"Only when I felt the edges of the writing here," Chiun said. "Along the straight lines of the engraving, there is a nick. It comes from a flaw in the chisel used to cut it. There was the same flaw in the other plaques. Written by the same man, with the same tool, at the same time."
"I figured it out," Remo said. "I figured it out."
"Who cares?" Terri snapped at him. "Probably done in one place at one time," she told Chiun.
"Correct," the old man said. "No one could have traveled that far to engrave plaques all over the world. Not in ancient days. The Hamidian boats were just too slow. They were made for cargo, and there is a saying in Sinanju that when offered a Hamidian voyage, one is better off swimming because it is faster."
"I knew it," Remo said. "I knew it." He touched Chiun's shoulder. "It was the powder on the ground," he said. "Somebody moved it when he was hanging this plaque."
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Chiun continued to look at Terri, whose face was illuminated in the glow of the flashlight she held at her waist.
"But why?" Terri asked. "Why would somebody go to all the trouble and expense of forging these plaques for us to find?"
"Because someone wants us to do just what we have been doing," Chiun said. "There is another thing also. There have always been stories of mountains of gold. But there has never been found a mountain of gold."
Terri shook her head. "Who wants us to do what we are doing? I don't understand."
They were interrupted by the sound of a trumpet, playing the Spanish march of the invitation to the bull.
Then behind them, they heard another sound. There was the noise of heavy hooves and the ugly snorting sound of an enraged bull; and then the beast, a whole half-ton of him, stomped around the far corner of the tunnel. He stopped under the bare light bulb. His eyes, fixed on the three humans, were narrowed and malevolent. Heavy breath came from his nostrils, its hot moisture creating little puffs of fog in the damp tunnel. His tail swished back and forth.
"Oh, crap," Terri said.
"Big Mac is here," said Remo.
Several women smiled warmly at Commander Spencer as he walked down the bleacher steps of the Plaza de Toros. He brushed against one woman and murmured an apology.
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"Senor, you can bump me anytime," she said, her doe-eyes flashing at him.
"Perhaps later," Spencer said, without breaking stride. His mind was not on women. His mind was on the game. The quarry waited and he was the hunter.
The tiny pulses in his temple were beginning to throb again.
The bull stood his ground. Remo, Chiun, and Terri looked at the big animal, then suddenly, the tunnel behind them was bathed in bright light. Remo glanced over his shoulder. The giant doors behind them leading to the sunlit arena had been opened, and standing in the center of the sand-floored arena, framed in the rectangle of the doorway as if it were a camera viewfinder, were a matador and two picadors on horseback.
Remo looked back at the bull and Chiun said, "Remo, please dispose of that thing."
"You never showed me how to do bulls."
"You can't see things. You can't do bulls. What good are you?" Chiun asked.
"I'm good in bed," Remo said.
"Will you two stop bickering and do something about that beast?" Terri said.
Remo stepped forward in the tunnel and called out, "Heyyyy, toro." He turned to Terri. "How do you like that? I saw it once in an Anthony Quinn movie."
Terri turned toward the sunlit entrance to the tunnel. "I'm getting out of here," she said, but Chiun reached out, took her arm and stopped her.
"We do not know what is out there. Someone
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brought us here. Someone may wait out there for you."
"Damned if I do and damned if I don't," Terri said, just as the bull charged.
Spencer was in the front row of seats, just behind the high wooden fence. He put a hand atop the thick wooden boards and lightly vaulted over the rail, dropping the eight feet into the sand of the arena below.
The crowd saw him and let out a surprised hiss, then began chattering nervously to themselves as Spencer marched across the sand toward the open doors of the tunnel.
The matador ran up to stop him, but without breaking stride the Englishman backhanded him across the face and he dropped into the sand as if felled with an axe. Then the Englishman in the dark-blue suit reached the tunnel entrance and stepped inside.
Remo was showing off. The bull had pulled up in its charge and Remo had dropped down on his knees so that his nose touched that of the giant creature.
From the side of his mouth, Remo said to Terri, "Wheeew, some breath. How do you like this?"
But Terri did not answer. Another voice did, a man's voice. Spencer stood in the archway, and said with a voice surprisingly devoid of malice, "Not bad, Yank. Too bad you won't have time to pursue it as a career."
With one smooth motion, Spencer slipped off
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his jacket and dropped it onto the floor of the tunnel, then pulled the doors shut behind him.
Strapped to each shirt-sleeve was a thin, eight-inch-long bomb that looked like a fireworks rocket. Spencer peeled one from the snap holder around his left forearm, then laid it over his arm and aimed it down the tunnel toward Remo. He twisted a small pin at the back of the missile and with a whooshing hiss, it flamed off down the tunnel.
Remo rose and turned, but he had no time to raise his arms or react to the weapon. Before it struck him, Chiun flashed across in front of Remo, his yellow robe a blurring fuzzy sun in the semilit tunnel. The side of his hand touched the rocket and it soared over Remo's shoulder to explode against the rear wall of the tunnel.
Without looking, Remo reached behind him and rapped the bull between the eyes with the side of his hand.
"Go to sleep, Ferdinand," he said. The bull moaned and fell onto its side, unconscious. Remo took a step toward the Englishman in the doorway, but Spencer had already ripped the second missile loose from his right forearm. Chiun grabbed Terri and ran down the tunnel and Remo followed.
Behind him, he heard the high-pitched sound of Spencer's vicious laughter.
Chiun hissed, "I know these boom-shooters. They seek out the heat of the human body."
They passed under the small light bulb that illuminated the far end of the tunnel. A thick iron door blocked their way out of the maze which wandered under the arena's stands. When they turned, their backs to the stone wall, Spencer was
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moving toward them. He stepped over the unconscious downed bull.