"I can tell you the truth now. The trunk is empty of all but your burgeoning guilt."
"What have I got to be guilty about?"
"That your offspring do not know their father, just as you did not know yours. The cycle repeats itself. They will carry this burden into the generations to come, and the seeds of the House of Sinanju will be scattered to the four quarters like the seeds of the wayward dandelion."
"I wish a wind would carry this trunk away."
"If it does," Chiun warned, "be certain that it carries you away with it, else you will face my wrath."
"Just as long as it carries me to someplace peaceful," sighed Remo.
Chapter 35
Assumpta Kaax, aka Lieutenant Balam of the Benito Juarez National Liberation Front, slipped along the jungle trail, following the bitter smell of scorched cornfields.
The air was very bitter this night. The burned-field stink mixed with the strange sulphuric smell coming from the sky.
She looked up. The clear skies were closing. It was difficult to say if this was from rain clouds or the troubled air rolling down from Mount Popo in the north.
The air did not smell like rain, but neither did it smell like air. Not the good clean air of the Lacandon jungle, where the falling rains cleansed everything, making it new again.
In the capital, she understood, the rain fell full of metals and poisons from manufacturing plants and factories that had nothing to do with her life or the lives of her people.
A snap of a branch made her drop to the spongy jungle floor. Crouching, she waited, dark eyes catching faint starlight.
Nothing moved in the direction of the snap.
Careful to remain crouched, she turned her supple body, the better to widen her field of vision.
Another snap came--this time to her left.
She squeezed her weapon, as if for reassurance, and she trembled. She had killed before, but only soldiers. She did not wish to kill a Maya by mistake.
The third snap seemed farther away. It was not the sound of bare feet or the soft Maya sandals. It was the hard sound of heavy boots breaking jungle detritus.
It might be a soldado, but it might also be the sound of a Juarezista creeping toward a midnight rendezvous.
The latter possibility was sufficiently important that Assumpta decided the risk of the former was worth taking.
Slowly she came to her feet and moved toward the sound.
"YOU HEAR THAT, CHIUN?" said Remo, head swiveling toward the sudden sound.
The Master of Sinanju's quick, birdlike head movement copied that of his pupil. Their eyes pointed in the same direction.
"Yes. The snap of a twig under a boot."
"Okay if I leave the trunk here for a sec?"
Chiun nodded. "Only because we both know your guilt will follow you whether you carry it or not."
They slipped toward the sound, two wraiths, silent and nearly impossible to see in the night.
COLONEL MAURICIO Primitivo crouched behind the sapodilla trees where he could not be seen. In his hands were dry branches he had picked off the ground.
With his thumb he snapped them one at a time, pausing more than a minute between snaps.
The Juarezista he had spied from afar would be drawn to the sound, he knew.
He gave the next branch a clean snap, and in the brief echo that followed he heard a soft footfall. Then another.
Yes, closer, he thought. Closer, my unsuspecting Juarezista. Come to your doom. For whether you are Subcomandante Verapaz or one of his tools, you will lead me to my heart's desire, I promise you.
He kept one eye on the ground near where he stood. It was the logical approach path. He had picked this spot for that very reason. The sapodilla tree afforded excellent shelter, thick enough to absorb high-velocity rounds.
A dull black boot pressed into the earth not three feet from his own waiting boots.
Dropping the twigs, he brought up his H , "Do not move, Juarezista! Or you will surely leave your bones for the tapirs to gnaw on."
The Juarezista froze. His training was good.
"Ah, bueno. You understood even if you cannot see me. Now, slowly step into the light that I may see you, rebel."
The boot hesitated.
"I can shoot around this tree more swiftly that you can bring your weapon to bear upon me. You know this. If you turn and run, I will pepper your fleeing back. You know this also."
There was no response to that. Colonel Primitivo took this as a sign of assent.
"Good. Now, into the light."
The second boot inched forward, and Colonel Primitivo's eyes went up to the head. A black ski mask enveloped it.
"Let me see your eyes," he said.
The face turned. If the eyes were green, he would obliterate them without hesitation.
But the eyes, large as a deer's, were mestizo brown.
Cursing inwardly, Colonel Primitivo snarled, "Now drop your weapon, insurgentista. "
The weapon remained in the trembling hands.
"Now!"
The weapon was dropped. It struck the jungle floor with a flat finality.