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  Time Trial

  ( The Destroyer - 53 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Strange goings-on in the Guatemalan jungles threaten to explode into an international incident when a team of American archaeologists disappear-after spotting secret weapons in the hands of barefoot natives.

  Remo and Chiun are sent in to dig for the truth, aided by a beautiful blonde archaeologist. But in the depths of the jungle they make a startling discovery-just as the ground rips apart and swallows them whole.

  When the trio sees the light again, it's a light that shined centuries before. And an ancient tribal war is threatening to switch it-and all that came after it-off forever. Our heroes have prevented wars before, but even if they escape from this fix alive, they're still at least a thousand years away from home...

  Time Trial

  The Destroyer #53

  by Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy

  Copyright © 1983

  by Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy

  All rights reserved.

  Time Trial

  A Peanut Press Book

  Published by

  peanutpress.com, Inc.

  www.peanutpress.com

  ISBN: 0-7408-0576-2

  First Peanut Press Edition

  This edition published by

  arrangement with

  Boondock Books

  www.boondockbooks.com

  A Dedication: For Kathy Rook, whose stories are wonderful; for Archie Edward Hinson, $2 worth; and for the Princeton Karate Club 'cause Megan said so. — Warren Murphy

  And an Interruption:

  Hold! What are these idiotic inscriptions? Who are these people? I, Chiun, now dedicate this book properly. For Don Davisson and Sally Vogel who are disgusted with all of you and the way you have ignored me for years and who have now formed The House of Sinanju Tribute Society, Post Office Box 17593, Portland, Oregon 97217. This is a good thing and I, the Master of Sinanju, approve.

  — Chiun

  ?Chapter One

  The priest led the procession through the cave of Puch, god of the Underworld. Past the six snarling heads of felled jaguars in the Hall of Balam they came, the holy men who chanted, holding aloft the dead sacrificed birds. Warriors walked behind them, chieftains gathered from distant jungle tribes.

  They were Olmec, each marked by a black spot of ash on his forehead. They moved slowly, in secrecy, because that was the way of the Olmec. Secrecy brought power, and so they walked softly into the Inner Chambers, where the magic would take place.

  Past the stone sentry of a man bearing an ape's head they came, past the Wall of Days, where garishly colored paintings depicted the Olmec's enemies in obscene postures, then past the demonic likeness of Puch himself, Master of the Dead, tangled snakes emanating from his ears, his luminescent jade eyes glowing.

  Ahead of them all walked the high priest, the h'men or visionary, he of the Sight. Festooned in spotted cat skins, his hair matted and stinking of blood from the birds sacrificed in the way of his people, he prepared for the ceremony to come, pulling his strength inward, blocking out his senses until he could hear only the heavy thrum of his own heartbeat, accentuated with every pace by the movement of the amber amulet he wore around his neck.

  The amulet was a talisman, believed by the Olmec to bring on visions of the future that only the ordained high priests of their tribe could see. But the priest himself knew the stone to be worthless.

  He had possessed the Sight since he was a child. The priests who had worn the amulet then, had known nothing of what was to come to their people, but even as a child he had known. In his visions, he knew that what was to come was no less than the curse of Puch himself.

  Death. Death for all of them. Death for ages, forever. He had known it then, but no one had listened. Now the elder priests were dead, killed by their own people, and the young h'men had risen to wear the amulet of leadership. If he had failed, he, too, would have died.

  But he did not fail, and what lay in the innermost chamber of the cave proved his victory. His vision had foreseen that the gods would come to rule the Olmec's enemies in the kingdom on the other side of the fire mountain Bocatan, and that those enemies would prevail. The visions were true; they were always true. The strange gods in their flying sky-chariot had come to aid the Olmec's enemies with weapons wrought from shafts of lightning, which they held in their bare hands. The Olmec had been driven away, forbidden to walk above ground.

  But even the gods can be challenged. And if they are conquered, the future can be changed. The Olmec had both challenged and conquered the enemy gods, who lay now, captured, defeated, inside the inner chamber of the cave, their hands and legs bound like those of ordinary mortals, their throats parched, the taste of fear in their mouths. The gods waited to die.

  The entourage halted at the entrance to the chamber as five of the warriors rolled away the great stone that served as a door. Inside, the holy men placed the dead birds at the feet of the stone likeness of Puch, which dominated the cold room. Demonic-looking obsidian snakes guarded the chamber from the curse of light. The high priest stepped forward.

  "Hear me, O Dread One," he intoned, raising his arms high. "For you have we defied the prophecies. For you have we seized the enemy gods. For you do we make sacrifice of them."

  He lowered his arms and turned to face the altar across the chamber. Six stone slabs stretched across the length of the room. On top of each was one of the fallen deities, bound and helpless. They craned their necks to watch the priest as he prepared to come to them.

  From the clothes they wore, each of the holy men took the snow-white spine of a sting ray and placed it at the priest's feet. Kneeling, the priest picked them up and pierced his flesh with them: his arms, his chest, belly, thighs, and hands. The darts were painful; they ripped the flesh where they struck and caused the priest's blood to fall in heavy droplets to the ground, but the priest's face remained expressionless. Ahead of him lay the bed of burning coals to be used in his final purification. Smoke rose from it like steam.

  He stood, hearing his heart beat slower and deeper, as the blood falling around his feet became a pool of red, his body streaked. He would feel no pain now. The moment had come. He walked forward.

  The burning coals bit into his bare feet like hungry animals, crumbling beneath his weight. Blood coursing down his arms mingled with the sweat of pain and heat and dripped off his fingers to sizzle on the steaming, spitting coals. He was the h'men, he of the Sight; in his hands lay the future of his people. He moved silently, steadily, leaving a trail of burning blood behind.

  The enemy gods watched. They were amazed, their alien features twisted. All but the leader. He watched, too, but his face was different. It held a look of serene detachment, even of excitement. This god, possibly because he was a god, was not afraid to die. When the high priest stepped off the coals to stand directly before them, the gods began to babble in fear. One cried out. Another wept when the priest removed the great carved obsidian dagger from his belt and walked behind them, into position. Only the leader-god's face remained impassive. He spoke something in his strange tongue, and the weeping god became silent. As the priest held the dagger high above the leader-god's head, the others chanted a strange prayer in unison. The leader did not join them.

  He watched the priest. For a moment, the priest was distracted by the god's strange eyes. They were clouded, as if behind them were a deep mist, but unafraid. The priest respected this god, even if he was not of the Olmec. When the ceremony was over, he would command that the bodies of the others be given to the fire mountain Bocatan as offering. But the leader's would remain here, where his spirit would serve Puch. This one was worthy of
Puch.

  "Dread One, I commend them to you," the priest said. Then, with one powerful downward thrust, he plunged the dagger into the forehead of the leader-god. Blood spurted out of him, streaming over the silver garment he wore, cloth that felt wet to the touch, even when dry. Now the blood ran off the strange clothing as if it were running off a bank of clay. The god's world, the priest thought, must be a strange place indeed.

  The others shrieked like cowards. They were the lesser gods, unworthy. The priest finished them off quickly, lodging the dagger where he could. When he was finished, his arms were covered with blood and bone.

  "Begone with them," the priest said with contempt. "But the king god stays here. Bring wine and bread for his sustenance in the Land of the Dead."

  When the work was finished and the priest stood over the dead gods, his arms spattered, he listened to himself. The breath rushed heavily out of him, and his heart was still thudding with the kill. The muscles in his arms twitched. His fingers felt weak. The gods had given him the Sight, but he was not a peaceful visionary. The excitement of the kill instilled a feeling in him close to lust. There would never be a woman for him, he knew, because no woman could satisfy him as well as death in the moment he inflicted it. The first sharp thrust into a man's living body, stilling it forever, brought him more pleasure than a thousand courtesans.

  Exercising all the control he could will, he placed the stone dagger carefully in its sheath on the column beside the slabs holding the bodies.

  His head ached. A refrain, feeling like a black thread in his brain, began to voice itself, intruding and unwelcome.

  The weapons. The shafts of fire.

  The gods had been captured without the magic weapons that had driven the Olmec into defeat. Without them, victory would always belong to the favorites of the alien gods, to those who dwelled in the kingdom on the other side of the fire mountain Bocatan.

  The priest's task was not yet finished. Before his people could come to power, he would have to steal the fire of the gods.

  Unnerved after his ordeal, controlling each small step, the priest walked up the thirty-three steps out of the cave. Outside, rising above the cave, roared the waterfall that hid the shrine from view of the Olmec's enemies. The priest stripped himself beside the thundering waters, wincing as he pulled the white ray spines from his body. Then, his wounds bleeding freely, he stepped into the cold water to cleanse himself.

  He washed the blood from his hair and hands— his own, the sacrificed birds', the blood of the alien gods from their distant world. They were all one in the water, as the Olmec believed past and future to be one.

  Past and future. The priest would change the future and thus alter the past for all the ages of man to come. He had stilled the voice of the gods. The prophecy would not come to pass. And now he would find the gods' weapons and with them lead the Olmec to eternal triumph.

  He rose from the water and looked toward Bocatan. The fire mountain was sleeping now, as it had slept for a hundred years, its burning orange floods contained within it. Beyond it lay Yaxbenhaltun, the vast kingdom of the enemy, the kingdom prophesied to rule over the entire world, causing all others to perish in its wake.

  The kingdom of the Maya.

  The priest looked back once on the poison fields that surrounded the Olmec camp. Their legacy of death. Then, naked, he walked toward the enemy kingdom beyond the mountain.

  ?Chapter Two

  His name was Remo and he was squeezing water from a stone— or trying to. A four-foot-high mound of fine sand stood beside him in silent testimony to his failure. Since before midnight he had been collecting rocks off the stony floor of the Mojave desert, handling each to test for shape and weight, pressing, concentrating the pressure evenly over every part of his hand so that the rock imploded, giving up what moisture it had.

  Except that the rocks in this desert held no moisture. It was August, and even the first breaking rays of sun in the red-dawned morning were hot enough to redden the skin of a normal white man.

  Not that Remo was normal. An entire government organization had been devised to make Remo as abnormal as possible. The organization, CURE, had taken a young policeman, framed him for a crime he didn't commit, sentenced him to die in an electric chair that didn't work, declared him dead to the world, then set about retraining his muscles and nerves and mind so that Remo was, in his own body, the most effective fighting machine in the employ of the government of the United States.

  CURE's director, Harold W. Smith, founded the organization long ago as a deterrent against crime, at the direction of a man who was then President of the United States. But unlike other law enforcement agencies, CURE worked. It worked because it operated against the law. Outside the Constitution. There was nothing legal about CURE. Smith's own base of operations, a powerful bank of computers inside the executive offices of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, and duplicated in another bank on the island of St. Maarten, regularly tapped other information centers, paid informants, instigated IRS investigations, forged documents, blackmailed politicians, circulated rumors, and generally did whatever Smith deemed necessary to halt the activities of those criminals who were normally beyond the pale of the law. And then there was Remo, the enforcement arm of CURE. Remo was probably the single most illegal individual in the world, let alone the U.S. government.

  Remo was an assassin. His job was to kill people— with his hands, his feet, his wrists, his shoulders, even his neck. He killed efficiently, exquisitely, and, most of the time, uncomplainingly. No government could ask for better.

  The President of the United States, the one person besides Harold Smith and Remo himself who knew of CURE's existence, referred to Remo only as "that special person." But in the president's mind, as in the mind of every president before him who knew about CURE, Remo was no person. He was a tool, a killing machine, and the main reason why CURE had to remain the best-kept secret in the country.

  Smith had selected Remo for CURE, but he had not trained him. No American in history had ever learned to kill the way Remo could kill. For Remo's extraordinary instruction, Smith had turned to the East, to a small village in North Korea, which had been producing assassins for hire since before the writing of history. In the village of Sinanju, one man existed who knew the secrets of the sun source of the martial arts— an eighty-year-old man who could create a killing machine from a dead man. His name was Chiun, Master of Sinanju, whose job it was to see to it that Remo was never normal again.

  Through the years, Remo's body had changed, his digestive system simplified, his nervous system rendered more sensitive and complex than other humans'. But his mind had changed, too, adapted to the ways of his ancient master, so that Remo now was less a tool of the government than he was heir to the ancient House of Sinanju.

  And so instead of killing people for the U.S. government, Remo was standing in the middle of the desert squeezing rocks for Chiun.

  "Again," the old man said with exaggerated patience, the white wisps of hair on his head and chin sparkling in the spectacularly bright sunlight.

  "There's no water in these rocks, Little Father," Remo groused. "From the looks of this place, there hasn't been water here since the dinosaurs. Where are we, anyway?"

  They had come to this place via the northern route, meaning by way of the North Pole. Every six months Chiun led Remo on a training expedition into extremes of climate, where he would observe his protégé as Remo performed tasks so difficult that they were likely never to arise in the line of duty. He grilled Remo in mountain running, tree splitting, swimming beneath twenty-foot arctic ice floes, and now, for reasons obscure to Remo, he felt it necessary to watch his pupil extract water from a rock.

  "It is unimportant where we are. The terrain is acceptable. That is all that matters. Again, Remo." He tossed Remo another rock.

  "Meaning we're lost," Remo said, crumbling the rock to dust.

  Chiun shrugged. "What does it matter? If one is not in Sinanju, it makes no d
ifference where one is."

  "It does if you're in the middle of the Gobi desert."

  Chiun clucked. "The Gobi. Only a white man would take this for the Gobi. Have you taken no notice of the flora?" He pointed to a patch of white near the eastern horizon.

  "That's not flora," Remo said. "It's the bones of some poor sucker caught out here after seven A.M. That's fauna. Dead fauna."

  "Complaints, complaints." The old Oriental adjusted his crimson satin robe and tossed Remo another rock.

  "How long do I have to keep doing this?"

  "You do not have to keep doing anything. Just do it once. Then we may progress."

  "Progress where?"

  "To the jungle, I think. You could use more jungle experience."

  "Oh, great. Just great. I suppose you'll want me to squeeze rocks in the jungle, too."

  "Don't be foolish. Anyone can get water from a rock in a jungle."

  "Yeah, I know. It takes imagination to get water from a rock in the desert."

  "It is not a matter of imagination," Chiun snapped. "It is a matter of timing. Hold the rock downward, so that the moisture cannot evaporate before you see it." He demonstrated.

  Remo held out his hand, imitating the old man, weighing the rock between his fingers. "Like this?"

  "Yes," Chiun said crisply. "Of course, it is no good now that I've had to tell you."

  "Hey, it's working." Remo felt the faint accumulation of moisture on his skin. He opened his hand, and the dry dust blew away in the wind. He rubbed his fingers together.

  "This isn't water," he said.

  "Oh? And what is it, o knowledgeable one? Camel dung?"

  He sniffed his fingers. "It's oil."

  "Oil? Desert oil?" His eyes glinted. "Worth many millions in gold?"

  "Motor oil," Remo said.

  "Oh," Chiun said, his interest evaporated.

  "Say, I know where we are. It's California, right?"

  "All barbarian places look the same to me."

  "It's got to be California. We've been heading west, we haven't crossed any oceans, and I saw a sign for Nevada two days ago."