"Guess we walk till we find one." Remo shrugged.
They struck off together toward the control tower. "He could have at least had a car waiting," Remo said as they strolled across the windswept field.
"Add it to the list of insults heaped upon us by our current employer," Chiun replied. "A true monarch would have arranged for proper transportation."
"A while back you were saying you liked working for Smith," Remo said.
"Bite your tongue," Chiun retorted. "I merely said I work for Smith, not some temporary occupant of the Eagle Throne. The madman provides the stability of a paycheck. That is all. In spite of our association with the lunatic Smith, a true king is always preferable to any alternative."
"Not for me, Little Father," Remo said. "I kind of think Smitty's okay."
Chiun struck a bony fist against his own chest. "Go ahead, Remo," he insisted. "Stab the knife farther into your poor, poor father's heart."
Remo was surprised to detect the shadowy flicker of a light undertone. Barely perceptible. He didn't have time to press it.
He'd been aware of the great mechanical cry of a helicopter almost since they'd deplaned. The aircraft was sweeping toward Gibraltar from the harbor. Remo had assumed it was part of some routine British naval operation, until the helicopter slowed to a hover above their heads.
"You order a chopper?" he asked the Master of Sinanju over the roaring wind of the downdraft. As displaced air swirled around them, the bluishgreen Westland Naval Lynx settled on three fat wheels to the tarmac before them. The main rotor didn't stop its chopping whir as the side door slid open.
A British Royal Navy officer stuck his head out. "Gentlemen, I've been sent to collect you!" he shouted.
Remo glanced at the Master of Sinanju. The old Korean's face was blandly curious.
"I don't think so," Remo called back to the RN officer.
The man shook his head firmly. "Your Aunt Mildred sent us," he yelled over the wind.
Remo recognized it as one of Smith's code names.
"He came through after all," Remo commented to Chiun. "This make him a true monarch?"
"Not at all," the Master of Sinanju replied. "And in spite of that, he is still head and shoulders above any mere President." Hiking up his kimono skirts, he scurried inside the belly of the Lynx, slapping away the offered hand of the British officer.
Remo climbed in behind him.
The door slid shut. A moment later, the helicopter was pulling up into the sky, screaming a metallic protest.
Nose dipping, it soared away from the airport, flying over the small isthmus and out across the brilliant blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
"OUTBREAK OF PEACE." In death, Remo's Earthpeace contact had provided Harold W. Smith with the posthumous clue that had finally revealed the frightening power in the hands of the environmental group.
Smith had ignored the enigmatic phrase for much of the past two days, but with the Radiant Grappler located and Remo and Chiun's plane rerouted to intercept it, he had finally found time to investigate its possible meaning.
The time spent researching Earthpeace while the CIA was locating the missing boat had yielded much information.
Earthpeace had been founded in the late 1960s by a group of Canadian environmentalists whose credo was confrontation. The group was active in its approach, whether it was blocking fishing boats, stopping Eskimos from hunting seals or blowing the whistle on companies for illegal ocean dumping.
It seemed clear to Smith that, as a group, Earthpeace thrived on both confrontation and sympathetic media attention. That sympathy had reached its peak when, in 1985, French agents had sunk the first Radiant Grappler in the harbor at Auckland, New Zealand, while it was on its way to protest nuclear testing in French Polynesia.
Earthpeace representatives screamed bloody murder, and as a result of this blessing in disguise, donations to the group had risen along with its public profile. The infusion of cash allowed them the opportunity to hire more high-profile spokesmen. One of these mouthpieces was none other than Bryce Edmund Babcock.
At the time, Babcock was between positions. He had been governor of Arizona for a number of years, but had recently left office to pursue other career opportunities.
Everyone knew that Babcock had an eye on the Oval Office. With his days as governor behind him, it was important for him to find a position that kept him in the public eye. Earthpeace came with its offer at just the right time. The joining together of the two-term governor and the environmental organization had been a perfect fit.
Babcock was a firm believer in the rights of the state over those of the individual. If you had an endangered rat in your cornfield, you plowed somewhere else. If you had a slug living on the basement walls of your waterfront home, you vacated the premises to the invertebrate. If you had a slimy, mosquito-filled puddle in your backyard, it was an untouchable wetland.
The former governor and presidential hopeful relished his Earthpeace power. When he shook an admonishing finger in the Northwest, hundreds of lumberjacks were thrown out of work. When he frowned in New England, generations of fishermen were forced to scuttle their boats along with their livelihoods. Men who tilled the soil or toiled at sea shuddered and swore when they heard his name.
When the 1988 presidential race came along, there was no question that Bryce Babcock would throw his hat in the ring. The two years he'd put in at Earthpeace had been but a stepping-stone to the ultimate position of power to all environmentalists. The presidency of the United States.
Bryce Babcock ran. Bryce Babcock lost.
His showings in Iowa and New Hampshire had been pathetic. In both contests, he limped in as an also-ran.
The loss was devastating to Babcock, as well as to the rank and file of Earthpeace.
The timing couldn't have been worse for Earthpeace. The group's influence had waned in the years following the sinking of the Grappler. The public had begun to view its rolls as a bunch of hempworshiping loons. And on top of everything else, the world had maddeningly started to adopt the organization's message.
The whaling industry was dead in most parts of the world. Toxic dumping was nearly extinct. A moratorium on atomic testing was accepted by almost every nation on Earth. The Russians and Americans had even begun to roll back their nuclear stockpiles.
The fact of the matter was, Earthpeace needed a sympathizer like Babcock to win the presidency in order to boost its waning celebrity. When he lost, the group lost, too.
It was touch and go for a few years after the former governor's primary loss. Fortunately for Babcock and Earthpeace, all politics were cyclical. The party that had gone on to beat Babcock's in 1988 found itself on the outside looking in in 1992. With his impeccable liberal environmental credentials, Babcock was tapped by the new President to head up the Department of the Interior.
During the two terms of the current President, Babcock made his allegiance to Earthpeace clear in both attitude and policy.
Since Babcock's ties to Earthpeace had remained strong throughout his tenure as a cabinet secretary, Smith had decided to try a more private search. In perusing the interior head's e-mail, the CURE director had found a note from the Treasury secretary, under whose auspices the Secret Service fell. In it was mention of the former President's horseback-riding accident.
A red flag instantly went up for Smith.
The note had been sent before the event had become public knowledge. A follow-up letter from Babcock to the Treasury secretary very casually questioned the whereabouts of the old President, including hospital and room number.
Certain of the link now, Smith had checked the rest of Babcock's outgoing e-mail. Sure enough, the information had been forwarded to the Earthpeace cell in San Francisco.
Babcock was involved.
Further checking revealed that the interior secretary had purchased a plane ticket to Panama more than a month before. His arrival time coincided with the passage of the Radiant Grappler through the canal.
But surely Babcock could not have known about the ex-President's accident a month before it happened. There had to be yet another explanation for his trip.
Smith had uncovered the reason, once more, in Babcock's e-mail.
Dr. Ree Hop Doe. When Smith saw the name, he blinked in shock. The name was infamous in intelligence circles-should have been despised throughout the country.
Doe was a naturalized American citizen of Taiwanese birth. A scientist at Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory, he had been indicted on charges that he had betrayed his adopted country by selling decades' worth of nuclear secrets to the Chinese. Thanks to Doe, the People's Republic of China had leaped a generation ahead in its offensive nuclear capability.