"Oh, there's no danger. It's just that you get sensitive to the feel of these birds, and this one's gone tail-heavy."
"Let me worry about maintenance," Swindell snapped. "You just earn your flight pay."
"Yes, sir," the pilot said unhappily.
Twenty minutes later, the pilot's voice came in the earphones with more than a suggestion of edginess.
"Umm, Mr. Swindell . . ." he began.
"What?"
"We've overshot the site. I don't know how it happened, but we should have overflown it ten minutes ago."
"You on course?" Swindell asked, more perplexed than angry.
"Absolutely. By the compass."
Swindell looked out the bubble. "I didn't see any floodlights," he said uneasily. The rotor chopping made his teeth vibrate.
"Same here. Do you suppose they're out?"
"Out?" Swindell asked. "We have our own generators. And backups. How could both go out?" He looked down through the chin port.
Swindell's mouth dropped like a steam shovel's jaw. It hung there, agape. Then he answered his own question. "Those damn Dirt Firsters!" he snarled.
There was only one road snaking through the Little San Bernardino Mountains into the desert. So Remo knew he stood little chance of becoming lost. He knew that the Condome site, like most construction sites, would be ablaze with floodlights to minimize pilferage of the open-air material stockpiles.
Remo saw no floodlights.
But he did smell something unpleasantly familiar-the combined body odor of a dozen unwashed human beings.
"We're close. Real close," Remo told Chiun.
"I see nothing," Chiun said petulantly.
"Take a whiff. The Dirt Firsters are in this area. If they're close, so is the Condome project."
"I do not know this word 'Condome.' "
"Welcome to America in the nineties," Remo sighed. "I'm still trying to transcend Madonna."
"Your religion is your concern," Chiun sniffed.
If there was any doubt Dirt First!! was in the vicinity, the sight of Day-Glo yellow blotches on passing palm boles dispelled that. They marked fresh spikes. The occasional broken-armed cactus stood as mute testimony to Dirt First's attempt to adapt their environmental consciences to the desert.
"We'd better hurry before the cholla cactus ends up on the endangered-succulent list," Remo muttered.
Remo discovered the presence of a Dirt Firster blocking the road in an unmistakable way: he almost ran one down.
His headlights picked up a woman's wounded-deer eyes in a near-invisible face. Remo had mistaken her for a road kill because she lay across the road like a human log coated with sand.
"Hang on!" Remo called, wrenching the wheel to the left. The car sailed off the road and into a dune. It bounced along before coming to a stop, oil pan scraping sand.
Remo killed the ignition and plunged out of the car. He wasn't sure if he had struck the woman or not.
When she sat up and shook a sandy fist in his direction, he received his answer.
"You idiot!" she complained. "You almost ran me over!"
"You're lying across a dark road practically in camouflage and you're calling me an idiot?" Remo snapped back. "You're damn lucky a tire didn't burst that melon you think is your head."
"I happen to be monkey-wrenching," she said tartly, examining her beaded Indian skirt for damage.
"Committing suicide is a better term for it," Remo said, roughly pulling the woman to her feet.
"We call it monkey-wrenching. Impeding undesirable progress in the cause of Mother Nature."
"And I call this getting to the heart of the matter," Remo said, suddenly twisting the woman's plump wrist in a painful direction.
"Ow! Ow! This isn't fair."
"Losing a nuke always brings out the worst in me," Remo snapped. "Right, Chiun?"
The Master of Sinanju floated up to examine the woman's squirming figure. She noticed him and in the dark made a misidentification.
"Hey, Desert Chief. How about telling your pale face friend to let a blood sister go? I ain't done nothing."
Chiun looked his question.
"She thinks you're an Indian," Remo supplied.
Chiun grimaced. "The woman is blind," he said. "But I will open her eyes." One yellow claw of a hand drifted out to her earlobe, took a pinch, and slowly increased the pressure.
The Dirt Firster's reaction was not that of a person with a pinched earlobe, but one who had somehow gotten her tongue caught in a light socket. Flinging out her arms, she howled as if to raise the dead.
"First question," Remo said. "Where are the rest of them?"
"Over . . . there," she gasped. "At the . . . ow . . . Condome. Monkey-wrenching it. Please! That's my triple-pierced ear!"
"Second question. Pay attention. This is important. Who has the neutron bomb?"
"Umm, Russia?"
"Wrong."
"China? The U.S.? I'm not big on current events. "
"You can do better than that," Remo warned.
"How should I know?" she asked, squeezing her eyes.
"You're with Dirt First," Remo explained. "We know they lifted the bomb. Is it here?"
"Nobody told me about any bomb. Honest Injun."
Remo frowned. He turned to the Master of Sinanju. "She sounds like she's telling the truth," he said reluctantly.
"I am telling the truth, you conterprogressive!"
"Third and last question," Remo said. "Did your people gas La Plomo?"
"No!" Tears streamed down her face, making flesh-colored vein patterns on her dirty cheeks.
Remo watched as Chiun applied increasing pressure. When the woman simply repeated "No!" several times in quick succession, Chiun shifted his tormenting hand to the base of her spine. He gave a tap. The woman flopped to the road like a bouncy sack of suet. She did not get up again.
"What did you do that for?" Remo demanded. "We didn't get any answers."
"Yes, we did," Chiun said tightly. "We learned the truth."
"Yeah? Well, maybe she wasn't in on it. They recruit new people all the time." Remo looked away. "Okay, let's shake up the rest of them."
They went in search of the Condome site.
Fabrique Foirade was immensely proud of himself.
After another ignominious retreat, he had regrouped his forces and shifted tactics with what he believed was the oppression-honed brilliance of a Ho Chi Minh.
"Okay," he had said. "Now they know we're serious. They're cowering in that ugly dome of a thing. So we fall back on some good old-fashioned monkey-wrenching."
"Like what?" he was asked.
"First, we fill the gas tanks of every vehicle with sand."
"But we didn't bring any sand!"
"We're standing on tons," Fabrique pointed out.
Everyone noticed this for a fact.
"Gee, if we use real desert sand, won't that wreck the local ecosystem?" Fabrique was asked.
This point was hotly debated for several moments. Fabrique Foirade won the argument by the simple expedient of braining the most vocal dissenter with the blunt end of a handy spike.
"Any other objections?" he inquired stonily.
He received none. Fabrique took this as a textbook example of the perfect application of socialist dialogue.
"Okay," he urged, "sand in the tanks. Cut every wire and break every tool. And somebody dump Joyce across the road as an obstruction. She'll know what to do when she wakes up."
This proved to be easy enough to accomplish. The surplus of sand was a tremendous boon. Soon the outside gas generators were sputtering into silence. The lights died out.
"Maybe we should have saved the light for last," a man who was so coated with sand that he resembled walking sandpaper suggested timidly, after the overwhelming darkness put a stop to further ecotage. Dirt First!! kept bumping into one another.
Someone found a battery-powered flashlight. Foirade took possession of this and started rooting around. The others merrily broke everything the light illuminated.