"I, too, feel unhappy."
"Well, at least it's not yellow."
"It is not much of a blessing, but it is a blessing nonetheless," agreed the Master of Sinanju.
"Maybe if we blink up a storm, the blue will go away."
"It is worth a try."
When they had blinked the deep blue from their burned retinas, Remo and Chiun mustered up the courage to turn and face Pare Mesozoique.
The stockade fence still held.
Remo licked his dry lips to wet them. "You up for going back in?" he asked.
"It is our duty."
"Then I guess we gotta, although between you and me, I feel more like going back on strike."
"It is a worthy idea. Worthy of Jool Phairne."
"Who?"
Chiun gestured over his shoulder. "That brilliant writer whose name adorns that sign."
"You means Jules Verne?"
"That is not how you pronounce it."
"You mean Jules Verne is pronounced 'fool Phairne'?"
"Yes."
"No wonder these people keep getting conquered."
"It is part of their problem. From the Romans and Vikings to the Prussians and Germans, they have fallen before invader after invader. Perhaps it has given them an inferiority context."
"It's 'complex.' And you wouldn't know it to talk to a Frenchman. Or woman."
As they approached Parc Mesozoique, the whine of a rotor disturbed the stillness of the park. A moment later a small French army helicopter lifted, canted west and droned out of sight.
"Damn, there goes that damn April May!"
They reached the spot where the helicopter had lifted off. There was no sign of anyone or anything.
Then the Master of Sinanju noticed the drag marks in the dirt at their feet.
"Behold, Remo. A man was dragged to the helicopter."
"Yeah. And these small footprints on either side belong to Dominique. She must have dragged someone away. The question is who?"
"Let us discover that."
They followed the footprint-decorated drag marks to an upthrust protuberance on the park grounds. It was a small volcano, as volcanoes go. Probably twenty feet high. The sides were molded of some kind of streaked red clay. When they climbed it, the skin crumbled under their feet, setting bits of clay rolling and bouncing down to the base.
At the lip of the crater, they looked down and saw a ladder disappearing into a very black hole.
"Looks like the back way in," muttered Remo.
"Come," said Chiun, swinging around so he could take hold of the ladder's rungs.
They climbed down into the darkness, which proved to be a flat plug of glassy obsidian.
"Dead end," said Remo.
The Master of Sinanju said nothing as he moved about the inner walls of the cone. It was rough but not terribly irregular. Except for a single knob of obsidian. Chiun took hold of it, pushing and pulling it experimentally until, with a jolt, the obsidian plug dropped two inches, then continued dropping with the smoothness of an elevator.
Black-and-yellow safety stripes appeared on the walls as Remo and Chiun rode past.
"How do we know this isn't a trap?" Remo asked.
"How could anyone trap a Master of Sinanju and his trusty badger?"
"That's 'gofer.'"
"Consider it a promotion to a higher order of animal," Chiun said magnanimously.
At the bottom of the cone, they found themselves standing before one end of a concrete tunnel with a great black mouse-head silhouette painted onto the floor.
Then they smelled a smell they knew very, very well.
"Death," said Chiun.
"A lot of death," said Remo.
There were a lot of dead, they discovered as they crept along the concrete tunnels and corridors of the French Utilicanard. People lying dead at their desks, in their dormlike rooms, even lying fallen over their maintenance brooms.
And every one of them clutched an amber lollipop shaped like the head of Mongo Mouse and smelling of almonds.
"Dead about two days," said Remo, touching a cool fallen body.
The dead all wore the jumpsuits they associated with Utiliduck workers except these weren't white as they were in the States but a very chic peach.
"Looks like a mass suicide," Remo said, straightening up. "When the French bombs started to hit, they must have decided to take the hard way out rather than risk capture."
"This is very sinister. Could a color have done this?"