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  center of the village, among men and women who were looking down at the ground where there was a greenish black oily slick.

  Ruby pushed through the people and stood at his side.

  Samedi looked around at all the faces. They were weeping quietly.

  "Where is Edved?" he asked.

  The silent weeping turned to sobbing and screams of anguish.

  "Master, Master," one woman said. She pointed down at the green slick on the dry dusty dirt of the hilltop.

  "Enough weeping. Where is Edved?"

  "There," she said. She pointed at the slick of green. "There is Edved," and she let out a shriek that would curdle milk.

  Samedi sank slowly to his knees and looked at the bile on the ground. He extended his hand as if to touch it, then withdrew it.

  He knelt there for long minutes. When he rose and turned to Ruby there were tears in the corners of his eyes.

  "Corazon has declared a war," he said slowly. "What is it you want me to do? I will do anything."

  Ruby could not take her eyes off the green slick on the ground. The thought that somehow Corazon had reduced that giant young man to nothing more than a memory and a puddle made her shudder with loathing.

  She looked into Samedi's eyes.

  "Anything you want," he repeated.

  And then he clapped his hands. Once. The sound reverberated like a pistol shot over the tiny village

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  and carried out into the bright afternoon air, like an order.

  And the drums stopped.

  And the hills and the mountains were silent.

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  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  There were no streetlights in Ciudad Natividado.

  The city square was pitchblack and still except for the throbbing in Remo's temple.

  But it wasn't throbbing. He was awake now and he realized the throbbing came from outside himself. It was the drums and they were louder than he had heard them before. Closer.

  He lay quietly in his cage, feeling the cool of the Baqian night. He could sense that the guards standing alongside the cages were edgy. They shuffled back and forth from foot to foot and they spun around nervously, looking behind them, every time a night animal cried.

  And the drums were getting louder, growing in intensity.

  Trying to make no sound, Remo slowly extended his fingers toward the nearest bar of his cage.

  His fingers circled the inch-thick metal. He

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  squeezed, but felt no give of metal under his hand. He was still without strength. His body ached from the cramped position he had slept in.

  He turned quietly in his cage, moving his head around to see how Chiun was.

  His face was near the bars on the side of Chiun's cage. Through the bars he saw Chiun's face. The Oriental's eyes were open. His finger was at his mouth and he gave Remo a shushing gesture to keep him quiet.

  They lay still and listened to the drums grow louder.

  Louder and closer, louder and closer the distant thumping which had hung over the island like weather now was taking on a physical reality by its changing.

  And then the drums stopped. The air was heavy with stillness.

  And then there was another sound, a scratch as if something were being dragged across gravel. Remo listened intently. His muscles were weak but his senses seemed to be coming back. It was someone walking, scuffing his feet in the gravel and dirt. No. Two people walking.

  And then Remo saw them.

  Two men. Fifty yards away, at the end of the main street of Ciudad Natividado. They were shirtless and wore white trousers. Even in the dim moonlight and the occasional beam of light through a window of the presidential palace, Remo could see their eyes, bugged, large whites, staring out of their heads.

  They were scuffing forward now, their feet kicking up small swirls of dust in the dry street.

  They were only twenty-five yards away when the guards spun and saw them.

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  "Stop!" one guard shouted.

  The two men kept coming on, slowly, like glaciers inexorably powerful, and they lifted their hands in front of them as if they were divers approaching the edge of the high board. They opened their mouths and a thin low wail came forth. And the drams started again, so close that it seemed to Remo that their distance must be measured in feet now, not miles.

  One of the guards shouted, "Stop or we'll shoot!"

  The moan from the two men grew higher in pitch, climbing the scale of sound until it was a bitter high wailing scream.

  The guards waited, looked at each other, then screamed themselves as the two men came clearly into sight.

  "Duppy!" screamed one.

  "Zombie!" shouted the other.

  They dropped their rifles and ran toward the presidential palace.

  Now Remo heard footsteps running quickly in the dirt street and then he felt his cage being lifted into the air and he was being carried away. When he looked back, the two men in white trousers had turned and were shuffling back the way they had come, their scuffing feet still kicking up dust in the street, but silent now, their wailing ended. Then they vanished into the dark at the end of the street.

  Remo looked up to see who was carrying his cage but he saw only black faces against a blacker night.

  They were carried into a small wooden shack. Its interior was dimly lit with candles and the windows were sealed with tar paper to prevent any light from spilling outside.

  Remo looked up. Four black men had been carrying him and Chiun. Wordlessly they went to work on

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  the cage padlocks with heavy bolt-cutters. Two strong snips and the cages were open. Remo crawled out, then stood up on the dirt floor. He stretched his muscles and almost fell to the ground. Chiun was standing alongside him and he put a hand onto Remo's arm for support.

  The four black men glided toward the door and were gone.

  Remo turned to look at them, to thank them, but before he could speak he heard a familiar voice.

  He turned around to see Ruby staring at him, wearing a green tentlike dress, her hair neatly arranged in corn rows. She was staring at him, shaking her head.

  "Minute I see you," she said, "I know you gonna be nothin' but trouble, dodo."

  "You're cute, Ruby," Remo said.

  He reached forward to touch her, lost his balance, and fell forward. Ruby caught him in her arms.

  "I don' know what you get paid," she said as she struggled him over to a cot on the floor, "and I don' wanna know, 'cause it gonna be more than I make and I gonna he sick, 'cause anythin' they pay you's too much. Lay down and let Ruby fix you up."

  She arranged Remo on the cot, then helped Chiun to the other cot in the room.

  "I gonna get some food in you. Both you too skinny."

  "We don't eat most things," Remo said. "We have a special diet."

  "You eat what I gives you," said Ruby. "You think this some fancy white man's hotel? I gotta get you fixed up so we can take care of the general and get us outa here in one piece."

  "And just how do you propose to do that?" asked Remo. "Corazon's got the machine and the army."

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  "Yeah, fish, but there something he ain't got."

  "What's that?" asked Remo.

  "Me," Ruby said.

  She went to Chiun and pulled a thin clean sheet up over him.

  "Why do you call Remo fish?" asked Chiun.

  "He look like a fish," she said. "He got no lips at all."

  "He can't help that," Chiun said. "It is the way of his kind."

  "He can't help it but that don' make it no better," said Ruby. "Now go to sleep."

  Then she was quiet and in the background as he drifted off to sleep, Remo heard the drums begin again.

  Generalissimo Corazon was in his long white nightgown when the two frightened guards were led into the presidential sitting room.

  They prostrated themselves on the floor before him.

&nb
sp; "It was the dapples" one of them wept. "Zombies."

  "So you dropped your weapons and fled like children," Corazon said.

  "They were coming for us," the other guard cried. "The drums stopped and then they came down the street at us and they had their arms up and they was coming for us."

  "It was the voodoo. The zombies," the other guard tried to explain. "The evil power."

  "The power, hah?" Corazon yelled. "I show you the power. I show you who gots the power, me or the voodoo. On your feet. Stand up."

  He had the two men stand facing away from him and then took the drape off the mung machine and pressed the button. There was a loud crack, a zapping

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  noise, and as the two men melted into mush Corazon shouted again, "Now you see power. Real power. The power of Corazon. That be power."

  Major Estrada stood on the side of the room quietly watching, noting that this time Corazon had pressed only one button to fire the machine and remembering which button it was.

  "And don't you just be standing there, Estrada," Corazon called out. "You go get me some salt."

  Estrada left and went to the kitchen of the palace where he took two saltshakers. One he put into his pocket and the other he brought back to Corazon, who sat in his gilt throne chair, looking glum.

  Corazon took the shaker, looked at Estrada shrewdly, then unscrewed the top of the shaker and stuck his big index finger into the small jar. He tasted it to be sure it was salt. He nodded satisfaction.

  "Now I got the salt, I all right," Corazon said. "The zombie, he can't live with the salt on him. And tomorrow I gonna go kill that Samedi, and I be the spiritual leader of this country forever and ever, amen." He gestured toward the spots on the floor. "And you, clean up that mess."

  Remo awakened to the smell of food. It was a strange smell, one he could not place.

  "'Bout time you get you lazy butt up," said Ruby working at a wood-fire stove in a comer of the shack's single room.

  "Is Chiun awake yet?"

  "He sleeping still, but he older than you. He got a right to sleep late and hanging 'round with you must give him lots of things to worry about and sleep off."

  "What are you cooking? It smells awful," Remo

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  said. He flexed his muscles but realized with annoyance that the strength had not returned to them.

  Ruby's voice rose in a piercing shriek. "Don't you worry about what it is. It put some flesh on you. You eat, you hear?" She was spooning food onto a plate. Watching her in her shapeless green dress, Remo could see the well-formed turn of her buttocks, the long line of thigh outlined by the material, the full, high breasts. He moved up into a sitting position on the cot.

  "You know you'd be a good-looking woman if it wasn't for that hair of yours," he said. "It looks like something that was done by a high wind in a wheat field."

  "Yeah, that's true," Ruby said thoughtfully. "But if I wore my 'fro, they recognize me around here for sure. This way is better, least till we be getting home. Here. Eat this."

  She handed the plate to Remo, who examined it carefully. It was all vegetables-green stringy things and yellow stringy things. He had never seen any of them before.

  "What is this? I'm not eating anything until I know what it is. I'm not eating any disguised neckbones or chitlins or like that," he said.

  "It's just greens. You eat it." She began putting more on a plate for Chiun.

  "What kind of greens?" Remo asked.

  "What you mean, what kind of greens? It's greens. Greens be greens. What you need, a taster? Think you a king and somebody trying to poison you? You ain't no king, just a trouble-making turkey dodo fish-lip. Eat."

  And because Remo feared that if he didn't Ruby

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  would turn her hundred-mile-an-hour earth-moving screech of a voice on him, he tasted some.

  It wasn't too bad, he decided. And nourishment felt good in his body. He saw Chiun's eyes open. Ruby must have seen it too, because she was quickly at Chiun's side, cooing at the old man, helping him to sit up and gently but firmly planting a plate in his lap with orders to "eat this all up and don't leave none."

  Chiun nodded and picked slowly at the food, but ate it all.

  "I am not familiar with this food, but it was good," Chiun said.

  Remo finished his, too.

  "Good, there's more," Ruby said. "It put strength back in your bodies."

  She refilled their plates, then sat on a low wooden footstool and watched them eat, as if she were counting their chews to make sure they didn't cheat.

  When they were done, she stacked the plates on the stove, then went back to sit on her stool. "I think we got to come to an agreement," she said. Chiun nodded. Remo just looked at her. "Now I'm taking charge here," she said. Chiun nodded again. "Why you?" asked Remo.

  "Because I know what I'm doing," Ruby said. "Now you know I'm from the CIA. I don't know much about where you two are coming from, except it's something I probably don't wanna know about. But let's face it, you two just ain't much. I mean, you do a pretty good trick with that listening to people's feet so you know they carrying a gun, but what else do you do? You, dodo, you almost get yourself shot up by a guard and you bofe wind up in cages and Ruby's got to bail you out." She shook her head. "Not

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  much to talk about. Now I want to get outa here alive, so we do it my way. I gonna get rid of that Corazon and get somebody else running this place and we gonna get his machine and then we going back to America. That all right with you, old gentle-mans?"

  "His name is Chiun," Remo snapped. "Not 'old gentlemans.'"

  "That all right with you, Mister Chiun?" Ruby asked.

  "It is all right."

  "Good," Ruby said. "Then it's agreed."

  "Hey, wait a minute," said Remo. "What about me? You didn't ask me. Don't I count?"

  "I don't know," Ruby said. "Let's hear you count."

  "Aaah," Remo said in disgust.

  "No, fish," said Ruby, "you don't count. You got nothin' to say about nothin.' And one thing more, when I get us all outa here-me and the old gentle-mans, Mister Chiun-we got a deal about that learning how people are carrying guns, right?"

  "Right," said Chiun. "Forty percent."

  "Twenty," said Ruby.

  "Thirty," said Remo.

  "All right," Ruby said to Remo. She pointed to Chiun. "But he pays you outa his share. Maybe you get enough to buy yourself some new socks." She sniffed her disdain. "Country," she said.

  "All right, Madam Gandhi. Now that you're in charge, you mind telling us how and when you're going to move against Corazon?"

  "The how don't concern you, 'cause you just mess it up. The when is now. We already started. Eat some more greens."

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  "That's right, Remo. Eat some more greens," Chiun said.

  Generalissimo Corazon had drafted the proclamation carefully. The old hungan had slipped through his fingers yesterday and the two Americans had escaped, but it did not matter. He had the mung machine and it worked against the Americans and it worked against the hungans family. He had proved it yesterday when he had obliterated the high priest's son. So he had no fear any longer as he drafted the proclamation appointing himself "God for Life, Ruler Forever, President Eternal of All Baqia."

  He came out on the steps of the palace leading to the courtyard to read it to his troops before he led them to the mountains to flush out the old voodoo leader, Samedi.

  But where were the troops?

  Corazon looked around the palace courtyard. There were no soldiers to be seen. He glanced upwards at the flagpole. Hanging from the rope beneath the Baqian flag was a stuffed dummy. It was dressed in a soldier's uniform and wore riding boots and had a chestful of medals. It was grossly overpadded and meant to represent Corazon. Hanging from its chest was a cloth sign. A breeze caught the pennant and floated it out straight, so Corazon could read the words:

  "The hungan of the hills say Corazon will die. He is a pr
etender to the throne of Baqia."

  Generalissimo Corazon dropped the proclamation on the stone steps and fled inside the palace.

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  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It took four direct orders from Generalissimo Corazon to get a soldier to climb the flagpole and take down the dummy of the general and the threatening banner.

  While he climbed, the drums began beating louder and the soldiers in the guard posts around the palace wall looked toward the hills in fear.

  "Now burn it," Major Estrada said after the soldier had cut the dummy loose, to fall on the ground, and then slid back down the flagpole.

  "Not me, Major," said the soldier. "Don't make me do that."

  "Why not?"

  "'Cause I probably dead already for what I do. Don't make me go burning no magic."

  "There is no magic except El Presidente's magic," snapped Estrada.

  "Good. Let El Presidente's magic remove the

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  dummy," the soldier said. "I will not." He picked up his rifle and walked back to his guard station.

  Estrada scratched his head, then dragged the dummy to a maintenance room near the palace garage, where he threw it on a pile of garbage.

  Corazon thanked Estrada for removing the effigy. The president sat in his throne room, the saltshaker tied about his neck on a leather thong.

  "We going to get rid of that old hungan in the mountains," he said.

  "Who's going to do it?" asked Estrada.

  "Me. You. The army."

  "They scared. You be lucky to get six soldiers to go with you."

  "They're afraid of what?"

  "You hear those drums getting louder? They peeing their pants," Estrada said.

  "I got the machine."

  "The machine is a month old," Estrada said. "They haven't had time to learn to be afraid of it. But they been afraid of these drums all their lives."

  "We gonna go anyway and get that old man. Then nobody is left to challenge me. The Americans probably on their way home by now."

  "When you going to go?" asked Estrada.

  "We are going as soon as I decide to go," Corazon said. He waved Estrada away with his hand.

  It was 9 A.M.

  By 9:45 A.M., a new dummy of Generalissimo Corazon hung from the flagpole in the palace courtyard.

  None of the guards had seen anybody lift the dummy up the flag rope. And none could explain how the body of Private Torrez, who had climbed the pole