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.