When his eyes flew open, somehow the Land Rover was rattling along the crossties between the rusty rails, its tires a hair from scraping the rails on either side.
Despite the bumpiness of the ride, the tires held a true course.
"Mind telling me what you think you are doing?" Remo chattered.
"I think I am seeking a dragon," replied Chiun blandly.
"What makes you think the train the dinosaur is on runs on this track?"
"Because there is only one track. This land is too poor to have more than one. Therefore it is too poor to have more than one railroad line."
"I'll buy that," said Remo, trying to keep his teeth from chipping. "So how do we know we're going in the right direction?"
"We do not."
"Huh?"
Chiun lifted a bony finger. The other held the wheel rock-steady. "But I do. For the track runs in only two directions. And the other goes into the sea. Therefore we are going in the proper direction."
Remo couldn't argue with that logic, so he said, "I see plenty of road on either side of the railbed."
"Which is true now, but may not be true when the tracks enter jungle," Chiun pointed out, unperturbed.
It was dark. The headlights were bobbing and bucking like flashlights attached to a milkshake machine.
Soon, the city was left behind and all was darkness except for the two funnels of light bouncing ahead of them.
Abruptly, the Master of Sinanju stopped the Land Rover.
"It is your turn," he told Remo.
"It is?"
"I have done the hard part. No thinking will be needed until we reach the dragon." He stepped from the vehicle.
"Thanks a lot," said Remo, sliding behind the wheel. He waited for the Master of Sinanju to step around and settle into the passenger seat.
Remo got the Land Rover going. It bumped along clumsily until he shook off inertia; then it was like running a stick along a picket fence, only a hundred times worse.
After a while, he had the rhythm and decided he had better start letting Chiun down gently, or this was going to be a very long night.
"Little Father, I hate to be a wet blanket, but this thing we're after, if it's real, is no dragon."
"You have said that."
"It's a dinosaur."
"Which is a Greek word, greatly corrupted by whites."
"Right. Right. It means . . . uh. It'll come back to me."
"Awful lizard," supplied Chiun.
"Close enough. It means terrible lizard. Dinosaurs were terrible lizards."
"And dragon is a corrupt Greek word, drakon. Which also means a great lizard."
"I didn't know that."
"That is why I am the Reigning Master and you are driving an automobile along a railroad track. Heh heh heft."
Remo let Chiun's self-satisfied cackling roll over him without a comeback.
"Chiun," he said, his voice quiet, "I just don't want you to be disappointed."
The Master of Sinanju arranged his kimono skirts into a more pleasing fall. "Never fear," he said. "I will not be. For I know that the dragon that will prolong my life lies waiting for me in the night before us."
Remo fell silent. Suddenly, he didn't want to reach the end of the tracks. What if Chiun insisted upon slaughtering the Brontosaur? How could Remo stop him? Would he stop him? For if there was one wish Remo could have granted, it was to prolong the life of the person in all the world who mattered most to him-a person who had already lived a full century and could not go on forever ....
Chapter 11
Nancy Derringer couldn't sleep.
Under the circumstances, sleep would have been difficult at best. She was lying on the hard ground and there were fire ants crawling in and out of her clothing. It was night. Pitch dark. But it was not cool. The night air clung to her skin like clammy cotton, heavy and warm, and leeching perspiration from her open pores.
Then there was Skip King.
"I want everybody to know that I haven't given up," he was saying. The other members of the Burger Triumph team, the camera crew and the dispirited Berets, breathed back hushed support.
"We're with you, Mr. King."
"Just say the word."
"Yeah. We can take these third world clowns."
"The first person to try some fool stunt that could only get us or Jack slaughtered," Nancy warned, "I'll kick in the head with both feet and all my might."
King recoiled. "Nancy, what's got into you? We have a chance to escape here."
"We have a chance to bleed all over the ground, too. I vote we wait until morning, and then try to use our brains." She gave King a withering look. "Those of us so blessed."
King squinted at her in the darkness. "This isn't penis envy, is it?"
"How would you know?" Nancy said and rolled over so she wouldn't have to look at him. The man was impossible. And he had an ego bigger than Old Jack himself. Not to mention a whole lot uglier.
Over by the campfire, Commander Malu of the Congress for a Green Africa was singeing the hair off a dead monkey.
It was a white-nosed monkey. Malu had caught it in a liana snare and strangled it with his bare hands. Nancy had shut her eyes to drown out the pitiful creature's cries of distress, and she jammed one ear against the dirt. But the other ear heard every shriek clearly.
Now the dead monkey was suspended, humanlike hands and feet hanging grotesquely over the fire. Malu had tied its tail around its own neck so it was like an anthropomorphic purse. He swung the dead thing in and out of the flames until the skin was singed crisp and brown and as hairless as a human baby.
"Tonight," Commander Malu said exuberantly, "we will feast on white-nosed monkey stew. M-m-m-m-m."
Nancy looked away.
And she saw the white man.
He was a shadow, a manlike moth in the darkness.
He wore black. Nancy would have missed him entirely, except that below the short sleeves of his black T-shirt, his arms were bare. They showed faintly, like long disembodied moth wings.
She noticed that he had incredibly thick wrists connecting his lean forearms to his strong-looking hands.
As Nancy watched, he slipped into a bush and it didn't even rustle.
"No one should lose heart," Skip King was whispering to the others. "We are representatives of one of the greatest multinational corporations in the entire world. If we don't let the board down, I guarantee they won't let us down. Count on it."
It had been like this half the night. King couldn't stop talking. Some people, Nancy knew, became motormouths under nervous strain. King was obviously that way. But did he really believe that B.S. about being corporately untouchable? Nancy decided he was just whistling in the dark.
Then there was a hand at her mouth.
The hand was cool and dry, despite the evening heat.
A calm male voice whispered in her ear. "I'm a friend."
Nancy tried to struggle against the hand, but it held too tight. She felt fingers pluck at her bonds and she almost laughed into the man's fingers. She had been tied with wire and pliers. There was no way the man could undo her fetters without a bolt cutter.
She heard a series of pinging sounds, but no accompanying click of bolt cutters.
Then the blood flowed into her hands and the pain of returning circulation came.
Nancy was lifted bodily and deposited into a prickly clump of nettles. "Just keep your head down and everything will be all right," the voice told her.
"Who-"
The man faded into the hot darkness. She got a glimpse of a strong, masculine face dominated by high cheekbones and deep-set eyes that became skull holes in a bone-hard face as it withdrew from sight.
He made absolutely no sound among the thorn bushes.