"Is too!" Chiun's soldier shouted. His shout was picked up by the rest of the hundred men behind him. "Is too!" they screamed over and over again. "Is too!"
The noise routed Remo's lieutenant. He fell back to the main body of his men, and they conferred quietly while Chiun's army hooted.
Then the lieutenant turned. He raised his arm over his head. When he lowered it, his entire hundred-man detachment shouted in unison, "Everybody in your family is dirty!"
"Isn't this pitiful?" Remo asked Chiun.
"Now you know why the Crusades went on for three hundred years, my son. It was Frenchmen fighting Arabs. Neither of them could win. The Arabs were good at insults, but the French had better field kitchens. Their sauces were excellent. They were evenly matched."
"I never thought we'd be on opposite sides in a war," Remo said.
"That is true only if you consider this a war," Chiun said.
All men were now shouting at one another. One of Chiun's Arabs, braver than the rest, picked up a handful of sand and threw it at Remo's lieutenant. He reacted as if he had been jolted by electricity. He jumped around, brushing the sand from his highly starched uniform, screaming invective at the sand-thrower. When he was again clean, he threw sand back. Soon both armies were throwing sand at each other. Remo noticed that all hundred of his soldiers had thrown their rifles down so they could throw sand with both hands. There were 100 rifles, useless with
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sand in their barrels. Chiun's soldiers had laid down spear and sword to shovel sand. Meanwhile, they kept yelling.
"It sounds like the New York Stock Exchange three minutes before closing on Friday," Remo said.
"It is awful," Chiun agreed. Remo glanced at him, but he noticed that Chiun's eyes were looking away, focused back on the main tent at the head of the oasis, where Sheik Fareem was holding his head in his hands, as if in pain. Near him were another 600 foot soldiers. The hundred men on horseback still waited impatiently for the word to charge.
Remo could not see Abdul or Ganulle. He looked over to the mouth of the valley. There he saw the Rolls Royce. General Bull was watching the action, applauding. Reva Bloom looked bored. Melody Wakefield was tapping away with her pencil as fast as she could. Oscar, the chauffeur, leaned against the Rolls fender, cleaning his fingernails with a knife.
The rest of Remo's army had gone. He looked off to the south. There, men were racing along the road as fast as their legs would carry them. Could he shoot the whole army for desertion? Remo wondered.
"It looks like I'm outnumbered," Remo said as he turned back to Chiun. But Chiun had gone. Remo saw the aged Oriental racing back toward the village, almost flying across the sand, moving so quickly that his slippered feet left no prints in the soft powdered sand. Remo started running after him, his feet burying themselves ankle deep in the sand, until he remembered that there was no speed in hurrying, that he must sense the pressure of the sand up against his feet and aim the pressure of his body forward, not downward, so that the feet would not sink but only skim over the sand as if skiing along its surface.
He came up out of the sand and was running across it at top speed, leaving not even a mark where he had been. Sheik Fareem had turned, and saw Chiun coming toward him and Remo closing behind him. He turned toward them, but Chiun flew by him and dove against
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the canvas wall of the sheik's tent. The fabric gave way with a wrenching groan. Chiun landed on his feet and, with Remo standing alongside him, he reached down and pulled aside the ripped flap of fabric. Under it was Ganulle, the sheik's regent. A rifle lay at his feet.
Remo turned as Fareem came over to them.
The sheik looked down at Ganulle, who was moaning his way back toward consciousness, and then at Chiun.
"This rifle was aimed at your back, Excellency," Chiun said. Before the sheik could speak, there was a sound in the back of the tent, as someone tried to climb out from under the fabric on the far side. Chiun nodded to Remo, who went around the rear of the tent and returned, a moment later, dragging Abdul by the neck of his long robe.
He dropped the fat man at the feet of his father.
"You too?" Fareem gasped as his son looked up at him helplessly. "Ganulle and you?"
It was a question that would not brook a lie in response. Abdul nodded.
"But why?"
"Your brother, the king," Abdul said. "He promised us ... all this land would be ours . . . the oil ... if only ..." He could not finish the sentence.
Sheik Fareem pulled his long, curved sword from its scabbard. Abdul shrank away as the sheik held the sword toward him; then, with a cry of anguish, Fareem raised the sword high over his head, turned, and ran. A riderless horse stood lazily near the edge of the clearing, and the sheik swung himself easily up into his saddle. Then, yodeling an Arab call, he rode out across the sand toward Remo's army.
The sheik's startled horsemen watched their leader ride off, and then they spurred their steeds and followed him, their voices raised, high-pitched, in a curiously melodic battle cry.
Remo's soldiers, who were four points ahead in the war of the words with Fareem's villager troops, heard the sounds. They looked up and saw the sheik coming,
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his sword circling high over his head. They turned and ran.
But by the time he reached the nearest soldier, the sheik's fury seemed to have abated because instead of cutting the man in two, he stopped and waved to his men; they galloped over and circled Remo's soldiers, who then fell abjectly onto the sand, cringing and sniveling for their lives.
The sheik spurred his mount and rode off toward the parked Rolls Royce, and in moments, Melody Wake-field and General Bull had joined the group of prisoners.
"That is a man and a half, isn't it, Chiun?" Remo said, nodding toward the sheik, who was riding majestically back toward the oasis.
. "Yes, he is," Chiun said. "That is why the House of Sinanju honors its contract with him, prisoner."
When Reva finally trudged through the sand to Remo, she asked, "What happened?"
"We lost."
"Oh, shit."
"What's going on here?" General Bull shouted from among the group of prisoners.
"We lost the war," Remo said.
"I told you we should have used napalm."
"We'll use it in next week's war," Remo said.
"If word of this gets out, I'm ruined," Bull said. "Who'd buy military equipment from a loser?"
Melody Wakefield was standing with the prisoners, still typing with a pencil on the typewriter hung around her neck. She finally dropped the pencil and said, "Listen to this." She began to read. "A gallant band of Hamidi Arabian soldiers today defended the future of Islam against a terrorist band of Israeli sympathizers. By the time the smoke from the battlefield had settled, the pro-Israel forces had been routed. In a brilliant display of battlefield tactics .. ."
While she babbled on, Sheik Fareem looked at Remo.
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"What is this thing without hands talking about?"
Remo shrugged.
"Who are the gallant Arabian soldiers?" Fareem