Chiun was certainly elderly, but he was as frail as a cast-iron locomotive. A Master of the ancient martial art called Sinanju, the elderly Korean had trained Remo. Remo was a Master of this martial art himself. In title, at least, he was Reigning Master of Sinanju. Chiun had given up his Reigning Master status to become the Master of Sinanju Emeritus, which implied some sort of retirement and surrender of authority.
In practice, Remo still did what the old man told him to do a lot of the time. Chiun had an air of all-encompassing wisdom and a goatlike stubborn streak, both hard to ignore.
Remo caught up to the old man in seconds. “I couldn’t let you go on alone, you being so frail and all.”
“Hush,” the old man said. “This is a place of death.”
Remo looked around, then felt what Chiun was talking about. They had entered a vast tract of Brazilian rain forest that was recently engulfed in a cloud of superheated steam, which killed everything. From tiny gnats to the giant upper-canopy trees, the steam killed them and left their cooked remains where they had died.
It was unlike the clear-cutting of the rain forest. This forest was still there, but dead. The earth was littered with the carcasses of the forest creatures. The smell was overpowering, but the aura of the place was even more unsettling.
“It’s worse than a battlefield,” Remo observed. He had been on jungle battlefields. “Everything is dead here.”
“Yes,” Chiun said somberly.
“Everything,” Remo added, sounding lame.
Chiun seemed to understand. He turned to Remo and nodded. “Exactly.”
Remo and Chiun were no strangers to death. Delivering death was their job. The Masters of Sinanju were assassins—the world’s preeminent assassins. Working for the U.S. government, Remo and Chiun had encountered and delivered more death than they cared to remember—but not like this. Remo had never been so immersed in the smells and stillness of so many dead things…
He tried to think of something else. He really ought to be looking for the drug lord, Burgos, not tagging after a fast-talking parrot. Burgos was intent on establishing a system of coca farms in the territory stricken by the geothermal disaster. He could easily clear narrow, miles-long strips of land among the decimated rain forest. The dead trees and the new growth would hide the cultivation, and this patch of land was so far away from everything it would be expensive to monitor from the air. Burgos would be less harassed here than in Colombia, making for better harvests.
Burgos himself was on a personal tour of the parboiled rain forest. As far as Burgos knew, his plan was still a cartel secret.
Remo and his employer were determined to nip Burgos in the bud—as long as Remo was in the vicinity anyway.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if the bird did lead us to Burgos?” Remo suggested, trying to lighten his own mood. “Maybe that’s why he brought us here.”
“I think not,” Chiun replied, not even breathing hard as they skimmed through the detritus of the jungle floor.
“Who can tell? Maybe he can be our crime-sniffing sidekick. You know, he points us to the bad guys and we go take them out.”
“Like Rin Tin Tin?”
“Sure. But in color.”
“You speak nonsense. His globe-trotting days are done, and he desires the serenity of his home.”
“Is that what he told you?”
“That is what I know to be true.”
After another few miles, Remo said, “I’m not so sure, Little Father. If this was my home, I don’t think I’d want to come back to it.”
Chiun said nothing.
The bird stopped on a dead branch high above them, peered ahead and screeched in alarm. He flapped strongly into the trees and was gone.
Remo and Chiun reached ahead with their senses. The smell of human remains now tinged the air.
Someone shouted in Spanish. Another voice spoke in a language totally foreign to Remo Williams. Far away, the bird cried out in pain.
At that, Chiun slipped away like a racing breeze, Remo close behind. They moved faster than any other man on Earth could run, and yet they didn’t disturb the litter that carpeted the jungle floor.
In seconds Remo found himself at the edge of a jungle clearing. Some sort of a native village had recently stood here. The putrefying corpses of the villagers were still scattered about the village.
One of them was alive. It was an older male figure in a brief loincloth, his face smeared with symbols painted in mud. He was standing against a hut wall, bloodied from a beating.
His torturer was bloodied, too. There was a fresh gash across his face and the huge parrot was flapping around above him, screeching.
The man yanked out a handgun.
The villager’s stiff-back pride melted. He collapsed at the feet of his torturer, begging him to spare the bird. The gunman delivered a quick kick to the man’s temple and shot at the hyacinth macaw.
A target that big, that close, that purple should have been hard to miss.
But the torturer missed. Chiun had slipped across the clearing with all the speed and commotion of hawk shadow, coming alongside the torturer before the man knew Chiun was even there. The elderly Asian man snicked his long fingernails at the gun hand as the trigger was squeezed.
Chiun’s fingernails were strong and sharp as the finest sword blade. They detached the hand from the wrist, and the bullet went wild.
The torturer fell down, his lifeblood pouring out, which didn’t make his friends happy at all.
Remo was on the attack, skimming among the other gunmen. Armed guards had been standing by with automatic rifles ready. Remo snatched the rifles and sent them arcing away into the jungle.
Then he went for the others. Every one of them was armed, and he took their weapons away from them in whatever way was most expedient. He slapped their pistol hands, shattering their hand bones in the process. He shoved the rifles like battering rams into the rib cages of the owners.
Chiun was helping the villager to his feet. The man cared only about the huge macaw, now standing on his wrist and nuzzling his chest. The bird became stained with the old man’s blood, but neither of them cared.
“I guess they know each other,” Remo observed. “How bad is he?”
“If he ceases squirming, I shall be able to inspect him. I think he shall live. I believe we have also found what you were looking for, Remo. I suggest you deal with them while I tend to him.”
Chiun barked at the villager in a strange tongue and pushed the bird away. The old Korean didn’t have the gentlest bedside manner.
“Notice I did not kill a single one of you,” Remo announced grandly to the others, most of whom were on the ground holding some injured part of their body.
“You killed him,” snarled a man hugging a broken arm.
“Not me. It was the elderly fella. You gentlemen happen to be friends of Juan Burgos?”
“No,” snarled the man with the busted arm.
“Liar,” Remo announced, and touched the man on the forehead. A deep pit appeared there, and the man collapsed.
“I bet one of you is Juan Burgos,” Remo said. “And you’re just too chickenshit to make yourself known.” Remo loved to humiliate a high-up slimeball in front of his subordinate slimeballs. They were usually too stupid and too concerned with their own masculinity to ignore the gibe.
“I am Juan Burgos and I am no coward.”
Remo looked him up and down. “I believe you because you have the most expensive-looking suit and the greasiest-looking hair.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Nothing. I just had to be sure I had the right piece of human trash before I put the garbage out.”