"You can think of jade as nothing," Chiun said blandly.
"No one else does."
"When you are used to working for gold and settle for less, then jade is nothing. It is nothing compared to your lovely smile," Chiun said.
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"Do you mean that?" Terri asked. Her head turned toward Chiun, she bumped into Remo.
"Hey. You interested in living? Stop," said Remo.
"How could I not mean it?" Chiun asked Terri.
"I've been told my smile is my best feature," Terri said. She felt a hand on her shoulder. Remo was pointing for her to step back.
"It always is with the really great beauties," Chiun said.
"I've never thought of myself as a great beauty. Attractive maybe. Stunning perhaps," said Terri Pomfret. "But not really a great beauty. Not really. Not all the time, anyway."
"When the Master of Sinanju says great, he means great," said Chiun. "I have seen stunning and attractive. You are far beyond that."
"Hey, Terri. Death. Destruction. Fear. Getting killed. Valium. Heads rolling. Fingers cut off. Danger," said Remo, trying to get her attention.
"Yes," said Terri, giving a very special smile to Chiun. "Did you want something, Remo?"
"I want to save your body."
"Oh, yes. That. Thank you. Your teacher is such a wonderful person. I am so glad I got to know how really decent a true assassin is."
"Step back. That's it. Thank you," said Remo.
"I mean, most people think assassins are just killers, you know. They don't take time to really know them."
"Back," said Remo.
"They judge without knowing. And that is just ignorance," she said.
"Beautiful woman, he is working. Please step back with me," said Chiun.
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"I didn't notice," she said apologetically.
"Yes," said Chiun. "Three direct threats can be very subtle."
Remo moved on up the trail. He wanted to be alone for this. He wanted to move alone. He was quiet with the trail but the birds were not calling. He was quiet with the trail but the noises of people where there should be noises were not coming up the trail.
He had not done much training in the countryside because, as Chiun had explained, major work was almost always done in cities because that was where the rulers were.
Yet the way to knowing the jungle was knowing oneself. One knew the sea by one's blood. One knew the jungle by one's breath.
Remo moved like a midnight dream, silent with all that was around him because he was part of all that was around him. Long ago, before he had been recruited for this training, in a time of beer and bowling alleys and hamburgers with cheese on them and sugar and tomato sauce, he would have thought of a place like the jungles of the Yucatan as bushes that should be removed.
Now, as a part of it, he was sure of it.
"I hate this junk," he mumbled to himself, looking at the broad green leaves and bright flowers. "Pot this place, plant some grass and make it a golf course or a park."
A bowling alley, he thought, would look nice around here. Anything would look nice here except this jungle. That was what he thought when he saw the outlines of a man in camouflage combat fatigues. Man had a gun. Another sniper on the
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small ridge surrounding the trail that entered the village. Lookouts.
Remo moved off the trail and skirted the two snipers. He would have liked to have moved up a tree for a look into the village but high things for men who were preparing a trap always attracted notice. Underbrush was safe.
He moved low through that until he came to the clearing. The clearing reminded him that people did not really ever live in the jungle because they always had to clear space for their villages.
And then he saw the pit. He knew what was in there because no one was moving in the village. All the villagers had been killed and put in that pit. And then leaves had covered it.
It had to be recent, within the last few hours, because human bodies rotted quickly. It was one of the few species that almost always had food in its stomach.
There were more men. A few surrounded the village but the greater concentration were at the small hillock to the south, the one with a black craggy rock sticking out of it, as if someone had brought it in from Colorado and stuffed it into the jungle.
Remo counted ten men in all.
The main body was at the large black rock. They also had a spring net as if they were going to capture some animal. The important thing, Remo told himself, was not to let any one of the snipers go wandering off. One of them might just throw a shot down the trail, which would be no problem for Chiun but might hurt Terri.
Ten, thought Remo and moved up behind the
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first very quietly. The sniper was lying in prone position, the rifle resting on his palms. Remo severed the spinal column just beneath the cranium. The sniper went to sleep on his rifle forever.
Remo caught the next sitting lotus-like with the gun in his lap. Remo moved his left hand to the throat and with the concentrated power some might ascribe to a steam shovel kept the man seated with more and more pressure until the back cracked.
He put away two more who were scanning the long trail with binoculars. He simply put the binoculars into the heads with a smothered slap into the lenses. The eye sockets kept going.
Remo heard a little tune in his head. It was "Whistle While You Work" and he hummed it softly.
Walid ibn Hassan waited with his beloved, trained perfectly on the trail before him. He had not heard on his small radio from Mahatma for twenty minutes. That was strange. Mahatma had been the first point on the trail and had seen them. Three of them, an Oriental, a woman, and a white man.
He had beamed that in on the shortwave to Lord Wissex's man at a station nearby, and Hassan had picked it up on his radio. This was necessary because Wissex wanted to know what the bodyguards were like. Hassan knew why. He had heard that knife fighters had been killed by these bodyguards and now here he was. It was the old rule: first knives, then guns.
So Hassan kept his beloved ready, barrel pointed down the trail, eyes alert. He remembered what he had heard of the dead knife fighters and alone
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