Oil Slick Page 15

  When Remo returned to his hotel room, Chiun was already up sitting in his meditation posture, staring at a blank wall.

  “I’m home, Chiun,” said Remo cheerily.

  He was answered by silence.

  “It was a terrible night,” he said.

  Silence.

  “Didn’t you worry about me?”

  Chiun continued to stare straight ahead.

  Remo was annoyed. “Didn’t you worry that Nuihc might have gotten me.”

  The mention of the unmentionable name brought Chiun alive.

  He wheeled toward Remo. “The challenge will come only in a place of the dead animals,” he said. “So it is written; so it must be. You can spend all night gallivanting if you want; it is no concern of mine.”

  · · ·

  Baraka’s body was found before noon and Dapoli soon resounded with the news.

  Remo and Chiun were still in their rooms, working on balance exercises, when the news came over the radio which Chiun kept on continuously as a substitute for television—almost as if he were hoping the radio set would sprout a picture tube and somehow jump into the broadcast of As the Planet Revolves.

  In stilted formal English, with dirge music playing in the background, the radio announcer said: “The esteemed leader, Colonel Baraka, is dead.”

  Remo had been hanging by his heels from the slim molding over the front door, catching balls thrown to him by Chiun. The exercise was difficult, and for a normal athlete would have been impossible. Trying to coordinate one’s hand and eyes and brain while hanging upside down would have been too much. For Remo it was an exercise necessary to teach him that the body must be able to work under all conditions, regardless of environment.

  The exercise went like this: Chiun would throw a ball. Remo would catch it one-handed and roll it back along the floor toward Chiun, six feet away, while Chiun would have already taken another ball from the pile which would be on its way to Remo.

  Left. Right. High. Low. Fast. Slow. Remo caught them all and was beginning to get that prideful feeling that comes from a perfect performance. He knew it was perfect. So good, so perfect, that he was sure it might drag an “adequate” from Chiun. From Chiun this was the highest accolade. Only once had Chiun slipped and told Remo something was “perfect” but he caught himself quickly and added “…for a white man.”

  Chiun’s arm was drawn back to throw another hard pink ball when the announcer’s voice reported Baraka’s death. Chiun heard it and threw the ball violently against Remo, so hard that Remo was unable to move before the ball hit him full in the face.

  “Goddamn it,” he howled.

  But Chiun had turned and walked away and was standing next to the radio, listening, his hands clenching and unclenching.

  “The illustrious leader’s body was found near the Baraka Memorial Road in the middle of the desert on the way to the Mountains of Hercules. A national period of mourning has been proclaimed by Lieutenant General Jaafar Ali Amin, who has assumed leadership of the government.

  “General Ali Amin has blamed the Zionist imperialist American-financed swine for the murder of Colonel Baraka. ‘It must have taken a dozen assassins to subdue him,’ said the general. ‘The signs of a struggle were everywhere. He fought bravely against overwhelming odds. The honor and memory of Colonel Baraka will be avenged.’”

  Remo rolled to the floor. He paid no attention to the radio.

  “Goddamn it, Chiun, that hurt,” he said, rubbing his right cheek.

  “Silence,” commanded Chiun.

  Remo was silent. He listened.

  Finally, the announcer said that the station would stop broadcasting for three minutes as a memorial to Colonel Baraka and to give people time to take their prayer rugs and pray toward Mecca.

  “All right, Chiun,” said Remo good-humoredly. “Baraka’s dead. Saves you the work.”

  “It was him,” Chiun said. “It was him.”

  His voice was cold, distant, angry.

  “So what?” Remo shrugged.

  “So what? So a debt owed by the Master of Sinanju must be paid by the Master of Sinanju. It was my contract to return King Adras to the throne. He has robbed me of my right to fulfill that contract. In the eyes of my ancestors, it will be as if I failed. I am disgraced.”

  “Oh, come on, Little Father, it’s not so bad as all that.”

  “It is worse,” said Chiun. “Such perfidy. I would never have expected it from one who was born into the House.”

  The announcer’s voice repeated the bulletin. Chiun listened to it all the way through, as if hoping the announcer would say that it had all been a mistake. But it was no mistake. Baraka was dead and this time, Chiun greeted the three-minute pause for Baraka’s memory with a smash of his right hand that left the ancient wood-cased old radio a mass of splinters. Miraculously, it continued to squawk.

  Remo watched Chiun’s face. It seemed to have aged twenty years in a few minutes.

  The old man turned and walked slowly across the room. He sat on the floor facing the window. His fingers were touched before him, in prayerful supplication. He was silent, staring at the sky.

  Remo knew there would be no way to cheer him up; that there was nothing he could say.

  The telephone rang.

  Almost thankful for the break, Remo picked up the phone.

  It was Smith.

  “Remo, what the hell are you doing there?”

  “What are you talking about?” Remo said testily.

  “We heard that Clogg and a lot of his men are dead. And a government agent. A black girl. And now Baraka. Are you running amok?”

  “I didn’t do it,” said Remo. “Not all of them anyway.”

  “Well, enough’s enough,” said Smith. “Forgot about the assignment and trying to get the oil turned back on. The government’s going to deal with the new president politically and see what happens. I want you and Chiun to come home. Right away.”

  Remo looked at Chiun, sitting sadly, looking out the window.

  “Did you hear me?” asked Smith. “I said, you two come home right away.”

  “I heard you,” said Remo. “Stuff it…We’ve got things to do.”

  He hung up the telephone.

  He looked again at Chiun, but the old man was deep in a sadness that Remo could not enter, that no one could enter, because it belonged only to the Master of Sinanju. Chiun was what his history and tradition made him.

  Just as Remo was Remo and must do what Remo must do. Right now, that was his job. He had been assigned to get the oil turned back on. He would do his job, and if he could, he would do something for Chiun along the line.

  Chiun wanted to be alone now, Remo knew, so he walked quietly out of the room and loped the four blocks to the presidential palace. It looked no different. Just as many guards. Only the Lobynian flag showed a change, because it was now flying at half-staff, and Remo noticed that the grommets were starting to pull loose. The huge city square was beginning to fill with people, probably awaiting a message from the new ruler, Lieutenant General Ali Amin.

  Well, Remo would see that the first message from the new ruler was interesting.

  Remo walked around the back of the building. Six guards and four broken doors later, he stood in front of the new ruler of Lobynia, Lieutenant General Ali Amin.

  The general looked at him and almost involuntarily his hand went up to his right cheek where a long gash had scabbed over, promising to heal into a beautiful white scar.

  “Good,” said Remo. “You remember me. Now if you want to keep breathing, this is what you’re going to do.”

  While Remo was explaining to General Ali Amin what he was going to do, a message was left for him at his hotel room.

  There was a knock on the door. Chiun in his own room heard the knock and then something else. Something sliding.

  Chiun went through the adjoining door and saw a white envelope on the floor inside Remo’s door. He picked it up, looked at both sides of it, then opened it.
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  The bare envelope contained a single small sheet of paper. On it was crabbed handwriting that Chiun recognized immediately. It said: “Pig Remo. I wait for you in the intended place. N.”

  Chiun held the paper in his hands for many minutes, as if absorbing its feel, as if he could pull from its texture a message other than the one that had been written.

  Then he dropped the note to the floor and went back to his own room. Not even Chiun could tell how, but now he knew where the appointed place was. The legends of Sinanju said that the challenge must come in a place of the dead animals and now he knew where that place was.

  It did not matter to him that the challenge had been meant for Remo. There was only one way for Chiun to redeem his honor as the Master of Sinanju. It would be to visit punishment upon the man who had robbed Chiun of the duty which was his: the duty of removing Colonel Baraka from the throne of Lobynia.

  That much was left to Chiun. Slowly he dressed in a two-piece black karate type suit, and slipped thong sandals onto his feet. Then he opened the door and went downstairs.

  Minutes later, a terrified taxicab driver floored the gas pedal of his vehicle and headed out on the central road into the desert, toward the vast Lobynian oil storage fields—the place of the dead animals. There, millions of animals had died to create for future ages the oil on which their foolish countries ran. Today Chiun might die. Would he someday be nothing but oil? Not even so much as a memory?

  The cab driver whose meter had been ripped out by Chiun’s bare hands smiled nervously at his fare, who sat silently in the front seat staring ahead.

  “Radio, sir?” he asked.

  There was no answer. Taking silence as acquiescence and needing something to cover the sound of his labored breathing, the driver turned on the radio.

  The same announcer’s voice came on: “General All Amin has just concluded his address to the Lobynian people from the balcony of the palace. He has announced the following major steps.

  “First, an end to the Lobynian oil embargo against the United States.

  “Second, in an effort to bring all of Lobynia into a cohesive world force and to end factionalism, he has issued an invitation to King Adras to join with him in the formation of a new government, recognizing both the monarchy and the right of free people to govern themselves.

  “All hail General Ali Amin. All hail King Adras.”

  Chiun listened and smiled. Remo had done that for Chiun. Remo was really a good-hearted child.

  And Chiun was happy it was he, and not Remo, who was going to the desert to face Nuihc’s challenge.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHIUN STOPPED THE CAB two hundred yards from the gigantic oil depot, told the driver he would get his reward in heaven, and stepped out into the burning Lobynian sand.

  As he had expected, the depot was deserted. There were no people, no signs of activity. Nuihc had not chanced interference in his challenge to Remo.

  Slowly the aged Korean moved through the sand, his feet oblivious to any feeling of heat, toward the storage tanks. There was both sorrow and anger in his heart that his brother’s son, born into the House of Sinanju, would attempt to disgrace him by killing Baraka. Death was too good for Nuihc, but death was the one punishment that Chiun was not allowed to administer. Because, for ages past, there had been a dictum that the reigning Master of Sinanju could not take the life of anyone from the village. The rule had been instituted centuries before to prevent the village’s benefactor from becoming its tyrant. It still bound Chiun, and worse, Nuihc knew it.

  And then, too, there was the fact that Nuihc was less than half Chiun’s age, and had had access to the secrets of Sinanju since birth, when he had been anointed and designated as he who would one day become Master. How great were Nuihc’s skills?

  He still yearned to be the Master of Sinanju. Today, the Master would test him.

  Chiun stopped before the gigantic red-and-white-striped oil tank and listened. From many miles away, he heard the hushed breeze buffet the coastline of this country. He heard the light scurrying of small desert animals. He heard the sound of oil moving slowly, heavily through a massive four-foot-wide pipe that snaked its way across the desert and ended here in a small concrete blockhouse, where its precious juice was piped from the building through smaller pipes to the rows of tanks,

  But he heard nothing else.

  Behind the long row of tanks, there were derricks of producing wells, but they too had been shut down for the day. Chiun moved softly through the sand toward the gigantic steel towers.

  He stopped just before reaching the towers and turned around. It was as if he were in an amphitheater. He was bounded on three sides by oil tanks, on the back by the oil towers. No better place to be than in an arena.

  Chiun stopped, folded his black-robed arms, and spoke, his voice ringing in the sodden stillness of the Lobynian summer.

  “I am the Master, come to face the usurper of my duties. Where is he? Does he hide in the sand like a sick and dying lizard? Show yourself.”

  And a voice answered, ringing in echo off the oil tanks, “Be gone, old man. My challenge is to the white man to whom you have given the secrets. Be gone.”

  “You have not dishonored the white man,” said Chiun. “You have dishonored me and dishonored the memories of all the Masters who have gone before. Show yourself.”

  “As you will,” responded Nuihc’s voice, and then he appeared atop an oil tank sixty yards across the sand from Chiun. Like Chiun, he wore a two-piece black costume, and now he spread his robed arms against the sun-bleached white sky and called out: “You are a fool, old man, for now you must die.”

  Nuihc looked across the distance to his uncle, contempt on his face, then jumped from the top of the tank. He seemed to float in slow motion. He landed lightly in the sand at the base of the tank and raised his eyes toward Chiun again.

  Slowly he began to walk across the sand toward the aged, frail Chiun.

  “You are too old, old man. It is time another took your place,” Nuihc said.

  Chiun did not speak; he did not move.

  Nuihc advanced. “And after you are gone, then I shall deal with the pale piece of pig’s ear who is your disciple.”

  Chiun was still silent.

  “The buzzards will pick your meatless bones,” said Nuihc still advancing, now only twenty yards from Chiun.

  And still Chiun did not speak or move.

  And then only ten yards separated them, and Chiun slowly raised a hand above his head.

  “Stop!” he called and his voice resounded like thunder in the mock arena and Nuihc stopped in mid-stride, as if frozen.

  Across the yards, Chiun fixed his steely hazel eyes upon his nephew.

  “You should pray to your ancestors for forgiveness,” Chiun said softly. “And especially my brother, the father whom you have disgraced. You go now to meet him in another world.”

  Nuihc smiled thinly. “Have you forgotten, old man, that you may not kill another from the village? I am protected.”

  “I knew you would hide, like a woman, behind a shield of tradition,” Chiun said. “But I will not be untrue to my duties. I will not kill you.” He paused, and then his eyes narrowed even further, until they were only thin penciled slits in his face, which now looked like a primitive mask of hatred and doom. Nuihc seemed relieved, but Chiun said, “No, I will not kill you. But I will leave you here in broken pieces and let the sun finish the task I am not permitted to complete.”

  And then Chiun took a step forward. And another. And another.

  And Nuihc backed up. “You cannot do that,” he cried.

  “Swine,” shouted Chiun. “Dare you to lecture the Master on his powers?” And then he jumped through the air toward Nuihc, who turned and fled, running to escape between two of the tanks out into the broad trackless desert.

  But Chiun was in front of him. Nuihc turned again. He felt the whir of air pressure and lowered his head fractionally. A yellow hand flashed by, over the top
of his long hair. It hit with a crash against the side of one of the tanks, and thick gooey oil poured through the rupture Chiun’s blow had made in the steel.

  Nuihc gasped and bolted to the right, again heading for an opening. But there…again…Chiun stood before him, a spectre of death and destruction in black.

  In desperation, Nuihc left his feet and leaped toward Chiun, his feet cocked beneath his body, ready to lash out and smash into the old man’s face or body. Chiun stood unmoving as Nuihc flew toward him. Then Nuihc’s right leg flashed out, aimed at Chiun’s face, but Chiun merely raised his right hand and to Nuihc it felt as if his foot had slammed into a mountain. He dropped heavily onto the sand, but as fast as he lit he was scurrying away in another direction.

  He slipped crossing the growing pool of oil that gushed from the ruptured tank, turning the sand arena into a sticky quagmire, then saw ahead of him one of the two oil towers and ran frantically toward it. He leaped upward, grabbed a crossbar, spun his body around, and then began to climb up the slim pyramidal steel web.

  Chiun walked slowly across the sand toward the tower.

  · · ·

  Remo returned to his room, pleased with the day’s work, hopeful that getting Adras back onto the throne had helped lift Chiun out of his despondency.

  “Hey, Chiun,” he called as he entered the hotel room. There was no answer and the only sound in the room came from the radio, as the announcer talked about the impact of the oil embargo in making the West understand the unity of the Arab peoples.

  “Chiun?”

  Remo looked around the room, then went through the door into his room. There he saw the note on the floor. He picked it up and read it.

  “Pig Remo. I wait for you in the intended place. N.”

  Chiun had gone instead of Remo. But where was the intended place. He carried the note back into the other room. Chiun should not have gone. It was Remo’s challenge to meet. Suppose it was a trap? If Nuihc had hurt Chiun in any way, then he would not sleep another night on the earth, Remo vowed. But where was the intended place?

  The squawk of the announcer burst into his thoughts and he went angrily over to turn off the radio.