Arabian Nightmare td-86 Page 2

  Over the centuries, the House of Sinanju had risen in power and influence. The Masters of Sinanju learned every killing art there was, perfected many new ones, and then in the days of the Great Wang transcended the so-called martial arts when Wang discovered the sun source-the inner power that enabled the Masters of Sinanju to overcome human limitations and frailties to fully realize the potential of their minds and bodies.

  More feared than the ninjas, more hated that the Borgias, more powerful than an army of Visigoths on the march, the Masters of Sinanju rose up from the mud flats of an inhospitable village to stand supreme in the martial arts.

  A long line, proud, haughty, unbroken. Until the time of Chiun, whose original Korean pupil went renegade, leaving him with no replacement until America had asked him to do an impossible, unforgivable thing-train a white man in the forbidden art of Sinanju.

  The last of his line, Chiun had done this thing. And in the long years that followed, he had discovered that Remo Williams possessed the promise of greatness. Chiun dared to dream that Remo was the fulfillment of a half-forgotten legend of Sinanju that foretold the coming of a dead night tiger who would be the avatar of Shiva the Destroyer, and would ultimately become the greatest Master of them all.

  Remo was. And had. But Remo had become increasingly subject to personality transformations, in which the spirit of Shiva had peered through Remo's mortal eyes.

  Now, at the worst possible time, Remo had become Shiva. Chiun had seen this on television. Kimberly Baynes had broken his neck, liberating the spirit of Shiva. Remo was no more.

  It meant that the Sinanju line ended with Chiun. In fulfilling the prophecy, Chiun had abolished the very thing he had sacrificed so much to perpetuate.

  Worse, Chiun had come to love Remo like a son. Now he felt abandoned and betrayed. Life held no more sweetness for him.

  Harold Smith adjusted his striped Dartmouth tie. He smoothed it down absently. Neither gesture was needed.

  "I understand how you feel," he said carefully.

  Chiun looked up with interest. "You have a son?"

  "A daughter."

  His eyes became slits of cold light. "Then you do not understand."

  "The President is uncertain whether or not he should order a strike against Abominadad."

  "Strike them," Chiun said flatly. "The world will be better off."

  "It would be a devastating strike. Remo would undoubtedly perish."

  Chiun waved a dismissive hand. "Remo is no more. Shiva walks in his shoes. Your President could no more obliterate Shiva than a Master of Sinanju could pull down the moon with a net of spiderwebs. Inform him he should not wait."

  Smith's stooped shoulders visibly sagged. "Then I guess you will be returning to Sinanju."

  "There is time. My contract has not yet expired. I will fulfill that-within the limitations that my long ordeal has inflicted on me."

  "I am sorry to inform you, Master Chiun," Harold Smith said, thinking quickly, "but your contract expired several weeks ago."

  Chiun's eyes snapped open in fright. A faint electrical sensation came into the room. It was coming from Chiun.

  "Truly?" he squeaked, his voice vibrating like a plucked harp string.

  "Truly."

  "This is terrible."

  "I might consider an extension."

  "I do not mean that," Chiun flared. "I mean that I have missed my kohi. "

  Smith blinked. "Excuse me?"

  "It is a Korean word," Chiun explained. "It means 'old and rare.' When a Master of Sinanju reaches his one hundredth birthday, he is said to have achieved his kohi. It is a time of great celebration. And I am the first Master of Sinanju to miss his kohi for reasons other than death." He heaved a tiny sigh. "Truly, I am cursed by the gods."

  "I am sorry to hear that," Smith said tonelessly.

  "Leave me now. I am disconsolate."

  "Of course."

  Smith moved toward the door. The Master of Sinanju's eyes slowly closed. The faint electricity in the air began subsiding.

  At the door, Smith paused.

  "By the way," he said, "have you insurance?"

  Chiun's voice was distant. "Why do you ask?"

  "Well, the sanitarium charges over three hundred dollars a day," Smith explained. "The private nurses are extra, of course. And the television is twenty-five dollars a day. To whom shall I send the bill?"

  Chiun sat up like a switchblade folding.

  "Bill!" he squeaked. "I have served your organization for two miserable decades! And you demand repayment?"

  "I must. This is Folcroft, not the organization. Technically, they are separate operating budgets. I cannot forgive the debt of one on behalf of the other."

  Chiun's eyes went narrow and steely.

  "You have saved me, Harold Smith, from a cold eternity of emptiness," he began.

  "I appreciate your gratitude," Smith said levelly.

  "I am not grateful," Chiun said coldly, "for I have returned to bitterness and ingratitude on all sides. Better that you had left me to bob like a dried apricot in the eternal Void than return me to such gracelessness."

  "Perhaps we might work something out," Smith suggested.

  Chiun's eyes squeezed into bitter blades.

  "How?"

  "I could forgive the debt, in return for your consultation on the Iraiti situation."

  Chiun's eyes squeezed tighter. But for a lean, menacing glitter, they might have been closed.

  "Is that not mixing your businesses?" he demanded.

  "CURE can legally pay you a consulting fee, out of which you may repay Folcroft for your medical expenses."

  "No," Chiun said in a firm voice.

  "No?

  "I must have double," said Chiun, his voice rising anew. "Double because I have endured the tortures of nurses who should be working in mines deep underground rather than attending one such as I."

  "I would agree to that," Smith said coolly.

  "Good. I must have several items from you, Smith."

  "Name them."

  "A brazier, the shell of a leopard tortoise, and the exact birth hour of Maddas Hinsein."

  Harold Smith's gray eyebrows lifted in surprise. "Why do you need Hinsein's birthdate?"

  "Because he is not dead," said Chiun, slipping back onto his pillow.

  Chapter 3

  Maddas Hinsein ran for his life from the baroque expanse of Arab Renaissance Square.

  He was not alone. It seemed as if all of Abominadad were fleeing the square and the fury that had unleashed itself upon the world.

  Twin furies, actually.

  Maddas, tripping over the hem of his abayuh, craned his veiled face around to once again behold the terrible sight.

  What his morose brown eyes saw filled him with a great dread.

  The gallows that had been converted into a reviewing stand was now a shipwreck of splinters and rude boards. More frightening, one of the giant bronze forearms-cast from a mold of Maddas' own-had cracked asunder. The scimitar one huge fist clutched was balanced in the puny human-sized hands of the assassin who now wielded it as if it were a mere plastic swizzle stick instead of the ponderous product of the finest German swordsmiths.

  It pointed straight upward, balanced, teetering. The blade began to descend. It swooshed like a jet taking off.

  Under the blade stood Kimberly Baynes, nude, her broken neck tilted to one side, her eyes, once limpid pools of violet ink, now burning like balls of phosphorescent blood in an angry face that Maddas barely recognized.

  They went wide as exploding suns as, hissing, the blade chopped down.

  The ground shook. Sparks spit from the cracking concrete like a devil's anvil being worked. The blade rang like the mighty sword of Allah smiting the infidel.

  And floating out from the vibration, a musical voice rang, mocking, insolent.

  "Come, Shiva. This is no way to treat your bride!"

  It was the voice of sweet Kimberly Baynes, and yet it was not.

  She
stood off to one side, her four arms lifting like a spider preparing to pounce upon its prey. Her small breasts shook.

  The blade lifted again. It described a figure eight in the air, the flutter and swish of the fine blade impossibly loud as it cleaved the air.

  This time it came in sideways, seeking her smooth neck.

  Nimble and light-footed, Kimberly leapt to avoid it. The terrible edge whizzed under her. She alighted on all six limbs like a sinister sleek insect sheathed in human flesh.

  "Lay down your sword, O Shiva," Kimberly proclaimed. "Kali claims you now. We will dance the Tandava and this land shall become the Caldron of Blood from which we shall both quaff mightily. "

  The answer was an inhuman roar, loud, terrible, deafening.

  It came from a man who wore a scarlet-and-purple costume that evoked images of genies, harems, and the Arabian Nights. His skin was a raw sunburned tone and his eyes burned like coals aflame. His thick-wristed hand balanced the other scimitar like a red ant carrying a twig.

  The blade crashed down again. Kimberly dodged expertly.

  This time it struck a prostrate figure in a green burnoose, chopping it in two. The separate parts of the body jumped into the sky.

  The sight of his official spokesman, Selim Fanek-whom Maddas Hinsein had wisely arranged to take his place on the gallows-flying upward in two sections reminded the Scimitar of the Arabs of how this gold-haired vixen had betrayed him. Were it not for his own cunning, Maddas himself would now be flying skyward in pieces like so much cordwood. It was Fanek who had taken the traitorous fatal blow meant for Maddas himself.

  He turned and resumed his run, a hulking figure in his feminine abayuh and black paratroop boots. He had to find sanctuary in this madness of betrayal. For soon the deadfall commands he had left with his trusted defense minister would be executed.

  And he knew also that soon the American bombs would fall. Maddas Hinsein could live with the downfall of his people. But he, too, was on ground zero. And the Scimitar of the Arabs had a greater destiny to fulfill than becoming so much mulch. One that did not include ignominious death.

  He had to find sanctuary.

  A man stumbled across his path. He was an old one, with but a single yellow-brown tooth in his head.

  "Allah forgive us!" the elder moaned. "For the sins of our wicked leader, we have been sent two demons to bedevil us."

  "Curse you, old man!" snapped Maddas Hinsein, stomping out the pitiful man's lone tooth with the heel of a boot. "You are too weak to enjoy the triumph that lies before the Iraiti people."

  Maddas plunged on, melting into the fleeing crowd.

  Elsewhere in Abominadad, two frightened men were being carried along with the human wave escaping the carnage of Arab Renaissance Square.

  "Can you see what's happening back there?" huffed Don Cooder, hostage anchor for the American television network BCN. His hair actually stood up on end-the result of a lifetime of hair-spray abuse.

  "No," puffed Reverend Juniper Jackman, who had come to Abominadad to upstage and liberate Cooder, only to end up his cellmate. "Why should I care? Gettin' out alive's all that matters."

  "We just witnessed a turning point in history," Cooder went on, his voice taking on a stentorian timbre. "Maddas, the Tyrant of Irait, has suffered the same overreaching fate as previous Iraiti despots. Someone has to inform the world."

  "If I spot a phone booth," Reverend Jackman said distractedly, "I'll let you know."

  "I'd give anything for a four-wire line at this crucial, pivotal, important moment in history I have been privileged to witness."

  "And I'd give anything if someone would just beam me back to Washington. As a famous man said once, 'Fame is fleeting, but my ass is forever.' "

  The crowd was scurrying like ragged lemmings for a cliff. Don Cooder and the Reverend Jackman were carried along by fear and the threat of trampling feet. If they tripped or stumbled, they would be instantly stomped into bloody rags. The thought of the closed-coffin funerals that would result made their blood run cold. Neither of them had come to Abominadad to be denied a last moment in the limelight-even if it was while lying amid black crepe and purple velvet.

  As the stampede of men, women, and children flooded into the city proper, it was forced into a channel made by two lines of office buildings.

  "Think they'll ever stop?" Cooder gasped.

  "Up with hope," Jackman wheezed.

  A cold, blocky building suddenly appeared in the path of the human flood. It almost blocked the other end of the street.

  The crowd attempted to go around it. But the momentum of their flight was too great, the multitude pressed too closely, for most to manage.

  "Oh, shoot," Reverned Jackman moaned.

  Part of the leading edge of the crowd actually smashed into the squat building like starlings into a 747's intakes. They made quite an ugly sound as they began piling up.

  The more nimble members of this surging clot of fleeing humanity thinned, and broke in two directions.

  Suddenly the way before Don Cooder and Reverend Jackman parted like the Red Sea. They saw the slumping bodies.

  And they saw the limestone facade, a bulwark of bodies crushed before it, seemingly coming at them.

  "I'm gonna die in a heathen land!" Reverend Jackman yelped.

  "I'm gonna die," Don Cooder moaned, "and there's no one to film my tragic yet ironic conclusion."

  Jackman turned around, eyes sick, anxious, as if a camera might somehow materialize to preserve their last heroic moments on earth.

  Then he noticed it.

  "Hey, showboat, wait up!" he yelled.

  "Are you crazy? I'll be trampled."

  "No, you won't," said Reverend Jackman, his voice suddenly far away.

  Cooder's head snapped back, thinking Jackman had fallen under the remorseless feet of the crowd.

  But when he looked back, he saw Reverend Juniper Jackman bent over, chest working like a bellows, retching as he tried to get his wind back.

  The stampede that had been hot on their heels had veered away in both directions to avoid the squat building.

  Realization dawned on Don Cooder. That meant he could stop too.

  He no sooner signaled his brain to slide into a skid than the side of his head slammed limestone and he joined the pile of slumped Iraiti bodies.

  "You dead?" Reverend Jackman asked after he had regained his breath and sidled up.

  "Is my face still photogenic?" Cooder asked, clutching his head.

  "No. Never was."

  Cooder closed his eyes. "Then I'm dead."

  "For a hick Texan with bags under his eyes clear down to his belly button, you make a lively noise, though," Reverend Jackman added.

  "Then I won't ask you to put me out of my misery," Don Cooder said, sitting up.

  "You won't have to. I'll bet any amount of money that folks think we're dead already."

  Don Cooder's glowing black eyes lit up.

  "Think of our triumphant return to the States: 'Hostage anchor and irrelevant black politician turned talkshow host return from the dead.' "

  "Hey, cut that 'irrelevant' part out, hear? I'm shadow senator of the District of Columbus now."

  "It's District of Columbia, and if they break programming when they get the glad news, it'll be on account of me, not you."

  "Let 'em," Reverend Jackman muttered, looking up to the sky. "I just don't want to be dead for real. 'Cause if my people hear I'm a goner, they're gonna insist the President bomb the pooh out of this heckhole in retaliation. "

  "We must find shelter!" Don Cooder's head jerked this way and that. "Do you see anything? Anything that looks substantial?"

  "Nothing," Jackman said airily. "Unless you count this fine upstanding building you slammed into."

  Cooder's eyes came into focus then. "Oh. Yeah," he said weakly. "That."

  Jackman helped the anchor to his feet.

  "You are one hell of a reporter, you know that?" Jackman growled. "You run smack into pro
bably the best bomb shelter in town and you don't have sense enough to notice."

  "Even Cronkite would be rattled after what happened to us," Cooder said, straightening his wrinkled suit. With a grandiose gesture he flung the door open. Then, recalling where he was, he executed a sudden reversal, saying, "Ministers before anchormen."

  Cautiously Reverend Jackman crept in. Cooder counted to ten using his fingers. When he heard no gunshots, he followed.

  The place was dark. The electricity was off. The signs were in Arabic so it was impossible to tell what purpose the building served.

  "What did happen to us?" Jackman asked. "It came and went so fast, it was kind of a blur."

  "That guy with the dead eyes was fixing to kill us," said Cooder.

  "Yeah. The white guy with the wrists like two-by-fours. He looked like an American, except he was dressed like outta the Arabian Nights. He was gonna do us barehanded, too. I remember him saying he was sorry he had to do it."

  They started up the stairs.

  "That was to you," Don Cooder said. "To me he said my murder was going to be a pleasure."

  Jackman grunted. "Musta been a right-winger. They all got it in for you."

  "No, he seemed to know me from somewhere. And he looked kinda familiar, to boot. He said something else. But I think it was knocked out of me."

  "Not the first time," Jackman grunted.

  They climbed five flights before they gave it up and started going room to room, trying telephones. All were dead. Not that it mattered much. They were in enemy territory, and condemned to die by Maddas Hinsein's Revolting Command Council. Even it they knew the Iraiti equivalent of 911, it probably wouldn't help.

  They found a window that faced toward the broad plaza of Arab Renaissance Square.

  "Maybe we can see something from here," Jackman suggested.

  The square was virtually deserted. The crossed scimitars that had pierced the sumptuous skyline still did, they were surprised to see. In fact, they were still crossed.

  A harsh clang greeted their ears. Even through the sealed window, it made their teeth rattle in sympathy.