The girl looked toward the slumped corpse of Bumba Fun. Her chin began trembling. Tears started in her eyes. She fought them back. In the end she won. No tears came.
"He didn't have to die," Remo said bitterly. "I could have handled it."
The girl lifted her chin proudly. "It was his duty to die. He was Bumba Fun."
Remo looked around. The nomads were staring at him with strange expressions on their windburned faces. They were edging closer, as if afraid to approach without permission but too fascinated not to try. They ignored the fallen Chinese weapons.
"The Chinese are going to miss this unit," he said. "You'd better pack up your tents and move on."
The girl shook her head stubbornly. "If we pack up tents, Chinese will not know who to punish. Punish others. We stay. If punishment come, we will be prepared. "
"Are you crazy?" Remo exploded. "You'll all be slaughtered."
"And we will come back in another life to resist the Chinese, to die again and again if our karma decrees it necessary."
"What good will that do?"
She lifted her chin defiantly. "Perhaps if enough Tibetan die, the world will begin to care about Tibetans."
Remo had no answer to that. "Look, I need a guide to Lhasa. How about you come along?"
"I cannot. Must stay."
"And die when the PLA catch up to you?"
"It is my duty. You see, that man was my father. I must take his place now."
"Have it your way," said Remo. He went over to the jeeps and trucks and disabled them with quick strokes that unerringly found fatigue spots in metal and vulnerable points elsewhere. He gathered up the rifles, snapping barrels like bread sticks with his bare hands.
When he was done, there wasn't a usable Chinese weapon or vehicle in the camp.
Remo climbed back into his jeep and started the engine. He remembered something.
"What did you mean when you said, 'The god rides him'?" he asked the Tibetan girl.
"You are Gonpo Jigme. Do you not know what is meant?"
"No," Remo admitted.
The girl lowered her eyelashes demurely. "Then the god no longer rides you. When Gonpo Jigme returns, you will know."
Remo sent the jeep around in a circle, pointed it toward the mountain that stood between-him and Lhasa. He sat, engine idling, and looked at the girl for a long moment.
"Hey, kid. I don't know your real name."
"Bumba Fun," said the Tibetan girl, waving him away.
Remo put the camp behind him, his face hard. He drove arrow straight toward the purple shadow at the base of the mountain the girl had called Nagbopori. It seemed to call him. But the faster he drove, the farther away it seemed to get. It was like a big granite mirage, always receding.
Remo finally reached it by nightfall. By then the purple shadow had turned black, and he barreled into it. It proved to be a needle-thin cut through one side of the mountain.
From somewhere above, he heard the huffing of a helicopter gunship and pulled into the lee of the declivity until the gunship had passed overhead.
Not long after, he heard the whuff and thoom of air-to-ground rockets thudding into the earth not many miles to the south.
"Damn!" he breathed.
Remo pulled over and went up a cliff side like a spider.
Reaching the flat top, he could spot flashes of light in the general direction of the nomads' camp. The night seemed to quake with each impact. When it finally stopped, there was only the faraway whirring of the main rotor.
When the gunship returned, it was a fat silhouette against a low smoldering fire on the pastureland.
"You bastards," he said in a too-soft voice. "They were only herdsmen."
Remo picked up a rock and stepped into view. He waved his arms.
The gunship pilot spotted him. Curious, he sent the ungainly craft sweeping in Remo's direction.
Remo dropped his arms and pitched the rock with a deceptively casual throw. The rock left his fingers moving at nearly seventy-five miles per hour.
It struck the gunship pilot in the face doing one-fifty, after punching a perfectly round hole in the Plexiglas windscreen.
The gunship shuddered as the hands and feet at the controls clutched up in death. It began to whirl in place like a confused Christmas ornament on a string.
The surviving crew scrambled to haul the dead pilot off his seat and regain control of the ship.
They had about as much luck doing that as they had in surviving the fiery impact that followed, when the spinning tail rotor struck a rocky escarpment and the big craft disintegrated in a boiling ball of flame.
Which was to say, none.
Remo climbed back down to his jeep and bored through the endless Tibetan night, wondering who Gonpo Jigme was supposed to be. He knew one thing for certain. He was no more Gonpo Jigme than Squirrelly Chicane was the Bunji Lama.
Chapter 28
For a day the forty-seventh Bunji Lama, incarnation of the Buddha to Come, endured the want and privation of Drapchi Prison stoically. She meditated in her cell. She sought higher consciousness. But none was forthcoming. Despite the pain she was forced to endure, she never gave up hope.
"Low," Squirrelly Chicane was hollering through her cell door, "if you won't let me make my call, give me back my stash."
Her voice reverberated down the dank corridor. If ears heard her plaintive plea, no voice responded.
"How about that roach? It's almost used-up anyway."
Silence followed her echoes.
"I'll settle for one of those hallucinogenic toads that you have to lick," Squirrelly said hopefully.
When the last echoes died away, so did all hope. Squirrelly sat herself down on the pile of sand that was her bed, moaning, "I can't believe this. I came all this way and I'm reduced to begging for a lick of a toad."
Clapping hands to her saffron shag, she added, "Won't this headache ever go away!"
"Embrace the pain," Lobsang Drom droned. "Transcend the pain."
"You try transcending this pounder!"
"Her Holiness must set an example for the other prisoners," Lobsang reminded her. "By suffering, you work to relieve the sorrows of the world."
"My Bunji butt! I want out of this hellhole. The storyline is dead in the water. I can see the audience going out for popcorn right now. And not coming back. The critics will murder me."
"The Bunji Lama is above all earthly criticism," Lobsang intoned.
"Tell that to Siskel and Ebert! I can just hear the fat one now. 'Squirrelly Chicane should have stuck with the kind of films her audience is used to seeing her in. Blah blah blahs Like he knows his buns from a bagel!"
Suddenly the lock began to rasp and grate.
"Who's there?" Squirrelly hissed. "Am I being let out?"
"It is I, O Bunji," said a squeaky voice.
"I who?"
"The Master of Sinanju has come to liberate you," the squeaky voice said.
Squirrelly lifted up on her supple toes and tried to look out the tiny cell-door window. She saw nothing but dank corridor.
"I don't see anyone," she complained.
"Who are you talking to, Bunji?" asked Kula worriedly.
"It's that little guy. Sinatra."
"The Master of Sinanju has come to liberate us!" Kula exclaimed.
The key in the lock continued to grate.
"Forget it," Squirrelly said. "It took two of them to lock it, and they left the key in because it'll probably take six of them to unlock it."
The lock squealed with a metallic complaint.
And to Squirrelly Chicane's utter astonishment, the cell door creaked open.
Standing there was the wispy Korean. He wore black. The top of his formerly bald head was black, as well.
"Did you grow hair?" Squirrelly asked.