"Are you all right?" Smith asked.
Remo paused. "I went to the house. He was there, Smitty."
"Chiun's ghost?" Smith said dryly.
"I don't know what you'd call it. But I saw him. And I made him a promise."
"Yes?"
"I promised I would return to Sinanju."
"And what did Chiun . . . er . . . say?"
"Nothing. He looked at me like a drowning man. I don't understand, but I made the promise. I'm going to Sinanju. I'm going to do my duty."
"What about the assignment? And Kimberly Baynes-or whoever she really is?"
"I'll handle both of them. I'll have to. Then my responsibility will be to fulfill my duty to the House."
"As you wish. I will make the arrangements to get you to Hamidi Arabia. The entire country is in a high state of nervousness. I thought I'd send you on a military flight. It would be better in your . . . um . . . condition as well. I'll arrange for someone to liase with you."
"No need," Remo said.
"Oh?"
"Just get word to Sheik Abdul Hamid Fareem."
Smith started. "The ruler of Hamidi Arabia? And what shall I say?"
Remo stood up in the darkness and Smith saw the play of bluish TV light on the folds of his black silk garment.
Remo turned, shadows crawling across his face. They settled into the hollows of his eyes so they became like the empty orbits of a skull in which diamond-hard lights gleamed faintly. He tucked his hands into the wide sleeves of his long ebony kimono, on which facing tigers reared in frozen anger.
"Tell him the Master of Sinanju is coming to Hamidi Arabia," Remo Williams said quietly.
Chapter 25
Everything Maddas Hinsein knew about global politics, he had learned in the coffee shops of Cairo.
Young Maddas had spent several years in Egypt in the aftermath of a failed attempt to assassinate the Iraiti leader of that time. There he had argued about Arab unity with students from the nearby Cairo University.
They were smooth-faced man-boys, their heads filled with citified dreams. He could never understand their appetite for loud talk. They argued forever-never learning the great truth of Maddas Hinsein's life.
It was far, far quicker to shoot those whose views were unacceptable than to argue back.
Although no older than the university students, Maddas was already a hardened veteran of internecine political warfare. After the failed assassination attempt, although wounded in the leg, he had narrowly escaped capture by the Iraiti secret police. Limping through the flat opulence of Abominadad, he had ducked into an alley as the ululations of their sirens drew nearer, ever nearer.
He happened to encounter an old woman in the alley. She wore the traditional black abayuh, which covered her like a shroud, black eyes peeping through her veil.
Maddas had approached her in the same direct way he had pursued his career as an Arab revolutionary.
"Sabah al-Heir," he had said. "May your morning be bright."
"Abah al-Nour," she murmured in reply. "May your morning be bright also."
As he knew she would, the woman modestly averted her eyes. And Maddas Hinsein reached down with one hand for the hem of her costume and lifted it straight up.
With the other, he yanked out his pistol and shot her once in the chest.
Stripping the body of the undamaged garment, Maddas Hinsein had pulled it over his head, hating himself for having to stoop so low. Wearing female garb was repugnant to him. Killing the woman was one thing-in revolution one recognized certain necessities-but being forced to wear soft garments was entirely different.
Besides, the woman was old, he saw as he pulled the veil from her face. She had had her life. And Maddas Hinsein was a man of destiny.
In the flowing black abayuh, Maddas Hinsein had traveled across the punishing desert, the traditional Arab respect for women saving him from search and inevitable capture. The longer he traveled, the safer he felt. He began to feel almost invincible when wrapped in this ebony shroud, his face masked, his life secure from harm. And as the miles melted behind him, Maddas Hinsein discovered a wondrous truth. He grew to enjoy the feel of the abayuh swathing his bulky, muscular body.
Upon reaching the Egyptian frontier, Maddas Hinsein had reluctantly folded the precious garment and carried it under his arm, telling the authorities it had belonged to his poor deceased mother.
"It is all I have to remember her by," he had told the curious border guards. He brushed a soulful eye with a spit-moistened finger, producing a convincing tear.
The sight of such a bear of an Arab moved to tears convinced the Egyptian border guard. They let him pass.
During the years in the Cairo coffee shops, Arab unity was on every lip. It was the Grand Dream, the Great Hope, and Paradise on Earth all in one. The reason was profoundly simple. No one could remember a time when there had been such a thing as Arab unity. So everyone was secure in the belief it would be wondrous. And in that atmosphere, Maddas had learned the lessons he had carried with him into his leadership days.
Truth one: the Arabs were disunited because imperialists kept them this way.
Truth two: the Arabs were meant to be united and only awaited a strongman like a modern Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who had captured Jerusalem in 597 B.C.
Truth three: for as long as the United States vied with Russia for world domination, Irait would be protected by the USSR from U.S. adventurism.
Truth four: Maddas Hinsein was destined to be the man who would unite the Arab nation under the Iraiti banner. This was Maddas' sole contribution to the discussions. Doubters were shot in the back at his earliest opportunity. Soon the Four Great Truths were discussed without dissent.
Had Maddas Hinsein learned his history from books and not idle conversation, he would have learned that the Arabs had enjoyed unity but once in their long history. And that had been under the prophet Mohammed, over a thousand years ago. Then Mohammed had died. United Araby was quickly dismembered under the ravenous talons of Mohammed's heirs.
Had he read newspapers, Maddas would have learned that the cold war had become a thing of the past and that Irait lay naked and exposed, no longer important in the global new world order that had shifted from ideology to the ultimate reality of international politics-economics.
So when after nearly a decade of unending war with his neighbor, Irug, Maddas Hinsein found his treasury bankrupt, he turned on his nearest oil-rich neighbor and swallowed tiny defenseless Kuran-hide, hoof, warp, and woof.
The unexpected appearance of a multinational force on his new southern border, when reported to him in the middle of the night by his defense minister, prompted him to conclude one thing: his adviser was drunk. And since alcohol was forbidden to Moslems, he had had the man shot before a firing squad. Then he had downed a stiff belt of cognac.
When the reports from the field told him that such a force not only existed but also was growing daily, President Hinsein had had the adviser exhumed and returned to his place of honor at the Revolting Command Council as a gesture of contrition.
"Let no man say again that Maddas Hinsein is not a man who readily admits his mistakes," he pronounced, as his advisers sat around the big table holding their noses against the stench of corruption.
Only when the corpse had begun to fall apart was he returned to his shallow grave. With full military honors.
It was in those early days of the U.S. buildup that Maddas, who had kept the nameless old woman's abayuh in a sealed trunk, exhumed it for the first time since his Cairo days.