like the twin bores of a double-barreled shotgun.

"Crush his skull like a coconut, for the brains are especially delectable," Lujan said.

And lifting one foot, Coatlicue brought it down like a massive nutcracker.

The face was jammed into the dirt. The head actually turned into an oblong under the incredible pressure and when it split, blood and curdlike brain matter gushed from nose, mouth and ears.

When Coatlicue took the dead one, it was all the further proof Rodrigo Lujan required to accept her divinity.

Her mouths did not approach. A blunt elephantine foot pressed down, and as a thousand incredulous eyes watched, the body was taken into the stone like liquid being drawn up a straw.

The foot, an admixture of basalt and precious metals, suddenly marbled with human fat.

"More, " said Coatlicue. "I will have more meat. "

Chapter 21

"There's one bright spot to being in Mexico," Remo was saying as he piloted the Humvee down the winding road north of San Cristobal de las Casas. Night was falling. The smells of the Lacandon jungle night were coming to the fore, among them the sharp tang of allspice and pine straw, and another odor that made him think of burnt corncobs. It made Remo remember he hadn't eaten since breakfast.

"And what is that?" asked Chiun.

"We're not in Mexico City."

"Mexico City is a terrible place," agreed Chiun. "The air is foul."

"That's on a good day," said Remo.

"I do not like to think about that place," said Chiun. "It holds terrible memories."

"Yeah. Last time we inhaled so much polluted air we were thrown completely off our game. And we had to fight Gordons."

"Another hateful name," said Chiun. "But that is not why the memories are so terrible."

"No. Then what?"

"It was there that I learned of the wonderful Aztec empire."

"Yeah, it was a great. If you like human sacrifice and kings who drank blood."

"I was not thinking of that. I was thinking of all the gold that was denied the House, for we knew nothing of the Aztecs."

"And they were only what, a four- or five-year sail from Korea?"

"It matters not how long one journeys from one's village, only the weights of gold that one bears upon him on his return," Chiun said aridly, flicking a gnat off one silken knee.

"That's easy for you to say. You weren't Wang or Yang or any of those early Masters who had to walk a few thousand dusty miles in their sandals just to reach India."

"India was a magnificent empire. We carried away much Indian gold. As well as Egyptian and Persian gold. These empires were most worthy in that wise. But of Aztec gold, we had none."

"Alas and alack," Remo clucked.

Chiun sniffed the air. "Perhaps there may yet be Aztec gold lying about, awaiting rescue."

"The only thing yellow I smell is burnt corncobs."

"Close your nostrils to its siren call," said Chiun. "Once you start on the path of corn eating, next you will be drinking its intoxicating juices. The path to slothfulness and ruin is paved with corn and pared fingernails."

"I'd settle for cold rice," Remo said dryly.

A road sign appeared, saying Chi Zotz. There was no milage or direction indicated.

Remo pulled out a map. "Boca Zotz is supposed to be around here, but it's not on this map."

"Perhaps it is near Chi Zotz," Chiun said. "We will stop at the next village and inquire."

"Suits me. Let's hope we can get a line on Verapaz while we're at it. It's a big jungle."

"Bristling with all manner of high dangers and low corn," added the Master of Sinanju sagely.

Chapter 22

When the harsh rattle of autofire came, it sounded amazingly far away.

Maybe it was the terrible sound itself that contributed to the momentary amazement that seized the wild-haired warrior's helpless body.

Always in the past, the Extinguisher had been in situations that would break a lesser man. Many were the traps, ambushes and deaths engineered for him. Yes, he fell into a good many of these. No warrior is perfect. But always and invariably the Extinguisher mustered his jungle-honed combat skills and saved the day-not to mention his battle-hardened butt.

The percussive sound of autofire meant that this was one time that wasn't going to happen.

In the brief moments before the bullets ripped into his steely muscled form with their hot, fatal kisses, the Extinguisher said a silent combat prayer to the red god of battle. This was not the way he had ever imagined it ending. Not here. Not now. Not so soon, with so many battles to be fought and the enemy in this campaign as yet unvanquished.

But war is hell, even a wild-haired warrior's private war.

His prayer done, he tensed. If it was quick, good. If not, then he would spit out a final curse against the foes who had robbed a troubled world of its one pure protector. That would be good, too. Not as good as living, true, but-

A low moan ascended to the low-hanging moon.

The rustle and thud of a body falling into vegetation came next. Then another. More moans, followed by a confused rustling and thudding.

A final burst of autofire cut off a muffled curse.

The Extinguisher froze, not knowing what to do. He heard it all. The moans. The sounds of sudden death. The dropping bodies.

But none were his own. He still stood erect against the execution tree.

A slow, measured rustle came from the west, and he sensed a nearing presence, soft and stealthy.

Popping open one eye, he saw the firing squad curled up in the high grass like insects whose bodies had been doused with gasoline and set aflame.

A slow movement caught his eye.

Approaching was a cautious figure wearing a brown uniform, a black ski mask muffling the head. It was a very large head, bloated, almost pulpy, as if it concealed a monstrously deformed skull.

"Shh," the figure hissed. The eyes were luminous in the dark, like black opals.

A knife came out. His bonds were sliced apart.

"Thanks," he hissed, rubbing his wrists.

"Shh. Vamos!"

That last word he understood. It meant come on. Grabbing his gear, the Extinguisher followed the wary figure, casting frequent glances over his backtrail in case pursuit materialized.

None did.

The Extinguisher would live to fight another day.

And if this was one time he hadn't saved himself, what the hell? Breathing was breathing. Besides, there was only one witness, and he wore the guerrilla garb that marked him as a Juarezista.

Once in the clear, it would be child's play to turn the tables on this jungle revolutionary and have his way with him.

It was unfair-cold turnabout. But this was war. And the first thing tossed out the window in war was gratitude.

Chapter 23

Coatlicue and her worshipful train were on the move once more.

With each thunderous step, they grew stronger. The earth, still racked by aftershocks, seemed to quake in sympathy with the goddess's mighty tread. And out of the villages and farms, they poured.

Aztec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Chocho, all united in one mystic purpose.

"We go to liberate Oaxaca, seat of the Zapotec empire," High Priest Rodrigo Lujan proclaimed to one and all. "We go to cast off the chilango yoke. Join us, become one with us, partake of the bounty of your reclaimed homelands. Shrug off your false saints. Tear down your crosses, your churches, your hollow religion that offers you breads and wines with transparent lies that you eat the blood and flesh of your dead god. That falseness is no more. Coatlicue offers no such things. When you follow Coatlicue, you eat real meat, you drink true blood and, in doing this, become one with your forefathers."

They came, they followed and some who heard that all they need do was lay their heavy bodies on the road before the lumbering one and be absorbed into her did that, too.

Coatlicue crushed them in her brutal mercy, without regard to sex or age or other of the so-called civilized niceties.

As they approached the town of Acatlan, she stood ten feet tall.

Once through it, having emptied the town of indio and mestizo alike, she topped twelve feet.

By the time she lumbered on through Huajuapan de Leon, her wary serpent heads straining to reach fifteen feet in height, the rude stone had softened to a warm brown that suggested flesh marbled with fat.

Striding alongside, Rodrigo Lujan reached out to touch her writhing skirt of serpents. It felt pleasantly warm. It was night now. The sun was down. Radiating heat could not explain away the sensation of warmth, nor the sinuousness with which the stone flowed as Coatlicue walked onward.

When he took his finger away, he had to pull hard.

And when he looked at it, Lujan saw he had left behind his entire fingerprint, as men who lived in subzero climates sometimes did when they stupidly touched their moist flesh to cold metal.

Only no phenomenon of cold could account for the patch of Rodrigo's skin that had become one with Coatlicue. She absorbed all flesh that came into contact with her.

Making a mental resolution not to touch or be touched by his goddess again, Lujan quickened his pace. It was harder to keep up with her seven-league strides now that she was growing and growing and growing.

Deep in his heart, he wondered if there was any limit to her ability to increase in size and mass.

Or for that matter, her appetites.

Chapter 24

"Hold up!" the Extinguisher ordered.

The Juarezista guerrilla froze.

"Que?" The voice was soft, like a jungle breeze.

"Something's wrong," he said, grabbing his stomach.

"What is it?" the Juarezista asked, creeping back along the jungle trail to join him.

"I think I'm wounded," he gasped.

Lifting his combat shirt, he exposed his flat abdomen. There was some blood, but no sign of a entry wound. They could be very small, he knew.

Turning around, he asked, "See any sign of an exit wound?"

"No, senor. "

"Damn. My gut feels like it's on fire."

"Jou are an American?"

"Fury's the name. Blaize Fury," he said.

"I have never heard of you."

"You shitting me?"

"I do not know the name. I am sorry."

"Never mind." The Extinguisher was doubled over now. "Man, what is wrong with me?" he moaned.

The guerrilla hovered solicitously. "Jou are not wounded."

"I feel terrible. It's like someone stuck a cold Kabar in my gut."

"Did jou drink of the water?"

"What? Oh, yeah. Awhile back."

"Ah . . . la turistas. "

"Don't call me a tourist. I'm a warrior."

"I am not. Jou are suffering from the tourist disease. The water does not agree with your belly."

"I don't feel like I'm going to throw up."

"That is not the hole through which the disease seeks release, senor. "

"What are you talking about?"

Then he knew. The sharp pain in his stomach traveled south and became an urgency in his bowels.

"Wait here," he said in a strangled voice.

The Extinguisher left the jungle trail and did his business in the dark, where no one would see. He was at his business a long time. Twice he started to pull up his pants, but had to resume squatting as more of the disease flooded from his beleaguered body.

"Oh, man. I hope this doesn't blow the mission."

When he was done, he stowed his emergency reading material back into his rucksack. To his surprise, he discovered his balaclava. He pulled it on. It seemed to give him strength to face what lay in store.

When he returned to the jungle path, he was the Extinguisher again, erect, proud and unbowed by the cruel rigors of the Lacandon jungle.

The eyes of the Juarezista went wide at the sight of his capable, manly figure.

"Jou are-"

"Yes," he said. "Now you understand. I am the Extinguisher."

"Que?"

"The Extinguisher. El Extinguirador. "

"I have never heard that name."

"You've never heard of the Extinguisher, savior of the oppressed? Where have you been living, in a freaking cave?"

"No, but now that I see that jou wear the mask of a Juarezista, I am proud to know you. That is, if jou are truly one of us."

He nodded, letting his body language relax. He stepped closer. This was going to be easy. The Juarezista stood about five-three and weighed no more than 130 pounds. He was a little thick in the hips, too. Out of shape. No match for the Extinguisher, who balled his fist, intending to coldcock the walking intelligence source before he knew what hit him.

The impulse to strike ignited in his brain.

Some jungle instinct must have seized the Juarezista because his hand suddenly reached up. He was moving to block the blow. Good luck to him. The Extinguisher had once been a Golden Gloves boxer.

In the brief seconds before the Extinguisher's fist connected, the Juarezista tore off his black ski mask and his face was revealed in the blazing moonlight.

The silver light showed an oval face, full, sensuous lips and a cascade of the most gorgeous shimmering black hair he had ever seen.

The fist connected. White teeth clicked shut, and the most gorgeous pair of dark eyes imaginable rolled up in the guerrilla's head as he fell backward, splaying across the jungle trail like a beached khaki starfish.

He lay there breathing rhythmically.

Then and only then did the Extinguisher see that he had a nice set of tits, too.

Chapter 25

Colonel Mauricio Primitivo awoke to the sound of a screech owl. It perched in a tree branch directly over his aching head. It looked down upon him and gave out an ungodly moan.

The Maya called it a moan bird. But to Colonel Primitivo's eyes, it looked like the ghostly soul of death as it regarded him with its slow-winking eyes.

The colonel took stock. He lived. Obviously.

Memories came back to him.

He remembered giving the command to fire. Remembered, too, the rattle of automatic fire that distinctly came from the wrong direction.

The hot breath of supersonic rounds zipping by him had made spiteful sounds like glass rods breaking. His firing squad had crumpled before his eyes, and then he became aware of a dull pain at his own back.

The pain was still there, he realized.

It was the last thing he remembered before his senses were robbed from him and the first thing he felt now.

He tried to stand up. And failed.

Rolling over, he propped himself up on one khaki elbow. Good. He could do that. He could not be mortally wounded and have such strength after lying bleeding into the jungle floor for God alone knew how many hours.

Stripping off his uniform blouse, he exposed an entry wound in his abdomen above the pelvic saddle. It was an angry red. He gave it a ginger squeeze, and it oozed blood like a small, fleshy volcano.

There was no pain. So he reached around, gritting his teeth as he sought the inevitable exit wound.

What he found was actually smaller. It burned when he gathered up the surrounding flesh and squeezed it. His fingers came back crimson. They kneaded the flesh, seeking hardness and bringing a grimace to his face. But no hardness was to be found.

This was good. It meant the bullet had passed cleanly through the flesh, not striking bone and, it was to be hoped, carefully avoiding organs great and small.

A searing pain racked him as Colonel Primitivo clambered to his feet. He winced, his thick whiskbroom mustache bristling. Well, pain was a sign of life after all.

He stood on his booted feet, swaying slightly.

Men lay all about him, dead. They were very dead, he saw. He gave one a kick for deserting him in the hour of national emergency and then, dripping blood from the clearly God-sent wound, he stumbled off toward Chiapas Barracks.

Never again would he take offense if a woman playfully punched his growing paunch and joked about his love handles.

They had saved his life.

Chapter 26

When he realized he had sucker-punched a woman, the Extinguisher raged, "Damn, damn, damn, what a stupid idiot I am!"

It was not his way to strike a woman. It was against his personal code. But he had done it, and there was no recalling the blow.

Kneeling, he checked her pulse. She breathed. Of course. Before he struck, he had calculated the force of the blow in advance. It was possible to kill a human being with one well-placed punch. But that was not the Extinguisher's way, either. The dead give up no Intel.

Cradling her limp head in his lap, he checked her mouth. She hadn't bitten or swallowed her tongue. That was good. No broken teeth, either. Also good. Women were fussy about their teeth.

For over an hour he squatted in the unfamiliar jungle protecting the female Juarezista guerilla, wondering what to do when she woke up.

Somewhere an unseen animal vented a fierce screech.

"Hope that wasn't a jaguar," he said to himself, snapping the Hellfire pistol up in its Whip-it sling.

If it was, the animal didn't approach.

At length, his conquest began to stir.

A cold shock of fear went through him as the Extinguisher realized the acute difficulty of his position.

Carefully he laid her head on a stone and stood up, his mind racing.

An idea struck him in a bolt of inspiration.

Unsheathing his Randall survival knife, he used it to slice open his left bicep, just enough to produce blood.

Then he jammed the point of the blade into a nearby tree. Two tough mahogany trees stubbornly refused to take the blade, so he plunged it into one with a reddish trunk with bark that hung in long pale strips like peeling dead skin.

Then the Extinguisher stood over her, waiting.

Her eyes fluttered open, roved dazedly, finally falling upon his boots. They looked up.

"Que?"

He pitched his voice to its lowest register. "You had a close call."

She shook her head as if to clear the cobwebs of sleep. Abruptly she took it into her hands as the pain told her shaking was a bad idea.

"What happened to me?" she moaned.

"Someone threw a knife at you. The only way to save your life was to knock you out. I caught the bite of the blade along one arm before it hit that tree."

Her eyes went from the streak of blood showing on his arm to the knife hilt protruding from the weird peeling tree.

"Jou-jou saved my life."

"Why not?" he said casually. "You saved mine back there."

With his help she found to her feet again.

She looked around perplexedly. "The one with the knife-where did he go?"

"He didn't get a second throw," the Extinguisher told her, patting his Hellfire.

"You are a brave warrior. You have come to join the Juarez National Liberation Front obviously."

"I fight alongside the good people of this earth wherever I find them," he said truthfully.

Her eyes shone with a mixture of gratitude and frank admiration. It was a look the Extinguisher had seen many, many times. He met it directly, with neither embarrassment nor false modesty.

"Well spoken. My name is Assumpta. I am from a village near here. I go to join the Juarezistas, even though I am but a woman."

"You are a brave woman."

She threw back her head proudly, lifting a defiant chin, tossing her hair with the motion. It was very thick and black. It explained why her head had seemed so large under her ski mask.

"The men of my village do not believe women can fight, nor that they should fight," she explained. "But I go anyway to avenge my brother, Ik, who perished at the hands of the federalistas. "

"Where you go, I go."

And in the darkness they shook hands firmly.

The Extinguisher had an ally. Whether circumstances would force him to betray her was unknown at this time. But for the moment they were a team.

"Subcomandante Verapaz, it is said, is marching on Mexico City," Assumpta said. "That is where I go."

"Lead the way. This jungle is new to me."

As they started off, the Extinguisher recovered his survival knife, sheathing it with a curt "Souvenir. Might come in handy."

They had donned their black masks again. The jungle accepted them into its cool, treacherous embrace. They moved as one, the Juarezista named Assumpta taking point. It was not the Extinguisher's way to let a woman take point, but it was her jungle so he figured it would be okay this time.

Besides, from the rear, he could better keep watch over her.

Not to mention the fact that he was really getting into the easy sway of her olive drab hips.

Chapter 27

The market town called Chi Zotz was nestled in the shadow of a tablelike mountain range. The air was clean and sweet, laden with budding wildflowers.

An English sign said WELCOME TO CHI ZOTZ. TURNING FOR PALENEQUE RUINS. FOOD, COLD SODA AND SAFE CAR PARKING. BIRTHPLACE OF SUBCOMANDANTE VERAPAZ.

Near the entrance to the town, a shawled woman stood outside an adobe home preparing a chicken dinner. She had the struggling chicken by the neck and, spreading her legs apart, wound up her arm.

She spun the bird in a circle twice. The neck snapped on the second revolution.

Examining the now-limp bird with satisfaction, she turned to reenter the home when Remo called out to her.

"Excuse me. Is Boca Zotz near here?"

"Boca Zotz is no more, senor. "

"Damn. What happened to it?"

"It has been renamed. It is now Chi Zotz, which means Bat's Mouth."

"Boca Zotz is this place, right?"

"No, this place is Chi Zotz. Boca Zotz is no more, senor. "

With that, the women vanished into the shadows of her home.

Remo drove on.

The town looked deserted. No one was in the tiny town square or walked the dirt streets. Painted slogans marred almost every blank surface available. Remo didn't need to understand much Spanish to understand defiant phrases like Solidaridad! Libertad! and Viva Verapaz!

"I caught you eyeing that fowl," Chiun said sharply.

"I was just thinking I could go for some duck right about now."

"I do not know what duck inhabits this land, but I would not eat it. Nor the fish. We will have rice, which is always safe to eat. Besides, chicken is unclean and unhealthful."

"People eat chicken all the time."

"Yes. Unknowingly."

"What do you mean unknowingly?"

"Chicken are incapable of urinating. This failure of hygiene fouls the fowl's tissues. To eat chicken is worse than consuming the flesh of pork."

Remo parked outside a dingy Spanish colonial building that suggested a restaurant because it sported a painted oval sign that looked exactly like a beer label. It said CARTA BLANCA. Soft ranchera music floated out.

When they entered, not a single glance came their way.

All eyes were glued to a flickering black-and-white TV set in one corner of the room. Chairs had been pulled up in a semicircle around the flickering TV light, but many people also stood around.

"Wonder what they're watching?" Remo asked Chiun.

"I do not know, but the odor of fear rises from them."

"Smells like chili and tacos to me," Remo grunted.

As they watched, he noticed a man in a white Texas hat make the sign of the cross.

"Could be coverage of the big earthquake," said Remo.

"I will ask."

Lifting his voice, the Master of Sinanju rattled off a rapid question in Spanish.

"El Monstruoso, " a man called back, making the sign of the cross himself.

"Did he say monster?" Remo asked.

"He said monster."

"You'd think with their capital in ruins, they would have better things to do than watch an old monster movie."

"Ay! El Monstruoso esta estrujando el tanque," a man cried.

"The monster has crushed a tank," Chiun translated.

"El Monstruoso devora el tanque!"

"The monster is eating the tank," Chiun said.

A man began weeping. Others began weeping, too.

"The special effects must be really something," Remo said.

"They are saying that the monster is coming this way."

"They sure take their movies seriously down here," said Remo, grabbing a chair. Chiun joined him.

The waiter was nervous. He sweated. He handed them menus and asked them their preferences in Spanish.

Remo pointed to an item of the menu. Cabro al cabron.

"What's this?" he asked the Master of Sinanju.

"Grilled goat."

"How about pastas de tortuga?"

"Turtle's feet."

"You're making this up so I don't get any meat, aren't you?"

"No," said Chiun, who then told the waiter, "Arroz. "

"If that's rice, make that a double," said Remo in English.

Chiun translated for the waiter, and within a few minutes bowls of steaming rice were laid before them.

They ate quickly. Remo finished first.

The commotion from the TV was distracting, so Remo wandered over and tried to see past the closeclustered heads of the TV viewers. The viewers in the back row were standing on stools. Even getting up on his toes didn't help much.

Getting no cooperation, Remo flicked at the earlobe of a man ahead of him, causing him to glower at the man beside him.

Remo caught a brief glimpse of the screen.

"Huh!" he grunted.

Returning to his table, he whispered to the Master of Sinanju. "Speak of the devil."

"Verapaz?"

"No. Gordons. I just saw him on TV."

Chiun's hazel eyes widened.

"What!"

"Yeah," Remo said casually. "He's the monster." Chiun eyed his pupil stonily. Remo looked back, a poker expression on his face. Finally he let his face come apart, grinning from ear to ear. "Fooled you."

"It was not Gordons?"

"Well, it looked like him. Or like the form he last assimilated."

"The ugly Aztec woman monster?"

"Yeah. Curlicue or whatever the name was."

"How do you know it is not Gordons returned to life?"

"Three reasons," said Remo. "One, we shattered Gordons into loose rock while he was in that form. He's deactivated. Two, Smith made us leave the corpse after the Mexican authorities stuck him back in their big museum. If he's still there, the roof has fallen in on his head by now."

"Those are not convincing reasons, Remo."

"I was getting to number three. Three, the monster on the TV had to be twenty-five feet tall. Cordons isn't twenty-five feet tall. The statue was only eight."

"Therefore, it is not Gordons."

"Can't be."

"Yes, you are right. Besides, how can it be Gordons when Gordons was vanquished by the Reigning Master of Sinanju?"

"I helped, too."

"I found his dense mechanical brain and broke it in his head."

"And I delivered the coup de grace. "

Chiun made a face. "You wasted a blow. He was already dead when you struck."

"Could be. But I was making sure. He came back to haunt us too many times before."

"But he is dead now. Long dead."

"If he wasn't, he'd have come back long before. And in a form we wouldn't recognize."

"I spit on his memory," Chiun said bitterly.

When the bill came, it was for five-hundred pesos.

"How much is that American?" Remo asked Chiun, who asked the waiter.

"Only seventy-five dollars."

"For two bowls of rice?" Remo complained.

"Jou are forgetting the water. It is not free."

Remo reached into his chinos. "I'm kinda low on cash. Discover card okay?"

"There is a thirty percent surcharge for all major credit cards."

"I'd get upset, but it goes on my expense account."

The waiter smiled broadly. The smile seemed to say This is what we count on, senor.

"By the way, we're looking for Subcomandante Verapaz."

"He is not here."

"I'm a reporter with Mother Jones magazine."

"Another?"

"You get a lot of reporters, I hear."

"Si. But not a lot from Mother Yones. They only come once or twice a season now. I think they have a little circulation problem."

"Subscriptions have been picking up. So, where can I find him?"

The waiter made his face sad. "Jou cannot, senor. For he is like the wind, unseeable and unfindable unless he wishes otherwise."

"How much?" Remo said wearily.

The waiter's sad face brightened. "For fifty dollars cash I will point you in the correct direction."

Remo counted out the money.

"You go north along the Pan American Highway, senor. Drive to Mexico City."

"Mexico City?"

"Si. Subcomandante Verapaz even now leads a drive to wrest Mexico City from the oppressor. Jou will undoubtedly find him somewhere along the road, crushing his enemies and lighting joy in the hearts of Mexicans everywhere."

"Thanks. You're a big help."

"May I sell you an authorized Subcomandante Verapaz doll, senores? An autographed picture? Get them now because if Verapaz either dies or succeeds, the price will surely double."

"No, but you can tell us why you changed Boca Zotz to Chi Zotz."

"That will be five additional dollars."

"Forget it."

"It is a very interesting story."

"Tell me the story, and I'll pay you what I think it's worth," Remo countered.

"Boca is Spanish. We live no longer under Spanish yoke. Boca becomes Chi so that now we will live in the Mouth of the Bat."

"So what's Boca mean?"

The waiter showed Remo his empty palm.

Remo was thinking it over when the Master of Sinanju said, "It is Spanish for mouth."

"You changed the name from Bat's Mouth to Bat's Mouth?"

"No, we change it from Bat's Mouth to Mouth of the Bat. It is a very great difference to the people."

"It is a very great pain in the boca to find this dump," said Remo on his way out the door.

"The soldados all say this, too," the waiter said smugly, folding Remo's money into his pocket.

Chapter 28

"It is called the give-and-take palm," Assumpta was saying as she broke a wicked needlelike thorn off the weirdly barbed tree. "It is called that because to touch it improperly will cut you. But the bark of the give-and-take plant makes a wonderful bandage with which to bind the very wound it causes, or any wound."

As the Extinguisher watched, she stripped off the bark on long, gauzy rolls almost like Ace bandages.

The moonlight was spectral and it made her black hair shine. Her body was as supple as bamboo. She smelled faintly of coconut.

With sure movements she bound the knife wound and, using one of the long, tough thorns, speared the loose end, cinching it tight.

"The father of my father taught this to me. He was a H'men, which is the same to you as a doctor, but one who uses the plants and herbs of the forest to heal the sick."

The Extinguisher grunted his thanks. It would be something to remember.

They moved on. As they picked their way, she taught him how to recognize the trees of the Lacandon rain forest, which was a weird conglomeration of semitropical vegetation coexisting with oak and pine trees.

"The red-bark one was known as the turista tree, because it sheds its bark the way a sunburned gringo sheds his skin," she explained. "That is the ceiba. And that the Manzanillo."

"Speaking of the turistas," he said. "Give me a minute, will you?"

She waited patiently as the Extinguisher did what had to be done, thinking that this having to drop one's pants every two miles was one hell of a way to win the trust of an enemy.

Rejoining her, he discovered her hacking a gnarled vine in two. She drank from it as if it were a garden hose. They continued on.

He said little, so she filled in the silences.

Her full name was Assumpta Kaax. She had been raised Catholic in the village called Escuintla, which meant Place of Dogs.

"It was a well-named place, Senor Fury. The dogs, who need little to sustain themselves, did well. The Maya did not."

She was thirteen when Subcomandante Verapaz had come to the village with his knowledge and his medicines and his wise words. He politicized the village, and politicized Assumpta, too. When she came of age; she had two choices. Marry a village boy she did not like, much less love. Or join the Juarezistas.

"Not that this last was a choice," she added hastily. "I ran away from my village to do this. I ran from poverty to a new life. Now I am Lieutenant Balam-which means jaguar-a true follower of Lord Kukulcan."

"Who?"

"It is the name by which some Maya call Subcomandante Verapaz. Kukulcan was our god many baktuns ago. He came bringing corn seeds, writing and other knowledges that uplifted the Maya of that cycle."

"Are you trying to tell me Verapaz is a god?"

"This is what many believe."

"What do you believe?"

She was quiet for a long, pensive period. The only sounds were the peeping of tree toads and the soft rustle of their own bodies bruising foliage.

"My heart is torn two ways," she admitted finally. "The knowledge he brings has caused me to cast off the saints of the priests of the oppressors, as well as the demons of my ancestors. Yet Subcomandante Verapaz is godlike in his way. Like Kukulcan, he has uplifted us, politicized us, opened our minds. Now he leads us to our certain destiny."

"That's not an answer."

"The only answer I can truthfully give is that my heart is torn, but my mind is clear. I would die for my lord Verapaz."

"I understand," the Extinguisher said. And he did. Because his heart was torn, too. He was falling in love with this jungle she-jaguar .. ..

And unwittingly she was leading the Extinguisher to an inescapable rendezvous with betrayal.

Chapter 29

"It is twenty-five feet tall!" the voice shouted into the ears of the president of the Mexican United States. It was the defense minister.

"What is twenty-five feet tall?" asked the president, holding on to his desk as yet another stomachchurning aftershock rolled through.

"Coatlicue. She is growing!"

"Do not call it a she. It is a statue. Imaginary. Sexless."

"She grows by the hour. And the indios pour from the villages to follow her. They flow behind her, a river of humanity."

"She-I mean it-is heading south?"

"South, si."

"With no objective in mind?"

"None that we can discern, Excellency. She follows the Pan American Highway without deviation."

"Perhaps she will walk into the sea."

"Why would she do that?" the defense minister wondered aloud.

"Because if there is a true God in heaven, that is what He will compel her do," said the president. "Otherwise, I do not know what will happen. I can spare no units. I would not know what orders to give if I could. Coatlicue is a national treasure, a symbol of our joined mestizo heritage. If she were to be destroyed, we would have total revolt. I would sooner slap the pope in the face with my own hand."

"There is one hope," the defense minister said in a slightly calmer voice.

"And what is that?" asked the president, holding his deskblotter over his head to keep the falling plaster out of his hair.

"If Coatlicue continues as she does, she will inescapably reach Chiapas State."

"This could be good or this could be bad," the president mused.

"Subcomandante Verapaz virtually controls Chiapas. Perhaps she will become his problem."

"If there is any way to urge Coatlicue to do this, I will not complain about the result. For if only one irritation cancels out the other, it would be a boon."

"Yes, Excellency."

Chapter 30

The Extinguisher called a halt.

"We gotta give it a rest," he told Assumpta.

"Que? What do you mean?"

"I'm beat."

"That is no way for a guerrillero to talk. We will never be beaten. Our spirits are indomitable."

"My knees are weak. I think that last time under a sapodilla tree I dumped my balls with the rest of my load."

"Ah, you are weak from sickness, not fear."

"The Extinguisher doesn't know fear."

"Perhaps. But he knows sickness and requires rest like any other man. Come. There is a village near here. They will take us in."

"No. I can't afford to be seen."

"Then we will go no closer than it is necessary and I will obtain food from the village and bring it back to you."

"All right. But be careful."

"I return soon, El Extinguirador."

"Call me Blaize."

The Extinguisher watched her go. She moved like a jungle cat, slipping between trees until she was only a shadow, then a shape, then one with the eternal jungle night.

He unlimbered his pack, picking through it carefully. The way things were going, he'd have to jettison extra gear if he was to make it to his destination-wherever that was.

Digging into his pack, he discovered something important was missing.

There was only one Extinguisher novel. He had brought two. Worst of all, the missing one was the one he hadn't finished.

"Damn it. Musta left it behind last time I took a dump."

Repacking his gear, he left the surviving book out.

It was too dangerous to sleep. Time enough for sleep when Assumpta returned.

Breaking out his waterproof poncho, he tented it over his head, making sure the skirts came all the way to the ground. Clicking on a flashlight, he began reading

The Extinguisher #221, Hell on Wheels.

Massachusetts State Trooper Edward X. MacIlwraith thought he'd seen everything in his twenty-eight years cruising Bay State highways until the day he pulled over the cherry red Eldorado and found himself looking into the bore of a .50-caliber Browning gutripper .. . .

The Extinguisher grinned happily. "Looks like a good one ...."

Chapter 31

Colonel Mauricio Primitivo was not accustomed to the jungle.

He knew enough to stay away from the Manzanillo tree, whose easily bruised bark leaked a thick, milky sap that made the skin erupt in ferocious rashes and boils.

The give-and-take palm was also to be avoided, although it was not as vicious as the Manzanillo.

The night wore on. The darkness was both impenetrable and absolute. The wild calls of unseen things abroad in the forest were disturbing. Colonel Primitive clutched his Heckler submachine gun more tightly.

The dark plots of bean and cornfields that had been scorched black to prepare the land for the spring planting gave off an odor that called to him.

It meant a village. In Chiapas a village meant indios. Indios meant Juarezista sympathizers. And sympathizers inescapably suggested a safe haven where the Masked One might go to lick his wounds.

Releasing the safety on his H Mauricio Primitivo picked up his pace. His thick mustache quirked upward in a slow anticipatory smile.

He would find what he sought or there would be a slaughter this night.

Perhaps a slaughter might transpire even if he found his quarry. All things were possible in lawless Chiapas.

Chapter 32

"We're getting nowhere," Remo said, pulling over to the side of the road.

It was well past midnight. They had been driving for hours and they hadn't come across a single Juarezista to interrogate.

"I say we head into the forest," Remo- suggested.

"You must carry my trunk," said Chiun.

Remo eyed the steamer trunk with the blue phoenixes in the back seat.

"Can't we leave it here?"

"It will be stolen by thieves."

While they were arguing, an armored column roared past.

The faces of the soldiers were grim. And they were in a fierce hurry.

They blew on past without stopping to ask questions.

"Maybe they're on the trail," said Remo.

"Let us follow them," Chiun suggested.

"Beats walking," said Remo, getting the Humvee in gear. He sent it back up the road. They fell in behind the armored column.

They followed a half mile before it abruptly left the highway and disappeared up a winding road.

"Here goes," said Remo.

The road led to a military installation. It was ablaze with lights, and soldiers were climbing into armored vehicles parked in front of it.

The column screeched to a disorganized stop, and men started piling out, blocking the way out.

"Looks like they're getting ready for war," Remo told Chiun. "Wait here with the trunk."

The new arrivals began yelling at the soldiers preparing to leave. They were being yelled at in return. All of it was in Spanish, and Remo understood none of it.

It was a great, noisy confusion in which his "Anyone here speak English?" was completely lost.

Noticing a main building, Remo entered. No one tried to stop him. They were too busy arguing and trying to get their vehicles lined up so the fresh soldiers could depart by the one winding access road.

Remo found the commanding officer fussing at his desk. He was digging through a sheaf of communications while trying to talk into two phones at once, one perched on each shoulder. His nameplate said ZARAGOZA.

"You speak English?" asked Remo.

The commander looked up.

"Si. Now go away."

"Can't."

"I am very busy with the present emeryency."

"It's about Subcomandante Verapaz," said Remo.

"You are too late," the commander said distractedly. "He is defunct."

"Dead?"

"That is what I have heard. But it is only an unsubstantiated rumor. Go away now. I have no time for gringo journalistas."

"In that case, I demand to see the body. Inquiring minds want to see it all."

"You cannot see the body because there is no body," the commander hissed. "Officially."

Remo came around the desk and relieved the commander of his telephones, his disorganized papers and his ability to rise from the chair of his own volition by squeezing his spine.

"Now, you listen very carefully," Remo said. "I've had a long day. I've traveled a long way, eaten expensive food and been soaked by every Mexican whose path I crossed. Not counting the ones who tried to shoot me."

"I understand."

"Good. I'm looking for Subcomandante Verapaz. I don't care if he's alive or dead. I just want to find him. Once I find him I can go home. Comprendo?"

"Comprende. The proper tense is comprende. "

"Thank you for the Spanish-grammar lesson. But stay with me here. I want to go home very badly. In the next hour if possible. So if you'll kindly point me in the right direction, I won't place you under cardiac arrest."

"Cardiac-?"

"Also known as commotio cordis. "

"Como-?"

"Don't bother. You'll only get tongue-tied like everybody else."

The commander spread his helpless hands. "I cannot point you to the body, senor. I am most sorry. Colonel Primitivo took this Verapaz from my hands and out into the jungle for summary execution."

"He come back?"

The commander looked helpless. "How can he come back if he is dead?" he asked plaintively.

"I meant the colonel, not the subcomandante. "

"Ah, I understand. No, the colonel did not come back. He is not-how you say?-attached to Chiapas Barracks, which this is. He has done his duty, now he is gone forever, no one being the wiser."

"Except you and me," Remo corrected.

"It is a military secret, senor. I hope you will keep it."

"Cross my heart and hope to spit, as the Beaver used to say."

"Que?"

"Never mind. Look, if Verapaz is dead, what's all the commotion?"

"We go to battle the monster."

"What monster?"

"The monster on the TV, senor. "

Remo followed the commander's pointing finger.

In a far corner of the room sat a TV set. It was on. The sound was off.

On the screen was a thirty-foot-tall stone monster striding through the night. Helicopter searchlights played over it. It was the same monster movie that had been playing in Chi Zotz hours before.

Remo thought the special effects were pretty good, but the camera work and editing were terrible.

"You going to fight that?"

"Si. It is a terrible emeryency up in Oaxaca. All my forces have been called up."

"Good. You have a nice monster fight. I just have one last question."

"What is that?"

"Where did the colonel take the body?"

"Into the jungle. But I would not go into there."

"Why not?"

"Because this is Maya country and it is after dark."

"After dark Kamazotz comes out."

"Kamazotz?"

"Yes. Kamazotz is the bat god of the Maya." The commander shook his head slowly. "Terrible. He will drain your blood and do other unpleasant things to you.

"Thanks for the warning. I'll take my chances."

"You are very welcome, senor. But there is one thing more I ask of you."

"What's that?"

"Could you undo the thing that you did to my neck? I would like to use my legs to join my men to fight the monster."

"Oh, sorry," said Remo, returning to release the cervical manipulation that had disabled the commander's vertebrae.

Outside, the soldiers were still fighting. The column looked like a wagon train trying to get itself pointed west. Only no one knew west from south.

Taking the wheel, Remo met Chiun's quizzical gaze.

"They're off to fight the monster."

"What monster?"

"The one on the TV."

"But that monster is not real."

"You're talking about an army that's afraid to go into the forest after curfew because the bat god lives there."

"I fear no bats," sniffed Chiun.

"That's good," Remo said, gunning the engine, "because we're about to hit the jungle. Verapaz is out there, maybe dead, maybe alive."

"It does not matter."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because we are not paid by the slaying. If someone else has felled our victim, we will still be paid."

"Me, I like my work. And I still have a few frustrations to get out."

"Perhaps you suffer from ingrown cuticles," Chiun said aridly. "They can be very painful unless pointed in the proper direction."

"The proper direction of Verapaz is the only direction I care about right now," said Remo, chasing his own bouncing headlight beams.

Chapter 33

Rodrigo Lujan was worried. He was very worried.

The federal army no longer worried him. They had hurled their all into the teeth of the goddess Coatlicue.

And their all had been hurled back into their own teeth, breaking them.

Military barricades had been erected. No one dared man them, but the roads were blocked by all manner of obstacles.

Massed tanks. These had been trampled and crushed as if by great stone pistons.

Burning wood and fuel had been next. She strode through that unfazed. Not so fortunate were the indios who willingly followed her in the conflagration and were consumed.

The smell of their roasted flesh was that of roast suckling pig. Rodrigo veered closer, and spying a rigidly raised firecrackled arm, stopped and yanked on it.

The cooked black flesh slid off in his hands, exposing pinkish meat, but by struggling he succeeded in pulling the arm from its socket, carrying it away for later consumption.

Farther along, a great ditch had been dug and covered with thin wood and camouflaged to resemble in the darkness a patch of unpaved road.

One great foot touched the ruse, sensed its unnatural hollowness and responding, lurched over the snare and onward.

All obstacles were defeated. Coatlicue was prescient and indomitable. Everyone knew this. So the army had curtailed their futile operations and withdrawn totally. Coatlicue made wonderful progress until she reached the outskirts of Oaxaca.

The chilango army had all but ceded the old seat of the Zapotec nation to Coatlicue the invincible. Victory was assured.

That was not what concerned Rodrigo Lujan.

It was Coatlicue's voracious, all-consuming appetite.

The indios continued to pour out of the zinc-roofed huts and village hovels. They replenished the newly fallen.

The problem was those who fell, fell not to the enemy but to Coatlicue herself-now a crazy quilt of marbled flesh, stone and armor. She continued feeding. Her appetite was insatiable. It was said of the Aztecs that in the days before the Spanish came, they were sacrificing hearts to the sun at a ferocious rate, far more than were required to keep the universe continually in motion.

Rodrigo Lujan did not wish to become one of the sacrificed.

That was one reason he had commandeered a green Volkswagen taxicab. Should Coatlicue become blindly hungry, she could not take him into her immense body as long as he stayed behind the wheel.

He was following his goddess at a decorous pace when the brilliant notion birthed in his brain. He pressed the accelerator to the floor. The little bug pulled up and was pacing the striding deity that shook the earth that was already shaking.

"Coatlicue! I have the most brilliant idea!"

Coatlicue did not reply. That was good. Sometimes it was good not to be noticed. Also gratifying.

"Coatlicue, I know how you can ensure your survival."

The behemoth took another step and stopped, bringing the trailing clawed foot in line with the first.

The two reticulated serpent heads rolled down. One mouth parted, issuing a grating word. "Speak...."

"You must cease consuming your followers."

"This is contradictory. I grow larger and stronger by assimilating them."

"Yes. But now you are strong enough. For to grow stronger would make you a greater target to your enemies."

"I am greater in size, mass and volume than any bipedal meat machine. This equals survival."

"In the jungle it is said that the lowly mouse lives longer than the monkey. For the mouse's small size allows it to hide from predators who would otherwise eat the little mouse."

"I have attempted the survival strategy of feigning an inoperative state. This has failed. My new strategy appears to be working. My enemies have withdrawn because they fear my vast size."

"Yes. They fear you. But you are also striking fear into the hearts of your worshipers. This is not good."

"Previously you encouraged this survival tactic."

"I did. I do. But now it is different. You have all the vastness you require. And now you must emulate the survival tactics of the jungle guerrilleros. "

"That word does not match any in my memory banks. "

"I am thinking of the greatest master of survival in all of Mexico. By name, Subcomandante Verapaz. He dwells in the jungle, and although the same forces that have so miserably failed to destroy you also seek his destruction, they have never succeeded."

"Explain these survival tactics to me."

"Verapaz surrounds himself with loyal companeros, much as you do."

"Thus, my strategy is equal to his."

"Yes, except that Verapaz does not eat his loyal ones."

"Nor do I. I assimilate them. None are converted into waste products for disposal. The absorbed become inextricable from my present form. Nothing is wasted."

"This is good. For waste is bad. But having consumed your fill, is it not better to permit your followers to protect you with their numbers, their courage and their willingness to sacrifice themselves for you?"

"They appear to be gratified by the sacrifice."

"Yes, we must have sacrifice. I agree. Let us sacrifice others. Let us from this moment forward vow solemnly to sacrifice only our enemies. For my ancestors understood that to eat the brains and flesh of their enemies imbued them with the strength and skills of the vanquished."

"This is reasonable."

"Bueno. I am glad that you agree, Coatlicue. Now, come. Oaxaca lies behind this mountain before us. We must reach the seat of your temporal power on earth, where you will rule inviolate."

"Yes, l will rule. For ruling brings me followers and power, and these are the elements that will ensure my survival. "

"And mine," muttered Rodrigo Lujan under his breath.

Chapter 34

Blood hung in the air.

Remo and Chiun picked up the metallic taste in the still jungle air. The ground under their feet rumbled slightly.

"Aftershock," said Remo.

They moved through the jungle with the stealthy ease of jungle cats, following the scent. It was strong. Stronger than the pungent scent of crushed onion grass left by the trampling feet of their quarry. Their careful feet picked bare spots to land, crushing no grass and leaving no trail. They had abandoned the Humvee.

"It is the blood of men," Chiun intoned.

Remo nodded. "I smell gunpowder, too."

"We near our quarry."

"Maybe. Maybe not."

They came upon the dead bodies in a clearing. They wore the khaki uniforms of federal Mexican army soldiers.

"Shot," said Remo, looking them over.

There was a coffin. But no one inside.

"Looks like they had Verapaz in that coffin, took him out to execute him but were ambushed first," Remo concluded.

Chiun's hazel eyes were intent upon the ground. Starting from the coffin, he began walking in a widening circle.

"The footprints of men go this way," he said, pointing to the west.

Remo joined him.

"I count three."

Chiun nodded. "Two are hours old, one more recent."

Remo checked the bodies. "The commander said something about a colonel. There are blood spots here and the impression of a body, but no body. I think the colonel was wounded but got up."

"Yes, these are the prints of a colonel's boots."

"Now, how can you tell that?"

"Because I am Reigning Master and I have fingernails of the correct length."

Remo grunted skeptically. He looked around. "I guess we have a hike ahead of us."

"You may continue to carry my trunk."

"Thanks," Remo said dryly.

And taking the trunk up on his shoulder, Remo faced the Master of Sinanju, saying, "If I see a locker anywhere, I'm stashing this for the duration."

"Do not dare."

"You're just busting my chops, hoping I'll cave in to your little blackmail scam."

"You will," said Chiun.

"I will not."

"The night is young, and the trunk will only get more heavy."

"Actually it's pretty light. What did you say was inside?"

"I did not say. But in exchange for a solemn vow to free your nails, I will allow you to peer inside."

"No, thanks."

"I will not make this generous offer again."

"Good. Because I'm not falling for it."

They continued on. His curiosity aroused, Remo laid an ear against a lapis lazuli phoenix. A faint sound came from the trunk. It was hard to place, but Remo had a growing suspicion that he was carrying approximately five million loose toothpicks.

Well down the trail, they spotted other spoor.

"Smells like something died," Remo said, protecting his nostrils by switching to mouth respiration.

"Or a man's bowels have rebelled against his stomach."

"Yeah, now that you bring it up, that's exactly what it smells like. Pheew. "

"No doubt the ill one was a corn addict."

"Corn doesn't cause diarrhea," Remo said.

"Is it not said when the bowels fill with water the surest cure is rice?"

"Yeah..."

"And is not corn the opposite of rice?"

"That, I don't buy."

"It does not matter that you buy this or do not, only that it is true. Corn befouls the bowels, which in turn softens the stools. Avoid corn, Remo, if you wish to boast of substantial stools."

"I don't care two shits about my stools."

"You must be aware of these things if you are to achieve my sublime age."

"I can't really imagine myself getting to be one hundred years old."

"Nor can I, who am only eighty."

"Too late, Chiun. I know better. You were born sometime in the last century. You admitted it once."

"That does not mean I am the age you think I am."

Remo stepped over a fallen tree that was perforated by termite burrows. "It does unless you've pulled a Rip Van Winkle when no one was looking."

"Koreans do not reckon time as do Westerners."

"Whatever you say," said Remo. "Is this trunk filled with toothpicks by any chance?"

"No."

Farther along the terrible smell came again.

"I wonder if that's our man?"

"If it is, you may dispatch him," sniffed Chiun. "I do not care to soil my perfect nails with the task."

"Another reason to keep the nail clippers close by. Hey! What's this?"

Chiun froze in place. "What is what?" he hissed.

"That," said Remo, pointing.

Chiun's wide eyes tracked toward the base of a tree.

His parchment wrinkles tightened. "I see no foe."

"I didn't say anything about a foe. Isn't that a book?"

"Yes. So? Books are common."

"Not in the jungle," said Remo, laying down the lacquered trunk. "Hold on."

At the base of the tree, Remo examined the book carefully without getting too close. In Vietnam commonplace objects were often dropped along jungle paths by the Vietcong to lure unwary GIs into stepping on buried mines.

This particular book made Remo think of Vietnam. But his sharp eyes detected no trip wires or tell tale depression in the ground to suggest a buried antipersonnel mine.

It looked safe, so he knelt and picked up the book. A paperback, it came open in his hands as he regained his feet.

A slow look of surprise came over his face.

"Check it out," said Remo. "Who would read these in the jungle?"

"What is this?" said Chiun, drifting up.

Not taking his gaze from the title page, Remo lifted the book so the Master of Sinanju could examine the cover. It showed a grim-faced man wearing tigerstripe camouflage paint.

Eyes frowning, Chiun read the title aloud:

"Deadly Death?"

"Guess they ran out of good titles a couple hundred books back," said Remo.

"I do not understand your infatuation."

"This is an Extinguisher book. We used to read these by the ton back in Nam."

"You read this junk?"

"It wasn't junk! At least, it didn't read like junk back then. I don't know about now. This first paragraph is kinda dull."

Flipping back, Remo found the copyright page.

"It's a new one. Boy, I didn't think they still published these."

"It says it is number #214. Is that the number that are printed?"

"No, Little Father, that's the number of adventures in the series."

"You are joking."

"I guess they're still pretty popular."

"Throw it away, it will give you bad ideas."

Remo dropped the book where he found it.

"Okay, but only because we have work do do. But they used to be pretty exciting. I remember one where Blaize Fury single-handedly-"

"Who is Blaize Fury?"

"The Extinguisher's real name. He was a fire fighter whose entire family was burned to death by Mafia arsonists and decided to hunt them down."

"It has taken him 214 adventures and he had not yet succeeded?"

"Actually he got the arsonists in the first book, but it wasn't enough. After that he decided to wipe out the entire Mafia. He would go from city to city shooting practically everyone whose name ended in a vowel."

"No wonder he still struggles. He employs a boom stick and wastes his wrath upon soldiers. Any fool understands if you cut off the head, a snake will quickly die."

"The Mafia had a lot of snakes heads in those days. Besides, it's only fiction."

"One man wrote all those books?"

"I don't know about now, but back then, yeah."

"What was his name?"

"Cooper, Carter, or something like that. He was good. But after five or six books, you kinda noticed he was repeating the same three plots over and over again."

"Just like Gordons," sniffed Chiun.

"Now that you mention it, yeah, just like Mr. Gordons. All he was programmed to do was survive, but he lacked one essential ingredient. Creativity. Even when he finally got his programming fixed, he was still as naive as a six-year-old. Last time out, we pulled the wool over his eyes pretty easily."

"What do you mean 'we,' round-eyes?"

"It was a team effort, okay? Stop busting my chops."

"I do not like to hear about Gordons."

"He's out of commission, so what's the problem?"

"He robbed me of my most precious possession."

"Oh, here we go again ...." Remo groaned.

"Yes, scoff. Minimize. You are a minimizer of tragedies."

"Right now," Remo said, hoisting the trunk up onto his right shoulder, "I'm just a beast of burden."

"And I am the last pure-blooded Master of Sinanju. It was my responsibility to sire the next in my line. But I am unable to fulfill this sacred duty because of the accursed man-machine Gordons. "

"Actually he was an android, not a machine."

"He was a cruel monster. Fashioned by a white lunatic to bring horror to the world just as he brought horror to my formerly serene life."

"He was created for the space program. To go where human astronauts couldn't. To survive at all costs so that he could send back telemetry of what he found. But I agree with you about the lunatic part. The idiot who built Gordons programmed him to assimilate anything living or not so he could take whatever form maximized his survival."

"Instead, he maximized my grief by robbing me of my precious seed. An undeniable fact that you persist in minimizing."

In the jungle darkness Remo rolled his eyes to the interlacing jungle canopy.

In his mind's eye, Remo remembered a previous encounter with the survival android whose creator had named it Mr. Gordons after her favorite brand of gin. It had been shot into outer space, but had returned to earth orbit and assimilated a Soviet space shuttle. The shuttle carried in its cargo bay a doomsday satellite called the Sword of Damocles. Designed to orbit earth indefinitely, the Sword had to receive an annual radio signal or it would activate, bathing the planet in microwaves designed to sterilize the human race. No one would be killed, but eventually humanity would die out from lack of offspring. Showing more malevolence than foresight, the Kremlin had engineered it as a final revenge in the event the USSR ever fell to a Western nuclear strike.

They had successfully neutralized Gordons, but Chiun had been subjected to the rays. Ever since, he swore up and down he'd been sterilized.

The fact that he hadn't attempted to have children throughout the fifty to seventy years before that meant nothing to the Master of Sinanju. It was an injury that cut to the quick of his pride, and whenever the subject came up he wouldn't let Remo hear the end of it.

"I am childless, barren. Doomed forever to bring forth no sons. Though maidens throw their fecund wombs at my feet, I must spurn them, for they are of no use to me."

"Yeah, maidens throw themselves at your feet all the time. Refresh my memory, Little Father. Exactly when was the last time that happened?"

"This they no longer do because they can read the barren emptiness in my eyes. It is written across my features in lines of indescribable pain and sorrow."

"Well, at least you got your revenge."

"Gordons deserved to die a thousand times a thousand ignominious deaths."

"He never really lived, so I don't think it matters much."

"Now the future of the House has fallen upon shoulders that care not whether they sire a child or not. You hoard your precious seed like a miser."

"I gave at the office," Remo grumbled.

"You have squandered your seed. A grown son you did not know exists and a young daughter you never see. It is the end of the pure line of Sinanju. The sun is guttering in the sky, and you fritter away your time on nonsense."

"I have enough Sinanju blood in me and enough seed that when the time comes, I can make all the grandsons you could ever want."

"There is no such number. And it is never too soon to begin."

Noticing Remo shifting shoulders again, the Master of Sinanju asked a pointed question. "Is my precious trunk growing more heavy?"

"A little," Remo admitted.

"That is because its contents grow more heavy with each childless step you take."

"What contents?"

"Guilt."

"Oh, give me a break!"

"I can tell you the truth now. The trunk is empty of all but your burgeoning guilt."

"What have I got to be guilty about?"

"That your offspring do not know their father, just as you did not know yours. The cycle repeats itself. They will carry this burden into the generations to come, and the seeds of the House of Sinanju will be scattered to the four quarters like the seeds of the wayward dandelion."

"I wish a wind would carry this trunk away."

"If it does," Chiun warned, "be certain that it carries you away with it, else you will face my wrath."

"Just as long as it carries me to someplace peaceful," sighed Remo.

Chapter 35

Assumpta Kaax, aka Lieutenant Balam of the Benito Juarez National Liberation Front, slipped along the jungle trail, following the bitter smell of scorched cornfields.

The air was very bitter this night. The burned-field stink mixed with the strange sulphuric smell coming from the sky.

She looked up. The clear skies were closing. It was difficult to say if this was from rain clouds or the troubled air rolling down from Mount Popo in the north.

The air did not smell like rain, but neither did it smell like air. Not the good clean air of the Lacandon jungle, where the falling rains cleansed everything, making it new again.

In the capital, she understood, the rain fell full of metals and poisons from manufacturing plants and factories that had nothing to do with her life or the lives of her people.

A snap of a branch made her drop to the spongy jungle floor. Crouching, she waited, dark eyes catching faint starlight.

Nothing moved in the direction of the snap.

Careful to remain crouched, she turned her supple body, the better to widen her field of vision.

Another snap came--this time to her left.

She squeezed her weapon, as if for reassurance, and she trembled. She had killed before, but only soldiers. She did not wish to kill a Maya by mistake.

The third snap seemed farther away. It was not the sound of bare feet or the soft Maya sandals. It was the hard sound of heavy boots breaking jungle detritus.

It might be a soldado, but it might also be the sound of a Juarezista creeping toward a midnight rendezvous.

The latter possibility was sufficiently important that Assumpta decided the risk of the former was worth taking.

Slowly she came to her feet and moved toward the sound.

"YOU HEAR THAT, CHIUN?" said Remo, head swiveling toward the sudden sound.

The Master of Sinanju's quick, birdlike head movement copied that of his pupil. Their eyes pointed in the same direction.

"Yes. The snap of a twig under a boot."

"Okay if I leave the trunk here for a sec?"

Chiun nodded. "Only because we both know your guilt will follow you whether you carry it or not."

They slipped toward the sound, two wraiths, silent and nearly impossible to see in the night.

COLONEL MAURICIO Primitivo crouched behind the sapodilla trees where he could not be seen. In his hands were dry branches he had picked off the ground.

With his thumb he snapped them one at a time, pausing more than a minute between snaps.

The Juarezista he had spied from afar would be drawn to the sound, he knew.

He gave the next branch a clean snap, and in the brief echo that followed he heard a soft footfall. Then another.

Yes, closer, he thought. Closer, my unsuspecting Juarezista. Come to your doom. For whether you are Subcomandante Verapaz or one of his tools, you will lead me to my heart's desire, I promise you.

He kept one eye on the ground near where he stood. It was the logical approach path. He had picked this spot for that very reason. The sapodilla tree afforded excellent shelter, thick enough to absorb high-velocity rounds.

A dull black boot pressed into the earth not three feet from his own waiting boots.

Dropping the twigs, he brought up his H , "Do not move, Juarezista! Or you will surely leave your bones for the tapirs to gnaw on."

The Juarezista froze. His training was good.

"Ah, bueno. You understood even if you cannot see me. Now, slowly step into the light that I may see you, rebel."

The boot hesitated.

"I can shoot around this tree more swiftly that you can bring your weapon to bear upon me. You know this. If you turn and run, I will pepper your fleeing back. You know this also."

There was no response to that. Colonel Primitivo took this as a sign of assent.

"Good. Now, into the light."

The second boot inched forward, and Colonel Primitivo's eyes went up to the head. A black ski mask enveloped it.

"Let me see your eyes," he said.

The face turned. If the eyes were green, he would obliterate them without hesitation.

But the eyes, large as a deer's, were mestizo brown.

Cursing inwardly, Colonel Primitivo snarled, "Now drop your weapon, insurgentista. "

The weapon remained in the trembling hands.

"Now!"

The weapon was dropped. It struck the jungle floor with a flat finality.

"Now your hands. Raise them that I may search you for concealed weapons."

The hands were elevated.

"Now kneel so that you cannot run away."

Trembling, the Juarezista knelt.

When that was done, Colonel Primitivo knelt, too. He laid his right lower leg across the lower limbs of his captive, pinioning them.

Then, holding his own weapon away out of reach with one hand, he employed the other to pat down the rebel.

He found softness where he expected the hardness of a jungle guerrillero, and when his hand felt around to the front of the khaki uniform blouse, he discovered the soft mounds of a female.

"What is your name!" he hissed.

"Lieutenant Balam."

"Hah! You are no stalking jaguar on this night, eh chica?"

"I am ready to die if necessary."

"And I am prepared to kill you. But I will give you a chance. Subcomandante Verapaz is abroad, here in this zone, on this very night. Tell me where he is and your life may be spared."

"I do not know the answer to your question."

He brought his lips to her ear and made his voice low. "I think you lie, chica. Do you lie to me?"

"No."

"Yes, you lie. Your breasts tremble in your blouse. I know how a woman's breasts tremble when she mouths untruths."

The Juarezista said nothing. She only trembled more.

"There is a village near here. Perhaps he hides there."

"No, he does not!"

"Hah! You are too quick with your answer."

And stripping off her ski mask by its pom-pom, he exposed a fear-drained face. Long black hair cascaded down. He took up a fall of it and brought it to his nostrils. Sniffing, he detected the scent of coconut.

"You smell good for a jungle girl. You use coconut milk for shampoo. It smells enticing."

With a sudden savage gesture he grabbed up a thick twist of lustrous hair and yanked the girl to her feet even as he came to his.

Placing the stubby snout of the H small of her back, he ordered her to march toward the village.

The guerrillera complied, her steps leaden and defeated.

"Go ahead and cry, chica. I think you will need a head start, because after this sad night, this entire jungle will weep because Colonel Mauricio Primitivo has come to visit the rebels."

"Cabron," she said thickly.

"Ah, Subcomandante Verapaz has taught you the proper curses of the city, I see."

"Chinga to madre!"

He laughed. "Perhaps later, you and I, we will do what you suggest. Without my mother."

After that the guerrillera was silent.

They walked steadily toward the smell of burned corn husks, Colonel Primitivo looking back every once in a while.

He saw nothing. Thus, he knew he was not being followed.

He was wrong. He was being followed. But what followed him could not be seen by ordinary eyes or defeated by ordinary arms.

Chapter 36

Remo Williams gestured to the Master of Sinanju to keep his distance.

They were coming up on the village they had smelled earlier. The Mexican colonel was taking his prisoner directly to it.

"This guy may be doing our work for us."

"As long as he takes no credit," said Chiun, "I will not mind."

"Wonder who the girl is."

"A wench who thinks she is a soldier. What manner of barbarians give a female killing weapons?"

"Women can do a lot of things men can do, Little Father," Remo said dryly. "Scientists discovered this just recently."

"That is not what I mean," Chiun hissed. "What idiot would place a dangerous boom stick into the hands of a creature whose moods swing with the waxing and waning moon?"

"You may have a point there, but right now I think the colonel's in no danger."

They moved on, slipping from tree to tree, becoming one with each bole they attached themselves to. Every time the colonel looked back-which was fairly often-he saw only unmoving trees.

Finally the colonel was tramping through the burned cornfield, making enough rustling sounds to awaken the village.

If that was his plan, he succeeded.

A sleepy head emerged from a shack with a thatched roof.

The colonel casually sighted across the shoulder of his captive and shot it to pieces.

A woman screamed inarticulately, and Remo said, "Damn it, Chiun! That guy was unarmed!"

But the colonel heard them not.

The shots brought new heads sticking out. Switching to selective fire, the colonel popped them like birds on the wing.

Sleepy, surprised faces materialized in the gloom, and were as quickly obliterated.

The colonel raised his voice to a shout. "Verapaz, I am come for you! Show yourself!"

Remo was moving by then.

He cleared the space between himself and the colonel in less than five seconds flat, even with having to skirt various exotic trees.

Even then he was not as fast as the guerrilla, who had dropped to the ground, turned like a dog in the dirt and was kicking out at the colonel with her khakiclad legs.

"Puta!" he snarled, bringing his submachine gun down to perforate her belly.

Remo reached him then. One hand drifting out ahead, he broke the weapon in two with a hard downward chop.

The colonel had been holding his weapon steady with both hands. Now they flew apart, each holding a different end.

His eyes went wide at the sight of his bifurcated weapon.

Then Remo was in his face.

"What the hell kind of soldier are you! Those people were unarmed."

"Who are jou?"

Remo relieved him of the weapon parts, tossing them in several directions. The colonel started to grab his combat knife.

Remo let him. When it lifted, Remo took it away from him, held it in front of his face with one hand and used his free index finger to tap the blade. Three taps, starting just back of the point. With each tap, a section of the blade broke off clean until there was no more blade.

Remo handed the colonel back the useless hilt.

To show his gratitude, the colonel tried to shoot Remo in the face with a hastily pulled side arm.

Remo clapped his hands once, abruptly. They came together with the tightly gripped weapon between them.

The colonel felt the sting of the converging hands on his gun hand, flinched and told his brain to tell his trigger finger to squeeze the trigger.

His finger refused. Then the pistol began falling apart in his hands as if every screw had melted.

When he was left with only the cartridge-packed handle, but no breech or barrel, his gun hand began turning red as if sunburned. He stared at it with wideeyed disbelief.

"Can you say 'vascular disintegration'?" asked Remo.

"I do not know those words."

"Think of the veins on your hand turning to mush and letting all the blood seep into your tissues."

The colonel suddenly screamed. Not from the realization of his maiming but from the pain signals that finally caught up with his brain.

Reaching for his neck, Remo squeezed a nerve that cut off the pain. He wasn't in a hurry; he let some pain seep through.

"I'm looking for Verapaz."

Through gritted teeth, the colonel said, "As am I! We are on the same side, yes?"

"We are on the same side, absolutely not, " Remo shot back. "I don't kill noncombatants."

"You are obviously American. CIA?'

"UNICEF."

"The children's fund?"

"That's right. We're looking after the welfare of children everywhere. We also take donations. Dollars, not pesos."

"You are loco."

"If loco means I'm mad enough to break your neck, I have no quarrel with loco. "

"Jou might have your wish, for I believe Verapaz to be in this very village." He gave the prostrate guerrilla a nudge with a black-booted toe. "This Naca, she knows."

Reaching down, Remo brought the guerrilla to her feet.

"Where's Verapaz?"

"I know not."

"She is obviously lying," said Chiun, who had materialized at their side.

"I have said this," Primitivo said.

"You stay out of this," Remo said.

The Master of Sinanju drifted up to the girl, making his voice sympathetic. "Poor child. They give you the tools of death when you should be the bearer of life."

"I do not need your advice, even if you saved my life," she spit.

Remo said, "Look, we have no problem with you. We just want Verapaz."

"I would sooner die than surrender him to you. Go ahead. Shoot me if you must."

Turning away in disgust, Chiun said, "Go ahead, Remo. Shoot her. Her milk has been soured by war. She is spoiled for motherhood."

"I'm shooting nobody." Remo faced her. "There's an easy way and a hard way. Which do you want?"

"The third way. The way out of this nightmare. How dare you come into my land to seek my Lord Verapaz? This is no affair of gringos. "

"That's another story. Look, we have a job to do and then we're out of here. I don't want to hurt you."

"I am not afraid of you."

"Damn," said Remo. Turning to Chiun, he said, "Your turn, Little Father."

"I am no harmer of females. That is your job."

Sighing, Remo told the girl, "This is going to hurt me as much as it hurts you."

"Hurt her as much as you wish," said Colonel Primitivo, dark eyes flashing with anticipation.

Remo took her left earlobe, where a sensitive nerve was located, and pinched it. The guerrilla seemed to surge up out of her boots and squeezed her tearing eyes shut even as she gnashed her lower lip to a crimson rag.

"I do not know!" she wailed.

"She lies," spat the colonel.

"She's telling the truth," said Remo, releasing the girl's earlobe.

Gasping for air, she shrank back into her uniform, saying, "Kill me now if you must."

"The next person who touches her," a cold voice said from the jungle thickness, "eats angry subsonic rounds!"

Chapter 37

The commanding crack of a voice came from the west.

Remo's gaze veered toward the sound.

The ranks of trees were clustered tightly, and clotting darkness held sway between them. The gathering clouds above had almost swallowed the last fading starlight before the approach of dawn.

But there was enough starlight for Remo's eyes to capture and magnify.

Deep in the murk, a figure in black resolved itself out of the shadows. The head was muffled except for a slash surrounding the eyes, which were darkened with burned cork.

Remo saw the eyes. Blue.

"Bingo!" he said. "There's our man, Chiun."

"The eyes should be green."

"Blue-green. They're close enough for government work."

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," Chiun called.

"Step away from the girl!" the crack of a voice said.

"Make us," taunted Chiun.

"I'll wax you all."

"You wax us and the girl dies, too," Remo pointed out.

"That's a chance I'll take."

The guerrilla stiffened and held her breath. Otherwise, she didn't look very worried.

Remo lifted his voice again. "Sorry. No sale. She doesn't think you'll do it, and neither do we."

"You are finished, Verapaz," the Mexican colonel called out.

"Shut up, tostada face. I'm not Verapaz."

"Then who are you?" Chiun demanded.

"Ask your colonel."

Remo eyed the colonel.

Primitivo shrugged. "He claims to be El Extinguirador. "

"Who?"

"You might know him as Blaize Fury."

"Yeah, I know who Blaize Fury is. How come you do, too?"

"Because I have read many of his pulse-pounding adventures in my carefree jouth. "

"Same here."

Primitivo showed smiling teeth. "Then we are allies."

"Blaize Fury wouldn't shoot unarmed civilians in the face and neither would I. Sorry. Consider your fan-club membership permanently revoked."

To Remo's surprise the colonel looked completely crestfallen.

The commanding voice sounded again, a distinct whiplash of a sound. "The Extinguisher doesn't say things twice."

"The Extinguisher is a sissy," Chiun called out.

"Who are you calling a sissy?"

"The Extinguisher. The sissy who extinguishes."

Remo called out. "Look, we're not backing down, so you better come out so we can straighten this out."

A long silence developed. Remo had his eye on the shape in the forest murk. Abruptly it moved to one side.

The Extinguisher thought he was being stealthy, but Remo tracked him easily. He saw that Chiun had him fixed in his sights, too.

At a nod from Remo, the Master of Sinanju faded back into the jungle, his emerald-and-ocher kimono blending in with the vegetation.

After that, Remo folded his arms and waited.

The Extinguisher moved in a semicircle, keeping them in sight at all times. When he reached a tree, he unhooked a small folding grapnel from his web belt and affixed it to a black nylon line. Swinging it up, he snared an overhanging branch. Then like a nimble black spider, he went up, hand over hand.

His grip was not what it should have been. He slid down twice.

Floating across the space came a soft curse or two.

Finally he reached the branch and started to grab for it.

Perched directly above, the Master of Sinanju calmly reached down and sawed the nylon line with one swift fingernail swipe.

The man in black landed in the dirt like a sack of sausage.

Remo was on top of him seconds later. Reaching down, he pulled off his gear and threw it every which way.

"You can't do this to the Extinguisher!"

"Watch me," said Remo, flinging away the web belt and reaching for the black leather shoulder sling supporting a machine pistol.

It broke under the strength of his hard yank, and Remo prepared to toss it away, too, when he noticed amid all the projecting clips a Lucite ammo drum.

"What the hell is this?"

"My Hellfire pistol. It's the only one of its kind."

Remo's eyes looked strange. Dropping the weapon, holster and all, he took hold of the ski mask and yanked it straight up.

The last of the starlight disappeared then. But Remo didn't need it.

The exposed face was young and angular, the short hair dirty blond. And to Remo's eyes it looked very familiar.

"Chiun, I think we have a problem."

"It is not my problem," Chiun said from the branch above. "For he is not my son, but yours."

Chapter 38

Remo dragged the man who called himself the Extinguisher to his feet.

The Master of Sinanju dropped from his branch, as light as a green parachute descending, to land beside them.

"This idiot isn't my son," Remo said in a disgusted voice.

"Hey, I resent that!"

"No son of mine would parade around tricked out like a walking Swiss army knife. Or pretend to be some phoney dime-novel superhero."

"The Extinguisher is a legend. How do you know he isn't real?"

"Because I have a working brain. Your name is Winston Smith. Until last year you were with the Navy. Now you're AWOL."

"No. Wait. Think about it. Everybody knows the Extinguisher's name. It might be a cover to con the bad guys thinking that they have nothing to be afraid of."

"They do not," Chiun retorted. "For we spied your clumsy clanking and clunking and ambushed you before you could unleash your ridiculous toy gun upon us."

"Hey, I have an excuse. I have the trots."

"What is this witless one talking about?" Chiun asked Remo.

Winston Smith lowered his voice. "The screaming shits to you."

Chiun sniffed the air delicately. "Is it you who has befouled the jungle?" he asked.

"Not my fault. I drank some bad water."

"This is Mexico," Remo said. "All the water is bad."

"Yeah, well, now I know. That doesn't change who I am."

"Kid, I was reading Blaize Fury when I was in Nam and your highest ambition was to crawl up a fallopian tube."

"You were in 'Nam? Cool! What was it like?"

"It was hell."

"You're lucky. I missed out on 'Nam."

"You missed out on common sense too. What are you doing down here?"

"He is a Juarezista," the girl inserted.

"That true?"

The Extinguisher looked away. "Let me talk to you in private, okay?"

Remo took him by the arm and into the jungle. In a thick part of the woods, he spun him around.

"Let's have it."

"I'm only pretending to be a Juarezista. "

"Like you're pretending to be the Extinguisher?"

"No, I'm really him. I mean I took on the nom de guerre to further my work."

"What work?"

Smith whispered, "I'm gonna wax Subcomandante Verapaz."

Remo looked at him. In the darkness Smith waited expectantly, his grimy face shining with an inner pride.

"Why?" Remo asked.

"What do you mean-why? It's what the Extinguisher does."

"If you don't stop referring to yourself in the third person, I'm going to shake you so hard your nuts are going to drop out your nostrils. Now, answer my question."

"I'm on assignment," Smith said grudgingly.

"Working for who?"

"That's classified."

Remo gave Smith's bicep a hard squeeze. Smith gritted his teeth, and sweat popped from his forehead. But he fought back his pain with such grim determination that Remo relented slightly.

"No. Really, I can't say who sent me. It's the first rule of black ops."

"The first rule of survival is to tell the truth when a bigger dog has you by the hind legs. Meet the bigger dog. Me."

"Okay, I'm with the UN."

"Nice try. No sale. Try again."

"It's true. I'm working for the UN. It's quasiofficial right now. If I dust Verapaz, I'll have a solid gig."

"Well, you can dust off your resume. Verapaz belongs to us."

"Us! what do you mean us? Who are you guys?"

"That is classified," Remo snapped.

"You're kidding, aren't you? I mean, my Uncle Harold sent you down to haul my sorry butt back to Folcroft, didn't he?"

Remo shook his head. "He's not your Uncle Harold, and we're here after Verapaz. Never mind why."

"Look, we'll team up. How's that?"

"I need a partner like you need an imagination. Forget it."

Smith turned. "Okay. Fine. Let me go and may the best man win."

Remo arrested him by the collar. "Look, you were a SEAL, right?"

"Yeah. What's it to you?"

"You should know the score. You're a foreigner in a war zone loaded down with enough gear to get you stood up in front of a firing squad."

Winston Smith cracked a lopsided grin. "Yeah. That chicken-shit Mexican colonel tried that already. I still live."

"That girl save you?"

"She's not just a girl. She's guerrilla. There's no shame in being saved at the last minute by an ally."

"She saved your sorry butt and you conned her into taking you to Verapaz, am I right?"

"Right."

"And in the middle of making formal introductions, you're going to whip out that overgrown Pez dispenser of yours and blow them both away, right?"

"No. Just Verapaz."

"Then what?"

"What do you mean?"

"You heard me. After you blow Verapaz away, what are you going to do about the girl?"

Winston looked at his boots. His voice lost its bluster. "I haven't thought that part all the way through yet," he admitted.

"What if she pulls out her weapon and nails you?"

"She wouldn't do that! Would she?"

"You ask me, she's half in love with you."

Smith brightened. "You really think so?"

"Can the high school stuff. You shoot Verapaz, and she'll either nail you or make you shoot her. Is that what you want?"

"I don't know yet. This is only my second mission."

"Okay. Listen up. From now on, you follow my lead. Understand?"

"What're you planning?"

"Just follow my lead and stay out from underfoot."

Pushing the boy ahead of him, Remo rejoined the others.

The villagers were hanging back in fear. The dead were being pulled out of the shacks, and a fresh-blood smell hung in the air like a jungle miasma.

Remo lifted his voice for Assumpta's benefit. "Looks like we're joining the Juarezistas, Little Father."

And keeping his face away from the others, the Master of Sinanju, whose sharp ears had heard every word, winked broadly.

"I have always desired to defend the downpressed."

"It's oppressed, " Winston said dispiritedly.

"Jou are friends of El Extinguirador?" Assumpta asked.

"He thinks he's my father," Winston said.

"He is," Chiun said.

"Is he?" asked Assumpta.

Remo and Winston looked at one another.

"No way," both said in unison.

Turning to Assumpta, Remo asked, "Can you lead us to Verapaz?"

"If you are truly friends of Senor Blaize Fury, I will do this, for I trust him with all of my heart."

Remo shot Winston a glance. Winston looked everywhere but back.

"Okay," Remo said. "One last loose end and we're out of here."

"What is that?" asked Colonel Mauricio Primitivo.

"You."

The colonel squared his shoulder boards. "I am no loose end. I am a colonel in the Mexican federal army."

"No, you're a war criminal in a civil war." And Remo whistled for some of the lurking villagers to come padding up.

"Jou cannot do this. It is uncivilized."

"It is justice," Assumpta spat out the words.

A knot of Maya surrounded Colonel Primitivo. Assumpta spoke to them in a musical tongue that was not Spanish by the quizzical look on the Master of Sinanju's parchment face.

Someone dropped a rock on the colonel's head, knocking him out cold. Others grabbed his ankles and pulled him back into the village.

"What's going to happen to him?" Winston asked as they started off.

Assumpta shrugged. "He may be flayed while living, or burned with the old corn."

"Kinda drastic."

"It is what happens to all who oppose the righteous justice of the Juarezistas. "

Winston Smith looked uncomfortable.

Chapter 39

Oaxaca in the valley was all but empty of men when the flowing train of Coatlicue lumbered in.

The federal government had ceded the capital of the entire state. The immaculate city in the valley was virtually deserted.

Dust still hung in the air from the departed vehicles.

They stood in the center of the broad, tree-ringed Zocalo, the plaza that all Mexican towns and cities possess. This one was not as great as that of Mexico City, but to the eyes of High Priest Rodrigo Lujan, it was holy. Because it belonged to him.

Towering above him under a sky dark with sinister clouds was Coatlicue, in whose name he had taken the city built over sacred Zapotec soil. Her skin resembled that of an armadillo now, covered in steely plates absorbed from the army tanks that she crushed and absorbed. No conquistador was ever so formidable, Lujan thought proudly.

"We are victorious!" he sang out.

"We are not alone," Coatlicue said, her voice ringing hollowly, her eyes peering from armored slits.

" What!"

"I detect the body heat of meat machines in the surrounding structures. A high probability of a trap is indicated."

"But no trap can possibly harm you, Coatlicue," said Rodrigo, stepping into the shelter of the living idol he worshiped above all.

"You must investigate this situation."

"You promised to protect me."

"Very well," said Lujan, adjusting his feathered cloak. He had acquired more festive garments along the way. Others had, too. Nearby stood a knot of Aztecs in the brine-stiffened uniforms of the Jaguar Company. Eagle Knights were nearby, bedecked in feathers both real and artificial. They carried weapons ranging from the obsidian-bladed spears to heavy hardwood clubs capable of dashing a man's brains from his skull.

"Jaguars. Investigate these buildings."

They moved with alacrity. And why not-for they understood that loyal service meant that they needn't be eaten. Not that they would turn away from the prospect. But there were other ways to serve Coatlicue, their Mother.

The Jaguars came back hauling trembling Zapotecs.

"Release them, for these are my people."

Going among them, Lujan blessed them with his hands upon their trembling heads, saying, "Welcome to your new life. For as long as you serve Our Mother, you will eat meat and live in splendor."

Then, lifting his voice in joy and triumph, Lujan called, "Come out, my people. Join the ranks of the new lords of Oaxaca. Come, come, do not be afraid. The world has turned upside down, and you have happily landed on the correct side. Come, step forth."

Slowly they came. Carefully. Zapotecs were in the majority, but a sprinkling of others showed their faces, as well. Mixtec, mostly. Lujan did not bless them. Mixtec invaders had usurped the old capital of Monte Alban, casting down the Zapotecs who had built it. That was many centuries ago, true, but in his heart Lujan decided these latter-day stragglers would not enjoy the best of the new Zapotec order. After all, someone had to take out the garbage.

In the middle of this rumination, a priest emerged from Santo Domingo Church.

He approached with a trembling certitude. His white cassock with the barbarian purple cross on its front swayed with each step. He walked behind a heavy gold crucifix, which he carried aloft before him.

Lujan welcomed him. "Padre! Come. Approach."

"I do not know from what hell you have emerged, Coatlicue, but in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I banish you. Viva Cristo Rey !"

"You play your role well, Padre," Lujan called out. "You remind me of the padre who is in all the old monster movies. He comes full of faith and fear, just as you do. He is brave. He is true. Despite the awful power of El Enormo-or whatever the monster is called-he believes his faith will shield him from the demons from hell."

"I banish you, creature of superstition."

"Do you hear, my people? This padre calls us superstitious. Us! We who stand in the protecting shadow of Our Living Mother. You, priest. Where is your god? Have him appear."

"His spirit is in us all. It permeates the air."

"Look above you. The air is dark and roiled. Terrible powers are abroad. A dark new day has dawned. Your crosses of gold will be melted down and reshaped into braziers and idols. No more confessions. No more commandments. Coatlicue rules now."

The priest stood still, his arm lifted as high as humanly possible. It shook and shook in his great, satisfying fear.

"No," Lujan called. "Do not stop. Approach. Coatlicue will not eat you. For she has had her fill. Is that not right, Coatlicue?"

Coatlicue said nothing. Her armored serpent heads separated and homed in on the priest, very much like the cobralike death-ray dealer in the movie called The War of the Worlds.

The priest was speaking Latin now, his words coming faster and faster, the vowels and consonants blended together.

"What is the matter, priest? Your white magic does not work. Coatlicue stands supreme, despite your useless prayers."

When the priest ran out of prayers and strength, he dropped to his knees sobbing. Then his head tipped forward and struck the stone flags of the Zocalo. High Priest Rodrigo Lujan ordered his Eagles to seize him.

They laid him at the feet of the unmoving and unmoved Coatlicue, and as an obsidian dagger was banded to Lujan, the Jaguar soldiers stripped apart the cassock to bare the heaving, helpless chest.

The heart of the priest seemed to beat through his ribs and skin. It called to Rodrigo Lujan, asking, pleading, begging for release.

And with swift, sure movements of the wickedly sharp black blade, Rodrigo Lujan released the pounding heart and held it up to the brownish sky, his blood-spattered face beaming.

Coatlicue looked down through her armored eye slits and boomed, "No, thank you. I am full."

Chapter 40

The word came down from the north.

"There is terrible news, Lord Kukulcan!"

Alirio Antonio Arcila stood up in his jungle encampment. He had expected bad news. They were in Oaxaca State now. They had passed from Chiapas without challenge or incident. It was suspicious. Almost as if the army had let them pass this far. A trap was likely. And so he asked, "The army is massing now?"

"Yes! No!"

"Speak, faithful Kix."

"The army is massing, yes. But that is not the terrible news, no."

"What is it, then?"

"Coatlicue walks the earth again."

Antonio frowned under his ski mask. "What is this you say?"

"The mother god of the rude Aztecs has returned to life. She walks, twenty or thirty feet tall, and hurls back the army like wooden toys."

This time Antonio glowered under his ski mask. Was this indio baboso drunk on pulque? "Where do you hear this?" he demanded.

"In the village of my people. It is all over the television. It has even preempted the telenovelas. "

Antonio's masked mouth dropped open. This was serious if Television Azteca preempted the soap operas. They did not do that even for national catastrophes, of which this past day was the greatest since the conquistadors came ashore.

"I must see this for myself."

Going to a pack mule, he unearthed his chief intelligence-gathering device. A portable battery-powered TV.

"Coatlicue is on Television Azteca," Kix panted. "That is Channel Cinco."

The set took a moment to warm up, during which Antonio fiddled with the rabbit ears. The mountains were a problem, but if he pointed the antenna correctly most of the snow went away.

On Television Azteca he saw the shifting images of destruction.

"This is a monster movie!" he objected, derision in his voice.

"No, this is real. Coatlicue walks."

It was true, he saw after careful study. This was live coverage. The creature was the familiar one from the National Museum of Anthropology. It was easily thirty feet tall.

The army had barricaded the road before it. The statue, somehow animate, stony yet flexible at the same time, crushed the armored vehicles under her remorseless golem tread.

"See! She is invincible!"

"Where is this coming from?" Antonio demanded.

"Ciudad Oaxaca, Lord."

"Oaxaca city means nothing to me. Let Coatlicue have all of Oaxaca State. It will be a buffer state for Chiapas."

"No, no. Do you not see, Lord? If Coatlicue is back, can Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli be far behind? He is your mortal enemy."

"Tezcatlipoca is the mortal enemy of Quetzalcoatl."

"But you are Quetzalcoatl. The Aztecs call you this in their attempt to steal you from us. They cannot, for we have prior claim, but they have tried."

"I do not care about this," Antonio said impatiently.

"But the television says that all indios follow Coatlicue."

"What is this?"

"It is true. Aztec. Mixtec. Even some Maya."

This, Antonio cared about. He came to his feet trembling. "That lumbering rock is usurping my revolution! "

"You must wage counterrevolution."

"Mexico City can wait. We're going to the city of Oaxaca."

"These Aztecs will rue the day they stole our religions, our gods and our women!" Kix swore.

Antonio assembled an advance unit of twenty men to go ahead of the main group.

"This way we will travel faster," he told them. "I, of course shall lead."

If anyone would have told Alirio Antonio Arcila only a day ago that he would willingly lead men in combat against a thirty-foot foe, he would have scoffed.

He was not the first revolutionary to be seduced into madness by his own press.

Chapter 41

Dawn broke over the Lacandon jungle. The sky was clearing. A few stars still hung in the bluing sky.

"See that star?" said Assumpta, pointing.

"That is no star," Chiun said. "That is Venus. A mere planet."

"That star is the heart and soul of Kukulcan in whose name we fight."

A moment later a shooting star fell.

"And that," she said, "my ancestors believed to be a cigar thrown away by the old gods of the Maya."

"Your gods smoke tobacco?" Chiun asked skeptically.

"This is what was believed."

"No wonder the women of your tribe carry boom sticks."

Remo paused to look behind them.

Winston Smith was bringing up the rear. He clinked and jingled with every step like an itinerant silverware salesman.

"Anytime you want to ditch some of that gear, feel free," Remo called back.

"No chance. These are my warrior's accoutrements."

"You'll catch a bullet jingling like that."

"The round hasn't been cast that will drop the Extinguisher."

"Watch that-"

"Oof!"

"-tree root," finished Remo.

"Be patient with him," Assumpta said. "He suffers from the turistas. "

Chiun waited for Winston to catch up. He fell in beside him, hands tucked into the sleeves of his kimono.

"You are a disgrace to your bloodline."

"Get stuffed, Wong."

A fingernail drifted out instructively. It seemed only to tap the spine, but the results were noisy.

"Ooowww!"

"Apologize to your grand uncle," Chiun chided.

"You're not my grand uncle."

"I am ashamed to admit it, but it is true. I am a distant relative of your father."

Winston Smith's eyes fell on Remo walking ahead. He dropped his voice. "Hey, what's his name anyway?"

"That is classified," said Chiun, quickening his pace.

The day was in full cry now. The jungle birds were awake. As they marched along, a red macaw watched them with detached curiosity, its scarlet head swiveling like a feathered tracking device. Remo carried Chiun's recovered trunk on one shoulder.

"No, I'm serious. What do I call him?"

"Ask him."

Smith caught up with Remo.

"You know, we've never been really introduced."

"Tough."

"I told you this was my second mission. You never asked me what the first was."

"Ask me if I care," said Remo.

"I did Mahout Feroze Anin, the warlord of Stomique."

Hearing this, Chiun hurried up to join them. "Did you get paid?"

"No, it was a freebie."

"Pah! You are hopeless."

"Look, I had to establish my rep."

"You establish your reputation by the amount of gold received. Do you know nothing about the art you practice?"

"I'm a warrior. I fight. Payment is optional. Besides, my reputation is the greatest one a man could have. Just mention the dreaded name Extinguisher and see the bad guys go white."

"You look a little pale yourself," Remo said.

Smith looked momentarily weird. "Oh, shit. Excuse me a second."

"Hold up," said Remo impatiently. "The dreaded Extinguisher has to take another bathroom break."

"He is very brave to march on weak bowels," Assumpta said.

"How long you known him?" asked Remo.

"Only since last night. Did you know they publish his manly exploits in books?"

"Do tell," said Remo. Chiun yawned.

"It is true. He has told me they have sold forty million copies all around the world."

Chiun's hazel eyes exploded. "Is this true, Remo? Forty millions of copies?"

"That's what that book I found along the trail said."

Chiun's eyes narrowed.

When Winston Smith returned from his assignation with a ceiba tree, all eyes were upon him.

"Do you receive royalties?" Chiun demanded.

"On what?"

"Your foolish adventures."

"No."

"Idiot."

They continued on.

"You guys will learn to respect me for what I do," Smith said plaintively.

"We respect those we respect for their skills and their gold," Chiun said. "You have neither."

"Some day I'm going to have a book published about my actual adventures, then I'll retire on my royalties."

"Don't count on living that long," said Remo.

"I've been writing it all along. Check out my rucksack."

Dropping back, Remo did. He pulled out a black school notebook. On the cover was the stenciled outline of a fire extinguisher spitting bullets through its nozzle.

Remo opened it.

"Looks like a diary."

"It's my war journal."

"You write everything down?"

"Sure!"

"What if you're captured?"

"I get captured all the freaking time. Nothing bad ever happens."

Remo tossed the notebook into the jungle.

"Hey! You can't do that! That's private property."

"Rule number one-don't write anything down. If you're captured, they'll hang you with your own words."

"The rope hasn't been woven that-"

"You're a menace to yourself," said Remo, noticing something drop from a frayed popcorn pocket of Smith's black uniform. He picked it up.

It was tiny plastic fire extinguisher.

"What's this thing?"

"Icons. I wax a kill, I leave it in his hand. Sometimes in his mouth. Strikes fear like crazy into the guys who find him."

Seeing another one drop onto the trail, Remo said, "You might as well leave a trail of bread crumbs behind for the enemy to follow."

"Listen, you just don't understand my profession."

"Tell it to the Marines, squid."

"Jarhead."

"You are all related?" asked Assumpta.

"Distantly," Chiun said. "The blood is very diluted."

"And what is your name, old one?"

"I am called Chiun. More than that I will not say."

"You are maya?"

"Pah!"

"There is a word in our language. Chuen. "

Chiun looked interested. "Yes?"

"It means monkey."

"Pah," said the Master of Sinanju.

"You ask me-" Winston Smith laughed "-you looked kinda like a chuen when you were up in that tree."

That was enough for Remo and Chiun. They decided right then and there that Winston Smith needed an emergency bath. Smith was apprised of their decision when they picked him up bodily and tossed him into a scummy jungle pond, rucksack and all.

When he emerged, Smith stood trembling and dripping while he bestowed several colorful but uncomplimentary new titles upon their persons.

The Master of Sinanju decided he wasn't as thoroughly clean as they thought and took it upon himself to wash Smith's Mouth out with a bar of Lava soap taken from the rucksack.

After that, Winston Smith became a much more agreeable traveling companion.

Chapter 42

En route to Oaxaca, Comandante Efrain Zaragoza encountered a sight that filled his patriotic soul with rage and fear.

Refugees. Mexican refugees. They were a mix of city chilangos like him and rural mestizos.

"The monster!" they cried, weeping. "He has taken Oaxaca."

"Then the monster is doomed to die," Zaragoza returned.

The refugees dribbled down in colectivos, mopeds and taxis. The thin trickle became a river and soon a flood. The road became impassable.

Zaragoza rode in the turret of a light armored vehicle. It ran on six huge tires like an APC but sported a formidable 25 mm Bushmaster autocannon. It was very nimble.

"Leave the road to the refugees. Take to the ground," he radioed to the column at his back.

The column left the road and moved on.

The ground was open, growing increasingly hilly, then mountainous. But they would make it. They would retake Oaxaca and end the madness that had been unleashed on a perfectly civilized nation.

Farther along they encountered the straggling remains of Montezuma Barracks.

They limped down in blistered Humvees and APCs.

Linking up with his counterpart, Zaragoza demanded, "Why do you flee?"

From out of his turret the commander of Montezuma Barracks lifted a portable television set. It was on, and on the screen was the incredible sight of the demon Coatlicue herself, surrounded by circle upon circle of indio warriors and adherents.

"We were outnumbered," the commander said.

"You have modern guns. I see only sticks in the indios' hands."

"I am not speaking of the accursed indios. La Ponderosa herself outnumbers us in her sheer enormidad. She crushes tanks under her stone tread. She smites helicopters from the very sky, after first shrugging off their rockets. There was no stopping her."

"I have orders to vanquish her."

"Prepare to be vanquished. Adios. "

The APC's engine roared anew. It lurched forward.

"Where do you go?" Zaragoza demanded.

"Chiapas. Perhaps Yucatan. It may be safe in Yucatan."

"This is desertion, Commander."

"The capital is a shambles, and Oaxaca is ruled by demons and indios. There is nothing to desert unless a miracle also springs out of the wounded earth."

As he watched the armored column with its demoralized crewmen rumble south to the relative safety of guerrilla-held Chiapas, Comandante Zaragoza gave fleeting thought to joining the parade of survivors.

But he was a soldier true and loyal to his nation, and he had visions of making general one day.

"Onward! " he cried. "We drive on Oaxaca. "

The column moved on, trembling because the aftershocks continued at irregular intervals.

It seemed as if the whole world had gone mad with fear and panic. It was no wonder that the old gods walked again.

Chapter 43

In a village whose name Remo couldn't begin to pronounce, they were told in no uncertain terms that Subcomandante Verapaz was marching on the city of Oaxaca.

"What's in Oaxaca?" asked Remo after Assumpta had translated the words for them.

Assumpta answered the question in Spanish. "La Monstruosa."

"What monster?" Chiun asked sharply.

"The monster that has escaped the capital. It is being said the upheaval has opened a pit and unleashed her from the fires below."

"Her?" said Remo.

"Si. The monster is female."

Remo looked at Chiun, and the Master of Sinanju looked back.

"You don't think..." Remo started to say.

"It cannot be."

"What's the monster's name?" Remo asked Assumpta.

Back came the response, which needed no translation. "Coatlicue."

"Why would Verapaz go to fight a monster?" said Remo because he didn't want to follow the conversation to its logical conclusion.

"Because he is believed to be Lord Kukulcan and Lord Kukulcan is the mortal enemy of Coatlicue."

From a cantina, a frightened voice called out.

"He is saying that the monster has conquered Oaxaca itself," Assumpta explained. "The army has fled before her."

More rapid words came.

"But the monster has remained stopped for several hours now. She is not leaving. Chiapas may be safe."

"How does he know this?" asked Chiun.

"He watches it in the television, as does all of Mexico."

Remo said, "Come on, Little Father. Let's check this out."

They entered the cantina.

It was just like the restaurant in the last town they had visited, down to the semicircle of men in white Texas hats huddled around a flickering TV set. Except this set was in color.

On the screen stood the Coatlicue monster, immobile, armored like a steely beetle, as all around Indians danced and feasted.

"What are they eating?" Remo asked, noticing all the blood.

"Men. They are eating men," said Chiun.

"How long has this been going on?" Remo asked no one in particular.

"Since last afternoon," Assumpta told him.

Remo drew Chiun aside and lowered his voice. "This is either the longest monster movie ever made or we've got a serious problem here, Little Father."

Chiun's eyes squeezed down to glittering slits.

"It is Gordons."

"Who?" asked Winston Smith.

"Stay out of this!" snapped Remo.

"Up yours. Who do you think you are, my father?"

Remo opened his mouth to shoot back a retort. A flicker of strangeness crossed his face. He shut it.

"If that's Gordons, how'd he get so big?" Remo wondered.

"I will ask," said Assumpta.

Before Remo could say Don't waste your time, she did and received a short reply from a TV watcher.

"I am told the Coatlicue monster has been eating people since it marched from the capital to Oaxaca. As she ate, she grew."

"Can Gordons do that?" Remo asked.

Chiun regarded the screen, stony of face. "He has. That is plain to see."

"There is a phone around here?" Remo asked.

Someone pointed to an old wooden booth like the one Clark Kent favored very early in his career. It said TELEPHONO in faded black letters.

Remo tried getting a connection to the States and was told the cost would be four thousand dollars.

"Mexican or American?" he asked.

"American. Dollars are American. Mexican dollars are pesos, senor."

"That's highway robbery!" he exploded.

And the operator hung up.

Wearily Remo got a new operator and, when told the price had gone up to five thousand dollars American, read off his Discover card account number without complaint.

Once he had the connection to the States, he dialed Harold Smith by sticking his finger in the 1 hole and spinning the old-fashioned rotary dial over and over, hoping it would work.

It did. Harold Smith's lemony voice came on the line.

"Smith, what are you hearing out of Mexico?"

"It is a catastrophe."

"More than you think. What do you hear about a monster running amok in Oaxaca?"

"Nothing."

"Well, it's all over Mexican TV down here. And it looks like Mr. Gordons."

"What!"

"He's thirty feet tall this time, Smith. You really screwed up, you know that?"

"Gordons was deactivated. You assured me of that."

"Yeah. But we wanted to crush him to powder just to make sure."

"That was not practicable. The Coatlicue idol had been restored to the museum, inert and harmless. It was a Mexican national treasure. And your mission was accomplished."

"You could have let us finish the damn job."

"You said it was finished," Smith said hotly.

"Enough!" cried Chiun, slapping his long-nailed hands together.

Taking the phone from a startled Remo, the Master of Sinanju spoke into the receiver. "O Emperor, let us not revisit past errors. Instruct us. The rebel Verapaz has thus far eluded us, but we persevere. This new problem also calls our name. What is your wish?"

"Destroy them both. I want this mission completed by sundown, if possible."

"It shall be as you wish."

"Do what you have to," Smith said testily.

And Chiun hung up.

"Who were you talking to?" Winston asked when they rejoined them. Assumpta was at the door watching for soldiers.

"Never mind," said Remo.

"It wasn't my Uncle Harold, was it? Did he ask about me?"

"Your name didn't come up, and it was a private conversation."

"Fine. Take a hike. Assumpta and I will handle ourselves from here on. You don't need me. I won't need you."

"We're going to Oaxaca," said Remo.

"And I'm going to hook up with Subcomandante Verapaz."

"I mean all of us."

Winston whipped up his Hellfire supermachine pistol and pointed it in Remo's face. "This baby here says I go my way."

Remo looked at the weapon that seemed to point in every direction except back at its owner. "That thing still voice activated?"

"Get real. I took all that crap out."

"So if I take it away from you, I can shoot you with it if I want to?"

"Nice try. But I can still disable it with a voice command."

"That right?"

"Yeah. That's right. You make a play for it and all I have to say is 'Disengage.'"

"Disengage," the gun said in a mechanical voice, going dead.

"Damn you!" Winston snapped, reaching for a side-mounted button. The barrel lit up, and he trained it on Remo's face.

"Too slow," Winston said.

"Guess so," said Remo.

And while Winston Smith was grinning, Remo coolly said, "Disengage."

"Disengage," the gun repeated obligingly, and then shut down.

"But it wasn't supposed to do that!" Smith complained, a dumbfounded expression crossing his face.

He was still wearing it when Remo pried the weapon from his unresisting fingers.

"We're a team till this is done," Remo said.

"Give me back my piece."

"Behave yourself and maybe I will."

They left the cantina. Assumpta started off ahead of them, looking for transportation.

"The CIA, designed that gun," Winston said after a long silence.

Remo eyed him. "So?"

"It's programmed to recognize my voice. Only my voice."

"Maybe it needs a new chip. "

"But it recognized your voice. It did that last time, too."

Remo said nothing. He didn't like the way this conversation was going, either.

"You know what I think?"

"You do not think!" Chiun said unkindly.

"I think there's a logical explanation. And it means one thing."

"I'm not your father," Remo said hastily.

"It means you're CIA. Come on. Admit it."

"If you had a brain, you'd know a CIA agent doesn't admit anything."

"Gotcha! You just proved my point."

"Congratulations, but it's not true," Remo said dryly.

"But you are warm," Chiun said.

"Chiun!" Remo warned.

"Four letters. It begins with a C and ends with an E."

"Damn! I know all the intelligence agencies by heart. Let's see. CANE? CORE?"

"You are getting warmer," Chiun prompted.

"Try CARE," said Remo. "If you're going to pester it out of us, it's CARE."

Winston frowned. "Isn't that a relief program?"

"That's the cover story," Remo said dryly.

Up ahead Assumpta was haggling with a fat man wearing a baseball cap that said "Frente Juarezista de Liberacion Nacional." She was out of earshot. They kept their voices low.

"We're never going to catch up to Verapaz hoofing it," Winston hissed.

"You got a better idea?" Remo asked.

"We need a helicopter."

"We need a helicopter pilot unless you're thinking of the kind that eats quarters and doesn't go anywhere."

"I'm rated for choppers."

Remo favored him with a skeptical eye. "That the truth?"

"Would I lie?"

Chiun sniffed. "Yes, repeatedly."

"Look, if we can find a chopper, I'll get us out of this jungle."

"There was a helicopter at the army post," Chiun said.

"Let's see if it's still there," said Remo.

Chapter 44

When the dawn of the first full day after the Great Mexico City Earthquake broke, it failed to break over a hundred-mile swatch from the Valley of Mexico to Oaxaca State.

The brown pall emanating from the unquiet volcano called Smoking Mountain since the days of the Aztecs extended far to the south, blotting out the rays of the rising sun.

The deep black of the night abated somewhat, but no bright blessings fell from Tonituah, the Sun God. The lowering sky refused to permit even the merest ray of sunshine to penetrate.

In the Zocalo of Oaxaca, the adherents of Coatlicue stirred to this phenomenon. They had fallen asleep around the splashing fountain. Now their eyes blinked at the ominous atmosphere.

"There is no sun!"

"The sun has gone out!"

"Call back the sun, Coatlicue. Make him shine."

But Coatlicue stood unhearing.

It fell to High Priest Rodrigo Lujan to bring meaning to the evil portent of a dawn without light. He disentangled himself from a knot of freshly deflowered Zapotec maidens.

"It is the will of Coatlicue that you do not see the sun on the first day of the new Zapotec empire," he shouted.

"What can we do? What must we do? Tell us?"

"Our Mother desires hearts. We must sacrifice fresh hearts to Coatlicue. That will call back the retreating sun."

The logical next question came. "Whose hearts?"

"I will choose the hearts that Coatlicue whispers are needed. Make lines."

They formed ranks, disorderly and uneasy, but no one ran as Rodrigo Lujan moved through them.

Scrutinizing the faces that shifted with downcast eyes as he came to them each in turn, he tapped the chosen ones on the tops of their heads with a heavy walnut scepter.

Jaguar soldiers seized each one, dragging them after the high priest whose long, rabbit-trimmed feather cloak swept the Zocalo flags in his wake.

When he had ten, these were thrown at Coatlicue's feet, and the obsidian blade came out, glittering dully in the weird postdawn twilight.

"Coatlicue, Mighty Mother. In your name I consecrate these hearts as an offering to your indifferent love."

Coatlicue looked down with her flat eyes. Her steelplated serpent heads were at rest, blunt snouts touching.

The blade slashed and split flesh and rib bone as the victims were opened up. Quick, sure strokes severed the aorta and other arteries.

The first extraction was very bloody, but as he moved along, Lujan learned where and how to slice so that the blood spurted away from his eager face.

Not that he minded blood. But the warm stuff in his eyes soon turned sticky and made vision difficult.

By the tenth and last victim, the blood was a fountain that washed Coatlicue's clawed feet and touched her high priest not at all.

Cheers went up. Only a few faces frowned. All Mixtec faces.

They had good reason to frown, Rodrigo knew. All ten offerings wore Mixtec faces. Mixtec hearts now lay at the feet of Coatlicue the uncaring.

And at a gesture, the dead Mixtec husks were thrown against Coatlicue's obdurate feet, only to be absorbed like liquid into two rude sponges. Even the blood flowed toward her, strengthening her power.

When the ceremony was concluded, all eyes turned to the heavens in anticipation of the returning sun. Instead, there came a distant rumble that was not echoed in the ground at their feet.

Thunder. Not an aftershock. Then it began to rain.

And the hearts of the followers of Coatlicue grew fearful, for the rain pelting from the very black heavens was itself black as the ink of an octopus.

Even Rodrigo Lujan, ruler priest of Oaxaca, felt a distinct chill as he watched the octopus ink rain streak his bare arms, his pristine finery and most terribly, his implacable Mother.

Chapter 45

Chiapas Barracks was deserted when they reached it less than an hour later. They piled out of the rented rust-bucket Impala that had cost Remo his Discover card. Let Smith worry about the bill.

The helicopter was still there. It was a utility chopper, crudely converted into a makeshift gunship by rocket pods and Gatling guns bolted to the body.

The bad news was that it seated two people-three if someone were willing to squeeze into the storage area behind the seats.

That option was rendered moot when the Master of Sinanju took his steamer trunk from Remo and carefully stowed it there.

"In case you haven't noticed, we don't have room for everybody," Winston Smith said, stowing his gear inside.

"The girl will stay behind," Chiun said.

"I'm not leaving Assumpta."

"Then you both may stay behind."

"Then who'll fly the chopper?" Remo and Smith said at the same time.

"I will," said Chiun.

No one thought that was a survivable option, and it showed on their faces.

"Let's see if she flies first," said Winston, climbing into the cockpit. Once seated, he laid his feet on the pedals and took hold of the collective stick. He snapped switches, and the rotor blades whined slowly to a whirling silvery disk. The chopper vibrated like an eager steed.

Winston called out, "Gas gauge says low. We're going to need a full tank and some spare cans."

Remo looked around. There was a Quonset but nearby and it smelled vaguely of gasoline. Handing the Hellfire pistol to Assumpta, he started for it. Remo got halfway there.

Behind him the helicopter reared upward. Remo whirled. Assumpta clung half in and half out of the cockpit. Winston leaned over to haul her in.

Chiun was shrieking over the rotor scream. And winning.

Remo went from zero to sixty from a standing start, but even as he closed with the lifting whirlybird, he knew his chances were slim.

Through the swirling dust and the Plexiglas of the cockpit, Winston Smith's grinning mouth formed a single word.

"Sucker!"

Chapter 46

"What is happening?" asked Coatlicue.

Lujan looked skyward. The skies were still brown, but a darker brown, as if thunderclouds loomed over the haze unseen.

"We have a saying in these times," he said. "Perhaps it is very old. I do not know. It goes, 'Crazy February, crazier March.'"

"Clarify meaning."

"We have our worst weather in the month of February, except for March."

"You have your worst weather in March, then."

"Precisely."

"Then why do you not say March?"

"That would not be very Mexican," laughed High Priest Rodrigo Lujan. "You must know this, Coatlicue. You should know this, for you are more Mexican than any of us."

Coatlicue said nothing to that. Why should she? Lujan had just stated the obvious.

It was raining furiously, a downpour. The Zocalo was drenched. The ground seemed to dance in a million places. It danced like angry obsidian imps, for the splashing rain was very, very black.

The skies opened up in one of the wild elemental electrical storms that are famous from Mexico City to Acapulco. The rain was a wrath from above, presaging the threat of thunderbolts. There came a rumble of ominous thunder. It was quite distant. It might have been an aftershock, but the earth did not jump. Nor was it Mount Popo, which was too far away for his sound to carry.

A second rumble came.

"Hear the drums of our ancestors!" Rodrigo exulted. "They beat in the far distance! See the rain that falls-are they not like cleansing tears? Rejoice in the tears from above! Revel in the cleansing rain of this new age. "

Like a cannonade, a peal of thunder rumbled through the valley to end in a crash of sound like a bowling ball coursing to a nine-pin strike.

The revels ceased. Fear touched every blackstreaked face.

"Come, come! Why do you cower? You are masters of this valley once more. Dance! Sing! Make love in the rain! All is permitted. Your Mother on earth permits you to do as you will."

"There is danger, " Coatlicue said from above.

"What do you say, Mother?"

"Danger approaches."

Another long rumble ended in a crack of violent sound.

To the southwest, where the ancient Zapotec capital of Monte Alban brooded atop a mountain, a jagged line of electrical blue showed in sharp relief against the lowering sky.

The rain was drumming on the Zocalo, drowning the stone fountain's splashing.

"What danger?" Lujan asked his god.

"The electrical storm approaches."

"So? It is but lightning."

"Lightning is dangerous. My systems are not immune to a lightning strike."

"Systems?"

"I am electrical in nature, as are meat machines. If lightning should strike my present form, it could melt my circuits."

"Circuits?"

"I cannot remain here where I am the tallest object for miles around."

"Circuits?" Lujan repeated. "But jou are a god."

"I am a survival android."

"Jou are Coatlicue."

"I am in danger," Coatlicue said as all around them the adherents of High Priest Rodrigo Lujan and his Mother Goddess Coatlicue scattered for cover.

For the thunder was drawing closer, and bolts of lightning lashed the horizon in all directions. It was as if a storm had surrounded Oaxaca and was pressing in for the kill.

And deep in the pit of his stomach, Rodrigo Lujan knew a dim and growing fear.

The rumbles of thunder came more often. As he listened, Lujan noticed the intervals between the peals of thunder and the crash of the striking bolts came closer together. The echoes would no sooner finish bouncing off the mountain than lightning forked and more thunder crashed angrily.

Coatlicue herself gave voice to the fear rising in his mind. "The lightning approaches this place."

"Send it away, Coatlicue."

"I have no such ability."

"But you are a god."

"I am a survival android whose assimilation program is damaged. I cannot assume a more mobile shape. In my attempt to perpetuate my existence, I have taken on a greater and greater mass of surrounding matter, so as to protect my central processor from damage."

"Central processor?" Lujan said dully. The rain sounds filled his ears. Bitter black rain ran down into his eyes, half blinding him. The cloudburst drummed against his skin like cold awakening fingers.

"I am the tallest form for miles around, " Coatlicue was saying. "I will attract the lightning bolts and I am not grounded against lightning. "

"Lightning cannot harm you."

"Lightning is capable of disrupting my damaged circuits. I could be annihilated."

"Annihilated? It is impossible."

"I have never faced this situation before. Instruct me. I must survive."

"Yes, I will instruct you. Let me think. Yes, what has my mother told true? When there is a lightning system, one lies down flat upon the ground."

"I am unable to perform that function. My present form is not equipped with knees or other folding joints. If I become prone, I will be unable to rise again. "

"Then jou must seek cover."

"I am sixty meters in height. There is no cover."

"When I was small, I would hide under a tree when it rained this fiercely," Lujan said.

"I see no tree taller that my present form."

"El drbol del Tule!"

"Explain. "

"There is a magnificent tree only a mile or three from here. A cypress, heavy with age, for it is said to be two thousand years old. The tourists flock to see it always. Go there. Stand beneath its Zapotec branches. It will protect you, if protection is necessary."

Picking up one gargantuan foot, Coatlicue slowly and ponderously reoriented herself toward the southeast as black rain sluiced down her armored hide. She was slow and deliberate, and her slowness suddenly filled Rodrigo Lujan with a cold dread.

For if Coatlicue feared the lightning, then it was truly something to be feared. And the circle of the horizon was ablaze with devilish pitchforks of electricity.

"I will lead the way, Coatlicue," said Lujan, who dared not voice the selfish thought rising in the back of his mind.

If he remained in the shadow of his Mother, any angry bolt that sought him would be drawn to Coatlicue herself. If by some black fate she should succumb, it would be a terrible tragedy, of course. But Rodrigo Lujan would carry on.

For what was a god without priests to guide the faithful?

Chapter 47

The Mexican army utility chopper was sluggish. Winston Smith had to skim just above treetop level to make the flight to Oaxaca. But that was good, too. Too high made him subject to a sudden shootdown.

The green hills and valleys of Mexico rushed beneath them. The Plexiglas bubble swam with a streaky dark rain.

"Hope we can recognize Verapaz from the air," he muttered.

"He moves with a mighty army. How can we not?"

"Good point."

Assumpta looked over pensively. "Why did you leave those two behind? I still do not understand."

Smith frowned. He had dodged the question once already. "Okay, you deserve to know the absolute truth."

"Yes?"

"They were CIA killer agents."

Assumpta's mouth became an oval. "Even the old one?"

"He was the deadliest of them all. Knows super kung fu."

"They did behave strangely at times."

"You saw how they treated me. Like a kid. Me, the wild-haired warrior. Nobody treats the Extinguisher like a chump."

"If they are CIA killers, why did you vouch for them to me?"

"I couldn't be sure. But I got them to sorta admit it back when we were humping along the trail."

"Romping?"

"Military slang. Forget it."

"I like this word homping. I would homp with you anywhere, Blaize."

"Call me Winner. It's my real name. Short for Winston."

"Would you homp with me anywhere, Weener?"

Smith winced. Her pronunciation sounded too much like weiner. "Yeah. But first-we have to hook up with Verapaz."

"Did I tell you that Juarezista women are allowed to take whatever man they choose, without asking permission of anyone?"

"No, you didn't."

She inhaled sharply. "I would take you."

Smith swallowed. "You would?"

"Si. And I am not ashamed to admit that if I were to make love to you it would be my first time."

His hands trembling on the collective stick, Winston Smith muttered under his breath, "Mine, too."

And deep in the pit of his stomach, he got a very ugly feeling; he didn't know what to do with it.

Chapter 48

Comandante Efrain Zaragoza kept one eye on the TV as his unit rolled toward Oaxaca. The evil rain came down, making reception difficult. If it wasn't the rain, it was the interference from the mountains. It didn't help that he was hunkered down in the back of a jouncing armored vehicle.

Through the rain that was black, and the white snow on the screen, he could see his objective lumber on through the very strange rain. Coatlicue the animate.

Lightning blazed. It cracked and crashed.

"Santa Madre de Dios!" he cursed. "Why does the lightning not strike the demon and save us all from the terror of confronting her?"

"Perhaps if we pray," a sargento suggested.

"To whom?" Zaragoza spit. "To whom do we pray?"

"Let half our number pray to the old gods and the other half to the saints. And let the most powerful gods prevail."

It seemed reasonable, and so straws were drawn and, with the hammering of the rain from hell against the hulls of their APCs and LAVs, the unit prayed silently, nervous eyes on the horizon. Zaragoza monitored the screen.

The monster Coatlicue made her painstaking way onward. She seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut of steel, her torso bearing the haphazard military markings of the armor she had absorbed. The very same insignia marked their own machines. It made one think terrible thoughts about the fate of their crews.

Abruptly the screen exploded in a flash of fire.

"Our prayers are answered!" Zaragoza cried.

When the screen cleared, they saw Coatlicue standing stock-still, electricity running up and down her metallic skin. It evaporated with a spiteful snap and crackle.

Then ponderously she continued her march.

"No," said the sargento unhappily. "Ours were."

The order was given to pray to saints, not the ancient ones whose loyalties were in question, and as their lips moved silently, all eyes were fixed on the monster they sought to fight but hoped never to behold through their very own eyes.

Chapter 49

It had been too easy, Alirio Antonio Arcila felt.

His Juarezistas had filtered up from Chiapas to Oaxaca without hindrance. It was as if the army was allowing this.

After some thought he realized this must be so.

"They wish us to fight the monster Coatlicue," he told Kix as they paused to rest.

A rain was falling. It was filled with black particles that made their brown uniforms clammy and gritty at once.

"And we will. For are we not Maya?"

The portable TV was brought out of its waterproof carrying case and turned on.

The monster, now plated and scaled like an armadillo, lumbered toward an unknown destination. They fixed its position on their plastic recon maps.

"We are less than thirty minutes' march from the demon, and it is moving steadily our way," he decided.

"We will defeat it," Kix said. He sounded very sure of himself, so right then and there Antonio decided Kix would be the first to attack the monster.

"But where does it go?" Antonio wondered aloud.

"There can be but one destination," Kix muttered, tapping a point on the map. "The cypress of Tule."

Antonio frowned. "Why would it go there? It is but a tree."

"To get out of the fierce rain?"

No better explanation presented itself.

"We will move out now," Antonio announced, standing up. The moment of truth approached. If he defeated the stone mother, his image would be unshatterable. El Presidente himself would doubtless plead to join the Juarezista cause after that.

Chapter 50

High Priest Rodrigo Lujan tramped through the black rain along Highway 190 to Santa Maria del Tule.

They were passing through hills luxuriant with vegetation that was turning an ominous black under a pelting rain. But he had no eyes for their ruined splendor.

For one, he could hardly see. Two, he was having to lead the way through the rain, for Coatlicue did not know the route.

But most difficult of all, he walked without his sheltering cloak and headdress. He had been forced to leave them by the side of the road when the black rain made them too heavy to bear.

It was fortunate that he had discarded them, because the only warning he had of the impending lightning strike was the faint ozone tang and the rising of the hairs on his bare arms.

The knowledge that an electrical connection had been made between earth and sky galvanized him. Panic took him. In his alarm he leaped between the legs of his great stone Mother.

The bolt detonated. That was the exact sound. A ripping explosion, not a crack of lightning. Awesome to hear.

Coatlicue stopped dead in her tracks, and her entire body rippled with blue-and-green sparks and splinters of light.

When his ears cleared enough that he could hear again, Rodrigo heard the creak of her metal carapace as she resumed her untiring gait.

"You live, Coatlicue! " he called out.

"I survive. I must survive."

"We will both survive," he cried, following.

Not two hundred yards farther along, the second bolt struck.

Again the hairs lifted along his arms. Again there was the bitter ozone in his nostrils, and again Lujan sought refuge under the skirts of his mighty Mother.

This time he knew enough to plug his precious eardrums with his fingers.

Still the boom threw him off his feet.

This time Coatlicue crackled and sizzled like hamburger frying, her armadillo armor alive with violent electrical activity.

When it abated, she did not move.

Lujan crawled out to take in the fearsome sight. "Coatlicue! Mother! Do you still live?"

The only answer was the driving rain pattering and spitting off Coatlicue's steel skin. It seemed to spit in the face of High Priest Rodrigo Lujan, telling him his dreams of empire had been dashed by a vengeful bolt from the angry heavens.

Then the soldiers came.

COMANDANTE Efrain Zaragoza saw the second bolt explode and heard silent aftermath of its elemental fury.

He counted a full circle of sixty seconds by his watch. Two. Three.

"Our prayers have been answered," he breathed.

In a corner of the APC, a soldier cursed under his breath and Zaragoza knew the man had prayed for the other side. No matter. The saints had preserved Mexico, if not their lives.

It left only the mopping up and the harvesting of glory.

"Faster! Faster! Victory is ours!"

THEY SURROUNDED the inert golem with their vehicles, leaving no route of escape. It would look very bold on the TV, Zaragoza knew. For the helicopters still patrolled the skies broadcasting all to a cowering nation in need of a savior. Himself, he hoped.

Zaragoza was the first out. He approached the monster with only his H ne gun.

A half-naked man cowered at the feet of the demon that was as tall as a house.

"You are who?" Zaragoza demanded.

"I am abandoned," the man sobbed.

"You are indio. "

"I am abandoned by my Mother," he repeated.

The man looked so pitiful that Zaragoza decided to ignore him. Glancing over his shoulder, he fixed the orbiting helicopter camera ships and positioned himself so they would pick up his good side. Then, elevating his H ed fire on the monstrosity of baroque segmented steel plates.

The bullets spanged and dented the armor. But they might as well have been but hard candy. Nothing happened. The monster did not fall over. Zaragoza had hoped the monster would fall over. The sight would appear spectacular on TV Azteca.

"Soldados! Come! We must fire in unison if we are to topple this behemoth," Zaragoza cried, giving up on the hope of going down in history as Zaragoza the Giant Killer.

His soldados were not eager to leave the safety of their armored vehicles, but they did so. They stood around in awe of the silent golem.

"We will spray her breast with bullets so that she topples on her back, forever defeated," Zaragoza told them.

They formed a firing squad and began firing. It was haphazard fire, but it had an effect.

A section of armor cracked and dropped away. It struck sparks when it hit the road.

" Viva Zaragoza!" Zaragoza yelled, hoping his men would pick up the cry and it would carry to the helicopter microphones.

Whether that happened or not, was not to be known by Efrain Zaragoza. Or anyone else.

As if they had fractured a weak spot, the armor began cracking and falling away in large, dangerous pieces.

The pieces fell thudding, and it was all they could do to retreat before being crushed by the clanging plates.

They backed up sufficiently that the truth of their situation at once became clear. The armor was not breaking under the stress of so many bullet strikes.

It was breaking because the monster Coatlicue was shedding her hide as a snake sheds its skin.

She was casting off the heavy confining shell as she resumed her lumbering walk toward her unknown destination.

"Disparen!" Zaragoza ordered.

And his men emptied their weapons into the newly exposed brown stone that chipped and gave off puffs of rock dust in some places and actually bled in soft spots, but otherwise showed no sign of flinching or surrender.

Men made the sign of the cross as they backed away in mute awe.

"She is Coatlicue," Zaragoza muttered.

That was when sanity reasserted itself. They piled into their APCs and sent them scurrying south to Yucatan.

Perhaps the cameras had picked up nothing through the drumming black rain after all. It no longer mattered. Efrain Zaragoza had learned an important lesson. Glory was nothing. Life was all. And he was not being paid to fight walking stones that bled like men.

Chapter 51

"I was just thinking," Winston Smith said over the combined noise of rotor wash and rain.

"Si?"

"We lead dangerous lives. Danger is our beans and rice. We could be snuffed out at any moment."

"Yes, this is very true," Assumpta admitted.

"Once we join up with Verapaz, nothing is guaranteed. Not tomorrow. Not even tonight. Surviving the next hour is strictly fifty-fifty."

"This is so, chilito mio. "

Winston blinked. "What's that mean?"

"My little chili pepper." Assumpta smiled shyly.

"Look, why don't we just land this eggbeater and do it now? That way, if we're killed or separated or anything bad happens, at least we can say we knew true love before the end came."

"The gas is low ...."

"Yeah, I was gonna mention it, but I didn't want it to sound like a line."

"We will refuel and make passionate love as guerrilleros do."

"Great," said Winston. "That clearing up ahead looks soft."

The chopper skimmed lower and angled toward a landing.

At the last possible moment the ship seemed to lighten, as if dropping a load of fuel. Maybe the engine needed an overhaul, Winston thought.

After he shut it down, Winston Smith turned to Assumpta. "Well, here we are."

Her face was a cameo against the backdrop of the rain-washed Plexiglas bubble beyond which the raindistorted green landscape seemed to waver and run.

He leaned in to kiss her. Their arms bumped the controls. Assumpta laughed. Then her lips were pressed against his, and Winston wondered if he should stick his tongue in her mouth or wait until later. First kisses were logistical nightmares ....

Somewhere the sound of knocking intruded on their silent interlude. He ignored it.

It came again. Very loud this time.

Assumpta drew away in fear. "What is that?"

"Search me."

He saw the shape behind her. A face. It swam behind the swimming Plexiglas.

"Get down!" he cried, reaching for his Hellfire.

Before he could reach his weapon, the cockpit door at his back opened, letting in driving rain and an irresistible hand.

Smith was yanked out and dropped on his back. A foot stamped his gun into the mud. He looked up, his face furious.

The face of his alleged father looked down. It was not a happy face.

"Where the hell did you come from!" Winston raged.

"A magician never tells," Remo told him.

"Nice move. Your timing is fucking excellent."

"Forget it, chilito. It's curfew time. We heard every word."

"How's that possible?"

Remo pulled him to his feet. Winston noticed the old Korean standing behind him, also unhappy.

Assumpta shouted, "Let him go, jou-jou CIA yanquis! He has told me all about you. You will never defeat Lord Verapaz!"

"Right now we have a bigger problem."

"What's that?" Winston growled.

"The monster. I need you to fly us to him."

"Monster? Don't be stupid. The Extinguisher doesn't fight monsters. Try Raymond Burr."

"He's dead, so you're elected." And Winston found himself placed in the chopper pilot seat like a baby dropped into his high chair.