"Do this thing," Persephone told Eurydice.
"Do this thing," Eurydice told Omphale.
"Why do I have to do this if Persephone told you to do it?" Omphale grumbled.
"Because you are the youngest," sneered Eurydice. "Someday I will be older than both of you and we will see who bosses who about like a Filipina maid. I was not named after a Greek goddess to be a slave." Omphale looked at the time-clock display. It was still counting down. It had counted down nearly a day and, according to the digital display, it was a long way from opening by itself.
"It says 1999," she said.
"Liar!" Persephone screeched.
"See for yourself."
Persephone rushed to the display. "You changed it," she accused the white.
"If I could change it," the white countered, "wouldn't I have changed it so I could just throw the handle and open the door instead of ripping it apart?"
"This is a reasonable point," Omphale whispered.
Everyone agreed it was reasonable point. Then realization dawned on their dusky faces.
"You have saved our lives!" Persephone cried.
"You're welcome. Where's the gold?"
"It is our father's gold. You cannot have it."
"Is that the same father who locked you in to starve to death slowly?"
"Oui..."
"Don't see that you owe him much." The white ripped open another crate. "You sure have a lot of apples in these boxes."
"They are apple crates," said Persephone.
"We like apples," added Eurydice.
"Oui, " Omphale said. "They are very exotic fruit."
The white lifted a deep red apple out of the crate he was inspecting. "Waxy, too," he said.
"The wax is to keep it fresh," Eurydice said. "So that they do not spoil in the baking heat."
"Oui," Persephone added. "Apples are very delicate."
The white tossed the apple into the air. It returned to his palm with the meaty smack of a cannonball. "Heavy, too."
"These are magic apples. They were picked to sustain us many weeks."
"All the way to 1999?"
The three sisters wavered in their defiance. Their AK-47 rifle muzzles wavered, too.
"Should we shoot him?" Omphale hissed.
"He saved our lives," Eurydice countered.
"What good is being alive if we have no country, no father and no wealth?" Persephone persisted.
"Oui. Without wealth, life is not worth living."
"Let us kill him and enjoy life," Persephone urged.
"Oui, let's," agreed Omphale.
And the three AK-47 muzzles lifted toward the white who was puzzling over the waxy apples that were too heavy for fruit.
Three simultaneous bursts ripped toward him. He was already behind a stack of crates when the bullets arrived in the space where he had been.
The crates shook under the thudding lash of lead, and splinters flew everywhere.
One grazed Persephone in the arm, and she dropped her weapon screaming, "I am hit! I am hit! I am bleeding to death!"
"Good," said Omphale, who redirected her fire at her sister's heaving chest. "Let me put you of your misery."
The muzzle erupted.
"Aiiee!" shrieked Persephone, crumpling to the dirt floor.
The white was suddenly among them, and the first hint of being disarmed came when their fingers began stinging the way they did when their father used to take an admonishing riding crop to them.
The rifles went down the hole in the floor.
The two surviving sisters dropped to their knees and began begging for their lives.
"You can have your useless lives. I don't want them," said the white, returning to the crates. He picked up an apple and balanced it on one thumb. He set it spinning and dug the opposite thumbnail into the waxy flesh. Skin skimmed off like red wood shavings under the action of a high-speed lathe.
The meat exposed was not white, like the pulp of an apple should be, but yellowish and metallic. Gold. "Bingo!" said the white.
"You worship Bingo?" said Eurydice.
"Today, definitely."
"Bingo is more mighty than Shango?" asked Omphale.
"Shango," said the white confidently, "has nothing on my man Bingo."
"If you do not want our lives, we offer our bodies."
"Bingo has forbidden me from taking the bodies of beautiful women," said the white while he hammered the crate lids back on with no more tools than his hard fist. "I can only have ugly ones. It's the price I pay for having my magical powers."
"Then take us with you and keep us until we are old and ugly like the women the great Bingo has decreed that you enjoy."
"Who said I enjoy them?"
"You cannot leave us here to be tortured and killed by the enemies of our treacherous father, who slew our mothers for no reason."
"Your father the warlord who stole all that UN relief food that was supposed to feed his people?"
"Pah! They are beggars of no value," Omphale answered.
"You eat the food he stole?" the white countered. Omphale scrunched up her face. "It was not very good. Mealy and wormy."
"Then you gotta pay for your meal."
"We will be your love slaves. Bingo will never know."
"Bingo sees all, hears all, knows all. But tell you what. Help me carry this gold out, and we'll see if we can get you to the airport."
"We will do as you say because we respect your god and your mighty manly powers," Eurydice announced.
Remo carried three crates of gold on either shoulder without stooping a micron. Eurydice and Omphale each bent under the weight of one crate apiece.
That way they got every crate up to the veranda. When Eurydice dropped the last crate onto the stacks and fell panting across it, Remo whistled.
The gates parted and the Master of Sinanju padded up, eyes shining.
"Who are these?" he asked, indicating the panting women with a curt nod of his bearded chin.
"The warlord's black-hearted daughters."
"You have been abusing them?"
"If you call honest work abuse, yeah."
Chiun examined the crates with interest. "There is much gold here. You have done well."
"You should have seen what I had to go through to do this."
"You should have seen what I had to do to win my first gold."
"Tell me about it some other time," Remo said. "So, how are we going to get this stuff to the airport? This is camel-flattening gold if I ever saw it."
"We are not."
"Huh?" said Remo.
"They are," said Chiun as an armored column came up the dusty road.
The half-tracks and Soviet-era T-55 tanks deployed all over the compound and a man sporting a red beret and eight gold stars on each shoulder jumped off a half track and advanced confidently.
"I am Major Domo General Supreme Jean-Renoir Bazinda," he announced.
"I could tell by the sixteen stars," Remo said dryly. "You are all war criminals and must be shot."
"Do you have a Federal Express office in this city?" inquired the Master of Sinanju in an even tone.
"Your diplomats will not save you in revolutionary Stomique."
"I will require the gold of my son to be packed well for shipping to an American address I will provide," Chiun continued.
And Major Domo General Supreme Bazinda threw his head back and laughed at the tiny little Asian who dared to threaten the only sixteen-star general on the entire African continent.
As he laughed, he waved for his soldiers to come and stand these interlopers before the villa wall for proper shooting.
Instead, someone handed Bazinda a human head. The head plopped wetly onto one palm, and instinctively Bazinda grabbed it to keep it from falling into the dirt.
He saw that it was the head of his second-in-command, Colonel Avenger Barang. There was a very serious expression on the colonel's face. When he realized what he was holding, Bazinda's face mirrored it almost exactly. Except for the tendril of blood just starting from one corner of Barang's slack mouth.