Now, too late, he understood. It was all very clear to him. The reason no one else had leapt into the president's chair before him was a simple one. It was no longer the seat of power, but a throne of death.
And he had claimed it for his own.
Chapter 5
Harold Smith was surprised to find the Master of Sinanju seated on a tatami mat at the foot of his hospital bed.
Chiun wore a bone-white kimono which Smith had personally recovered from a steamer trunk in the Master of Sinanju's nearby home. He sat lotus-style, his back arched, his wizened features screwed up in concentration as he inscribed quick black brushstrokes on a parchment scroll. The overhead lights made hot blobs of light on his bald head. A covered wok simmered at his feet.
"The President has received an urgent communication from Abominadad," Smith began.
Without looking up, Chiun nodded.
"The defense minister of Irait has offered to release all hostages if the U.S. will call off the destructive forces they claim we have unleashed upon their city."
Chiun frowned, adding a brushstroke to the geometrical pattern he had been carefully creating on the parchment.
"The trouble is," Smith went on, "we have unleashed nothing. We believe the Iraitis are referring to Remo and Kimberly Baynes."
"This is not good," Chiun said, his frown making his face shrivel into a mummylike death mask. Leaping flames from a tiny Sterne, fire sent wavering blue shadows across the Master of Sinanju's dry features like the ghostly turning of the pages of history.
"Are you referring to the fact that we have no control over Remo and Kimberly?"
"No," said Chiun, "I am referring to the fact that your opponent, Maddas Hinsein, was born with the sun in Taurus. This is very bad. It means he is stubborn and intractable. He will not surrender until he is dead. And perhaps not even then."
"How can that be?" Smith wondered.
"For a true Taurus, this is possible."
After dipping a stiff writing stick into an ink stone, the Master of Sinanju made another brushstroke.
"The moon in Scorpio," he added.
"What does that mean?"
"He enjoys dressing as a woman." Chiun looked up, his eyes glinting. "That explains how he still lives."
Smith cleared his throat. "Er, Master Chiun, I must inform you that the word out of Abominadad is that Maddas Hinsein is dead. If he were not, why has his defense minister seized power?"
Idly the Master of Sinanju aimed a remote-control unit toward the nearby combination television and VCR unit. A tape began playing.
Smith watched intently as the last televised images out of Irait played again. He saw Remo pull back one arm to unleash the death blow that was meant to extinguish Don Cooder. Remo's hand, a spear of stiffened fingers, snapped out.
Too fast for even the camera to record it, a woman in a flowing black abayuh reached out to snatch Cooder from the blow's path. Remo's hand kept going, striking the grinning mustached figure in the green burnoose that stood directly behind.
"That man was not Maddas Hinsein," Chiun informed Smith as the tall burnoosed form was blown out of the frame with bone-breaking force.
"Why do you say that?" Smith asked as the camera caught a glimpse of the woman in the abayuh as she lifted her garment to expose her naked form and spidery limbs.
"Because," Chiun said, hitting the pause button, "that is Maddas Hinsein."
Smith leaned into the screen, blinking owlishly.
In one corner of the frozen image, a second abayuh-clad figure was vaulting over the reviewing-stand rail. Smith saw clearly the shiny black paratroop boots under the garment's wildly lifting hem.
"Boots," Smith said. "Very interesting, but hardly proof positive."
Wordlessly Chiun tapped the off switch and returned to his labors.
Noting the cool blue glow of the Sterno fire, Smith said, "I trust the wok was sufficient for your needs. Finding a brass brazier on short notice was not possible."
"We shall see if it accomplishes its purpose," was all the Master of Sinanju would say.
"The President has not yet made a military decision," Smith said when the silence had grown long. "The Hamidi officer in charge of the multinational coalition, Prince General Sulyeman Bazzaz, has refused to allow our forces to move. Politically, the President is stymied."
"Tell me of the other forces," Chiun suggested, still working on his scroll, which lay flat with its corners slightly curled under the weight of four stones.
"Well, currently the U.S.-led coalition includes the Hamidis, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the-"
"Speak to me not of Arab forces," Chiun snapped. "They are like the desert sands once the storm of war commences. They will sting the eyes and drag down the feet of your soldiers-those who do not turn against you."
"Well, there are the British, the French, the Greeks, the Italians, the Poles, the Canadians, and other European elements."
Chiun looked up. "No Mongols?" he squeaked in surprise.
"No Mongolian units were available to us."
"I do not mean uniformed footmen," Chiun retorted, "but sturdy horse Mongols."
"We do have the Turks on our side," Smith offered.
"Turks are acceptable," Chiun sniffed, "if one plans a slaughter. "
"The President is hoping to avoid any deaths."
"Then he is unworthy of being President. For the enemy enjoys carnage and will only be halted by his own destruction."
Chiun made a final dot on the scroll and left it to dry.
At that moment a furious crackling came from the covered wok.
"Ah," said Chiun, turning his attention to the fire. "It is done."
"I will leave you to your meal, then," Smith said, a trace of disappointment in his tone.
The Master of Sinanju lifted a frail hand whose long nails were like horn projections from which the flesh was retreating.
He said, "Hold, Emperor Smith."
Lifting the wok's brass lid, he laid it aside.
At the Master of Sinanju's beckon, Smith drew near. He leaned over the wok, from which steam and a faintly distasteful aroma rose.
"Isn't that-?" Smith began to say.
With his bare hands, Chiun lifted a tortoiseshell. Moisture beaded up from its humped dorsal surface. It was an odd rusty color, and speckled with brown leopardlike spots. Hairline cracks started from either edge. They radiated toward the dividing depression like thunderbolts in conflict. Here and there, they crossed.
"Show this to the general who commands your forces," Chiun directed.
Smith blinked.
"But what is it?" he blurted.
"It is a tortoiseshell," said the Master of Sinanju in a bland voice as he replaced the wok cover.
"I know that. I obtained it for you. But what is its significance?"
"The general will understand. Now, please leave me. I am weary from my labors."
"As you wish, Master Chiun," Harold Smith said in a puzzled voice. He went away, carrying the hot smelly object in ginger fingers.
The next morning a UPS express courier delivered the tortoiseshell in a nondescript Jiffy mailer to a side door of the White House.
The President of the United States himself signed for the package. He opened it, and even though he knew what to expect within, he still found himself turning the cracked and shriveled tortoiseshell over and over in his hands.
"I don't get it," muttered the President.
A moment later, the tortoiseshell in one hand and the cherry-red CURE line in the other, he was repeating himself to Harold Smith.
"I don't get it." His voice was as bewildered as a child lost in a mall.
"Nor do I," sighed Harold Smith. "But I would do as Master-"
"-The Oriental."
"-instructs. He has never failed us before."
"But this smacks of voodoo. How will it look to our coalition allies?"
"Like voodoo," Smith admitted. "On the other hand, what do you have to lose?"
/> "You have a point there," said the President, shoving the tortoiseshell back into its Jiffy bag. "The ways things stand, we're on the brink of the biggest military conflagration since the Big One."
"Good luck, Mr. President."
The Jiffy bag was couriered over to the Pentagon by a military attache and presented to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Down in the Tank-the Pentagon's war room-the Joint Chiefs lowered the lights before they extracted the withered shell for examination.
No one spoke for many minutes. Finally the chairman personally brought up the lights.
He held the shell up so that everyone could see, clearly and absolutely, that it was a tortoiseshell that seemed to have lain in the sun too long.
"Looks like the back off a turtle," the chief of staff of the Air Force ventured.
This seemingly safe opinion was contradicted all around. Some said it was a turtle shell. Others that it wasn't a shell at all but something else. No one one knew exactly what.
The chairman left the growing disagreement and got on the horn to the White House. He identified himself, asked a silent question, and listened intently for several moments before hanging up.
"What did he say?" asked the commandant of the Marine Corps.
"He said, 'Never mind what it is, ship the damned thing.' Unquote."
A C-130 Hercules Transport left Andrews Air Force Base within the hour, a Pentagon courier seated on a web seat, an attache case across his back and the tortoiseshell inside the case. The attache believed he was carrying all-important Pentagon campaign plans for the defense of Hamidi Arabia and the liberation of occupied Kuran. He believed this because no less than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had implied this. The chairman was not about to inform the man that he was ferrying the cracked shell of a tortoise-or possibly a turtle-all the way to a frontline base in the Hamidi desert.
Neither the attache nor the chairman knew that that was exactly what lay within the attache case.
Chapter 6
Prince General Suleyman Bazzaz was, strictly speaking, neither a general nor a prince.
As the adopted son of Sheik Abdul Hamid Fareem, the title of prince was conferred upon him one night in a bedouin tent with only the hissing of sand-driven wind and the spitting of single-humped dromedaries as a musical accompaniment.
When this was done, Sheik Fareem clapped his withered hands together and asked his new son, "Your heart's desire. Name this thing and it will be done."
Since Sheik Fareem ruled over a stretch of sand under which the world's energy requirements slept, Prince Bazzaz thought carefully upon this.
"I have always wished to fly the great fighter jets," said the new prince, then but nineteen and fresh from a trip to Bahrain, where he had seen the forbidden-to-Moslems film called Top Gun-forbidden because it showed actual kissing. "My favorite is the F-14 Tomcat, a magnificent plane, for it boasts more fins than a 1957 Cadillac."
"You wish only to join the Royal Hamidi Air Force?" asked the sheik, a trace of disappointment creeping over his windseared old visage.
"No," said Prince Bazzaz, sensing that he was underestimating the offer before him. "I wish for my own aircraft carrier. "
No sound passed between the two men in the candleflicker light of the midnight tent. It was winter. The cruel northern wind, the shamal, threatened the sturdy tent.
Presently Sheik Fareem nodded mutely and stole from the tent. Outside, a retinue of servants and military guards awaited. At a gesture from their sheik, one proffered a cellular telephone. The sheik spoke nervously for some minutes into this and then returned to the striped tent.
"It will take five years to build one," Sheik Fareem explained in disappointment. "What would you do in the meantime?"
"I would be general of the Hamidi Royal Air Force."
"No," said the sheik, shaking his head. "I cannot allow any son of mine, even if his blood is not my own, to be a mere general."
Prince Bazzaz's bronzed young face fell.
"No," the sheik went on sagely, "you shall be prince general."
Prince General Bazzaz' face lit up. That he had no experience in military service, never mind generaling, was of no moment, the sheik patiently explained to him.
"For as long as the black gold oozes up from the sands of Araby, the Americans will protect us," he had prophesied.
And so they did.
When the legions of the brutal Iraiti regime rolled south along the bait-Kuran Friendship Road, slaughtering and looting and raping as they shouted their solidarity with Arabs everywhere, Prince General Suleyman Bazzaz received the news at a difficult moment. It was while he was working on his tan.
The aide came to his private tanning booth in downtown Nemad, capital of Hamidi Arabia. It had cost twenty thousand dollars and gave almost as smooth a tan as the prince general would had gotten from sitting on a $12.95 chaise lounge under the scorching Hamidi sun. But even the lowliest effendis had the sun to bronze them. Only Bazzaz had a private tanning booth.
"The Iraitis are coming!" the aide shouted. "They have smashed into Kuran!"
"Our Kurani brothers will stop them," Prince General Bazzaz murmured nonchalantly. "They are almost as rich as we and they possess American weapons nearly the equal of our own."
"Which weapons are now in Iraiti hands," the aide added breathlessly. "And crack Iraiti Renaissance Guard units are heading this way."
Behind protective goggles of red lenses, the prince general's dark eyes blinked. "What of the valiant Kuranis?"
"Valiantly offering their services to protect our mutual border now that they have no country of their own," replied the aide.
Prince General Bazzaz threw off his protective visor and hurried into a white uniform which would have made an opera star blush with embarrassment and was whisked to the sheik's palace in his personal motorcade.
He arrived in exactly five minutes, three more than if he had walked. The palace was directly across the street from the command headquarters. But the winds were up and he did not wish to get dust on his ivory-white paratroop boots.
"O long-lived one," Bazzaz cried, bursting in on the majlis, where the sheik heard the complaints-which were many-of his people, "I am told the Iraitis have stabbed our Kurani brothers in the back."
"Let the word go forth," said the sheik, indignation making his voice quake. "This is an Arab affair. No outsiders are to meddle in matters between our brothers."
"Their tanks are coming this way. They covet our land. I have never before fought a war, 0 Father. What do I do? Which uniform should I wear-the white or the gold?"
The sheik blinked. He drew his adopted son close and whispered in his ear, "Call the Americans. Only they can save us now."
"But what about our Arab honor?" Bazzaz had demanded. "What about my honor? I am commander in chief."
"Honor is but a word," hissed the sheik. "Our blood is as spillable as any Kurani's. Call the Americans, and be silent. We will talk of honor once our nation is again secure."
And so began the mightiest airlift in history.
By the time the Hamidi-Kuran border had been fortified with several U.S. divisions and Hamidi Arabia at least temporarily secure from invasion, the question of command was first raised.
"I will command," said Prince General Bazzaz smoothly, upon meeting the general in charge of the UN farces. Today he was wearing the gold uniform, having decided to alternate.
"It's my army," retorted General Winfield Scott Hornworks, supreme commander of Allied Forces Central Command.
"It is my nation," said the prince general, who did not immediately comprehend why the unbeliever did not obey instantly. Had his father not hired this infidel army to do the will of the Hamidi royal family?
"Fine," retorted General Winfield Scott Hornworks. "We'll be on our way home, seeing as how your nice little sandbox of a country is out of immediate danger. If the Iraitis act up again, you give us a yell, hear?"
Prince General Bazzaz' eyes fixed on th
e broad retreating back of the American general as he started out of the room, looking like a human chocolate-chip cookie in his desert utilities and bush hat. They grew wide like twin explosions of surprise as the general's words sank in.
"I have a brilliant idea!" he called, lifting his bejeweled swagger stick. It trembled.
The general half-turned. "If it's half as brilliant as that getup of yours," he said dryly, "it oughta be a doozy."
"Why do we not rotate?"
"Rotate what?"
"Our responsibilities," Bazzaz said, smiling weakly. "Twelve hours for you and twelve for me."
Since the general had not actually been authorized to withdraw from Hamidi Arabia and was hoping to bluff the prince general, he gave this proposition serious thought. "It's possible," he allowed at last.
"Excellent! I will take days. I am a day person. Not a night oil."
"That's 'owl' and you got yourself a deal," said the general, who figured even in the crazy event the Pentagon went for this arrangement, any first strike would be a night operation.
"I would shake on it," said the prince general, "but you look like a pork-eater. No offense."
"None taken. And I got enough of a lungful of your perfume at this distance."
"It is English Leather," said the prince general proudly.
"You musta got the industrial-strength version," returned Hornworks dryly.
To General Winfield Scott Hornworks' utter astonishment, the Pentagon had gone for the insane shared-command idea.
"It's politically expedient," the U.S. secretary of defense had told him.
"Let me speak to the JCS," snapped General Hornworks, who decided to appeal to someone with sense and a uniform.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was equally supportive of the shared-command concept.
"And what the hell do I do if this goes to conflict?" roared General Hornworks.
"That won't happen. Maddas Hinsein isn't that crazy, to take on the U.S. in open conflict."
Except that as the weeks rolled by, it looked more and more as if he was. He had taken hostage every Westerner in Irait. He began threatening Israel. He promised a global conflagration if the U.S. did not withdraw from the gulf region. And when the Iraiti ambassador to the U.S. had been found strangled by a yellow ribbon, he had attempted to have two of the most prominent Western hostages publicly executed.
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