Somewhere in the darkness a spirit spark flickered. Awareness returned. Was this the Void? The question was unspoken. The answer nonexistent. Awareness faded. This was not the correct time. Perhaps the next time, he would try. Again. If there was a next time. If an eternity had not already crawled by since the last period of awareness.
As consciousness dimmed, a voice, female and discordantly musical, like a bell of basest metal, cut through the soundlessness of the abyss.
You cannot save him now. He is lost to you. He is mine. You are dead. Finish your dying, stubborn one.
The voice descended into low, diabolical laughter that followed his sinking mind into the blackest of pits that should have felt cold, but didn't.
Yet it was.
Chapter 30
Remo shut the APC door against the blowing sand. The dashboard was going crazy-gas-warning instruments, he decided. Either that or Old Spice had leaked into the electronics.
All around him, Arab soldiers flew into action. He was surprised at their discipline. Soon, every fan was roaring. The noise was like a million airplanes preparing for takeoff.
Prince General Bazzaz raced for a nearby helicopter. Its rotor roar blended with the rest. In a swirl of sand it took off, the sheik on board. Instead of retreating, however, the helicopter flew toward the north. Both members of the royal family were wearing gas masks. Remo was surprised at their apparent bravery.
Everyone had gotten into a gas suit by this time, including Remo's driver. Remo searched the cockpit for a mask of his own. He found one clipped under the dashboard. He pulled it over his head. It was a filter mask, with no attached oxygen tank. When he inhaled, the air smelled of charcoal, but it was breathable.
For several minutes the Arabs tended their fans, manually rotating them so their airstreams overlapped.
"Modern warfare," Remo grumbled. "Maybe next year they'll have automatic turning gears. Like K-Mart."
The helicopter quickly returned, blowing up more sand and adding to the confusion. Remo decided to wait for the sand to settle down before driving off. If anything, it got worse. Oddly, the sand seemed to be blowing back from the front lines, despite the fans' furious output. The blades were completely enveloped in dusty clouds.
Through the triple-paned windshield Remo could hear panicky exclamations in Arabic, none of which he understood.
Prince General Bazzaz fought his way through the gathering grit. He pounded on the door.
Remo opened it. "What's wrong?" he shouted over the din.
"We must retreat." His voice was muffled by his mask.
"Why? The fans are doing fine."
"The Iraiti are advancing. It is war."
"With tanks?"
"No, they have outsmarted us. They have fans too. And theirs are bigger than ours."
"You're joking," Remo exclaimed.
"I am not. This vehicle is needed for the retreat. I am sorry. You are on your own."
"Thanks a bunch," Remo said dryly.
"You are welcome a bunch. Now, please, step out."
"Not a chance," Remo snarled, gunning the engine.
The prince general jumped back. He wasn't accustomed to disobedience. While he was getting used to it, Remo slammed the door.
Turning, the prince general gave out a cry. The trucks started up. They advanced. That is, they went south, driving toward Remo, their fans blowing to beat the band, but doing nothing more to dispel the sandstorm.
Carrying Bazzaz, the helicopter lifted off in the swirl, turning its tail and flying low to the ground. And the truck line roared past Remo.
The dashboard gas sensors raised their screeching to a new level. Remo reached up under the leather and found a nest of wiring. He pulled them loose. The screeching stopped, although a few angry lights still winked.
"That's better," Remo muttered, sliding behind the wheel. He started the APC lumbering forward.
"Abominadad, here I come," he said.
Remo sent the APC bouncing over the dunes and wadis. Visibility soon dropped to zero. The color of the sandstorm slowly changed. It went from dun to a mustard yellow, until it resembled airborne diarrhea.
Holding the wheel steady, Remo relied on his natural sense of direction. He knew, somehow, that he was driving true north, and that was all that concerned him.
He didn't see the oncoming truck until its sand-colored grille emerged from the swirl like a shark with bad teeth.
It was a light truck, Remo realized. It was barreling straight at him, a goggle-eyed driver behind the wheel and canisters spewing the diarrhea-yellow gas mounted atop the cab.
"Screw him," Remo said, holding his course.
The heavy APC slammed into the truck without stopping. The grille caved in, its front tires lifting high. It tried to climb the APC roof, but its rear wheels lost all traction.
It bounced away, upsetting its twenty-foot rear-mounted fan. The cage crumpled when it struck sand. The blades chewed themselves to pieces against the mangled framework.
Remo wrestled the wheel around to get a better look at the truck. It lay on its side, wheels spinning. The fan lay several feet away. From the overturned cab, hissing yellowish billows of vapor spewed angrily. Remo glimpsed a battery of spilled gas cylinders, now no longer bolted to the dented cab roof.
The cab had been split open and a driver sprawled in the sand, holding his throat and gulping like a beached flounder.
His gas mask lay at his elbow, but he was too busy dying to look for it.
"Remind me not to crank down the windows anytime soon," Remo muttered, grateful for the sealed gas-proof vehicle.
In the distance, a line of similar trucks barreled south, as if impelled by their great fans. But the fans were pointed in the direction they traveled, pushing churning billows of gas ahead. Wind resistance pushed it back. The gas went everywhere except where it was supposed to.
"What the hell," Remo said to himself. "Juniper can cool his heels in Mad Ass's dungeon a little longer."
He sent the APC rolling after them.
Remo drew up alongside one, and pulling the wheel to the right, inexorably crowded the truck into the next one in line.
The drivers' peripheral vision was impaired by their gas mask goggles, so the first time they realized they were in trouble was when their spinning wheels rubbed one another.
At the speed they were traveling, that meant instant disaster.
Remo watched the first two trucks collide and spin away, tumbling, throwing off whirling fan blades and rags of gas.
They landed wrapped together in an impossible contortion of metal.
From that point on, it was just a matter of sideswiping each underweight truck with the armored APC until it tipped over or lost control.
After the last truck ate sand, Remo wrestled the APC north once more and played with the steering until his body told him he was attuned to magnetic north. The approximate direction of Abominadad.
He settled down for the ride, one thought uppermost in his mind.
How had Chiun done it all those years? The damn kimono was hotter than hell.
Chapter 31
Major Nasur Hamdoon was tired of shooting Kuranis.
He had been glad to shoot Kuranis during the early heady days of the reclamation of Kuran. Especially when the ungrateful Kuranis resisted being returned to the Iraiti motherland with their puny small arms, stones, and Molotov cocktails. Who did they think they were-Palestinians?
Did they not understand that all Arabs were brothers, and destined to be united? It was very strange. Nasur had expected to be welcomed as a liberator.
So when the liberated Arabs of Kuran turned on him with their pitiful weapons, Nasur indignantly shot them dead in the streets. The surviving Kuranis went underground. They planted bombs. They sniped from rooftops.
And the Iraiti troops under Major Hamdoon's command simply rounded up civilians at random and had them executed by various methods. Sometimes they were simply bled in the streets, their blood collected in glass beakers to be stored as plasma in the unlikely eventuality the Americans summoned up enough courage to attack.