At the end of a corridor there was a big brass Buddha, too heavy to be carried away by the Chinese who'd stripped the Potala. The Buddha sat on a wooden dais with his open palms cupped upward. In his palms rested a lotus flower.
Chiun seized it, wrenched it right, then left and finally all the way around. The Buddha began to sink into the floor of its own weight, dais and all, accompanied by a soft gritty hissing.
As the smiling head began dropping, Chiun motioned for the others to mount on the dais. Kula clambered aboard, one hand clapping a struggling Squirrelly Chicane to his shoulder. Lobsang followed, his thin face baffled. They rode the dais down into a cool yawning space as if it were a great freight elevator.
Down below it was very dark. Lobsang lit a yak butter candle, and its mellow light showed a dripping passage leading toward a clot of crepuscular shadow.
"Follow the passage to its end and await me there," Chiun instructed. "I must restore the Buddha in order to baffle the Chinese. Make haste!"
They complied, moving down the passage enveloped in a halo of malodorous light.
The Master of Sinanju examined the Buddha. It now sat on a pile of soft sand. The turning of the lotus had released catches that supported the idol. Its weight had caused the sand pile to spread outward and the Buddha to slip below the level of the floor. It was a secret a previous Master had learned and duly recorded in the histories of the house. He had not shown how to restore the Buddha, however.
Distantly there were shouts and the heavy fall of rushing feet. Searching PLA cadres. If they discovered the sunken Buddha, all would be lost.
Chiun, understanding that restoring the Buddha would be the work of hours, and not having hours, decided that it would be more efficacious to eradicate all evidence of the secret passage.
The passageway was constructed of mortarless blocks, in the fashion of architecture in Tibet. He retreated to the junction where the passage turned and looked for a keystone. It sat in its niche, fixed and immobile.
The Master of Sinanju laid the flat palm of his hand against it, feeling the ancient stone for cracked or weak points. When the sensitive flesh of his palms told his mind that such a place existed, he made fists of his bony hands.
He struck the spot with one fist, pulled back and struck with the other. Strike. Return. Strike. Return. The stone retreated into its niche with each shock. Finally, it reached the point of no retreat, and the blows of his fists, hard and resolute, began to chip away at the block's innate integrity.
The fists of the Master left no mark on the stone. Then abruptly, without warning, the stone broke apart.
The surrounding blocks began to groan.
Chiun flew down the passage, pipe-stem feet churning, fists pumping, head back.
There had been sufficient time for the others to have reached the egress of the passage, Chiun knew. If the gods were with him, there would be time for him to join them before disaster struck.
The rumble began far back and chased the Master of Sinanju down the passage.
He thanked the gods Remo had not come with them. For surely his clod-footed pupil would now be two or three paces behind, his thick head in imminent danger of being crushed by the falling blocks that now came down in a merciless rain.
Chapter 35
By early morning the caravan that had formed behind the truck carrying Remo Williams to Lhasa was half a mile long.
It was the perfect target for Chinese helicopter gunships or short-range artillery.
They rode through a sleepy hill town unchecked, picking up more trucks and leaving in their wake burning buildings.
"Once word travels, the Chinese are going to be all over us like hair on a yak," Remo said unhappily as he scanned the bright blue morning skies.
Bumba Fun grunted unconcernedly. "They fear Gonpo Jigme. They fear the Dreadnought. They will give back before us. You will see."
"Don't count on it."
A line of gunships appeared on the western horizon. They were moving north.
"Here they come," Remo warned.
But they didn't come. They kept traveling north. Then Remo realized they were headed toward Lhasa.
"Something's up."
"Yes. The Chinese are too frightened to strike at Gonpo the Dreadnought."
"Is there a radio in this thing?" Remo asked, reaching for the dash knobs. He got a radio station. A excitable voice came from the speaker, speaking Tibetan or Chinese. Remo couldn't tell.
"What's he saying?" Remo wanted to know.
"It is Radio Lhasa," said Bumba Fun. "They have declared martial law."
"And..."
"That is all they say. All Tibetans have been ordered indoors. Perhaps word of Gonpo Jigme's nearness has reached them, and they cower in fear of your coming."
"Maybe the Bunji Lama's stirred the place up," Remo countered.
"Oh, yes, the Chinese announcer mentioned the Bunji Lama also."
"What'd he say?"
"The Bunji has been taken to Drapchi Prison."
"That's probably good," Remo decided.
"But he has escaped."
"That's not good."
"Why is that not good, Gonpo?"
"You don't know the Bunji Lama like I know the Bunji Lama."
"I do not know the Bunji Lama at all," Bumba Fun admitted.
Another flight of helicopters appeared and made a beeline for the daunting mountains surrounding Lhasa.
"They must think we're the Chinese cavalry coming to the rescue," Remo said, watching the gunships rattle over a ridge.
Bumba Fun grinned. "We will blow into Lhasa like the end of the world."
"That's what I'm afraid of," said Remo, wondering how he was going to get out of Tibet alive, alone or not, with the entire country being mobilized.
SQUIRRELLY CHICANE WAS royally pissed.
She couldn't vent her holy pissedness. That was the part that pissed her off the most. It was bad enough to be packed around like a side of beef, but not having a say in the matter was just too much.
Beating on Kula's broad back only hurt her fists. Besides, Squirrelly didn't want to break her Oscar.
She was being saved. In all the movies she had ever done, being saved by males annoyed her most. She was over forty before she had been allowed to save her own cinematic behind.
Now, invested as the pontiff of Tibet, for Buddha's sake, and here she was reduced to being saved again. It was a major step backward, image- and career-wise. If only she could speak. She'd give them all a piece of her Bunji mind.
After what seemed like forever they emerged from the dank passage into a cool cavern of some sort. Fresh air blew in steadily. Squirrelly had only a moment to drink in the invigorating air when there came a low rumble from the passage.
And the Master of Sinanju flashed out of the maw, saying, "Make haste! The ceiling may fall at this end."
What is that sound? Squirrelly wondered as she was carried away from the spot. An earthquake?
From the mouth of the passage came another rumble, and the ground under their running feet shook. Out of the stone passage came a breath of fetid air mixed with dust and grit. It met with the incoming fresh air, mixed-and the fetid air won out.
The passage had collapsed. Squirrelly didn't know how. But it meant that the Chinese wouldn't be chasing them.
Nice plot twist, but where could the story go from here? A breakneck chase would have been better.
Otherwise, the ceiling held. The danger was over.
Kula set her on her feet, and she made a point of inflicting the blue lasers of her best on-screen glare at each of them in turn. Kula looked abashed. Lobsang actually flinched. But the Master of Sinanju pointedly ignored her.
Squirrelly hated that. But she was more interested in taking stock of her surroundings. This cavern was amazing. Every corner was a set unto itself. There were stone statuaries cut into the cave walls and great brass tubs of yak butter in which lit wicks floated and burned with a buttery yellow light.