In the meantime, Remo concentrated on the trail and his companions. Audrey working up a sweat in front of him, the rich aroma of her body wafting back to Remo on a sluggish jungle breeze. He put the stirring mental images on hold and checked the others, starting with their guide and working backward down the line. The men demonstrated varied levels of endurance, Remo saw, but none showed any signs of dropping from exhaustion. Up in front, their Malay pointman set a steady pace without demanding any superhuman effort. He appeared to have the oldest member of the team in mind, and Remo caught him glancing back at Dr. Stockwell every hundred yards or so, as if to reassure himself that the professor still had energy enough to carry on.
So far so good.
Three hours later, they stopped to rest for fifteen minutes, and Audrey winked on the sly before she settled next to Stockwell.
"Tell me, Audrey," the professor said, "have you seen anything unusual about the native flora?"
Audrey thought about the question for a moment, finally shook her head. "Not really, Safford. Much of what we see is rather primitive, of course—the ferns and fungi, obviously—but there's nothing I'd call prehistoric on the face of it. No fossil species sprung to life, by any means."
"An ordinary jungle, then?"
"In essence," she replied. "But we're not looking for a plant, remember. If I had to guess, I'd say that isolation would be more important to survival of an ancient species than specific flora. Even herbivores are fairly versatile, unless you're dealing with koala bears."
Their guide, Kuching Kangar, had seemed to follow the exchange with interest, though it was impossible to say how much he understood until he spoke.
"Nagaq eats meat," he said to no one in particular.
Professor Stockwell blinked and frowned. "A carnivore?"
The little Malay shrugged. "Eats meat," he said again.
"You've heard this from your people, I suppose?"
"Nagaq ate my datuk," the guide responded, slipping into Malay.
"His grandfather," Sibu Sandakan translated.
"What?" Professor Stockwell was amazed. "He surely cannot mean—"
"We hear him screams," the guide said, interrupting Stockwell. "Run down to the river where he go for water. Find his arm, kiri."
"The left one," Sandakan filled in, appearing shaken.
"Also, tracks left by Nagaq," the guide went on. "This big."
He held his hands apart, three feet or so, then let them fall into his lap. The story of his grandfather's annihilation seemed to conjure nothing in the way of strong emotion.
"When did all this happen?" Audrey asked.
"Two years gone, maybe three."
"What bloody rot," Pike Chalmers said. "It must have been a crocodile."
"No crocodile that big," the guide replied. If he was angered by the tall Brit's open skepticism, he concealed it well.
"My God, that's food for thought," Professor Stockwell said. "That is… I mean to say… "
"It's all right, Safford," Audrey told him, resting one hand on his sunburned arm. "I'm sure he didn't take offense."
"Nagaq eat meat," their guide repeated with a twitchy little smile, then scrambled to his feet and grabbed his pack.
"Rest over," he informed them. "We go now."
The Master of Sinanju had no difficulty following his quarry. Even on the river, it was child's play, watching for the point where they had landed their canoes and made a sad attempt at hiding them. The boats were tucked away behind some ferns, but no real effort had been made to sweep away the tracks where they were dragged ashore, and footprints from the several amateurs were everywhere.
The game was that much easier when they began the rough trek overland. Their clumsy boots left imprints that a blind man could have followed, tapping with his cane, and there were other signs, besides. A broken sapling. Scratches on a tree, where someone's gear had scraped the bark. A stone inverted, kicked aside to bare the worms beneath it. Fronds and branches cut with a machete where the trail was overgrown and they were forced to clear a path. Great imprints from their buttocks where they stopped to rest.
Remo was better than the others, granted, but he still left traces that the Master of Sinanju could detect with only minor concentration. In a contest, it wouldn't be good enough, but Remo surely would have chosen better footwear and equipment if the choice were his to make.
Chiun had started out a day behind the Stockwell expedition, giving them a night to sleep at Dampar, picking out a charter speedboat that would quickly shave their lead. He was an hour and a half behind them when he acquired the canoe, with no white men in the boat to hold him back once Chiun applied himself to paddling at speed. His quarry had no more than forty minutes' lead time when the Master beached his boat and took the time to hide it properly, where no man would discover it without a thorough, time-consuming search.
At that, Chiun was almost forced to view his tracking prowess as a handicap of sorts. He could have overtaken Remo and the others in an hour at the most, and shadowed them from killing distance, but he had no wish to baby-sit.
And after fifteen minutes on the jungle trail, he knew there was another problem that he must examine first, before he showed himself to Remo.
Stockwell's expedition had a tail.
He couldn't say another tail, because the faceless strangers had begun their hunt ahead of him. For all Chiun knew, they may have been in place before the expedition left K.L. They had made no effort to surprise the expedition yet, but they were armed and therefore dangerous—at least to whites with no appreciation of Sinanju.
Master Chiun had sensed the enemy before he covered half a mile on foot, then took time to sort the scents and general impressions that combined to let him know an adversary was at hand. He left the trail at once and moved wraithlike through the forest to pick up a second track that paralleled the first. The boots that trod this path were older, more run-down than those of Stockwell's expedition, and they were more numerous. He counted seventeen distinct and separate signatures along the way, including two men wearing sandals soled with rubber cut from blown-out tires. A smell of gun oil lingered on the air.
Chiun followed them that day, observed their progress, counted heads and weapons. They were Malay, with a couple of Chinese—the sandal-wearers—and their weapons, plus a motley sort of uniform patched up from camouflage fatigues and faded denim, readily identified them as guerrillas. Since he spoke no Malay, and the Chinese didn't use their native tongue, Chiun could only speculate upon their motive for pursuing Dr. Stockwell's party. Even so, their motive, while obscure, was clearly not benevolent.
Chiun considered falling on them from behind and winnowing the ranks, or traveling ahead to meet them on the trail, pretend to be an ancient, fragile pilgrim until they were close enough to strike, but he finally decided to do nothing for the moment. When in doubt, if there was no emergency at hand, a wise assassin limited his action to the gathering of information, all the better to react appropriately once his target was identified.
With that in mind, he broke off the surveillance and moved on to pick up Stockwell's trail. He shadowed Remo and the others on their first day's march and watched them from the overhanging branches of a great tree as they set up camp. Chiun considered stealing in to speak with Remo, when the others were asleep, but he had faith in Remo to detect the common enemy, and there was little he could add beyond a physical description of their foe.
And by that time, of course, the woman had begun distracting Remo from his task. She was a brazen hussy, little better than a common prostitute, the way she bared her flesh to Remo on such short acquaintance. Chiun couldn't decide if her seductive actions were deliberate, a piece of conscious strategy toward unknown ends, or whether she was simply what the white men called a slut, devoid of self-restraint and moral fiber.
Either way, Chiun had witnessed Remo's personal response with disapproval. The Master was prim, and he well remembered a recent attachment that had surprised him at the time… though he also knew that these days the young were promiscuous. Even then, it was not so much the fact that Remo chose to grant the hussy's wish—although Chiun had warned him more than once about the risks of sacrificing vital energy through sex, when he was on a mission for Emperor Harold Smith—as in his pupil's blatant disrespect for the time-honored methods of Sinanju.
Remo made no effort whatsoever to begin the mating properly, by seeking out the woman's pulse and forcing it to escalate. Maybe, Chiun thought, it was the memory of Jean Rice that hampered his style. He skipped some of the classic steps and duplicated others, stopping cold before he had completed even the most basic ritual for bringing female flesh to ecstasy. Chiun could not deny the woman's rapture even so, but he would have to speak with Remo later and remind him of the need to follow through in everything.
There was a moment when Chiun believed that Remo would detect him, watching from the darkness, but the woman managed to divert him with her supple body. She was handsome for a white, of course, but there was something in the pallid skin and too-abundant curves that put Chiun off.
Korean women were the best.
Next morning, after dining on a handful of cold rice, Chiun had checked on the guerrillas, found them breaking camp, before he hurried back to join the Stockwell expedition. If the enemy had plans to strike, he knew they would most likely wait for darkness, but it wouldn't hurt for him to scout the trail ahead. He would take care to leave the forest undisturbed and give the scientific party's Malay guide no reason to suspect another human being in the neighborhood.
When the attack came, if it came, Chiun would not be far away.
The stinking jungle had begun to wear on Lai Man Yau. Two days he had been waiting with his soldiers for the Yankee expedition to arrive, and now he had to track them at a snail's pace while they trekked into the Tasek Bera no-man's-land. It would have pleased him to attack the party and destroy them all—except, perhaps, the woman, who could entertain his men for several days before she died. Still, this was war, and Lai Man Yau was under orders. He would have to wait a bit, until the round-eyes found what they were looking for.
Beijing had been explicit on that point. A premature attack would ruin everything, and it would be considered treachery, deserving of a traitor's fate.
He could live on fish and rice, dried beef and fruit, for weeks if necessary. Long before that time, his enemies would either make their find or give up in disgust, and he would get approval for their execution either way.