Oil Slick

by Warren Murphy

  “Yes,” piped up Jessie Jenkins. “When do we get a chance to see Dapoli?”

  “Well, little black girl, we are walking through it now, are we not? Keep your eyes open and you will see it.” He smiled as he answered, then stopped, looking around for approval.

  Father Harrigan led the remainder of the group in good humored laughter.

  “Now that the questions are finished, we will continue,” said the cultural officer. He led the way through the gutter alongside the sidewalk, deep into the city toward two bigger buildings.

  Chiun asked Remo, “Where are we staying?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t make any reservations, we decided to leave so fast.”

  Chiun asked the noncommissioned officer leading his trunk-bearers, “Is there a hotel in this desert?”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said quickly. “The Lobynian Arms.”

  “Go there and secure us two rooms. Carefully place my belongings in the better of the rooms. Tell them we are coming. What is your name?”

  “Abu Telib, master,” the frightened soldier said.

  “If you fail, Abu Telib, I will find you,” Chiun said. “I will seek you out.”

  “I will not fail, master. I will not fail.”

  “Be gone.”

  “How come you get the best room?” asked Remo.

  “Rank has its privileges.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE CITY SQUARE OF DAPOLI was a trapezoid. Along the narrow back edge ran the long low palace building constructed under King Adras. To the right was the Revolutionary Triumph Building constructed under Colonel Baraka. The buildings were identical, except that having been constructed by foreign workmen, King Adras’s building was in much better shape, despite being fifty years older.

  The other two sides of the square were bordered by streets, on the far sides of which there were shacks, apparently designed by someone who regarded beads and colored glass as a substitute for both form and function.

  The square was alive with people, sounds, and odors. The vile barnyard smell of camels mingled with the smells of burning lamb and the sounds of people talking, shouting, bargaining, singing. Over it hung the piping sounds of wooden flutes common to the area.

  “All right, move aside. Everybody out of the way.” The cultural attache spoke harshly. He shouldered people aside as he led his brigade of Americans through the square toward the balcony of the palace on which the ceremonies were to be held.

  When the group reached the foot of the balcony, the officer turned to the Americans.

  “Here you will stay. You will not move from this group. You will not talk to Lobynians. You will show proper obeisance to the great leader, Colonel Baraka, and to the customs and sensibilities of our people. There will be penalties for violators.”

  Chiun and Remo stood in the rear of the group.

  “What are we doing here, Chiun?” asked Remo.

  “Shhh. We have come to see Colonel Baraka.”

  “It’s very important to you, Chiun, isn’t it?”

  “Important, yes. ‘Very important?’ Maybe.”

  “It is not at all important to me,” said Remo. “What is important is Nuihc.”

  Chiun turned to Remo, anger narrowing his eyes to two almond shaped slits. “I have told you not to mention in my presence the name of the son of my brother. He has disgraced the House of Sinanju with his evils.”

  “Yes, Chiun, I know. But he is behind all this. The killings of the oil scientists. Probably the oil boycott too, somehow. And that’s what my job is, to end the killings and get the oil turned back on.”

  “Fool. Think you that he cares about oil? He cares about us. This is all to entrap us. You remember the false agents of your bureau of investigation? A fat one and a thin one. That was his greeting. First fat, then thin. Extremes of weight mean nothing to one who knows the secrets of Sinanju. You remember, you dealt with that once before.”

  “All right,” said Remo. “Let’s say he is after us. Let’s go get him.”

  “He will come for us,” said Chiun stolidly. “I told you that once before. When we want him, he will find us. We need only wait.”

  “I’d rather it was on our terms,” said Remo, thinking of his previous battles with Chiun’s nephew. The only other man in the world who knew the secrets of the Sinanju assassins lusted for the deaths of Remo and Chiun so he could become Master of Sinanju.

  “And I would rather eat duck,” said Chiun, his eyes still aimed at the balcony. “The time will be of his choosing.”

  “And the place?” asked Remo.

  “The challenge will come, as it did before and as it must again, in a place of the dead animals. Thus it has been written. It can be no other way.”

  “The last time, the place of the dead animals was a museum. I don’t think Lobynia has any museums,” said Remo. He sniffed the air. “I don’t even think it’s got any bathrooms.”

  “There is a place of dead animals,” said Chiun with finality. “There you will be expected to meet his challenge again.”

  “How do you think it’ll go?” asked Remo.

  “He has the advantage of being Korean and of the House of Sinanju. On the other hand, you have had the benefit of my personal supervision. He is a defective diamond; you are a highly polished piece of gravel.”

  “That’s almost a compliment.”

  “Then I withdraw it. Shhhhh.”

  Onto the balcony stepped a handsome Italian-looking man, dressed in immaculate Army tans. The crowd roared its approval. “Baraka. Baraka. Baraka,” they screamed. It quickly built to a chant which seemed to shake the entire city.

  The colonel raised his arms for silence. He noticed as he looked down that the loudest screamers were the gang of American hoodlums who had arrived for the Third World Conference.

  “He does not look so bad,” said Chiun thoughtfully. “He will probably listen to me.”

  “Probably the mountain will come to Mohammed,” said Remo.

  In the silence ordered by Baraka, a detail of soldiers now came down the steps of the palace, each four bearing a casket, carrying them out onto the balcony and placing them on the platform behind Baraka.

  “Another demonstration of the cowardly Jew,” yelled Baraka, pointing at the dozen caskets behind him.

  The crowd roared.

  When it silenced, Baraka said, “We have come to pay tribute to men who gave their lives to keep Lobynia free.”

  More screaming and yelling followed this.

  It went on that way, each sentence interrupted by cheers and applause, as Baraka told how the men had found out plans for a sneak Israeli attack on Lobynia with atomic pistols, and they set out deep into the heartland of Israel, even into Tel Aviv, and foiled the plan and laid much of that city waste before they were finally overwhelmed by the entire Israeli army.

  “But now Tel Aviv knows that no place on earth is safe for them. No place out of the reach of Lobynian justice,” Baraka said, touching off screams, even while wondering to himself how Nuihc, who was so small and frail, had been able to kill so many commandos, who—while they might not have been much as fighting men—had the normal numbers of arms and legs each.

  As the cheering continued, Baraka searched the faces of the Americans gathered in a soldier-contained group in front of him. There were the usual assortment of pretty girls. He tried to pick out the prettiest one, in order to invite her to a private dinner at the palace some night during their stay. He gave up the job, but narrowed the number down to three. He would invite all three.

  The thing in overalls was, no doubt, a minister of some sort. Mohammed, bless his name, would cringe, were he to have such disciples. It was a wonder that Christ’s memory had survived, Baraka thought.

  He looked away from Father Harrigan in hurried distaste. In the back of the group staring coldly at him were two men of a different cast. One was American, obviously, but he bore the same sort of hard good looks as Baraka himself. His eyes met Baraka’s and there was
only cold depth in them, no glimmer of warmth or respect. Even more interesting was the man next to him. He was an aged Oriental in a long gold robe. When he met Baraka’s eyes, he smiled and raised an index finger, as if to signal Baraka that he would talk to him later. His eyes were hazel, like Nuihc’s, and had the same sort of detached deep placidity that Nuihc demonstrated.

  Baraka had no doubt that these were the two men whose arrival Nuihc had been awaiting. The days ahead might yet be interesting, Baraka thought.

  “And yet,” he yelled, “was a word of this brave strike into the Israel heartland carried in the pig press of the Western world?”

  He choked off the cheers by answering his own question. “No. Not one word. The capitalist Zionist press of the world was silent about the bravery of our fallen commandos.”

  More cheers. Through them, he heard the priest in overalls yell, “What do you expect when the publisher of the Times is named Sulzberger?”

  That was good, decided Baraka. He would use that the next time he was interviewed for American television.

  He let the crowd shout itself down this time and then said, “We will speed our commandos’ souls to Allah, by prayer.” Obediently, the crowd all turned eastward, toward what was now Saudi Arabia and the city of Mecca.

  Many of the crowd took prayer rugs from under their garments and spread them out before kneeling on them.

  “Pray unto Allah for the repose of their souls,” commanded Baraka. He dropped to his knees also, his sharp eyes glinting beneath the visor of his military hat, watching the crowd, making sure there were no guns aimed at him.

  The Americans shuffled around, then they too dropped to their knees. All but the hard-looking one and the old Oriental. They stood like two slim trees in a forest of kneeling humanity.

  Baraka was outraged. But a hiss came from the windows at the back of the balcony. “Let them be,” said Nuihc’s voice. “Do not touch them.”

  Baraka decided to overlook the religious affront. He lowered his head in prayer.

  Silence crowned the vast arena.

  Then the voice of the prostrate Father Harrigan rose above the crowd.

  “God of man, let those responsible for these deaths burn alive in ovens, according to thy grace. Let them singe and scorch in hell for their very whiteness. Let the full measure of vengeance be taken in thy good name. For an eye, let there be not an eye, but a hundred eyes. All according to thy goodness and love, let death run free among the Zionist white devils, the usurpers and rapers of the land. We ask it in the name of peace and brotherhood.”

  “Not bad,” Chiun said to Remo as Harrigan’s voice died out. “Especially the part about putting white people in ovens. Did I ever tell you that they were white because God took them out of the oven too soon?”

  Only a hundred times,” said Remo, looking around the crowd.

  “All right, you’ve seen Baraka. Seen enough?”

  “Yes, for now,” said Chiun.

  Seconds later, Baraka rose to his feet and looked over the kneeling crowd, before signaling it to rise. The two men, the American and the Oriental, were gone, vanished as if the earth had swallowed them up.

  He wondered if he would see them again, before Nuihc worked his will upon them.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE LOBYNIAN ARMS WAS about what Remo had expected.

  It had been a hovel in the days of its glory. Now, maintenance and operation were exclusively in the control of the Lobynians, who had nationalized the hotel as a national treasure, and had proceeded to turn it into an international disgrace.

  The paint was chipped and peeling in the two adjoining rooms that the frightened soldier had secured for Remo and Chiun.

  The beds, consisting of dirty, spotted mattresses on twisted metal frames, lacked not only sheets but covers. There was water in the showers, but only cold, the hot water knobs having been removed.

  One of the windows in the smaller of the two rooms was broken, which Remo thought should have gotten rid of the stale smell in the room, until he noticed that pouring through the broken glass were the even staler smells of the great Lobynian outdoors.

  “Nice place,” he said to Chiun.

  “It will keep the rain from our heads,” said Chiun.

  “It never rains in Lobynia.”

  “That explains the smell. The country has never been washed.”

  Chiun carefully counted the steamer trunks, satisfying himself that there were still fourteen of them. He opened one and began to pooch around in its innards, finally coming out with a bottle of ink, a long straight quill pen, and a sheaf of paper.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I will send a communique to Colonel Baraka,” said Chiun.

  “I’m going to call Smith.”

  What the room lacked in beauty, the telephone service equaled in inefficiency, and it took Remo forty-five minutes and four tries to get the buzzing ring to the Chicago dial-a-prayer whose number he had given the hotel operator.

  “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” came a recorded voice, scratchy from being patched halfway around the world.

  “Gimme that old time religion,” Remo said dutifully into the telephone, and then heard a whirring and clicking as his voice signal triggered a series of switching operations and finally he heard another click and Smith saying, “Hello.”

  “This is Remo. We’re on an open line.”

  “I know,” said Smith. “There isn’t a secure line in that entire country. See anything interesting? Clogg or Baraka?”

  “Both of them,” said Remo.

  “You said you knew who was behind this?” asked Smith cautiously.

  “That’s right,” Remo said, “but I can’t tell you yet. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “There is a new element by the way,” Smith said. He went on to explain that also aboard the plane was a man who had developed an oil substitute and was going to sell it to Baraka.

  “Oh,” said Remo casually, “what’s his name?”

  “Goldberg,” said Smith. He was annoyed when Remo laughed, and asked, “What’s so funny?”

  “You. And all your spies,” said Remo. Still laughing, he hung up. So Jessie Jenkins was an operative for the United States. That was the only way Smith could have heard of the oil substitute.

  Well, it was good to know. He would keep an eye out for her welfare. At least she wasn’t one of the nits.

  When he went back into the other room, Chiun was closing his bottle of ink.

  “It is done,” he said, and handed the long sheet of parchment forward to Remo. He watched anxiously as Remo read.

  Colonel Baraka

  You have until noon Friday to abdicate. If you do not, there is no hope for you. Give my best to your family.

  It was signed:

  The Master of Sinanju, Room 316, Lobynian Arms.

  “Well? What do you think?” asked Chiun.

  “It’s got a kind of old world charm about it,” Remo conceded.

  “You do not think it too weak? Should I have been more forceful?”

  “No,” said Remo, “I think you’ve got just the right flavor. I don’t know anyone who could have done it better.”

  “Good. I want to give him a chance to repent.”

  “Do you think it was a good idea to give him your room number?”

  “Certainly,” said Chiun. “How else can he contact me to capitulate?”

  Remo nodded. “That’s true enough. How will you deliver this?”

  “I will take it to the palace myself.”

  “I’ll deliver it if you want,” said Remo. “I’d like to get out.”

  “That would be helpful. It is time for my consciousness raising,” said Chiun.

  Remo took the rolled parchment from Chiun, went downstairs through the dirty unlit lobby and out into the bright sunlight of Dapoli. He absorbed the smells and sounds of the city as he walked the four blocks to the city square.

  The palace was ringed with guards and
Remo walked casually through the square, looking for one who was an officer. He finally found one with three stars on his shoulders, indicating a lieutenant general. He was walking back and forth before the palace building, informally inspecting the troops.

  “General,” called Remo moving quietly up behind him. The general turned. He was a young man with a long white scar running down his left cheek.

  “I have a message for Colonel Baraka. How do I get it to him?”

  “Well, you could send it to him by mail.”

  “He will get it then?”

  “No,” the general said. “The mail is never delivered in Lobynia.”

  “Well, actually, I was more interested in seeing he got the message than in providing a dry run for your mail system.”

  “Then you might leave it at the front door of the palace.”

  “Will he get it that way?”

  “Not unless you accompany it with a flock of sheep. One cannot present anything to the supreme commander without accompanying it with a ritual gift.”

  “Where can I get a flock of sheep?” asked Remo.

  “You can’t. There are no sheep in Dapoli.”

  “Is there another way to get a message to him?”

  “No,” said the general, turning from Remo.

  Remo clapped a hand on the soldier’s shoulder.

  “Just a minute. You’re telling me that there’s no way to get a message to Baraka?”

  “Colonel Baraka,” the officer corrected. “That’s just what I’m telling you.”

  “Do you know what you’re talking about?” asked Remo.

  “I am Lieutenant General Jaafar Ali Amin, the Minister of Intelligence. I know what I am talking about,” the officer said haughtily.

  “Suppose I gave the message to you?”

  “I would read it, then tear it up and throw away the pieces. This is not America. You have no special privileges here.”

  “Suppose, just as a hypothetical case, I told you that if you tore up the message, I would remove your intestines and strangle you with them? What would be your reaction to that?”

  “My hypothetical reaction would be to call the guard and have you arrested and create an international incident that would embarrass your nation.” He smiled. “Hypothetically, of course.”