The palace towers had been collapsed by some phantom force. They lay in ruins, chunks of broken brick scattered across the inner courtyard. Most of the outer palace walls were knocked over, exposing dark inner rooms.
"The Americans have returned," the colonel's young driver whispered fearfully.
"Stop here," Colonel al-Rasul whispered gruffly. The driver stopped in the main drive. The trucks drew in behind. The colonel was first out. His shiny boots crunched grit. He addressed the men who were hurriedly climbing down from the trucks.
"The palace guards must be hiding," he snarled. "Find the coward in charge and bring him to me." As the soldiers swarmed the buildings, the colonel went to the palace.
Only a cursory examination told him this was no ordinary assault. There was no sign of missile attack. There was no burning, no charred stone or craters showing point of impact.
The colonel kicked a chunk of rock. In the moonlight he saw a dent in the surface. Kneeling, he put his fist in the hole. Nearly a perfect fit. The declivity in the brick was in the perfect shape of a balled human fist. By the looks of where the big brick sat, it had been part of the base of a tower. It was as if someone were trying to make it seem that brute human force had knocked the towers from the sky.
"This does not make sense," the colonel muttered. His driver stood dutifully at his side, rifle at the ready.
"What is wrong, sir?" the soldier asked. The colonel shot the young man a silencing glare. The devastation around the area near the fallen tower was great, yet there were no treads in the sand to indicate the use of heavy equipment. Cranes with wrecking balls certainly hadn't been secretly shipped into Iraq to destroy one palace and then shipped back out again.
No natural phenomenon could account for the damage. There had been no earthquakes or sandstorms. It almost was as if some huge shadow had marched into the Tigris-Euphrates valley and felled the towers with powerful blows.
"Colonel!"
The call came from beyond the rubble. The colonel and his driver ran back to the Jeep and drove to the rear of the palace. Four soldiers stood in a semicircle on a road around back.
"Put on the lights," Colonel al-Rasul ordered. His driver fumbled at the switch for the headlights. The men winced in the glare of the yellow light. Below them lay a body. At least, it looked as if it might have been a body. When the colonel examined it, he thought he saw fingers. And teeth. The rest was a pulverized pile of goo in a Republican Guard uniform.
"What happened here?" Colonel al-Rasul barked.
"There are more, Colonel," a soldier informed him, a sickly expression on his face. "All over the grounds. We have not yet found anyone alive."
There was fear in the young man's voice. The colonel ignored him. Something had caught his eye. This road was supposed to lead into a tunnel in the mountain behind the palace. But in the wash of headlights he didn't see the opening to the underground weapons laboratory.
Colonel Mundhir al-Rasul went to the rock wall. Where the road ended, he found a wall of collapsed stone.
The newly formed rock face was solid, except for a single dark spot.
Crouching, the colonel peered into the hole.
It looked like an animal burrow. But no animal he knew of could cut its way through solid stone. The headlights from his Jeep cut a ways down the tunnel. The crushed stones at his feet indicated that something had dug its way out. His thoughts went to the handprint in the tower stone.
Colonel Mundhir al-Rasul was beginning to get the distinct feeling that Baghdad had not told him everything.
Fear tickling his belly, he tore his gaze from the eerie dark depths of the hole.
"We are returning to the airport," the colonel announced as he got up, slapping dust from his hands. "I will have Baghdad send reinforcements and we will come back in the morning."
As al-Rasul turned, he saw something move sharply across the bright Jeep headlights. A twisted shadow fell over Colonel al-Rasul, blanketing black the stone behind him. For a moment the shadow seemed to dance, things like human hands upraised. By the time the sharp light returned an instant later, blinding the colonel, the screams had already begun.
He heard cracks of bone, tearing of limbs. Arms and legs flew out of the light, twitching across the ground.
There was a gunshot. Only one. Useless. The screams grew in pitch. Steadier now.
Men cried for help. More shadows converged on the Jeep. The soldiers from Colonel Mundhir al-Rasul's entourage were racing in from all around the palace grounds.
More screams.
The colonel fumbled his side arm from its holster and ran forward. With shaking hands he took aim at the shadows beyond the light.
He stumbled over an arm that was no longer attached to a body. The colonel fell over the ragged appendage, landing spread-eagled on the ground. Sliding in the dirt, he came to a stop nose-to-nose with an Iraqi soldier. He recognized the face of his young driver. The man's mouth was open wide. Colonel al-Rasul saw the soldier's body. It was lying ten feet away from the man's head.
Mundhir al-Rasul scampered to his feet.
The bodies were everywhere. He saw them now, beyond the wash of the Jeep's headlights. All the soldiers he had brought with him from Baghdad. All dead.
It had started seconds-no more than ten seconds before.
Something moved out of the shadows. It was the thing. The terrible demon with the long spidery arms that had tunneled through solid stone, knocked over towers with bare hands and dismembered twenty-nine heavily armed soldiers in the time it took a man to scream.
When the colonel saw the creature's eyes, the old soldier felt the contents of his bladder drain down the front of his trousers.
The eyes of the monster glowed like twin red coals in the cold Iraqi night.
The instant he saw those devil eyes, the colonel threw away his gun and dropped to his knees in supplication.
"Spare me!" he cried out in fear, arms outstretched, face buried in the sand.
A hand grabbed him roughly by the scruff of the neck. He felt himself being yanked violently from the ground. Boots dangling off the ground, he spun in air, coming face-to-face with the nightmare-spawned demon.
It was not the face of a monster, but a man. He was white, with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. But, oh, the eyes. They burned red with ancient fury. When the demon who had taken on the form of a man opened its mouth to speak, an otherworldly voice boomed up from the lowest depths of Na'ar, Islam's Hell.
"You!" the demon bellowed. "Insect! You will take me where I need to go."
And his fear of the creature was such that Colonel Mundhir al-Rasul would have led a charge through the very gates of Na'ar itself rather than bear the horrible demon's terrible wrath.
WITH A DELICACY BELIED by his girth, the Great Wang sank cross-legged to the ground. He seemed to forget Chiun for a moment, content to breathe the air and gaze up at the sky.
Chiun was still on his knees, his hazel eyes locked on the spirit who stood wrapped in flesh before him. The old man slowly pulled himself from the ground. Confused, he sat at the feet of the greatest of all the Masters of Sinanju.
"It happened right about here," the first Master of the New Age announced all at once. "I don't know why I never recorded that. I guess it's just as well. There'd be pilgrims coming out here day and night. No sense desecrating a sacred place with tourists."
"What happened here, O Great Wang?" Chiun asked.
"You know," Wang said. "That thing. The thing that changed everything for us. This is the spot." All at once Chiun realized what the Great Wang meant.
It was as Remo had recited back in London's Hyde Park. Was it only days ago? It seemed like months. In Wang's time one Master ruled the village with many trained in Sinanju to serve under him. This was back in the days before the Sun Source. The Master of the time had died without an heir. While the night tigers fought one another to see who would become head of the village, Wang left to meditate. While he was alone in the wilderness, a ring of fire descended from the heavens, revealing to young Wang a new way. Wang returned to the village and slew the squabbling night tigers, taking up the mantle of Reigning Master. It took him a lifetime to understand all the vision in the wilderness had imparted to him in that instant.
While this was the oldest legend in the modern age of Sinanju, history had never recorded the spot. Chiun looked around the barren region with new eyes.
For his part Wang continued to watch the sky. He seemed fascinated by a distant bird. As dusk settled, the bird swooped and dived on currents of invisible air.