"Just hold your water. We gotta get outta here before anything breaks. Where's the rental car?"
"I had planned on taking the subway into town."
"With fourteen freaking trunks!" Remo shouted.
Smith adjusted his tie. "Actually, I had not expected this."
"Okay, I'll rustle us up some transportation."
There was a rental agency that provided vans, and Remo soon had one parked in front of the terminal.
After Remo had got the last of the trunks into the back of the van, he slipped behind the wheel and tried fighting his way out of the stubborn traffic congestion.
"Maybe the subway wasn't so bad an idea, after all," he muttered darkly.
He took the Callahan Tunnel and emerged near the North End, Boston's Italian district.
"I know this place," Chiun muttered.
"We were here about a year ago. That Mafia thing, remember?"
"Pah!"
"Where to, Smitty?"
"South. To Quincy."
"We were there, too. That was where the Mafia don had his headquarters. Come to think of it, weren't you interested in a condo there, Little Father?"
"I will settle for nothing less than a castle, as befits my station as the royal assassin in residence," Chiun sniffed.
Remo took the Southeast Expressway to the Quincy exit, where they pulled three G's holding a curved ramp that took them up over a bridge.
"Go straight," said Smith. Remo ignored the left-hand fork of the bridge.
They passed condos, office buildings, and a pagodalike structure that made Remo grip the wheel with sudden queasiness, but to this relief it turned out to be only a Chinese restaurant, and continued on.
At an intersection dominated by a high school, Smith said, "Take this left."
Remo drove left.
"Stop," said Smith, just as the high school fell behind.
"Where?"
"There!" said Chiun.
Remo stopped and looked out the window. And he saw it.
"You've gotta be kidding," Remo said.
"It is magnificent!" Chiun said rapturously.
Chapter 5
The plan was simple, as Nancy Derringer explained it.
"We block all the jungle trails except the one we hacked out of the Kanda Tract. Are you with me so far?"
Everyone said yes.
"We know the reptile eats fronds and creepers. Probably he prefers so-called jungle chocolate. We'll harvest some and leave a trail."
"Ha!" King scoffed. "What happens when he gets his fill?"
"It takes a lot of jungle chocolate to fill a belly the size of a cement truck," Nancy told him coolly.
The Bantus smiled among themselves to see the mzungu woman who was smarter than the mzungu man.
"But to keep him moving we will intersperse toadstools whenever he seems to be losing interest."
"What makes you think he eats toadstools?" King wanted to know.
"A deep knowledge of sauropod dietary habits and a brain I'm not afraid to use."
Even taciturn Ralph Thorpe laughed out loud at that one.
They got to work. The Bantus, who had earlier been easygoing if not torpid when Skip King had been giving the orders, now found their enthusiasm.
They hacked down trees all along the jungle paths, blocking them so that even a ten-ton dinosaur would find them daunting.
The Kanda Tract was full of the wild mangos known as jungle chocolate. Much of it was untouched because the forest had been too thick for the Apatosaur to do much more than snake his long neck between the trees to bite off pieces of the scrumptious melon.
They harvested only as much as would stay fresh for a four-hour interval. And placed them in quickly woven baskets.
Every hand was needed to make baskets, because they had to carry as many toadstools as they would need.
"I'm not weaving baskets," King snarled when the subject was broached. "That's woman's work."
The Bantus all looked as him with their smiles on automatic pilot and their soft eyes steady as buttons on a coat.
King failed to notice. "I didn't go to Wharton to weave baskets, and that's final."
"Fine," Nancy told him thinly. "Then you may go toadstooling."
The Bantus formed a circle around him, leaving a space in the direction of the escarpment.