When they looked again, Chiun's hands were again folded inside his robe. A foot-long section of the whip lay uselessly on the sand in front of him. The soldier looked in puzzlement at the shorter length of whip he was still holding. He growled a curse and snapped the whip again. And again Chiun intercepted it just before it touched him and, with the side of his hand moving like a knife, slashed off another piece of the bullhide.
And again.
Until the burly redhead was left with only a five-foot length of whip in his hands.
He angrily tossed it onto the sand and transferred his automatic pistol from his left hand to his right. As he raised his arm to take aim at Chiun, the old man began to move. He skittered sideways, across the sand,
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moving seemingly at random. Willie Bob found it hard to resist a smile. He had dealt before with targets taking evasive action. There was a very simple way to deal with them. It took only one shot. You simply trailed the victim with the sight on the nose of your pistol, following him as he moved. And when he stopped or reversed directions, he had to come right back across the barrel, and you squeezed and blew his brains to Kingdom Come. It was simple. Except it didn't work.
Willie Bob trailed the old man with the nose of the pistol as Chiun crab-skittered across the sand. Then the old man stopped. The sight on the pistol kept moving. Another inch, and squeeze. But the old man wasn't there.
He was off to the right fifteen feet away. Willie Bob cursed. How did the old bastard do that? Let him try it again, he thought.
The old man was moving again to his right. Willie Bob trailed him with the sight on the pistol, sighting just an inch behind the old man's head. Chiun stopped. Willie Bob panned the pistol the extra inch. His finger tightened against the trigger. But the old man wasn't there. Instead he was standing in front of Watson, his head barely coming up to the big soldier's chest. Willie Bob's mouth dropped open.
"Looking for something?" said Chiun, a faint smile playing about his mouth.
Willie Bob, angrily, brutishly, raised the pistol over his head to smash it down into the old wraith's skull. It started, then stopped. Willie Bob felt a burning pain sear into his wrist. It hurt too much to move his hand another inch. He felt the gun fall from his fingers and saw the old man catch it before it could reach the
sand.
Willie Bob stood there, paralyzed, his arm upraised over his head. He saw the old man carry the pistol over to the sheik and Abdul. He wanted to cry out, but
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he saw Ganulle looking at him sharply, his head gesturing infinitesimally, No, no.
The old yellow man stood in front of Abdul. He took the heavy pistol in both hands and snapped it in two, then handed both halves to the prince, bowed slightly to the sheik, and walked off toward his tent.
The cheers of the crowd rang around the shoulders of the Master of Sinanju as he entered the tent.
Back on the sandy plane, Sheik Fareem looked at his son, then reached down with his big, gnarled hand and slapped the young man across the face.
"You idiot," he said. "You have insulted a guest ... an honored guest . . . with this ridiculous display of hired bravado. Have you had enough?"
"Yes, Father," Abdul said. "Yes."
But even as he spoke, his wife saw him look past the sheik and into Ganulle's eyes.
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Chapter Eleven
General Bull had managed to find forty trucks that worked, and they had brought the Hamidi army out along the highway until they were just two miles from Sheik Fareem's village.
Now the army, a thousand strong, marched along behind the Rolls Royce. Melody Wakefield, resplendent in new black and yellow wrist bandages, marched along with the soldiers, her portable typewriter strung around her neck on a cord.
Remo and Reva sat in the back seat of the Rolls Royce. Oscar and Bull were in the front. Remo lowered the Rolls window and heard the drill master trying to lead the army in cadence.
"Sound off, one, two.
"Sound off, three, four.
"Cadence count, one, two, three, four . . . three,
four."
All the soldiers pitched in on the "Sound off" part, but there was dead silence as the drillmaster called out the numbers. Remo realized that the army he was leading not only couldn't march or fight, but it was made up of soldiers who couldn't count.
"Wonderful," he grumbled, and closed the electric window.
"It's not too late," General Bull said.
"Not too late for what?"
"For air cover. We can hit them where they live.
Napalm. High-explosive bombs. Poison gas. We'll never have to go in except to count the corpses."
"No. We're going to fight it out like a real war. Soldier against soldier," Remo said.
"People get hurt that way," Bull said.
"Shut up and turn around before I squeeze your ear."
Reva moved closer to Remo on the back seat.
"Are you looking forward to this?" she asked.
"No, why?"
"I thought you might be. You against your teacher."
"No," Remo said.
"Who's going to win?"
"All you keep asking me is who's going to win, who's going to win," Remo said.
"I'm just wondering," she said. "It means a lot to me that you win."
"I'll do my best," Remo said. "I don't know that I'd want to live in a world filled with dwarves and fifteen-dollar-a-gallon gas."
Oscar pulled off into the little clearing on the side of the road, and Remo and General Bull stepped out of the car.
Out in front of them sloped a large sand-filled valley, with the oasis at the far end. A hundred men on horses stood poised near the tent village. Around them clustered a number of men on foot, carrying swords and spears.
Remo saw Chiun, in a bright yellow kimono, standing off to the side, talking with Sheik Fareem. Beside them were two other men whom Remo recognized as Abdul and Ganulle.
With his hand Bull shaded his eyes from the sun as he surveyed the battlefield.
"Napalm, boy."
"What?"
"It's a natural for napalm. We can fill this valley with it. Burn everything to a crisp."
"How soon could you work it out?" Remo said.
"I'd need a week."
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"Why a week?"
"First I've got to get two planes that fly. Then I'll have to find a couple of American pilots who aren't on furlough. Then borrow some napalm from Libya. A week. But that's outside. With a break, maybe only five
days."
"Forget it, we're fighting now," Remo said.
"We'll attack in waves. First our ground forces to soften them up. Then the tanks."
"Why not the tanks first?" Remo asked.
"Well, they were fixing them this morning. They might not get here in time for the war."
"Start with your infantry," Remo said.
Bull signaled, and ten Arab lieutenants came forward to him. They were talking Arabic, which Remo couldn't understand. They seemed to be arguing.
Finally, Bull reached into the pocket of his brocaded cowboy shirt and pulled out a handful of toothpicks. He counted out ten and replaced the rest in bis pocket. Then he broke one to make it shorter than the other nine. He put his hands behind his back, and when he brought them forward, he held the ten toothpicks in his hand, their tops all even so no one could see which was the short one.
He moved his hand around, and reluctantly, the lieutenants each picked a toothpick.
The first three picked long toothpicks, and they fell on the sand, turning their faces to Mecca and bowing, screeching prayers of thanksgiving at the tops of their voices.
The fourth lieutenant picked the short toothpick. He too fell on the ground, weeping uncontrollably, kicking his feet into the powdery sand like a child having a temper tantrum.
Remo leaned over and lifted him by the back of the neck. He squeezed.
"Yes, sir," the lieutenant sai
d.
"Get your men and get moving."
"But they're armed. I can see their spears from here."
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"Nothing those spears can do to you will hurt like what I can do to you," Remo said. He squeezed the neck again. "Get moving."
The lieutenant ran off, rubbing his neck as if he had been stung by a bee. Remo heard a wailing from among the mass of troops. The lieutenant turned toward Remo, as if pleading, but Remo only wagged a warning ringer at him.
The lieutenant went back to rounding up his men. Finally, a hundred of them were behind him. The other soldiers had tried to shrink away from the scene of battle, even though it was hard for them to find a place to hide in the sand.
"All right, Lieutenant," Bull ordered. "Attack the enemy. For our country's honor."
Slowly, the lieutenant led the hundred men down the long graded slope of sand, toward the big amphitheater-shaped arena at the bottom.
From the other side, Remo saw a hundred men walk out to meet them. They carried spears and swords. Remo's men had rifles.
Remo told Reva, "You stay here," and told Bull, "You're in charge. Win the war." Then he walked out to the right, staying up along the top of the sand dune, so that he could look down into the valley below and watch the war. He saw Chiun come out of the cluster of people near the oasis and walk along the top of the dune toward him. They met in the middle and Remo bowed.
"Good afternoon, General," he said. "It's a nice day for a war, isn't it?"
"Yes, my son," Chiun said. "We have everything we need for a war, except armies."
They sat side by side in the sand to watch the battle shaping up below.
The two groups of a hundred stood facing each other across thirty feet of sand.
Remo's lieutenant struck first.
He turned toward Chiun's army and shouted at the top of his voice, "Your father is dirty!" He turned to
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his own troops for approval. Some of them applauded. The rest whistled.
One of Chiun's army stepped forward. He was only fifteen feet from the lieutenant. In his right hand, he held a sword.
"Your mother is dirty too!" he yelled.
His men laughed and whistled.
"She is not!" Remo's lieutenant yelled back.
"Is too!" Chiun's soldier shouted. His shout was picked up by the rest of the hundred men behind him. "Is too!" they screamed over and over again. "Is too!"
The noise routed Remo's lieutenant. He fell back to the main body of his men, and they conferred quietly while Chiun's army hooted.
Then the lieutenant turned. He raised his arm over his head. When he lowered it, his entire hundred-man detachment shouted in unison, "Everybody in your family is dirty!"
"Isn't this pitiful?" Remo asked Chiun.
"Now you know why the Crusades went on for three hundred years, my son. It was Frenchmen fighting Arabs. Neither of them could win. The Arabs were good at insults, but the French had better field kitchens. Their sauces were excellent. They were evenly matched."
"I never thought we'd be on opposite sides in a war," Remo said.
"That is true only if you consider this a war," Chiun said.
All men were now shouting at one another. One of Chiun's Arabs, braver than the rest, picked up a handful of sand and threw it at Remo's lieutenant. He reacted as if he had been jolted by electricity. He jumped around, brushing the sand from his highly starched uniform, screaming invective at the sand-thrower. When he was again clean, he threw sand back. Soon both armies were throwing sand at each other. Remo noticed that all hundred of his soldiers had thrown their rifles down so they could throw sand with both hands. There were 100 rifles, useless with
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sand in their barrels. Chiun's soldiers had laid down spear and sword to shovel sand. Meanwhile, they kept yelling.
"It sounds like the New York Stock Exchange three minutes before closing on Friday," Remo said.
"It is awful," Chiun agreed. Remo glanced at him, but he noticed that Chiun's eyes were looking away, focused back on the main tent at the head of the oasis, where Sheik Fareem was holding his head in his hands, as if in pain. Near him were another 600 foot soldiers. The hundred men on horseback still waited impatiently for the word to charge.
Remo could not see Abdul or Ganulle. He looked over to the mouth of the valley. There he saw the Rolls Royce. General Bull was watching the action, applauding. Reva Bloom looked bored. Melody Wakefield was tapping away with her pencil as fast as she could. Oscar, the chauffeur, leaned against the Rolls fender, cleaning his fingernails with a knife.
The rest of Remo's army had gone. He looked off to the south. There, men were racing along the road as fast as their legs would carry them. Could he shoot the whole army for desertion? Remo wondered.
"It looks like I'm outnumbered," Remo said as he turned back to Chiun. But Chiun had gone. Remo saw the aged Oriental racing back toward the village, almost flying across the sand, moving so quickly that his slippered feet left no prints in the soft powdered sand. Remo started running after him, his feet burying themselves ankle deep in the sand, until he remembered that there was no speed in hurrying, that he must sense the pressure of the sand up against his feet and aim the pressure of his body forward, not downward, so that the feet would not sink but only skim over the sand as if skiing along its surface.
He came up out of the sand and was running across it at top speed, leaving not even a mark where he had been. Sheik Fareem had turned, and saw Chiun coming toward him and Remo closing behind him. He turned toward them, but Chiun flew by him and dove against
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the canvas wall of the sheik's tent. The fabric gave way with a wrenching groan. Chiun landed on his feet and, with Remo standing alongside him, he reached down and pulled aside the ripped flap of fabric. Under it was Ganulle, the sheik's regent. A rifle lay at his feet.
Remo turned as Fareem came over to them.
The sheik looked down at Ganulle, who was moaning his way back toward consciousness, and then at Chiun.
"This rifle was aimed at your back, Excellency," Chiun said. Before the sheik could speak, there was a sound in the back of the tent, as someone tried to climb out from under the fabric on the far side. Chiun nodded to Remo, who went around the rear of the tent and returned, a moment later, dragging Abdul by the neck of his long robe.
He dropped the fat man at the feet of his father.
"You too?" Fareem gasped as his son looked up at him helplessly. "Ganulle and you?"
It was a question that would not brook a lie in response. Abdul nodded.
"But why?"
"Your brother, the king," Abdul said. "He promised us ... all this land would be ours . . . the oil ... if only ..." He could not finish the sentence.
Sheik Fareem pulled his long, curved sword from its scabbard. Abdul shrank away as the sheik held the sword toward him; then, with a cry of anguish, Fareem raised the sword high over his head, turned, and ran. A riderless horse stood lazily near the edge of the clearing, and the sheik swung himself easily up into his saddle. Then, yodeling an Arab call, he rode out across the sand toward Remo's army.
The sheik's startled horsemen watched their leader ride off, and then they spurred their steeds and followed him, their voices raised, high-pitched, in a curiously melodic battle cry.
Remo's soldiers, who were four points ahead in the war of the words with Fareem's villager troops, heard the sounds. They looked up and saw the sheik coming,
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his sword circling high over his head. They turned and ran.
But by the time he reached the nearest soldier, the sheik's fury seemed to have abated because instead of cutting the man in two, he stopped and waved to his men; they galloped over and circled Remo's soldiers, who then fell abjectly onto the sand, cringing and sniveling for their lives.
The sheik spurred his mount and rode off toward the parked Rolls Royce, and in moments, Melody Wake-field and General Bull had joined the group of p
risoners.
"That is a man and a half, isn't it, Chiun?" Remo said, nodding toward the sheik, who was riding majestically back toward the oasis.
. "Yes, he is," Chiun said. "That is why the House of Sinanju honors its contract with him, prisoner."
When Reva finally trudged through the sand to Remo, she asked, "What happened?"
"We lost."
"Oh, shit."
"What's going on here?" General Bull shouted from among the group of prisoners.
"We lost the war," Remo said.
"I told you we should have used napalm."
"We'll use it in next week's war," Remo said.
"If word of this gets out, I'm ruined," Bull said. "Who'd buy military equipment from a loser?"
Melody Wakefield was standing with the prisoners, still typing with a pencil on the typewriter hung around her neck. She finally dropped the pencil and said, "Listen to this." She began to read. "A gallant band of Hamidi Arabian soldiers today defended the future of Islam against a terrorist band of Israeli sympathizers. By the time the smoke from the battlefield had settled, the pro-Israel forces had been routed. In a brilliant display of battlefield tactics .. ."
While she babbled on, Sheik Fareem looked at Remo.
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"What is this thing without hands talking about?"
Remo shrugged.
"Who are the gallant Arabian soldiers?" Fareem
asked.
Remo pointed to the remnants of bis army, ©oweriag in the sand under guard.
"Them," he said.
"Who are these Israeli sympathizers?" Fareem asked.
"You," Remo said. "Ignore it, sheik. The broad's wacky."
Fareem slapped Melody Wakefield in the back of the head and sent her sprawling. "Be quiet, woman. No more of your lies," he growled.
"Zionist child-butcher," she called out. /
Remo put his foot on her mouth.
"Shut up, kid. You ain't in Boston now."
Remo was allowed to sit next to Chiun and the sheik. In front of them stood General Bull, Reva Bleem, Melody Wakefield, and Abdul.
"What are we to do with these creatures?" Fareem asked Chiun.
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