"Thief!" Chiun cried. "To touch that trunk is to die!"
"And he means every word," Remo called.
The Master of Sinanju looked like a harmless wisp attired in his silk robes. His age could have been anything from eighty to a hundred and twenty, but in fact he had passed the century mark some time back.
The three luggage pilferers ranged from perhaps twenty-five to thirty-eight years. They were tall, and muscular from hoisting heavy luggage forty hours a week.
But the Master of Sinanju fell among them like a crimson typhoon hitting a palm oasis.
The man who had frozen with his hands on the trunk suddenly took his hands into his mouth. Not by choice. Choice had nothing to do with it.
From his personal perspective. his own hands had acquired a life of their own. Like frightened pink tarantulas they leapt into his own mouth for protection against the crimson typhoon.
The man had a big mouth. But his hands were bigger. Still, they went down his gullet as if the bones had melted-where they clogged his windpipe so completely that his last ninety seconds of life consisted of hopping about in circles trying to yank his hands out of his mouth and trying to breathe through nostrils that no longer functioned.
In a way, he was lucky. He lived longer than the others, who made the mistake of drawing personal weapons.
Remo and Chiun gave them no time to use them.
"In for a penny, in for a pound," Remo muttered and took the nearest man by his head. Remo simply grasped and began shaking the man's head as if it were a milkshake container. He got about the same result. The man's brain, having the natural consistency of yogurt, was pureed in the receptacle of his skull.
He dropped his box cutter, never having gotten the blade extended.
It was quick, silent, and actually painless to the victim. Remo dropped the limp-boned man to the oil-stained concrete and caught the last few seconds of the third man's death throes.
The man had producted a switchblade. He used it with great skill. The blade darted toward the Master of Sinanju-and abruptly changed direction to carve out a flowing script on the wielder's own forehead.
Then it split his nose clear to the brain pan.
The man was on his back, dead, before the word THIEF began oozing blood off his forehead.
"Now you did it," Remo said, looking around at the carnage.
Chiun's hands clasped his wrists. Interlocked, they retreated into the joined sleeves of his kimono. "I did nothing. It was their fault. These carrion started it."
"Smith is gonna to have a shit fit."
"I will reason with Smith. Come."
And the Master of Sinanju floated away.
Grumbling, Remo brought the trunk up on his shoulder and hurried after him.
"This whole trip had better be worth it," he muttered.
When Remo emerged from the baggage area, Harold Smith's complexion looked as gray as a battleship. And as lifeless. His eyes were staring.
"All is well, Emperor Smith," Chiun said in a loud voice, and went on to recount the other thirteen piled trunks.
"We gotta move fast, Smitty," Remo said, adding the blue trunk to the stack.
"What happened?"
"Luggage thieves."
"They're not-"
"Alive? No. Definitely not."
"Oh, God."
"Just hold your water. We gotta get outta here before anything breaks. Where's the rental car?"
"I had planned on taking the subway into town."
"With fourteen freaking trunks!" Remo shouted.
Smith adjusted his tie. "Actually, I had not expected this."
"Okay, I'll rustle us up some transportation."
There was a rental agency that provided vans, and Remo soon had one parked in front of the terminal.
After Remo had got the last of the trunks into the back of the van, he slipped behind the wheel and tried fighting his way out of the stubborn traffic congestion.
"Maybe the subway wasn't so bad an idea, after all," he muttered darkly.
He took the Callahan Tunnel and emerged near the North End, Boston's Italian district.
"I know this place," Chiun muttered.
"We were here about a year ago. That Mafia thing, remember?"
"Pah!"
"Where to, Smitty?"
"South. To Quincy."
"We were there, too. That was where the Mafia don had his headquarters. Come to think of it, weren't you interested in a condo there, Little Father?"
"I will settle for nothing less than a castle, as befits my station as the royal assassin in residence," Chiun sniffed.
Remo took the Southeast Expressway to the Quincy exit, where they pulled three G's holding a curved ramp that took them up over a bridge.
"Go straight," said Smith. Remo ignored the left-hand fork of the bridge.
They passed condos, office buildings, and a pagodalike structure that made Remo grip the wheel with sudden queasiness, but to this relief it turned out to be only a Chinese restaurant, and continued on.
At an intersection dominated by a high school, Smith said, "Take this left."
Remo drove left.
"Stop," said Smith, just as the high school fell behind.
"Where?"
"There!" said Chiun.
Remo stopped and looked out the window. And he saw it.
"You've gotta be kidding," Remo said.
"It is magnificent!" Chiun said rapturously.
Chapter 5
The plan was simple, as Nancy Derringer explained it.
"We block all the jungle trails except the one we hacked out of the Kanda Tract. Are you with me so far?"
Everyone said yes.
"We know the reptile eats fronds and creepers. Probably he prefers so-called jungle chocolate. We'll harvest some and leave a trail."
"Ha!" King scoffed. "What happens when he gets his fill?"
"It takes a lot of jungle chocolate to fill a belly the size of a cement truck," Nancy told him coolly.
The Bantus smiled among themselves to see the mzungu woman who was smarter than the mzungu man.
"But to keep him moving we will intersperse toadstools whenever he seems to be losing interest."
"What makes you think he eats toadstools?" King wanted to know.
"A deep knowledge of sauropod dietary habits and a brain I'm not afraid to use."
Even taciturn Ralph Thorpe laughed out loud at that one.
They got to work. The Bantus, who had earlier been easygoing if not torpid when Skip King had been giving the orders, now found their enthusiasm.
They hacked down trees all along the jungle paths, blocking them so that even a ten-ton dinosaur would find them daunting.
The Kanda Tract was full of the wild mangos known as jungle chocolate. Much of it was untouched because the forest had been too thick for the Apatosaur to do much more than snake his long neck between the trees to bite off pieces of the scrumptious melon.
They harvested only as much as would stay fresh for a four-hour interval. And placed them in quickly woven baskets.
Every hand was needed to make baskets, because they had to carry as many toadstools as they would need.
"I'm not weaving baskets," King snarled when the subject was broached. "That's woman's work."
The Bantus all looked as him with their smiles on automatic pilot and their soft eyes steady as buttons on a coat.
King failed to notice. "I didn't go to Wharton to weave baskets, and that's final."
"Fine," Nancy told him thinly. "Then you may go toadstooling."
The Bantus formed a circle around him, leaving a space in the direction of the escarpment.
Angrily, King nested stacks of baskets together and went off to fill them.
It was approaching sundown when the great Apatosaurus began to stir.
Its leathery, black-rimmed nostrils twitched and blew out a snort. Slowly, the orange eyelids picked themselves up.
Lifting its long banded neck, it craned its masked head about in a semicircle as if seeking an explanation.