Amanda felt the hard fingers brush her swaying body through the material of her black jumpsuit. The fingers were hard like the blunt noses of bullets, yet they touched and kneaded her with just the right combination of strength and gentleness.
Not thinking of anything but those fingers, Amanda let herself sink back into the desk top, where Remo's fingers worked her wrists until she felt her pulse quicken. Then Remo's manipulations became a long, delicious blur in Amanda Bull's mind until she felt the front zipper of her jumpsuit ease down. And then Remo was inside her, exciting her, pleasing her, questioning her.
"The warhead," Remo asked through the white noise of her pleasure. "Where is it really?"
"Aahhh... later," Amanda moaned.
"Now, or I'll stop."
"Uhh— no, don't stop! Please don't stop. Feels... good."
"Only good?" Remo asked.
"Meant great— feels great!"
"There's a lot more to come," Remo said, "but only if you answer the question." Remo paused for a fraction of a second, which caused Amanda to grab him violently and begin grinding her body against his frantically.
"No! I'll tell!" Amanda cried. "It's at Broken Arrow. In an oil field."
"Where exactly?" Remo asked, resuming his rhythms.
"Off highway— uhh— Broken Arrow Expressway—"
"The rest of them there?"
"Oohh— oow, yes! Yes, yes! Yessss." But Amanda was no longer answering the question. She was shuddering in the first real climax of her life and was oblivious to everything but the response of her body to that climax.
She was still breathing heavily when she finally opened her eyes and saw Remo Williams standing there with a bored expression on his face, his clothes already replaced.
Amanda zipped up hastily before she got back on her feet.
"It— it was never like that before," she said foolishly.
Remo nodded.
"I told you everything, didn't I?"
Remo nodded again. The disinterest on his dead features was plain. He had used her, Amanda realized. He had given her pleasure such as she had never before experienced— sexual bliss that left her still trembling— but it meant nothing to him.
Amanda screamed. "You bastard!" And she pulled her pistol from the small of her back, aimed once, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
"Check the safety," Remo said coolly, a spark of humor in the shadows that were his eyes.
The safety was on, Amanda saw. She tried to thumb it off, but it wouldn't budge. She tried again, this time breaking her thumbnail.
"I jammed it," Remo told her. "You'll never get it loose."
"You bastard!" Amanda screeched again, and threw the weapon.
Remo weaved on his feet, and the useless pistol looked as if it had gone out of its way to avoid hitting him, rather than vice versa.
Amanda Bull tore out of the office, sobbing. Remo counted the number of photographs of flying saucers on the walls, and didn't leave until he got to 67.
"You let the woman escape?" Chiun asked when Remo rejoined him in the waiting car.
"Yeah," Remo replied. "She told me where the warhead really is, but I figured if I let her go, she'd try to warn the others and lead us to it quicker than if I tried to follow her directions."
Remo coasted down the street slowly.
"She went left," Chiun directed.
Remo steered the car to the left. There was no sign of Amanda Bull, but then a brown van pulled onto the street ahead, and Remo recognized its custom body. It was the official FOES van, which Amanda had retrieved from where it had been ditched earlier.
"We have them, no?" Pavel asked.
"Let's hope," Remo said.
"Where is she going?" Pavel wanted to know.
"Place is called Broken Arrow," Remo told him.
"Broken Arrow? See? I was right. I have helped you, but you wouldn't listen," Zarnitsa said.
"I'm not listening now," Remo said.
?Chapter Seventeen
When the Homestead Act opened up Oklahoma in the last century, the area called Broken Arrow had boasted of only two natural features: osage and Indians. Then the homesteaders came and started their cattle ranches and farms. Neither the osage nor the Indians vanished. They just sort of blended into the background. Broken Arrow had been a good place to raise beef. There was plenty of wide-open space and it was a short trek to nearby Tulsa, where cattle could be sold or shipped by rail to the hungry East.
By all rights, Broken Arrow should still be that way, and it would be if the cattlemen hadn't found the land bad for farming. It was bad all around. In time, the cattlemen sold off their land and tried again in Arizona or Wyoming. Others, not as young or perhaps more stubborn, stayed on and were still there when the first oil was struck. But not many of them. So few, in fact, that even the Indians got to share in the oil boom. And so what was once cattle-grazing territory vibrated to the chug and creak of the oil derrick.
By all rights, Broken Arrow should have remained a booming oil town, but even that did not last, as more of the black stuff was pumped out of the ground to be shipped to the oil-hungry East. While the wells did not always run dry, the ability of men to pump all of the oil out of the ground was not absolute. And so, one by one, some of the oil fields were shut down, not for lack of product, but because the oil lay so far underground, it could not be tapped.
The building stood in the middle of one of these abandoned fields, among the silent and forgotten spidery towers and pipelines and the overpowering smell of crude. It didn't belong there, but then it looked as if it didn't belong anywhere.
For one thing, it was blue— except for the door, which was a simple white panel on one side. There were no windows or any other ordinary features. In fact, there were no sides in the true sense because the structure was built along the lines of an Eskimo igloo and looked vaguely like a giant seashell lying on its side. But even that didn't describe the thing accurately.
It was unusual enough that Amanda recognized it for what it was immediately even though she had not been given a description of the World Master's emergency retreat, just its general location.
Amanda pulled the van off the road and walked through the scrub oak until she got to the white door. There was no sign of any other vehicle, which struck her as peculiar even in her present state, which was one of high agitation.
The door slid aside as soon as she got near it, and she entered the structure. It was dark inside. The walls felt smooth to her touch, like the bottom of a Teflon-coated frying pan. Amanda followed the wall.
"Stop, Amanda Bull," the baritone voice of the individual Amanda knew only as the World Master said. "You have come far enough. Report your success."