The Final Reel

It came from the direction of the main gate. In a decision surely intended to be the ultimate insult, the jeep had been painted in the drab green of the American Army. A sick joke on the part of the man inside.

Remo's eyes narrowed when he saw who was in the passenger's seat. His disgust was clearly visible when the jeep stopped a moment later and Assola al Khobar climbed out. Hurrying, the terrorist's driver reached into the back seat, recovering a long plastic garment bag.

The Arab's expression was superior behind his gnarl of facial hair. Pausing on his way to the main executive's building, the terrorist looked from Remo to Chiun. His face split into a wicked smile.

"I did not have a chance to thank you," al Khobar said to the Master of Sinanju, his tone condescending. He looked at Remo as he spoke. "I believe you saved my life."

Eyes flat, Chiun folded his hands inside the voluminous sleeves of his kimono.

"Do not thank me, murderer of women and children," he said coldly. "Had my emperor not dispatched me here, my son would have done the world a much needed service."

"Your son?" Assola said doubtfully. He walked over, standing toe-to-toe with Remo. "You are a government agent of some sort?" he pressed, jutting out his scraggly beard.

"Actually I'm with William Morris," Remo said levelly. "We're going to have to redo those head shots of yours again. The film developers keep committing suicide."

The urge to strike out at the arrogant Saudi terrorist was almost overpowering. Remo clenched his jaw tightly as he stared into the eyes of the man whose acts of terror had cost countless innocent victims their lives.

Al Khobar's smile broadened. "Admit it. Do not admit it. It does not matter. There is nothing your nation can do to defeat our glorious plan."

"As a flag-waving jingoist, you'll find we can be pretty resourceful when we have to be," Remo said tightly.

Al Khobar didn't seem convinced. He wore the look of someone who had the winning hand and clearly knew it.

"Will you be so bold when your depraved land lies in ashes?" the millionaire terrorist smirked. Not waiting for a response, al Khobar wheeled so quickly his military boots made thick black scuffs on the pavement. Snapping his fingers, he marched into the nearest building. His aide followed dutifully, crinkling garment bag held carefully aloft.

As Assola al Khobar disappeared inside the Taurus office complex, Remo spied just a few inches of khaki material jutting from the bottom of the bag.

"He gets his fatigues dry-cleaned?" Remo grumbled. "And he says we're decadent."

When he turned to Chiun, he found the Master of Sinanju had begun to wander away with Hank Bindle. The wily Korean was discussing himself, his script and Barbra Streisand's hair. Not necessarily in that order.

As he stood there, a terrible feeling of aloneness engulfed Remo.

The movie people all around him were without a clue. The fate of the Middle East and possibly the world was hanging in the balance, and all they were worried about was losing the light.

"If ignorance is bliss, Hollywood's got to be the happiest place on earth," Remo muttered.

As yet another camel released the contents of its bladder, he wandered morosely away from the makeshift oasis, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his chinos.

Chapter 15

The wild celebrations in the streets of Akkadad put to shame any previous festivities. Even those of a few weeks ago commemorating Ebla's independence had not been so grand.

Men screamed in exultation. Gunfire ripped the air in bursts of frenzied jubilation. Day and night, torches burned from metal braziers around the Great Sultan's Palace. Their glow silhouetted revelers into misshapen shadows across the high walls of the Eblan seat of power.

The potshots that had pocked palace parapets from time to time over the past decade and a half were no more.

The West had been brought to its knees. America-desecrator of the Arabian Peninsula-was impotent, helpless to strike at the loftiest seat of righteous Arab power.

By the grace of Allah, the heart of Ebla's sultan had been returned to them. And with its return the people of Ebla had been whipped into a fever of jihad-inspired enthusiasm.

Sultan Omay watched his subjects from the Fishbowl.

The bulletproof glass was still firmly in place. The twin threats of American assassination and his own people's joyful, reckless aim kept it there. He had come too far to be stopped now.

The excitement of the past two days had taken its toll on the ailing sultan. Sleeplessness and fatigue seemed to have aged him another twenty years. More and more he was beginning to resemble the mummies of his ancient Eblan ancestors, found years before in ruins near modern Tel Mardikh in Syria.

The sultan's white-knuckled hands gripped the railing of his veranda for support as he thought of his forebears.

Those had been the glory days of the Eblan empire. Back then Ebla knew real strength. When they were alive, those mummies had presided over an empire both rich and powerful. Sultan Omay had inherited none of that ancient greatness. His was a kingdom of goat-herds and nomads.

The puny pools of oil that had been discovered in the desert outside of Telk Madsad had given him his great fortune. But those wells were long dry. A grand metaphor for Ebla itself.

Childless, the sultanate would end with him. Lately his prime minister and some other officials had been suggesting he establish free elections. Distant relatives of the sultan had been looking to ascend to the throne. There was even a push among the people to install an ayatollah as leader and create a fundamentalist Islamic republic.

He was not even dead, and they were already circling, snatching out with grabbing claws, eager to pick his parched, tired bones.

Let them.

It was all over anyway. They just didn't know it yet.

Ebla was destined to sink into the desert dust. But he would give them cause to celebrate first. Their ancient nation would rise again, if only as a dying gesture.

And Sultan Omay still had an ace up his sleeve. Something no one yet knew about. Not even the Saudi, Assola al Khobar, so proud of the millions he had spent in support of his fatwa.

The Great Plan...

The glass-enclosed box was hot. Sunlight beat down upon him. Omay felt light-headed in the intense heat.

Still much work to do.

Turning, he stepped from the balcony. He had the shuffle of a nursing-home patient.

How mocking a thing Death was. His mind was as sharp as it had ever been, yet his body was failing him. Much faster now, it seemed, than before.

Omay walked carefully out into the hallway. He took his private elevator downstairs. An Ebla Arab Army colonel was waiting for the doors to open.

"They are ready, Sultan," the colonel announced with a crisp, British-style salute.

Sultan Omay nodded. He continued walking in the same unhurried pace as before. The colonel fell in beside him.

"Have they been told why they are here?"

"No, Sultan."

Omay allowed himself a wicked smile. Around his eyes the waxy skin bunched into tangled knots. When they reached a set of doors at the end of the corridor, the colonel stepped abruptly ahead of the sultan.

Another soldier was there. Each military man grabbed a door handle. Standing at attention, they pulled their respective doors open wide. The leader of Ebla shambled slowly between them. Alone.

The room into which he stepped was large and ornate. Rich tapestries hung from walls. Banners in the traditional reds of Ebla's ruler stretched from high arches.

Huge, brilliantly lit crystal chandeliers stretched down from the ceiling's center beam. And beneath them sat hundreds of reporters from nations all around the world.

All were men. The sultan had forbade female reporters from attending. At the appearance of the sickly monarch the reporters clamored to their feet. Flashes from cameras popped from around the periphery of the crowd. Videocameras whirred endless spools of tape.

In the wake of the kidnappings, the international press had descended like a swarm of biblical locusts on Akkadad, but had been denied access to the palace since the start of the crisis. As a result the hunger for any scrap of information had grown exponentially with each passing hour. When it was announced by the palace that the sultan had finally consented to be interviewed, the thunder from the feet of a thousand stampeding reporters rattled windows as far away as Baghdad.

Almost every news outlet was set to broadcast the press conference live. Every camera in the room tracked the steps of the frail figure as he walked through the doors and onto the dais. He stepped up to the podium.

"Sultan Omay! Sultan Omay!"

The chorus of voices screamed the name of the aged ruler as he settled in behind the podium.

The Eblan monarch looked weaker to them than at any time in the past. Even back during the near fatal bout with cancer that had turned him from the path of terror. His eyes were bleary, his body shaky. He gripped the edge of the podium for support.

"Sultan Omay!" In the first row of seats a reporter from America's BCN network screamed the name so loudly, ropy veins bulged in his neck. In his desperation to be the first to shout a question, he stepped eagerly forward.

It was the first and last break in protocol. The press rapidly discovered things were not as they had been during the sultan's days as the Great Peacemaker.

Armed soldiers had ushered the reporters into the room and now patrolled the edges of the large crowd. When the BCN man broke ranks, a guard jumped in front of him. With calm dispassion he slammed the butt of his rifle into the jaw of the reporter. The man dropped like the Tokyo stock market.

For the rest of the gathered press it was as though the palace servants had started pumping tranquilizer gas through the air vents. Catholic schoolchildren playing musical chairs could not have found their seats more quickly.

Soldiers dragged the bleeding and unconscious BCN reporter from the hall. The press dutifully filmed him up to the moment his legs disappeared through the rear door.

The door closed with a palace-rumbling thud.

At the podium the sultan waited for the room to grow completely silent before opening his mouth. When he finally spoke, his words were a pained rasp.

"Jihad is an individual duty," he began, soft voice barely audible.

Those in the room and around the world strained to hear him as he spoke into the angled microphone. "I act now as both an individual and as a leader of men. To the folly of peace have I dedicated myself these many years. But it was a peace dictated by the West in terms that satisfied only the interests of the enemies of all that Islam finds holy." The sultan coughed loudly, face seeming to grow weaker at the effort to speak.

"The Americans occupy our lands, plunder our riches, dictate to our rulers, terrorize our citizens, wreak cultural genocide against all Muslims and threaten by word and deed the very peace they claim to hold so dear. Enough. Enough!"

Omay seemed to grow stronger with the repetition. A frail hand slapped the podium.

"Enough!" he bellowed, voice so strong it startled in its ferocity.

More coughing. Cameras whirred, broadcasting the spasm to a global audience. Omay took a steadying breath. It seemed to restore some strength to him.

"The Aqsa mosque and Holy Mosque must be liberated. The Israeli occupation of the Prophet's Night Travel Land must end. The perversions of America must not be allowed to bleed into the Muslim world. To permit this is to declare war on God." Omay shook his head somberly. "Yet, in spite of the actions Ebla has taken to comply with God's order, America remains mute. It is time to loosen the infidel's tongue."

This was a cue. A door at the side of the stage opened.

The sultan afforded a single, bland look toward the open door. A few soldiers stood beyond, unseen by the press. Strong hands held fast a quaking, blindfolded figure.

Omay's rheumy eyes were dead. "To America I say this-there is no discussion. There will be no brokered deal. There will be total capitulation or there will be death."

The soldiers offstage reacted as they were meant to. Off came the blindfold. With a shove the man they'd been holding was propelled out onto the raised platform.

It was Helena Eckert's aide.

The man who'd awakened America's chief diplomat on that last flight to Akkadad blinked away stabs of pain caused by the unaccustomed light. Between the blindfold and his pitchblack cell, he'd seen little light since being taken captive.

Flashbulbs popped at his appearance. Reporters remained in their seats, eyes riveted to the stage. The young diplomat staggered to within a few feet of the Eblan ruler. Close enough for Omay's purposes.

A small semiautomatic handgun had been left on the shelf beneath the upper angled platform of the podium, the safety off.

When the young man had stumbled close enough that there was no chance for error, Sultan Omay sin-Khalam calmly removed the weapon and pointed. Bang!

The crackle of the gun over the microphone jolted the assembled press.

A hole erupted in the neck of the Great Peacemaker's victim. Choking blood, the diplomat grabbed his throat.

Bang!

The chest this time.

The man didn't fall. He seemed dumbfounded at what was going on. He blinked hard over and over, blind to his own murder. Tears of pain and fear streamed with rivers of blood.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Over and over again Omay shot, eyes growing more and more wild with each concussive blast. Blood splattered the first three rows of reporters. A few clutched stomachs and mouths, turning their faces away from the carnage. The rest stared, wide-eyed, at the grisly sight. In shock.

Bang! Click-click-click

The hammer struck hollowly against the empty clip. Omay didn't notice.

As the sultan continued to pull uselessly against the trigger, the diplomat's eyes finally found focus. And as soon as they did, they rolled back into the young man's head.

The body dropped, bleeding, to the stage. Feet kicked feebly as the last electrical impulses from the brain fired before death. Crimson bubbles popped as blood gurgled from wounds in neck and chest, soaking the carpeted surface of the podium.

Only when the body fell did Omay seem to break out of his trance. Looking down on the dead man, the sultan smiled.

Blood had exploded back, flecking his disease-ravaged face with spots of glistening red. The liquid was like an energizing elixir.

Gun in hand he turned, beaming, to the gathered world press.

"Any questions?" Sultan Omay asked.

Chapter 16

Face a stone mask of disgust, Dr. Harold Smith watched the murder as it was broadcast live to the entire world.

He watched the body stand impossibly upright for far, far too long. Watched the young man, barely out of his twenties, stagger and turn away from the hail of bullets. Watched as the secretary of state's aide felt numbly at his own wounds, eyes blind from the sudden stab of bright light.

The aide made a valiant effort to stand, but in the end he could only go the way that all men eventually must. His legs simply buckled beneath him and he fell. Seemingly in slow motion. He landed almost gently.

On the screen Omay licked his dry lips delightedly as he cast his eyes across the bloodied corpse. He then turned back to face the gathered press. When he asked for questions, murmurs of confusion rippled across the room. It was as if to Omay the dead man at his feet were no more than a prop to make a point.

As Smith watched the televised conference unfold, he was astonished to hear an actual question.

The speaker was a reporter from Independent Television News.

"Sultan Omay, does this action on your part place the rest of the hostages in any further danger?"

It was obscene. It was stupid. It was ghoulish. To the reporter it was also news. And decency and compassion had no place in journalism.

"That will be up to America," Omay replied crisply. Blood still speckled his wan face.

The ITN reporter had cracked the ice. More questions followed, though admittedly not many. The queries were about Eblan troops massed at the Israeli border, Israel's own defensive deployments and Sultan Omay's ultimate plans for the Middle East.

Omay answered each question calmly and rationally.

The body stayed there the entire time. None of the soldiers present made any effort to remove it. Watching from his Spartan Folcroft office, Smith shook his head in utter disgust. It was without a doubt the most surreal, horrific moment in the history of the medium.

Fortunately for Smith the blue contact phone jangled atop his desk. He reached for it, relieved for the distraction.

"Smitty, you've got to send me to Ebla," Remo's voice announced without preamble. There was a hard edge to it.

"No," Smith said flatly.

"Didn't you see it?" Remo snapped.

"I am watching the news conference right now."

"News conference?" Remo asked, incredulous. "That was goddamn cold-blooded murder."

"If you are looking for disagreement from me, you are not going to get it," Smith said evenly.

"So send me in," Remo pleaded.

"I cannot," Smith replied tightly.

"Why the hell not?"

Smith closed his eyes. The news conference continued to play out on the computer screen buried beneath the surface of his wide, high-tech desk.

"For one thing there is still the matter of al Khobar's Hollywood trap," the CURE director said.

"Maybe the soldiers here are the trap," Remo offered. "Maybe there isn't anything else. Did you think of that?"

"That was not the impression Omay gave the President. He has informed me that the sultan seemed confident that there was more for us to contend with than a band of Eblan soldiers loose in California."

"Such as?" Remo asked leadingly.

"Unknown at present," Smith admitted wearily. "Remo, did you see anything there that the sultan might believe to be his trump card?"

"Gee whiz, you mean other than the marauding, looting army he's landed on U.S. soil? Uh, no, Smitty, I'm coming up empty on that one."

Smith ignored the sarcasm. "Most of his forces have been there for quite some time," he explained. "Given what I have since learned from the Taurus manifests, it is clear Omay could have set the bulk of his army loose weeks ago."

"So he's big into delayed gratification," Remo said, exasperated. "So what?"

"It might be significant," Smith argued. "Do you know, Remo, what was in those storage containers you saw at the harbor in Long Beach?"

"No," Remo said slowly. "I left my X-ray specs back home." His sarcastic tone was somewhat dulled with mention of the harbor. He was still thinking that this was partially his fault for not noticing anything wrong in his search for Assola al Khobar.

"I have checked the shipping records," Smith said. "Something clearly does not add up. Satellite and ground-intelligence sources have located almost to the last jeep the equipment Omay has on the ground throughout Los Angeles County. The shipments for the past several weeks account for the tanks, jeeps and all other heavy equipment detected so far. Presumably many if not all of the men were sent in aboard the cargo ships, as well."

"Not exactly luxury berths," Remo commented.

"In a jihad comfort is the last order of business," Smith explained. He continued. "Those last two ships-the ones you saw being off-loaded-were packed with cargo containers. You are certain of that, correct?"

"I saw them with my own eyes," Remo said.

Smith nodded grimly. "Remo, I have not been able to account for the cargo aboard one of those two ships."

Remo blinked. "Smitty," he began slowly, "there were hundreds of containers on that ship."

"Yes," Smith said gravely. "Holding unknown cargo."

Remo exhaled loudly. "So you think the old bastard really does have something hidden up his turban?"

"Until we learn what was aboard that ship, we need to work under the assumption that he does. I will attempt to uncover his ultimate scheme from this end."

"You know there is an easier way," Remo said. "I could wring the information out of Assola." He sounded as if he'd enjoy the prospect.

Smith's response was decisive. "Under no circumstances are you to do anything provocative," the CURE director commanded. "At this point to attack al Khobar could have unknown repercussions. Perhaps the man himself is some sort of triggering mechanism. A subordinate might have been assigned to signal Ebla if he is compromised."

"The only subordinate I've seen near him is the guy who schlepps his dry-cleaning," Remo said, remembering the Eblan soldier with the plastic laundry bag.

"What?" Smith asked.

"Nothing," Remo said with a sigh. "I just-I just wish there was something we could do, Smitty."

"I share your frustration," Smith said, "but at present we are all hostages."

Smith turned his attention back to his computer and the bizarre news conference taking place in Ebla. It was winding down. As Smith watched, Omay left the dais, walking so uncertainly it seemed a question if he would make it off the stage alive. He shuffled past the body of the fallen State Department official and was gone. Back through the doors at which he had first appeared. They closed as if by magic behind his shrunken frame.

"There is a possibility of action on our part," the CURE director said, no hint of emotion in his voice. "But it would have to be synchronized precisely. I do not think it is feasible. It is more a doomsday scenario. The President indicated to me as recently as an hour ago that he hopes for a peaceful diplomatic resolution."

The sound from Remo's hotel TV bled over the line. He was still watching the action in Ebla. "That's shot to hell after this," Remo replied. As the reporters began to file from the hall, Eblan soldiers strode onto the dais near the bullet-riddled body.

"The situation will have to be too grim to resolve any other conceivable way," Smith said. "My alternate plan will only be used as a last resort."

A world away the limp body was dragged indelicately from the stage. On separate coasts of the United States, each man watched the grisly scene, face straining to control revulsion.

"We're way beyond that already, Smitty," Remo said. And his hollow voice was as cold as the grave.

Chapter 17

For Assola al Khobar, becoming the most reviled terrorist in the waning days of the twentieth century had been the ultimate act of late-found teenage rebellion.

"Look at you, Assola," his father, a Saudi Arabian billionaire, had said three months after his son returned from college in the West.

Assola had been watching The Graduate on the big-screen TV in the main living room of his family's estate in Riddah on the Red Sea. He had to crane his neck to see around his wealthy father.

"You have not moved off your backside since returning home," the elder al Khobar continued. "Is this the way you wish to spend your life?"

"You are in the way," Assola said blandly.

A spark of fiery rage erupted in his father's eyes. The older man marched over to the VCR. Grabbing it in his powerful hands, he wrenched the machine from its resting place in the entertainment center. The last Assola saw of it, the VCR and the precious movie it contained were sailing out the window in the direction of the Red Sea.

"I was watching that," Assola complained unhappily.

His father threw up his hands. "What am I to do with you, Assola?" he implored the heavens. "I have offered you employment a hundred times."

"I do not like construction work," Assola sniffed. He had always made it clear what he thought of the business through which his father had made his billions.

"It is no wonder," the senior al Khobar scoffed. "You are too weak to even lift a hammer. If not a laborer, you could be an office worker, yet you show no aptitude for finance or sales. I would make you a janitor, but you are too lazy even for that. You are no good at anything."

The words did not sting. In truth Assola could not disagree. He had never shown interest or aptitude for anything in life.

He finally struck a deal with his father. It was too great a shame for him to stay at home. The old man would give him his inheritance early if Assola agreed to leave Saudi Arabia and never come back. For Assola al Khobar, the agreement was worth every penny of the 250 million dollars he received.

Rich and feckless, Assola wandered the Arab world for several years searching for anything that might spark some life in his terminal case of ennui. It was fate coupled with boredom that led him to Afghanistan during the height of that nation's guerilla war with the old Soviet Union.

Assola was enjoying a forbidden drink in a ratty bar in Faizabad when the explosions started.

The dirt floor of the bar rocked from the impacts outside. Bottles crashed from collapsing shelves. Men yelled and raced for the exits. In fear for his life, Assola bolted after them, hoping they would lead him to safety.

They led him directly into the mouth of the attack. The five Russians MiL helicopters had flown in from a base in Tajikistan to the north. They swept down on Faizabad like Apocalyptic horsemen. The very air shrieked in pain.

Missiles exploded flaming trails of orange from wing rocket pods. The four-barreled machine guns mounted in the noses rattled deafeningly, spitting death-dealing lead at the scattering hordes. All around, people screamed.

But they were not screams of fear. These men of Faizabad reacted like trained soldiers.

As the Russian helicopters swept around for another pass at the city, weapons were brought from a wood-and-grass hovel. Cowering in the street at the rear of a rusted Rambler, Assola got his first up-close view of both the famous American Stinger missiles and the infamous mujahideen.

The swarm of MiLs had spun around. The lead helicopter was nearly upon them when a scraggly-faced old man swept a Stinger to his shoulder. With a casualness that could not but impress Assola al Khobar, the man aimed and fired.

The missile flew a steady course into the under-carriage of the nearest MiL. The helicopter dutifully exploded.

It dropped from the sky like a wounded beast. Behind it a cloud of acrid smoke filled the air.

To Assola's horror the remaining four helicopters burst through the shroud of black smoke, weapons blazing. Three more were taken out as easily as the first. Assola was relieved when only the fifth remained. His relief lasted up until he realized that there were no fighters near him and that the helicopter was heading his way.

Terrified, Assola began crawling rapidly away. Beside the Rambler his shaking hand struck something soft and wet.

The mujahideen fighter, on whose bleeding chest Assola al Khobar had dropped his hand, groaned. An unused rocket launcher lay in the frozen dirt beside the dying man.

Assola grabbed the fighter by his shirtfront. "Get up! Get up!" he pleaded.

The man shook his head. "I am shot," he wheezed.

Assola's eyes were wild. The ground shook. All other sounds were muted by the ferocity of the MiL's pounding rotors. The helicopter was nearly upon them.

"But you must shoot it down!" Assola yelled.

"I am dying," the man gasped. Pinkish froth bubbled from between his parted lips. "You must do it."

Assola's eyes went wide. It was the first thing anyone had asked him to do since he'd failed to take out the garbage for his mother back in Saudi Arabia. "What do I do?" Assola asked, panicked.

They were spotted cowering in the dirt. The nose machine guns of the MiL roared to life. With every inch the gunner drew a more accurate bead.

"Point it and fire!" the man screamed in what would be his final words.

As the mujahideen fighter breathed his last, Assola wheeled, missile in hand. Before he even knew it, he had depressed the fire button. The Stinger shrieked to life.

The missile roared off Assola's bucking shoulder. As if suddenly possessed with a mind of its own, the rocket soared into the smoke-streaked Afghan sky. It made a beeline straight into the belly of the approaching MiL.

Like the others before it, the helicopter erupted in a flash of blinding white. Streaking acrid smoke, it plummeted to earth, crashing in an explosion of splintering wood into the very bar at which Assola had been imbibing.

Assola al Khobar gasped. His breath made hot puffs of excited steam in the frigid air.

"Did you see what I did?" he exclaimed to the dead man at his feet. He stared at the burning bar, eyes alight with a fresh fire. A fire of purpose.

And in the ensuing flames that burned the building to ashes, Assola al Khobar was reborn.

The mujahideen accepted their new member joyfully. Even though Assola shied away from direct confrontation with Soviet forces over the ensuing few years of the rebel war, his pockets were deep. That made him a friend.

For his part Assola reveled in his game of war. He had discovered late in life that his destiny did not lie in driving nails or welding beams, as was his father's wish. Assola al Khobar realized that the thing in life he liked most was dealing death. Preferably from a great distance, so as to ensure the safety of Assola al Khobar.

When the timetable for Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was signed in Geneva in 1988, Assola's contacts around the world were already firmly in place. His segue into global terrorism was as graceful as a dance step from one of the old Fred Astaire musicals he used to watch from the air-conditioned comfort of his father's sofa.

He proclaimed the wholesale murder he dealt in as holy, wrapped himself in the banners of jihad. And as time wore on, he actually began to believe the religiousness of purpose he continually spouted.

But the truth was, if the infidel world were suddenly, miraculously wiped off the face of the planet, Assola al Khobar would simply turn his attention on his fellow Muslims. For the renegade Saudi millionaire, killing was a lot like potato chips. It was just too good to stop at one.

IT WAS ASSOLA AL KHOBAR'S greatest victory. Therefore, it was Islam's greatest victory.

America had been brought to its knees. The world's only remaining superpower was helpless to react:

The Ebla Arab Army soldiers that he now commanded marched through the streets of America with impunity. It was a show of both strength and defiance.

Al Khobar had insisted that the Arabs parade every two hours-to mock the helpless nation in whose side he had shoved the knife that could not be removed.

Every time the occupying army went out on maneuvers, television stations from nearby Los Angeles sent dozens of helicopters into the air. At the moment the aircraft buzzed like angry hornets above the column of tanks as it made its way up a closed section of the Hollywood Freeway between Santa Monica Boulevard and Ventura Freeway.

Assola al Khobar could not help but be reminded of that first MiL he had shot down so many years ago.

This wasn't the first time the Ebla Arab Army's American detachment had plunged brazenly en masse onto this bleached-out stretch of multilane highway. However, it was the first time Assola al Khobar had gone along for the ride.

Al Khobar posed boldly, half-out of the open lid of the desert tank's broad turret. One military boot was pressed in a cocky stance against the thick metal bulwark at the lip of the opening. White sun beating down atop his checkered kaffiyeh, al Khobar surveyed the land beyond the barriers of the freeway as if it were his own.

Above their heads a single chopper broke from the buzzing flock. It swooped down over the column of tanks, passing over the upturned faces of Eblan soldiers. As the shadow of the lightweight aircraft flitted over him, al Khobar clearly saw the wide, unblinking eye of a videocamera jutting out the open side door. He pretended he didn't notice it.

Posing for his own private film, the terrorist remained proudly defiant as the big tank rumbled down the desolate freeway. His jaw of scraggly beard pointed forward as the helicopter roared past in the opposite direction.

News at six and eleven. Probably right now assuming the live coverage was continuing.

Al Khobar's heart thrilled at the notoriety.

So many of his adult acts had been in secret. Always skulking, always hiding. But this. This was what he'd truly longed for from the start. Fame.

Like so many before him, al Khobar had come to Hollywood to become famous. But unlike nearly all of them, Assola al Khobar had succeeded. He prayed to Allah that his construction-worker father was watching.

Part of him felt like Charlemagne, Caesar and Alexander the Great. The rest felt more like Mel Gibson, Cary Grant and his beloved Omar Sharif.

Assola al Khobar was receiving more press coverage than O. J. Simpson during his infamous freeway escape attempt. And he was reveling in every minute of it.

Far down the line the news helicopter banked left. Cutting away from the tank, it soared out over the wide abyss below the elevated portion of freeway.

From the rear of the column, a few randomly fired bullets suddenly rattled toward the aircraft. They clattered against the side of the helicopter.

Al Khobar was instantly horrified.

Hearing the noise, he twisted in place atop the lead tank, dropping his foot down onto the inside ladder.

The aircraft had responded to the attack by pulling far away from the rolling line of tanks. Al Khobar caught sight of it as it swooped back toward the clustered pack of hovering helicopters and moved into position behind the rest.

All of the choppers seemed to respond the same way to the gunfire. Noses lifting, they pulled farther away.

"No!" al Khobar shouted up to the helicopters. He waved to them in a beckoning fashion. "Come back! It is safe!"

They weren't listening. All at once the wounded chopper broke away from the pack to head back in the direction of Los Angeles. A thin trail of trickling black smoke followed it.

Furious, al Khobar twisted in place. He looked directly at the men atop the two side-by-side tanks behind his own.

"I have told you before, you sons of desert dogs!" he screamed. "For Allah's sake, no shooting at the press!"

The nearest Eblans nodded dumb understanding. The order was barked down the line of military vehicles.

But the damage was already done. The helicopters remained at a cautious distance. There would be no more close-ups of him grandly posing for the six-o'clock news.

Glumly Assola al Khobar settled back into the open turret lid of his desert tank.

Unmolested, the tanks rattled onward down the deserted California freeway.

Chapter 18

Even after all that had taken place over the past few days, the more recalcitrant members of the United States press corps were still willing to give Sultan Omay sin-Khalam the benefit of the doubt. Before the press conference, that is.

"After all, Cokie," said Stan Ronaldman on a special prime-time edition of his Sunday-morning show, "his only real crime is hating the United States and who, after all, can blame him for that?"

But any lingering notions of goodwill dissolved two minutes into Omay's press conference.

The erstwhile Great Peacemaker had developed an instant and irrecoverable reputation the moment the first shot was fired at Helena Eckert's aide. The subsequent shots, coupled with the look of demonic possession in the eyes of Sultan Omay, had made it impossible for the international press to label him anything more charitable than "mentally unbalanced."

In America in the immediate wake of the televised murder, Ebla-hating became a national pastime. The practical effect of the young diplomat's death, Ebla's military build-up along Israel's border and the occupation of Hollywood was a call for action like none seen since the bombing of Pearl Harbor. They were lining up at armed-forces recruitment offices around the United States. The military was turning applicants away.

A cottage industry of anti-Eblan T-shirts, mugs, caps, key chains and bumper stickers had sprung up overnight. Sales figures were staggering.

It was the furor created during the Iranian hostage crisis of the late 1970s, multiplied by a factor of twenty.

The passion of patriotism rose like a national tide every time the parade of Eblan soldiers passed along the by-now-familiar stretch of the Hollywood Freeway.

Every two-hour tour by the U.S. contingent of the Ebla Arab Army brought the rest of the civilian population of the nation closer to invading the state themselves. White House spin masters were out in force trying to explain to the nation why this was not the best course of action. It was a tough sell.

Sitting in his Hollywood hotel, Remo Williams shared the frustration of his fellow Americans. Smith had insisted he wait, and so he would. But like the rest of the nation, he didn't know how long he could sit on his thumbs before he finally snapped. He had barely moved from the same spot on the floor all afternoon. His deep-set eyes were glued to the flickering images on the TV screen. The column of tanks had just taken an off-ramp near the Hollywood Bowl.

Threatening to collapse the raised structure, the huge tanks rumbled down the ramp in single file. Thick treads chewed pavement.

They'd return again two hours later. Like clockwork.

And Remo would still be sitting here. Waiting. As he watched the last of the tanks roll down the ramp, Remo's supersensitive ears detected a familiar confident glide coming from the hallway. His eyes were flat when a moment later the frail form of the Master of Sinanju passed into the room.

As he closed the door, the old Korean noted the television.

"They are not playing that same program again?" Chiun complained dully.

"It isn't a show and you know it," Remo said from the floor. A cup of tepid tea sat near his knees.

"Not one worth watching repeatedly-that much is certain," Chiun said. He nodded to al Khobar's tank. "Now, if the brilliant Rowan Atkinson was in that first vehicle, perhaps steering it with his feet, then you would have a program that might bear repeated viewings."

Remo wasn't in the mood. "Cram it, Little Father," he growled. "These bastards have invaded America, and you've got nothing better to do than traipse around Hollywood like the freaking Korean Dorothy Parker."

The look of frustration on his pupil's face was great. The Master of Sinanju paused in the middle of the room. Looking to the image on television, he nodded somberly.

"Let it not be said that the Master of Sinanju does not feel empathy," he intoned gravely.

"Yeah, right," Remo snorted.

But the old man's face was suddenly shadowed with deep understanding. "Remember, Remo, Korea has been conquered many times in the past. The Japanese and Chinese always thought the rice was whiter across our fair borders. But even though invading armies came and went, Sinanju was never affected."

"So what are you saying, we should just wait them out and everything'll be hunky-dory?" Remo asked dubiously.

Chiun's happy mood blossomed full once more. "Empathy does not mean that I actually care," he lilted. "Is the tea water still hot?"

Not waiting for a response, he stepped placidly over to the hotel room's small kitchenette.

"Yeah? Well you should be more concerned," Remo called, annoyed, after him. "If this turns out to be Uncle Sam's last birthday, the two of us will be lining up at the Sinanju soup kitchen."

"There are other ways to make a living," Chiun replied mysteriously.

The admission shocked Remo. For Chiun the job of professional assassin was the most noble calling one could have. For a moment Remo forgot about the Arab occupation.

"Don't tell me Bindle and Marmelstein actually bought your script?" Remo asked warily.

Chiun came back out of the kitchenette, a steaming cup of green tea in his wrinkled hands.

"Not yet," the old Korean admitted. "They have turned it over to a trusted subordinate known as a reader of scripts." He sank to the floor in front of the TV.

"Yeah, I remember," Remo said. "Neither one of those boobs knows how to read."

"Reading is overrated," Chiun sniffed. "They need only recognize great writing when it is read to them." He sipped pensively as he watched the Eblan tanks drive along Sunset Boulevard. "Change the channel."

"No. Look, even if they want to make it, don't be too sure there's gonna be enough dough left when it comes time."

"And what is that supposed to mean?"

"The two of them were spending money like water last time I saw them," Remo said.

"Taurus is the mightiest studio in this province," Chiun intoned. "Its coffers are deep."

"Just a word to the wise," Remo sighed.

"As offered from the brainless," Chiun retorted. They sat in silence for a few long minutes. The tanks had disappeared from the screen, replaced by the serious faces and empty insights of network reporters and anchormen.

Remo didn't know exactly how much time had passed when he first heard the noise.

It started far away. A loud, protracted rumbling. For a moment Remo thought it might be thunder. But as he listened he realized the sound he was hearing was artificial not natural. The relentless, echoing rumble was joined by a chorus of mechanical grinding and squeaking sounds-almost obscured by the great volume of the louder noise.

"Tanks," Remo said, jumping to his feet.

He ran to the window. Drawing back the long, ceiling-to-floor drapes, he peered down at the street. The first of the Ebla Arab Army tanks had rounded the corner. The ground shook beneath their great treads as they rumbled up the street, figures of strength and menace.

Assola al Khobar perched like a conquering tyrant in the front of the lead tank. The tank's turret swiveled back and forth, threatening in turn the buildings on either side of the street.

Chiun joined Remo at the window. His fingers grasped opposing wrists inside the voluminous sleeves of his kimono.

"When this is all over, I'm going to enjoy stuffing his flea-infested head down that cannon barrel," Remo commented flatly, nodding down to the terrorist.

"Bindle and Marmelstein do not like him," Chiun replied in a bland tone.

Remo raised an eyebrow. "That mean I have your blessing?"

The Master of Sinanju shrugged. "In its five-thousand-year history Sinanju has not seen a single day's work from Ebla. The loss of one lapdog to the latest skinflint to roost upon the Khalamite throne will not be noticed by anyone that matters. As long-" Chiun raised a cautionary talon "-as it does not affect my movie."

"I'm gonna hold you to that, Little Father." Remo looked back down on the column of tanks. There were almost fifty of the heavy military vehicles. It took nearly forty-five minutes for them to grumble their deliberate way up the wide road in front of the hotel.

Al Khobar had long since vanished by the time the last straggling tank pulled into view.

The sight of the column of old-fashioned foreign military vehicles driving unmolested through an American street filled Remo with loathing. He had seen the worst parts of his nation for so many years that he didn't think he would ever feel as strongly about America as he had in his youth. But with each tank that passed beneath his window, the level of bile in his throat rose until he thought he'd burst in angry frustration.

And, he soon discovered, he wasn't alone.

As Remo and Chiun watched the last of the tanks pass by, a lone figure stepped from beneath the awning of the building across the street. Remo plainly saw the revolver in his hand.

There were only two tanks left. One farther up the street, the other just beneath Remo's window.

The man with the gun stepped in front of the rear tank. He raised his gun in a marksman's pose, propping his gun arm up with his free hand. Hand thus steadied, he promptly began firing at the oncoming face of the final tank.

The gunshots had no effect. The bullets pinged uselessly off the heavy armor plating.

Up ahead the second-last tank slowed to a stop. It hesitated for a moment, as if surveying the scene. And, while Remo and Chiun watched, the turret began to turn slowly around. Back in the direction of the lone shooter.

"We'd better get down there," Remo said sharply.

"Why?" Chiun asked. "We will be able to see better from up here."

But Remo was no longer beside him. Chiun frowned, turning.

The door to their suite swung open wide.

The Master of Sinanju sighed. It was as he'd feared. Remo was already turning into a Hollywood youth. Desperate to call attention to himself, if only to step out from beneath the shadow of his celebrity father. It would only get worse when Chiun's movie came out. Remo would have to be put on suicide watch when the Academy Awards rolled around.

Offering silent commiseration to Marlon Brando for the travails he'd suffered with his children, the Master of Sinanju flounced out the door after his own wayward son.

Chapter 19

Anyone who claimed to never want to be a hero was a bald-faced liar. Lieutenant Frank Hanion, LAPD, retired, knew this for a fact. Everybody wanted to be a hero. But there were very few people who were actually capable of heroism.

Hanlon was one of them.

A twenty-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, Frank had been a hero from his first day in blue to his last day as a detective. Even though he had never fired his gun once while on duty and had spent most of his time on the force touring grammar schools as part of the department's antidrug campaign, Frank knew down into every last red blood cell in his uniform-blue bone marrow that he was a hero. He had just never had an opportunity to demonstrate that fact to anyone.

Until the Occupation.

There was nothing America could do. It faced a simultaneous threat, both at home and abroad. The President and other government officials were paralyzed. American citizens in the occupied areas were cautioned to stay in their homes.

Appeals for calm during this difficult time only brought to a head Frank's long-smoldering call to heroism.

This crisis didn't demand calmness. Quite the opposite. It screamed out for men of action. Heroes. Of which Lieutenant Frank H. Hanlon was one.

Frank had stayed in his apartment for the first day of the crisis preparing for his great moment. Most of this prep time involved drinking whiskey and swearing at the television. When he had at last had his fill of both Arabs and Seagrams, Frank took to the streets.

He lived in the Valley, just over the hill from the Hollywood sign, within the lines set up by the U.S. Army. Frank piled whatever provisions he thought he might need in the back of his Dodge. As he cruised the streets in search of trouble, spare ammunition, blankets, life preservers from his old rowboat-one never knew-and a few bottles of liquid courage sat on the rear seat of his mobile assault unit.

It was when he pulled over to the side of the road for a pit stop that he heard the rumble of tanks in the distance. Zipping up, he spun away from the potted plant that had doubled as his litter box. Frank waited anxiously in the alcove of a posh Beverly Hills hotel.

An eternity later the lead tank rolled into view down the wide street.

The man perched atop it was familiar. Before leaving his apartment, Frank had seen that face on the news as the convoy thundered down the freeway. There was no mistaking that scraggly beard and those rotten teeth.

He could have taken an easy potshot at Assola al Khobar. But as the first tank rolled into range, Frank's courage quickly fled. He realized that he was still a little too drunk to aim accurately. If he missed knocking out their leader, the entire line of fifty tanks would be after him. Frank might be a hero, but even John Rambo wasn't crazy enough to take those odds.

"A real hero ish always cautious," Frank slurred, pulling his hip flask from his jacket pocket. Hands shaking, he took a steadying gulp.

The first tank passed by, rumbling off down the street. At an intersection it took a left, moving out of sight.

The rest of the Ebla Arab Army, U.S., took a long time to pass by. Hidden in the shadows, Frank slowly drained his flask. By the time they'd gotten down to the last two tanks, Frank Hanlon was as drunk as a gibbon and raring to fight.

One tank was down the street. The second was the runt of the litter, chugging to keep up with the rest.

When the last tank was nearly upon him, Frank tossed his empty flask away. Wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he drew his Colt Python from his old police holster. Steadying himself so that the ground didn't wobble too much beneath him, Frank lurched out in front of the tank.

Staggering, he made it out to the middle of the street.

The big tank bore slowly down on him, mighty treads grinding remorselessly against the hot asphalt. It was huge. As big as a bull elephant. And unlike the elephants Frank had seen on many a sleepless night, the tank was ugly brown not pastel pink.

Feeling like that anonymous Chinese student in Tiananmen Square, Frank positioned himself defiantly before the tank.

He brought his revolver up, aiming carefully at the angled metal nose of the mechanical beast. He didn't know what kind of damage he'd cause to the tank. But it was time someone took a stand. And that someone would be Frank Hanlon, dammit.

With vain-glorious images dancing in his wheeling head, Frank fired. The gun was loud in his ears. He had only ever fired it on the police range. But he'd always worn protective headphones back then. The noise rang against his eardrums.

The tank kept coming.

Frank looked at the gun. In his boozy haze he had expected more to happen the first time he used it. Frowning a lopsided frown, he lowered the gun again.

This time he pulled the trigger several times in a row. He saw the sparks from the ricochets as the bullets caromed off the front of the tank.

The massive vehicle was closer still.

The gun was empty. Peering down into the barrel, Frank clicked the chamber a few times to make sure.

Nope, empty.

Belching confusion, Frank began patting the pockets of his hunting vest. He seemed to vaguely remember leaving his spare ammo in the car.

The tank was here.

The crew inside had no intention of even slowing. They were going to run the lone American down. Outside the tank Frank wasn't sure what to do. Should he run to get more ammunition, or should he stand his ground like a real hero would?

"Now, where did I park?" he asked aloud, scratching his belly with his gun barrel.

The tank was only a few yards away. Maybe it was just the booze, but it seemed to be coming a lot faster than he thought it should.

The rumbling was deafening. The loud, persistent squeak of a loose tread cried off the rattling walls of the surrounding buildings.

Frank Hanlon stood like a besotted deer charmed by headlights. If it had been up to him and his whiskey-fueled indecision, he would most certainly have been killed. Fortunately for Frank it was not left up to him.

In that fraction of space between life and oblivion, something else came flying into view:

Frank became aware in his hazy vision of a young man in a black T-shirt running in from the direction of the nearest hotel. An old Asian flew up behind him.

He couldn't believe their nerve.

"Hey, I'm the hero today," Frank yelled drunkenly over the roar of the tank.

With these interlopers stealing his thunder there was only one thing left to do. Frank decided to take a nap. "You two better be gone when I wake up," he slurred as his eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out.

Remo flew in front of the massive treads of the tank just as Frank collapsed.

"I'll take care of Jim Bean," Remo shouted over his shoulder. "You get the other one."

Chiun soared past Remo and Frank. Pipe-stem arms and legs pumping in furious concert, he raced down the street toward the other tank, which even now was in the process of leveling its cannon back toward them.

Remo grabbed the unconscious man beneath one limp arm. Flinging Frank over his shoulder, he bounded from the tank's path at the precise moment it should have crushed their bones to jelly. He tossed the snoring ex-cop safely to the sidewalk.

Behind them the tank suddenly stopped dead. It purred menacingly.

Someone inside had obviously been hoping that the gray-haired old lunatic would stand his ground. They were upset to lose their prey at the last moment.

The hatch popped open. A white kaffiyeh stuck angrily up through the opening, a sweating Arab face beneath it. It took the Eblan soldier only a moment to spot Remo. It was fairly easy, considering the fact that Remo was waving at him from a spot directly in front of the tank.

"Random safety inspection," Remo called up to the man. "I think these tires are low on air." Walking around the side of the tank, Remo kicked a toe out at the tread. With a series of loud snaps a row of thick metal hasps shattered agreeably. The tread popped from around the wheels, unraveling onto the road with a slap.

"Pretty shoddy workmanship," Remo commented with a sympathetic nod. "Foreign car, huh. You better believe it matters to me. Say, where's your inspection sticker? The emissions on this sucker must be off the chart."

The Arab ducked back down inside the tank. "Mujajat!" his muffled voice shouted.

By his tone Remo could tell that whatever the soldier had said, it wasn't complimentary. His suspicions were confirmed a second later when the man popped back into view, an AK-47 clenched in his rage-white hands.

"Hey, don't blame me if you can't keep this thing up to state and federal standards," Remo said, waggling an admonishing finger. "You got passengerside air bags in there?"

The Arab was no longer listening. Aiming at Remo's chest, the gunman opened fire. The rifle screamed to life.

Remo danced away from the hail of bullets, ducking in beside the tank. Crouching low, he ran along the side of the huge vehicle, punching his balled-up fist into the wheels of the tank as he went.

The giant metal disks shattered obediently beneath his hand. One by one they snapped and folded in on themselves.

Feeling the powerful blows reverberating up through the shell of the tank, the Arab stopped shooting. He began screaming to his confederates.

Still out of sight of the hatch, Remo hadn't gotten halfway through the series of seven wheels when the rear of the tank began lifting slowly into the air. It rocked forward with agonizing slowness, finally falling the last few feet to the street. When it was all over, the tank resembled a coffee table with one missing leg.

Remo slipped beneath the lifted belly of the tank. Kicking upward, he removed the next tread as he had the first. Again using his fist, he removed the first three wheels on the opposite side of the tank.

The vehicle fell forward onto its snub nose, evening itself out once more. It sat useless, engine running, three of its remaining four wheels high up in the air.

Inside the angled-forward vehicle someone finally cut the engine. The crippled tank grew silent. When Remo poked his head back up around the side of the armored vehicle, he found the original Eblan had been joined by two associates.

All three Arabs were armed with automatic weapons. They brandished the guns before them, crouching in alert postures as they scanned the area immediately around the tank for any sign of Remo. On the sidewalk Frank Hanlon groaned.

The trio of Arabs wheeled in his direction. Their guns hung out over the edge of the tank. Too inviting a target to pass up.

They didn't have a chance to fire on the sound before Remo sprang back into view before them. Remo's fingers wrapped around handfuls of gun barrels.

"Yoink!" Remo called out as he tugged on the ends of the three guns.

At once all three men were yanked airborne. There was a crazed sensation of flying as their feet whipped up above their heads. The whole world spun crazily around them for an instant before they struck pavement.

Three loud oofs sounded in unison as the wind was knocked from the soldiers' lungs.

They were dizzy from the abruptness of their flight and the harshness of landing. When they got their bearings, they found that they were lying on their backs on the road. The hot blacktop burned through their thin robes.

Something big loomed above them. Whatever it was blotted out the sun. As one they realized they were looking at the underside of their own tank.

Above each of their bellies hovered an intact wheel. Metal exposed by the lack of a tread gleamed brightly down at them. They looked quite heavy.

The American who had disabled their mighty Eblan war vehicle stood above them, his hand resting casually on the side of the rearing tank.

"Sorry, but you failed inspection. Say, any of you boys ever hear of the Baghdad Crunch?" Remo asked down to them. His expression was hard.

And as the three men lay helpless, the American lowered his hand. The tons of metal that formed the massive tank creaked once and then moved along with it.

Impossible. No man had such strength. Impossible still was the speed at which the three wheels raced toward them. They didn't have much time to ponder this miracle. In the end the Baghdad Crunch was more of a wet squish.

Remo released the tank. It fell back to where it had been. As it rose, bloodied entrails from the ruptured bodies of the three dead Arabs trailed its gleaming wheels.

His thoughts turned to Chiun and the second tank. Leaving the dead tank crew, Remo headed down the street.

EVEN BEFORE REMO HAD GONE to work on the first tank, he had been spotted. Gharib Zambur recognized him as soon as he raced from the door of the hotel in the company of an aged Asian. The giant Arab knew at once that he was the same American who had assaulted him in the lobby of the Taurus Studios office complex. The godless infidel who had embarrassed him in front of his fellow Eblans by strangling him to unconsciousness with his own head wear.

A broad smile split the face of the Arab soldier as he peered through the slitlike opening at the rear of the second Eblan desert tank. Through Allah's intervention he would have his revenge.

"Take this!" he snarled. Pulling his gun from his belt, Zambur slapped the weapon into the hand of one of the other men inside the old tank. The act he was about to commit required something special.

As his companions babbled nonsense about the Asian coming their way, Zambur retrieved his special weapon from its resting place near the turret ladder. It was a heavy, sharp scimitar. The long, fat sword had belonged to his father and his father before him.

Seven-foot blade clasped in one huge hand, Zambur climbed up into the turret and flung open the hatch. He pulled himself up onto the hot metal surface of the tank.

He found he was not alone.

The others had been right. The old Asian had broken away from the young white and was racing over to the more distant of the two tanks.

When he spied the big Eblan climbing from the turret, sword in hand, Chiun stopped dead in his tracks. Long nails clicking into twin ivory arrows, he tucked his hands inside his kimono sleeves. He waited calmly.

Zambur jumped down from the tank, landing loudly on size-seventeen feet. He strode over to the patiently waiting Asian, the sword of his ancestors clutched and upright in his massive hand.

The Arab could see that he towered over the tiny man by more than a foot and a half. The old man was standing in such a way as to block Zambur's path to the other tank and the detested American.

"Out of my way, decrepit one," Zambur boomed loudly, stopping before the small Asian.

Chiun's papery lips parted. "Sinanju does not yield for Eblan maha," he replied simply. Shocked by the insult, Zambur raised his sword high. He was a huge figure of looming menace. "Impertinent one," the Arab boomed, "I could split your ancient hide with but the dull edge of my sword."

Chiun slowly pulled his hands from his billowing sleeves. His face was somber, yet a whisper of mirth kissed his hazel eyes.

"I invite you to try," was all he said.

Zambur didn't need to be asked a second time. The big Arab brought his sword back with both hands. He would slice the old man right down the middle.

With a mighty bellow from his powerful lungs, he dropped the scimitar in a sweeping line directly toward the fragile crown of the old man's eggshell head.

Chiun stood his ground, calmly bemused.

A hair before the sword split taut vellum skin, there was a flash of movement in the flowing material of Chiun's purple kimono. When the Master of Sinanju's bony wrist connected with the forearm of Zambur, it was like striking solid granite.

The Arab howled in pain. A dull ache immediately washed up from the point of impact at his wrist.

Zambur heard the jangle of metal-like distant bells. He quickly realized that it was the sound of his own sword vibrating to a stop. Somehow the old man had blocked the downward blow with one upraised arm.

"What trickery is this?" the Arab bellowed, eyes wide.

Zambur brought the sword back once more. He would not allow the old man to get the better of him again.

He swung again, this time from side to side. The sword whipped toward Chiun's frail neck.

At the instant when it should have lopped the old Korean's head off, Chiun leaned back at the waist, spine bending to an impossible angle. As he bent backward parallel to the ground, the sword flashed over him. Once it had passed harmlessly by, he raised himself erect.

"Forgive me, you are not a maha, " Chiun intoned apologetically. "You are merely shaybah."

He had gone from calling Zambur "cow" to "old man." The latter was doubly insulting coming from someone of Chiun's advanced years.

"I will use your brittle bones for kindling!" the Arab raged, winding back a third time with his mighty sword.

With all the fury within him, he struck out again.

This time he didn't even see Chiun move. He only knew he'd missed when his sword clanked, unbloodied, against the side of the tank.

For the first time Zambur began to regret not bringing his gun. Sweating from his exertions, he raised his sword again. Before he could swing yet another time, Zambur felt a pair of bony hands clasp fast to his own.

The sword was frozen in midair far back behind his head. He couldn't see who held him in place, but he suddenly realized the old man was no longer before him. He was instantly reminded of the younger man who had slipped behind him to strangle him back at Taurus. A voice that was familiar by now hissed warmly in Zambur's ear.

"Allow me, shaybah," Chiun offered in a whisper. "I will guide your aged hand."

All at once the scimitar in his clutched hands seemed to take on a life of its own. It rocketed forward and around with amazing speed. Zambur was twisted in place as it moved.

The downstroke came incredibly fast. The flesh felt as if it would tear from his hands, so great was the speed.

Zambur caught a glimpse of the main cannon of his tank. As he watched, the sword flew down toward the long barrel.

He was certain that the sword would shatter. His hands would, as well, for they could not hope to withstand the force of so great a blow. But to his amazement, there was only a tiny tug as the sharp-ened steel end of the blade met the armored plates of the tank.

And as Zambur watched, awed, the scimitar sliced straight through the impossibly thick barrel of the tank's turret cannon. It slid out the other end in a single, glorious piece, as if it had passed through nothing more substantial than a loaf of fresh-baked bread.

The sheared section of cannon dropped leadenly onto the front end of the tank, rolling forward before plunging to the ground. It struck with a heavy, hollow clank.

As quickly as they had taken hold, the pressure of Chiun's guiding hands left Zambur's own. The Arab stood alone, holding his scimitar before the Eblan tank. The blunt end of the cannon aimed out over the street. The huge amputated section lay unmoving on the blacktop.

He turned, his long face wrapped in a mask of amazement. Chiun stood before him once more. His hands no longer resided in his sleeves.

"You like blades, old one," Chiun said. Any trace of humor had left his eyes. "I have seen your fearsome Eblan weapons. Let me introduce you to those of Sinanju."

And Chiun's razor-sharp fingernails lashed out toward the lumbering Arab. Zambur had no time to react.

The Arab felt a tug at his throat. The sensation was sickly familiar. The vibrations through his giant's body were the same ones he'd felt when his father's sword struck the now severed section of cannon.

Zambur instinctively grabbed at the wound he knew the old Asian's nails had inflicted on his throat.

When his big hands bumped his stubbled chin, he was surprised to see the world turn weirdly upside down. A brief sensation of falling was followed by a sudden, jarring stop.

Zambur saw feet. They were very, very large. And in the flitting ghost that was his final, lucid thought, he wondered if his feet looked so big to others. Then he died.

WHEN REMO CAME TROTTING up to Chiun a moment later, his eyes strayed to Zambur's decapitated head resting between the giant Eblan's ankles. The body itself was still upright where it had fallen against the front of the tank. A fountain of red bubbled from the open neck.

"I hope that wasn't the Taurus script reader," Remo commented dryly.

"For your sake it had better not be," Chiun warned.

As they spoke, the hatch clacked shut atop the tank. Remo glanced up. He heard the lid being sealed from inside.

"Oh, great," he groused. "These things are harder to open than prescription bottles. Wanna give me a hand?"

"No," Chiun said impatiently. "But since you have already dragged me out here in defiance of Smith's orders..."

Hiking up his kimono skirts, he and Remo moved toward the last tank. They were distracted by a sudden gunshot from the street behind them.

Remo spun in the direction from which he'd come.

Frank Hanlon had roused himself from his alcoholic slumber. More than that, the former LAPD cop had found some bullets in the pocket of his hunting vest.

"Oh, cripes," Remo muttered when he saw that Hanlon was using his newly loaded gun against the band of eight Eblan soldiers that had just ridden around the corner on camelback.

Luckily for Frank Hanlon, the great jostling the Arabs were enduring on the backs of the desert creatures made it impossible to aim and ride simultaneously. Their return fire was wildly erratic.

And as they struggled to draw a bead, Hanlon landed a million-to-one shot. He picked one of the men off.

The soldier tumbled from the hump of his mount. His foot was still wrapped in the leather reins, and his camel immediately began dragging him down the posh Beverly Hills street.

The other Eblans screamed madly and continued on.

All of the activity in the street had not gone unnoticed. Sensing the start of belated revolution, people had already begun venturing outside before the arrival of the latest soldiers.

As the camels rode by the first crippled tank, a pedestrian emboldened by the sight of the shattered military vehicle raced out from the door of Remo's hotel. While Remo and Chiun watched from farther down the street, the man took to the hood of a parked Bentley, bounding to the roof. With a leap and a yell, he flew through the air, connecting solidly with a passing Arab soldier. Both Eblan and American plummeted from camel to street.

Bloodied yet victorious, the man tore the AK-47 from the Arab's grasping hands, promptly turning it on its owner. As the first bullet-riddled Eblan body fell, he turned the weapon on the rest. Two more were knocked from their camels in the first sweep of the gun.

More bystanders raced to collect the weapons of the dead.

Gunfire echoed off the buildings as the remaining four Eblan cavalrymen attempted to flee the scene. They didn't make it more than a few yards before being mowed down.

Cheering Americans rolled out into the streets as the final soldier tumbled from his camel.

The floodgates were open. A small, joyful riot began to break out in downtown Beverly Hills.

And above it all, Remo heard the approaching rotor noise of one of L.A.'s many news helicopters. The chopper broke into view above the hotel, settling like a fat hummingbird into a noisy hover above the pandemonium.

"Remember who wished to remain in our hotel room," Chiun pointed out over the din. The wisps of hair above his ears blew crazily in the downdraft. "Let's just get this over with," Remo shouted, peeved. He made a move toward the tank.

By this time the crew inside the armored vehicle had gotten their bearings. They'd already loaded a shell into the breech before setting out on the freeway.

With no warning they fired. The explosion was deafening.

Remo and Chiun sensed the imminent explosion a microsecond before it took place. They were out of the way and had covered their ears the instant before the shell exploded from the blunted cannon barrel.

The missile didn't go far. It exploded in the street a few dozen yards away, creating an instant crater of orange flame and black smoke. Two parked cars blew up onto their sides on the sidewalk. Chunks of tar and dirt rained down all around. People screamed.

The Beverly Hills street had rapidly devolved into a Beirut slum.

Pandemonium breaking out all around, Remo turned slowly to the Master of Sinanju. "I hope Smith isn't too narrow in his definition of 'provocative,'" he said tiredly.

Using the acrid smoke for cover, he turned and mounted the tank, careful to keep his face directed away from the hovering TV news helicopter.

Chapter 20

Thick clusters of taped wires ran from soundstage 2 to soundstage 3 on the old MBM studios lot. They disappeared inside the cavernous black interior beyond the partially opened soundstage doors. Arabs in long, flowing robes could be seen working furtively inside the dimly lit interiors of the buildings as Bruce Marmelstein walked across the lot from the executive offices.

It wasn't the first time he'd seen this same scene. Since arriving in town as liaison to Sultan Omay, Mr. Koala had been encouraging Marmelstein to rent all available space from every studio in town for Taurus's epic motion picture. The wires and Arab workmen invariably showed up after the stages had been rented.

Even after the Arab takeover of Hollywood, Mr. Koala had continued to insist on renting space. The other studios were even more willing to deal now than they had been before, considering the double threat of zero film production and an armed incursion on their lots if they refused. Right now Taurus had crews on every major studio lot in the greater Los Angeles area.

Marmelstein found al Khobar exiting soundstage 4. Both men had to step over bundles of wires as they walked toward each other.

"I've been meaning to ask you, Mr. Koala, what is all this stuff?" Bruce Marmelstein asked once they'd met up.

Assola al Khobar appeared annoyed even to be addressed.

"It is for the film," the terrorist replied tersely. Marmelstein frowned. He'd been in the movie business ever since he'd stopped teasing Barbra Streisand's hair eighteen years ago and he had never seen anything remotely like this ganglia of wires before. However he didn't wish to appear ignorant. "Oh, yeah," said Bruce Marrnelstein nodding confidently. "Movie stuff. By the by, there's a phone call for you." He pointed back to the office complex. "I think it might be the sultan." Without even a word of thanks, al Khobar began striding toward the building. Bruce Marmelstein hurried to keep pace.

"He's not into his finances too much, is he?"

Al Khobar's eyes were dead ahead. When he spoke, he didn't even look at the studio executive. "What do you mean?"

"Well..." Marmelstein began vaguely. "Balancing checkbooks. Looking at his bank statement. He's not into all that, right? I mean, he'd have accountants doing all that."

"Of course, fool."

"Of course," Marmelstein agreed. "Of course, of course."

They were almost at the building. Marmelstein took the plunge.

"Don't bring up his bank accounts, would you?" he blurted in a rush of words.

The terrorist was instantly suspicious. "Why?"

"This film of Hank's is, well, it's a tad over budget." Helpless hands rose quickly. "I've tried to talk him down, but he insists on realism. I know you said that's what the sultan wanted, too. He wanted the nitty-gritty of this whole invasion thing. Hank wants to give it to him."

They were at the doors to the building. Al Khobar flung them open, stepping inside. Marmelstein followed eagerly.

"The sultan does not want one of your ridiculous Hollywood films. You were told to make a documentary."

"It is, it is!" Marmelstein insisted. "It's just that Hank-not me, but Hank-wanted to dress it up a little."

"Dress it as you like," the terrorist snapped. "It matters not to me." His interests were clearly elsewhere. He pushed the third-floor button on the lobby elevator.

As they waited for the car, Bruce Marmelstein seemed greatly relieved.

"Not to me, either," he said. "But it does to Hank. And to the sultan, obviously. You promise him from me that The Movie is going to be the greatest movie ever made."

The elevator doors opened. Al Khobar stepped aboard, trailed by Bruce Marmelstein.

"Actually you'd better tell him that promise is from Hank," Marmelstein said after brief consideration. He shrugged. "I mean, no sense putting my ass in the sling if Hank's a shitty director."

The silver doors slid silently shut.

THEIR HOLLYWOOD OFFICE WAS only the poor cousin to Bindle and Marmelstein's regular digs at the main Taurus Studios complex back in Burbank. Still, the room was in its third metamorphosis in less than thirty hours.

They had gone halfway through the whole Caligula thing with marble walls and spurting fountains when Hank Bindle had decided he was allergic to marble. The room had been hastily gutted and redone in a Louis XIV motif.

Bruce Marmelstein had been shocked to find out that Louis XIV meant a sort of sissy, old European design. The offices of the greatest makers of testosterone-fueled movies in cinema history looked like his grandma's house.

The big room was undergoing its third change now. It was all very gleaming, very high-tech. All blacks and silvers and glass. Bindle and Marmelstein had yet to notice that the stuff going into the Hollywood office was the same exact stuff that had originally been taken out of their Burbank office. The builders and designers were charging Taurus quadruple their regular rate to rearrange the furniture. When he stepped through the door, Assola al Khobar immediately chased Hank Bindle and the decorators from the office. Stepping across the crinkling tarps that had been spread across the floor, the terrorist grabbed the phone from Bindle's desk. Fumbling with the thin wire, he finally managed to wrap it around his head.

"Mr. Koala," he announced, instantly embarrassed to have used the name the idiots Bindle and Marmelstein had inadvertently given him.

The long bout of coughing that preceded a voice on the other end of the line told him that he was indeed speaking with Sultan Omay sin-Khalam.

"Assola, is the plan in danger?" the sultan wheezed once he had regained control of himself.

"Danger?" al Khobar asked, surprised. "No, it is not in danger. Everything is going as expected. Why?"

Omay forced strength into his frail voice. In spite of the attempt he sounded terribly weak.

"There is street fighting in progress," the sultan insisted. "This have I seen on CNN."

The terrorist's expression steeled.

"I have not heard of this," al Khobar said levelly.

"How could you not know?" Omay accused. "Two of my glorious Ebla Arab Army tanks have been destroyed by the Americans. More than a dozen of my brave Eblan soldiers lay dead in the street, murdered by a bloodthirsty mob."

"This mob," al Khobar asked worriedly. "You are certain it is not the United States Army?"

"No. They wore the garb of everyday infidels." Al Khobar was visibly relieved.

"This was not completely unexpected," the terrorist said. "You will remember in one of our earliest discussions I mentioned the likelihood of such an eventuality. My experiences in Afghanistan taught me this."

"No," Omay coughed. "No, you have lost control." The sultan's ragged voice was harsh. "I entrusted a Saudi and not an Eblan to do this most important work, and you have lost control."

"I have not, Omay sin-Khalam, I assure you. The insurrection will be dealt with." Al Khobar considered. "It would help greatly if you were to demonstrate the force of our will on one of the remaining hostages."

As the terrorist had expected, this suggestion had an instant mollifying effect on the sultan.

"As a gesture of Ebla's displeasure?" the ruler asked craftily.

"Absolutely," al Khobar replied.

The leader of Ebla considered for only a moment. "It will be as you suggest, Assola," Omay said, the lust for blood evident in his aged voice. "You believe this will quell any further violence?"

"I do," al Khobar asserted. "Provided you make it clear that this is the reason for the execution."

"I will," Omay said, coughing lightly. He was warming to the idea of being on television once more. "Did you know, Assola, that the first execution brought attention from around the world?"

"It was a glorious sight."

"Yes," Omay said proudly. "The ratings were quite high. I have never had such an audience." He was thinking wistfully of his glory days as the Great Peacemaker. Back then his every move had been international news. But this was much better. Not only did he not have to shake hands with Jews, but now there was also blood involved. "And how is your other work proceeding?" the sultan asked.

Al Khobar's voice became vague. "All is well," he said. He spoke no more.

"The timetable you established is in place here," Omay coughed, "Are you ready to set-?"

"Everything is under control here, Omay sin-Khalam," Assola al Khobar said quickly. "Long live your sultanate. Together let us wipe the stain of Western influence from the Muslim world. May Allah smile always on you and on Ebla, the flower of the desert."

And lest the old imbecile give away any more information over an open line, he broke the connection.

"Fool," al Khobar spit as he dropped the phone's wire headset to the paint-spattered tarpaulin atop Hank Bindle's desk.

He knew what Omay had been about to ask. And the answer was yes. Everything was nearly in place. He thought of the plan he had helped craft, a plan that was about to come to glorious fruition. It was a scheme fiendish in design and breathtaking in execution. An act of terrorism that would make the East African bombings he had engineered last year look like wet Chinese fireworks.

It was a plan from which America would never recover.

In spite of his agitation at Sultan Omay, Assola al Khobar smiled a row of black-and-brown teeth at the empty office.

Chapter 21

"What were you thinking?"

On the phone the lemony voice of Harold Smith had risen three octaves. He now sounded like tart citrus being squeezed through a rusted garlic press.

"Smitty, this sitting-around bullcrap was getting ridiculous," Remo said defensively. "Obviously I'm not the only one who thinks so. What, did you want me to just stand there and let a tank drive over that guy?"

"That was an option," Smith snapped.

"And one that I wished to take, Emperor Smith!" Chiun called from across the room.

"You might be interested to know you have made Mr. Hanlon a national hero," Smith said.

"The man you rescued from the tank." Smith's anger gave way to intense weariness.

"That guy?" Remo said, surprised. "He was just some drunk."

"Yes," Smith replied. "He was also airlifted out of the military cordon by a news helicopter. He is now appearing on every talk show around the country."

"There, you see?" Remo challenged. "It could have been a lot worse. Be happy it's Foster Brooks and not me on Oprah."

"I suppose we should count our blessings," Smith conceded dryly. "After all, the news helicopter was focused on Hanlon and the other rioters while you took care of the other tank and its crew."

"That's right, Smitty," Remo said. "This won't be as bad as you think. From what I can tell it's already blown over."

"Yes, but other pockets of insurrection are doubtless forming in the wake of this first successful counterattack," Smith pressed.

"Geez, Smitty, you make it sound like a bad thing we're fighting back," Remo groused. "I'm kind of glad to see Americans willing to risk something for once."

"Need I remind you that it was the President's hope for a diplomatic resolution to this situation?"

"Was his dingus in or out of the nearest intern when he cooked that up?" Remo asked, aggravated. "He must've seen the look on that crap-bag Omay's face when he shot that kid over in Ebla. He loved every second of it. That psycho's not going away until he's started a major war."

"The President has now conceded as much," Smith said. "In the wake of that incident he has privately given up on diplomacy. He is in the process of developing a military solution in conjunction with our allies to free the men who are being held captive."

"Good luck," Remo commented. "I remember what happened the last time we tried to rescue hostages in that neck of the world."

"It is a difficult situation," Smith admitted. "Made all the more difficult by what has now occurred on your end."

"Listen, that guy was out there blasting away without me even being there," Remo said, using his most reasonable tone. "Even if I'd let him get run over, the rest of those people wouldn't have stood by without reacting. He'd have become a martyr and they would have rioted anyway. And instead of Eblans being killed it would have been about a hundred Americans."

"Possibly," Smith replied vaguely.

The CURE director was distracted from their conversation by an electronic beep emanating from his desk computer. Remo heard the noise over the crosscountry line.

"One moment, Remo," Smith said.

Remo heard the sound of Smith's fingers drumming rapidly against the capacitor keyboard at the edge of his desk. When the noise of typing subsided, there was the briefest of pauses. All at once Remo heard a sharp intake of breath.

"My God, not again," Smith croaked.

"What is it?" Remo asked sharply.

"Put on your television," Smith insisted. His voice was flat, almost dead.

"Chiun, snap that on, would you?" Remo called. The Master of Sinanju was sitting in front of the TV studying the latest issue of People magazine. Without looking, he reached up and stabbed a finger at the pad on the front of the television. The screen came rapidly to life.

Remo knew at once why the CURE director's computer had alerted him. On the screen was Sultan Omay, more wild-eyed and sickly looking than ever.

The leader of Ebla was obviously somewhere out in the sandy wasteland of his small Mideast nation. The desert sun beat down upon him. Tents were framed behind him. Farther back along the horizon Ebla Arab Army troops could be seen conducting marching exercises in the sand.

There was someone kneeling on the ground before Omay. The man wore an untucked white dress shirt, open at the collar. He was blindfolded.

Chiun had turned the television on just as Sultan Omay was in the process of raising something to the back of the kneeling man's head. Remo knew in a sick instant what was happening.

As Remo watched, revulsion growing, Omay placed the gun to the back of the man's head. He pulled the trigger.

The forehead burst open like a ripe melon. Fortunately for most home viewers, the murder happened too quickly to be seen well. Ghouls would have to rewind and freeze-frame videotapes in order to see the gore clearly. The body slumped face first into the powdery sand.

Sultan Omay looked away from the body and up into the waiting camera. He seemed as comfortable with the medium as any American television star. When he spoke, his voice was weak. "A crime has been committed this day," Omay announced to the camera. His eyes were flat.

For a surreal moment Remo thought he was going to actually admit to wrongdoing. He couldn't have been more wrong.

"That crime has been perpetrated by the people of America against the peaceful men of the Ebla Arab Army," Omay continued. "America will be made to pay for every last drop of precious Eblan blood spilled. This is a down payment on retribution. There will be much more to come."

Without another word Omay turned away from the camera. On shaky, shuffling legs he walked back toward the tent immediately behind him. Eblan soldiers lifted the flaps and allowed the frail old man to pass inside.

Obviously there was some kind of prearranged system in place with the international news media. With no comment from any reporter at the scene, the image of the bedouin village merely winked out. It was replaced by a serious-faced anchorman at a news desk.

"Smitty," Remo said, voice flat as a desert horizon.

"One moment," Smith insisted.

There was the sound of urgent typing coming over the line.

Remo found the remote control to the TV. He flipped quickly through the channels looking for more of Sultan Omay.

Nothing.

The image that had been broadcast was from a single pool camera that all of the news services were using. Omay apparently didn't want the press corps following him into the desert.

Smith's voice came back on a moment later. "I have booked Chiun on a flight to Greece," the CURE director said. He was struggling to control his anger.

"What are you talking about, Smitty?" Remo demanded. "Chiun's not going-I am."

"No, you are not," Smith said firmly. "Chiun is more familiar with that part of the world than you are. Frankly at this point an American would attract far too much attention. Chiun can take a flight from Greece to Jordan. From there he will have to improvise."

"This is nuts," Remo complained.

"Yes," Chiun echoed loudly. "I cannot leave my beloved Town of Tinsel. Send Remo." He passed a bored eye over the "Picks and Pans" column of his magazine.

"Chiun says he doesn't want to go," Remo objected.

"I know that you can hear me, Master Chiun," Smith said. "I will not remind you of the obligation of your contract."

The Master of Sinanju's head lifted. He craned it slowly around to look at his pupil. His expression blamed Remo, not Smith, for this latest turn of events. With a menacingly delicate hand he folded his magazine closed.

"I will do as you command, Smith," he said without enthusiasm.

"You get that, Smitty?" Remo asked.

"I did," Smith said. "Tell him that his tickets will be waiting at the Cross-World Airways desk at Los Angeles International Airport. He will have to find his own way out of Hollywood through the Ebla-U.S. military lines."

"He heard you, but he doesn't look happy," Remo said.

"Chiun's emotional well-being is the least of my worries at the moment."

"So while he's off zapping the bad guy I'm supposed to just sit here twiddling my thumbs?" Remo asked.

"Not at all. Remo, you have to stay in Hollywood," Smith argued. "The sultan has also threatened to destroy our cultural capital. Are you forgetting the boatload of missing supplies?"

"Smitty, you're keeping me here for some pig in a poke," Remo muttered. "We don't know if he has anything planned here at all. This whole Hollywood angle might just be an ego boost for that rotting old fossil."

"Listen to Remo, Emperor," Chiun called, irritated, from across the room. "This is one of those rare times when he makes sense."

"I do not believe so," Smith said. "Given what we have just witnessed, the sultan has obviously stepped up his campaign. His designs since the outset have included both the entertainment community and the situation he has created in the Mideast." Smith's voice sounded firmer, as if he were pleased to finally take some action. "CURE can no longer sit idly by and allow this crisis to go on indefinitely. It has finally escalated to the point that it has become necessary to split you and Chiun up in order to strike back in a two-pronged attack."

"What do you want us to do?"

There was urgency to Smith's tone. "This is the plan I had hesitated to use before," he said. "It requires a great deal of delicacy. More delicacy, perhaps, than you and Chiun are capable of."

"Lather us up, why don't you?" Remo said sarcastically.

"That is not an insult, but a statement of fact. Remo, I need you to remove Assola al Khobar in America at the precise moment Chiun dispatches Sultan Omay in Ebla."

Remo's face clouded. "What good will that do?" he asked. "You said yourself taking out Assola might be the trigger that starts everything going over here."

"Perhaps not," Smith said. "If the leaders of both Eblan factions are removed simultaneously, their larger scheme might collapse. One might not be able to act without the other there for guidance."

"'Perhaps Perhaps ... might ... might.' You don't sound too sure."

"I am not," Smith admitted. "But we have reached an impasse. Better to get whatever is to happen over with quickly than to allow it to go on any longer."

"If you say so." Remo didn't sound convinced. Remo's uncertainty did not deter Smith.

"There is a ten-hour difference from Los Angeles to Ebla. You and Chiun are to strike tomorrow at precisely 8:00 p.m. Pacific daylight time. That is 6:00 a.m. in Ebla. Chiun should be in place by then."

"Did you get that, Chiun?" Remo asked.

"I am annoyed, not deaf," the Master of Sinanju answered. His wrinkled face was bunched into a scowl.

Remo knew he was thinking about the precious screenplay he'd left in the hands of Bindle and Marmelstein.

"In the interim, Remo, stick close to al Khobar. Even an inadvertent slip could give us a clue as to what he has done with the mysterious missing shipment of cargo."

"Not very bloody likely," Remo muttered.

"Irrespective, when the eleventh hour is upon us you may, er, persuade him to give you the information before his ultimate removal."

"'Ultimate removal.' Geez, Smitty, you make it sound like I'm taking out the freaking trash," Remo complained.

The CURE director did not miss a beat. "You are."

Chapter 22

Hank Bindle was beginning to think he didn't like directing. Nothing was going right for him.

The Arabs were no longer cooperating as they had been. He could thank Mr. Koala for that. The Eblan executive had pulled all the extras away from the production after that minor unpleasantness in Beverly Hills. Every available man was now out patrolling the streets with an enthusiasm that, frankly, Hank Bindle thought was bordering on nutty.

His new "Arabs" consisted of anyone he could find and wrap in a bedsheet. None of them looked convincingly like Middle Eastern terrorists. Particularly the female office workers he had conscripted. Their silicone- or saline-enhanced chests kept bouncing out all over the place in a very nonterroristic way. On top of that their false mustaches kept getting gunked to their lip gloss.

The shoot had gone on for barely two days and already it was an unqualified disaster.

Now on top of it all, he'd lost the sun. "Shit!" Hank Bindle screamed.

He waved a menacing fist at the heavens. "Shit, shit, shit!" he screamed more loudly.

The sun remained behind a smear of thin white clouds. Even the sky itself mocked him.

Bindle flung his megaphone away.

"I can't believe this!" he screamed. "Cut!" Bindle wheeled around. "Get that sun out here, pronto!" he yelled at his alarmed assistant.

"I'll get right on it, H.B.," the assistant said gulping. She ran off to call the Griffith Park Observatory. Bindle stormed around his exterior set. He wore a bright green ascot and a red beret tipped at a rakish angle. The sleeves of his red sweater were draped lazily across his shoulders and were tied at his chest. In his clashing reds and greens he looked like a Louis B. Mayer-era director dressed up for the studio Christmas party.

A group of men in T-shirts and shorts was working on a strange mechanical creature behind one of the cameras. It was the first of the eight dozen animatronic camels Bindle had ordered. The hastily constructed prototype cost thirty-seven million dollars and looked as if someone had flung a hairy rug over a tall chain-link fence.

"Have you got that thing working yet?" Bindle demanded.

"Some sand got inside the gizmo. Shorted it out," an electrician said. "Do they have to actually walk in the desert?"

"No," Bindle said sarcastically. "Why don't you strap a pair of mechanical wings to them and we can fly them around like frigging Aladdin's magic carpet?"

"Gee, I'm not sure about the aerodynamics of this design." The electrician frowned seriously.

Before Bindle could explain to him that he'd been joking, a voice broke in behind them. "How's it going?"

The men returned to their work as Hank Bindle turned around. Bruce Marmelstein stood near the cameras, a tight smile on his face.

"Rotten," Bindle grumbled to his partner. "Nothing is working right. This whole production is a mess."

"Have you found a script yet?" Marmelstein asked. He appeared nervous. Sweat beads dotted his tan forehead.

Hank Bindle was surprised. They were only two days into production. Too early for a finished script. And Bruce Marmelstein had never expressed an interest in the creative end of the business before. He was only concerned with money. For Marmelstein everything was ultimately affected by the bottom line.

Bindle took Marmelstein by the arm. He quickly guided him away from the crew's prying ears. "What's wrong?" Bindle whispered.

"I was just checking on our finances," Marmelstein said anxiously. "We're heading onto shaky ground vis-A-vis the Omay situation."

"For this production?"

"For the entire studio. The Movie is sinking us into a quagmire of red ink. It's gone way over budget."

"Hmm," Hank Bindle considered. "I forget, how much was the original budget?"

"Three hundred million."

"And how much have we spent?"

Marmelstein checked a wrinkled sheet of paper clutched in his hand. It was damp with sweat. "Two and a half billion," Marmelstein said sickly.

"Is that a lot?" asked Bindle, who, after all, was creative and not a money cruncher.

"A billion is a number followed by nine zeros."

"Wow." Hank Bindle almost sounded impressed at their ability to spend.

"We've gone from being in the black to being in the red in one day. They haven't picked up on it in Ebla yet, but it's only a matter of time. I think they're busy with something else right now. A war, maybe."

"That's politics," Bindle said dismissively. He pitched his voice low. "We've still got other ways to finance. What about our video-distribution company?" he asked.

"I think we might have hit a snag there," Marmelstein said. "Apparently Jimmy Fitzsimmons turned up dead at some kind of rally in Boston. When the cops investigated, they checked his warehouse. The videos were all seized."

Bindle's voice got even lower. "The drugs?"

Marmelstein shook his head. "That was funneled back here through his contacts in the Patriconne Family in Rhode Island. There's been nothing since the raid. I don't know if it's shut off completely or if the Patriconnes are just laying low."

"That shouldn't matter," Hank Bindle said. "No matter how much we spend, we'll make it back on The Movie. Look at Titanic's world gross in relation to cost. After all, we're going to be the only movie out next summer."

Bruce Marmelstein's sick look intensified. "About that," he said uncertainly. "There were a lot of other productions going on away from here when the invasion started. They're still going on. East Coast facilities are taking up the slack. All the other major studios have promised they won't let this alter their summer-release schedules one bit."

Hank Bindle began to get the same queasy feeling as his longtime partner.

"We're not going to be alone?" he gasped. His voice was small.

Marmelstein shook his head. "There are at least two probable blockbusters set to open before Memorial Day. We've got to make The Movie deliver the goods. Otherwise forget The Avengers or Batman and Robin, we are going to have the most expensive bomb in the history of movies to our names."

Hank Bindle's head was spinning. His stomach clenched madly. He grabbed the shoulder of his partner for support. When he looked at Marmelstein, his eyes were watering.

Bindle looked for a moment as if he wished to speak. But he suddenly twisted away, doubling up at the waist. With a loud heaving noise he vomited up the veal Parmesan lunch he'd had flown in special from his favorite Venice restaurant on one of the new Taurus jets.

"I don't know any other way to make a living!" Bindle said desperately through the retching. Wheeling, he grabbed for his partner, gripping Marmelstein's arms so tightly he could feel bone. "What will I do?"

"You?" Bruce Marmelstein whimpered. "I can't go back to styling hair. My scissors are hanging on the wall at Planet Hollywood."

"So what can we do?" Bindle asked.

"I don't know," Marmelstein said. He was nearly crying. "Maybe we should think like executives think. I mean, what would the President do in our shoes?"

A thought suddenly occurred to both of them. Their panicked eyes locked.

"Scapegoat," they said in unison.

"Ian?" Bindle asked.

"Not for two and a half billion."

Bindle snapped his fingers. "Koala was supposed to direct this white elephant. We can say it was all him." His eyes were filled with eager hope.

Thinking aloud, Marmelstein took up the thread. "He is the middleman between the studio and the sultan. If we can get him to sign the okays for the money I've gotten from Ebla, we could pin this whole disaster on him."

Hank Bindle knew the problem they were presented with. How could they possibly get Mr. Koala to sign away more than two billion dollars of Sultan Omay sin-Khalam's personal wealth? "Blackmail?" Bindle suggested.

"We don't have anything on him."

"Bribe?"

"With what?"

"Oh, yeah,"

"Besides, he's a millionaire or something already."

The solution came in a sudden instant. "Kidnap him and torture him until he signs?"

"Bingo." Bruce Marmelstein smiled, as if they'd just decided on the proper shade of mauve for their office.

"And afterward?" Bindle asked.

Their mutual conclusion was obvious. It was the only alternative, considering the corner they'd painted themselves and their studio into. But unbeknownst to Hank Bindle and Bruce Marmelstein, their obvious conclusion would spark a crisis in the Mideast and create a near disaster in their own backyard.

"Kill him," Bindle and Marmelstein concluded happily.

Behind them, their animatronic camel chugged to life. Smoke poured from its mechanical bottom.

Chapter 23

Tom Roberts was this close to bolting from this halfassed production. He didn't need these headaches. Tom was sitting alone in his trailer on the Taurus lot. Empty wine bottles and marijuana roaches littered the table in the small kitchen. His moon face was resting morosely in his hands as he considered what he'd gotten himself into.

Tom had been nominated for Academy Awards for both Dead Guy Strolling and for starring in the prison film The Hairlip Salvation. His career didn't need a bona fide disaster like Taurus Studios' The Movie. The problem was, he and his agent had bought into Bindle and Marmelstein's early hype that The Movie would be the only movie out next summer. He'd signed on before any of them had thought the whole project through clearly. Now he and his common-law wife, Susan Saranrap, were hopelessly entangled in a project that seemed destined for the discount-bargain basket of video stores across America. Assuming this bomb even made it to video.

He wondered if this would be the movie that sank his career. Hollywood was more forgiving now than it had once been when it came to disasters. After all George Clooney could still find work, for God's sake. He might survive this great gobbling turkey of a film. Then again he might not.

He couldn't risk it. If he lost his movie career, all he'd have to look forward to day after day was his common-law wife and the ten screaming brats they'd had together before menopause had driven into her like a runaway concrete truck.

He had to get out.

Tom lifted his head from his hands. Through boozy eyes he took in the interior of the trailer. He'd have to get off the Taurus lot somehow. But how? There were Arabs everywhere.

And once he got off, what would he do? There were more Arabs out in the streets. Not as many as were clustered around the studio, but still enough to make slipping away unseen difficult.

As he scanned the junk lying around the room, his bleary eyes settled on a piece of wardrobe that he'd tossed aside. His assistants hadn't put it away yet. It was the robe he was supposed to wear in his starring role in the as yet unscripted movie.

Looking at the rumpled cloth, an idea suddenly occurred to him. An event rare indeed.

Tom got uncertainly to his feet, knocking the bottles and joints to the floor in the process. Staggering, he pushed away from the table and over to the robe.

FOR THE THIRD TIME Remo entered the Taurus lot. The guard at the booth waved him through. By this point the old man recognized Remo.

He parked his rented car in the space marked Hank Bindle: Park Here And You'll Never Park In This Town Again and headed for the door.

When he pulled the building's main door open, Susan Saranrap nearly barreled into him as she stormed outside. She stopped short, eyeing Remo accusingly. She seemed suddenly to remember him from before.

"Are you an assistant to Bindle and Marmelstein?" she demanded without so much as a hello.

"Me?" Remo asked, surprised. "No, I have my sanity."

Huge, furious eyes glanced around the parking lot. "Well, do you know where they are?"

"They're not in their office?"

"No," she said. "And that faggot Ian has no idea where they're hiding. Neither do any of the workmen." She groaned loudly. "You know, I might quit this movie and go off and have another baby," she threatened, blowing a clump of stringy hair from her haggard face.

"Are you insane?" Remo asked. "You're 150 years old."

Susan appeared shocked. "I'm only thirty-eight," she insisted hotly.

"You were already thirty-eight back when Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton owned this town," Remo replied.

She sucked in an angry hiss of air. "You think you're so smart?" she challenged. "I can have an embryo implanted." She jutted out her chin. There were wrinkles on it.

"Yeah, I heard they can do that now." Remo nodded. "Why not see if they'll stick in a brain while they're at it?"

He sidestepped the spluttering actress and went inside.

UPSTAIRS, REMO DISCOVERED that Bindle and Marmelstein were indeed nowhere to be found. Their office wasn't empty, however. Carpenters and plasterers were working feverishly around the room creating an all-new retro art-deco look.

He didn't see al Khobar anywhere.

Remo wondered briefly how Chiun was doing. The Master of Sinanju had secured a promise from Remo that he would shepherd Chiun's script through Bindle and Marmelstein's offices. Otherwise he would not go. Remo had agreed.

For now, Remo had a long wait before he had to worry about his own end of the mission.

At one point while he was waiting he glanced out the window. He saw Susan Saranrap and a very obvious Tom Roberts dressed in Arab garb down in the parking lot. They were on the back of a bizarre-looking mechanical creature that moved with all the elegance of a broken can opener. The massive artificial animal squeaked and smoked its way toward the Taurus Studios main gate.

"I can't wait to get out of this town," Remo complained.

He sank into a chair to watch the workmen rebuild the office.

Chapter 24

Reggio "Lips" Cagliari had made his bones at the ripe old age of eighteen. He became a made man in California's Pubescio crime family at twenty-five. He had a great future in the West Coast Mafia until the mysterious disappearance of Don Fiavorante Pubescio back in 1992.

At twenty-six Reggio became a man without a family.

Once Don Fiavorante was gone, the Pubescio territory had been up for grabs. Mafiosi swooped in like ravenous jackals ripping at the carcass of the once mighty Pubescio empire.

When the feeding frenzy was over, Reggio was one of the few goodfellas left out in the cold. He was still alive. But none of the California families wanted to take him in. It took a while, but he finally found a lowly position with the Vaggliosi Family of Los Angeles.

The Vaggliosis worked the Teamsters for most of the big Hollywood studios. Reggio was put in place as a small-time union organizer.

He knew he'd never move any further up the Mafia chain. When he was with the Pubescio Family he had been on an inside track. Murder, extortion, explosives, arson, prostitution. Here he'd languish in his minor union post until he retired or dropped dead of a heart attack. Considering the way he had taken to eating pasta to drown his sorrows, the latter would claim him first. Reggio had ballooned up from a slim 182 pounds to more than 300 since switching allegiances.

After sitting at the same desk and gorging himself on the same cuisine for a number of wasted years, an opportunity to earn a few extra dollars had presented itself to Reggio Cagliari. He was approached by Jimmy Fitzsimmons, a minor figure from Rhode Island's Patriconne Family. "Fits" Fitzsimmons wanted Reggio to help out with a video-distribution business the East Coast family was setting up. He'd also help funnel drugs back to the film capital.

Of course Reggio knew there were rumors that an East Coast family-possibly the Scubiscis or Patriconnes-had been responsible for Don Fiavorante Pubescio's death. But money was money. He'd gotten in bed with the Patriconnes, using his Hollywood connections to set up the pirated-video scheme between the Rhode Island syndicate and Taurus Studios.

The deal earned Reggio a nice, neat and, above all, quiet little paycheck. He wanted to keep it that way. He didn't need someone blabbing to the Vaggliosis that he had his own little profit-skimming business going on under their crooked Sicilian noses. The scheme had been set up specifically to minimize Reggio's own personal risks. Therefore, "Lips" Cagliari was surprised when the threat to this cozy little arrangement came from the least-likely quarter.

Reggio was eating Italian takeout behind the desk of his small Culver City office when there came a timid knock at his door. He looked up, noodles hanging from his mouth. He was puzzled to see the Taurus management team of Hank Bindle and Bruce Marmelstein framed in the open doorway.

"Hello, Reg," Bruce Marmelstein said. He was clearly a man attempting to keep his disdain in check. It wasn't just the gooey cheese sauce of Reggio's fettucine Alfredo that was off-putting to him, but the office decor, as well. It was a motif Bruce liked to call "larval seventies plastic dreadful."

Marmelstein entered the office, followed by a more timid Hank Bindle.

Reggio knew that it wasn't an easy thing to safely negotiate the streets of the motion-picture capital of the world these days. But then, as friends of Ebla's invading army, Bindle and Marmelstein would surely have a special dispensation.

"May we come in?" Marmelstein asked.

"You're already in," Reggio mumbled, his mouth full. He bit down on his cheesy pasta. Fat strips dropped back to the desk beside his greasy paper plate. He'd get them later. Nothing was wasted when it came to feeding his great bulk.

The union man continued eating while Bindle and Marmelstein found metal folding-chairs before his desk. Hank Bindle put down a handkerchief before sitting.

"Have you heard from back east yet, Reggio?" Bruce Marmelstein asked, knowing full well that he hadn't.

Reggio chewed languidly as he stared at the men. "I ain't heard nothin' yet," he replied.

"Ian read in the paper that there was trouble with Mr. Fitzsimmons," Marmelstein noted. "He said the police have kind of connected him to Bernardo Patriconne."

"Ian's a faggot," Reggio mumbled. But the look in the back of his eyes registered his concern.

"Yes, but be that as it may," Marmelstein continued. "If they make the West Coast connection, the person on this end most likely to be damaged is you. Everything filters through you. Mr. Vaggliosi will be pretty upset when he finds out you've been freelancing. Especially after taking you in from the Pubescio Family. I'd say you're looking at a .45-caliber enema."

Reggio's eyes narrowed. "How do you know so much about the business?" he asked.

Marmelstein shrugged. "I'm a movie executive." Reggio accepted the explanation. He settled farther down in his chair. His great bulk shifted out over the arms.

"Yeah, well, you guys ain't all rosy in this," he countered.

"We're safe," Hank Bindle boasted proudly. He withered visibly from the instant dirty looks of both Bruce Marmelstein and Reggio Cagliari.

"Let's just say we're protected," Marmelstein said, pulling his annoyed eyes away from his partner.

"What, you set someone else up to take the fall for you again?" Reggio snarled.

"Insurance is important, Reggio," Marmelstein replied noncommittally. "It could be for you, too," he added with sudden earnestness.

Reggio was still eating. He chewed for a full twenty seconds before speaking. "What do you got?"

Bruce Marmelstein knew in that instant that he had Cagliari. The fish was on the line. All he had to do was haul him in and whack him with the oar.

Marmelstein reached in his pocket and removed a small square of folded paper. He placed it on the desk between them, near a pastel-pink box of cannoli Reggio was planning to have for dessert. The paper blossomed of its own accord into a familiar rectangular shape.

"This is a check for 750,000 dollars," Marmelstein said. He licked his lips in nervous excitement. "We'd like you to perform a service for us."

"What kind of service?" Reggio asked. He poked at the check with his fork, making sure all the numbers were there. They were. Leaving the check, he returned to his plate.

"Have you seen what they call the 'news' on TV?" Marmelstein asked, making quotation marks in the air with his fingers. "It's usually on sometime between Ricki Lake and prime time."

"The news," Reggio said evenly, as if talking to an idiot. "Of course I seen the news."

"Excellent," Marmelstein said. "Then you know about what's going on out there." He pointed over his shoulder to where, presumably, "there" was. "All those Arabs and stuff?"

"Of course I do," Reggio said, now certain that he was talking to an idiot.

"They've got a leader. A fellow named Mr. Koala. He's our liaison with Sultan Omay, the new head of the studio."

"That's the guy what's threatenin' to invade Israel and kill our secretary of state." Reggio nodded.

"Could be," Marmelstein said with a shrug. "If it doesn't have to do with the Industry, I don't pay much attention. Sorry." He tapped the check with a tan index finger. "Hank and I were hoping you could have a little talk with our Mr. Koala. We need him to sign a few papers-legal nonsense. You know."

"Yeah, I know." Reggio stabbed the check with his plastic fork, dragging it toward him. He lifted it in his pudgy hand, scanning it carefully. "Hey, there ain't no signature on this check," Reggio accused.

Bruce Marmelstein's face grew uncomfortable. "That's where it gets a little complicated," he admitted.

"Complicated," Hank Bindle agreed.

"Yeah?" Reggio asked. He dropped his fork back into the remains of his fettucine. "Uncomplicate it."

"The Taurus coffers are our proprietary domain," Marmelstein explained. "Of course they are. We're cochairmen of the studio. We can legally sign the checks, no problem."

"No problem." Hank Bindle nodded.

"Shut up," Reggio snapped at Bindle.

"Absolutely," Bindle agreed. The eternal yes man, he wasn't even sure what Reggio had said. He got a pretty good idea when he had to duck out of the way of a hurled plate of cheese-drenched pasta.

"What we need is for you to get him to sign everything and then sort of disappear. That includes your check."

"Hey, genius," Reggio said. "If he signs the check, it will be a direct link back to me."

"Gee, I didn't think of that, Bruce," Hank Bindle said, his expression clouding.

Marmelstein shot him another dirty look. "Taurus will make the funds immediately available to you," Marmelstein promised Reggio. "A smart man would be out of the country long before anything, um, turned up here." He smiled uncomfortably.

Reggio looked at the check. The tiny stars of the Taurus symbol were embossed on the blue paper. They sparkled when angled to the light properly.

The union man moved much more quickly than his bulk would have indicated. With a gush of cheese-filled air from his great lungs, the check vanished into his pocket. He folded his huge hands on his desk.

"Where's these papers what you need the A-rab to sign?" Reggio "Lips" Cagliari asked.

Chapter 25

The end was very near. Omay sin-Khalam did not need a doctor to tell him. Yet he awaited the news. The Eblan doctor frowned as he removed the stethoscope from the ghastly gray flesh of Omay's chest. The short, yellowed chest hair was brittle to the touch.

"How long?" the sultan asked, recognizing the somber look of hopelessness on the man's face.

"Anytime, Sultan," the doctor said sadly. "We should return you to the palace at once."

"I am not some book from a lending library," Sultan Omay retorted hotly. His small fit of pique was not without cost. He coughed long and deeply, at last spitting a gob of deep mucus onto the sandy floor of the tent.

"Sama 'an wa ta'atan, O Sultan," said the doctor, bowing deferentially. He left the bedouin tent quickly, lest he inspire the wrath of the increasingly irritable monarch.

Attendants hurried over. Hastily they dressed the sultan in fine robes of flowing silk. The mantle of the sin-Khalam sultanate was placed atop his head.

A body-length mirror had been brought from the palace. Although it was frowned upon in the more strict corners of the Muslim world, a sultan had to have some privileges.

Omay admired his reflection in the long mirror. It was good to wear proper dress again. For too long he had been bound by the garb of the West. All was as it should be now. He only wished that he had not wasted so much time.

"We are ready. Get me the Saudi," he ordered a soldier. The man hurried to collect the cellular phone, which routed their calls through Akkadad to Hollywood. It would take him a few minutes to raise Assola al Khobar.

Leaving the breezeless heat of the large tent, Sultan Omay shuffled out into the scorching hot sun of the vast Eblan desert. He placed his hands on his wasted hips, surveying the wasteland that was his domain.

The fierce Mideast sun was directly above and impossible to gaze upon at this time of day. So brightly pervasive was it, it seemed as if the entire sky had been engulfed in white-hot flame. The heavenly fire washed down onto the land, turning the sand into a blanket of blistering crystalline granules.

Omay left the mouth of the tent. His silk slippers kicked puffs of hot powder into the oppressive desert air as he shuffled around the side of his tent.

He found the hostages where they had been left. More than three dozen of them.

The stakes had been driven deep into the hardpacked earth beneath the shifting surface sand. Their hands and legs had been stretched out by ropes-each limb to one of four corner stakes. Individually they looked like large Xs traced into the burning sand.

The entire U.S. diplomatic delegation, along with its support personnel, lay baking in the unforgiving desert sun. The Ebla Arab Army colonel who was Sultan Omay's personal aide stood watch over them.

The secretary of state was nearest the edge of the tent. Her makeup faded, Helena Eckert's face was blistered with bright red lesions. Her sunburned eyelids were closed tightly, and her head lolled to one side, jowly cheek pressed into the sand.

Pathetic moans rose up from the surrounding field. Omay thrilled to the sound as he stood over the dying form of the American secretary of state.

"Our friend al Khobar is ready by now." Omay smiled down at Helena. "Today will see the end of Israel and the beginning of the end of your nation." The secretary of state only groaned.

Omay turned to his attending Eblan colonel. "Give the female water," Omay barked, weak eyes flashing anger.

The colonel quickly knelt beside the prone form of the American diplomat. He poured a little warm water from a canteen onto the secretary's cracked lips and mouth. She coughed at first, throat rebelling at the liquid, but then greedily accepted the meager gift.

When she spoke, her words were barely audible.

"You don't know America at all," Helena Eckert breathed. She didn't open her swollen eyes.

Omay smiled. He looked approvingly at his colonel.

"And you, woman, do not know what I have in store for your country," he said. "By this time tomorrow the place that produces the filth that is your culture will lay in ruins. Your nation will not recover. And the man who engineered it all will return to Ebla. A hero to Islam."

"Al Khobar will never get out alive," Helena Eckert said weakly. She'd heard this madman's scheme before.

"Though only a Saudi, he is as cunning as a fox. Assola al Khobar will have his hero's welcome. Perhaps when he returns I will introduce you to him." A wicked grin. "That is, if you are still alive."

"You'll die first, you cancerous old bastard," the secretary of state hissed, abandoning the final vestiges of her diplomatic self.

Above Helena, Sultan Omay bristled at the remark. Scowling, the old man stood more erect. He wanted to spit on the American secretary but found to his intense displeasure that his mouth could form no more saliva.

Tasting the sandy dryness of his tongue, Sultan Omay turned to his attending soldier.

"Spit in this cursed female's face," he commanded

Snapping to attention, the colonel drew up a thick wad of sand-fueled saliva. He expelled it dutifully onto the face of the secretary of state.

It had no effect whatsoever. Helena Eckert was delirious.

"You're going to die, you cancerous bastard," she uttered in a distant, rasping whisper. It was as if she were in a world all her own. "You're going to die and rot in hell. Rot, rot, rot..."

The saliva rolled down her cheek, dripping onto the scorching desert sand.

"Die and rot in hell," Helena continued, oblivious to all that was around her. "Eaten by cancer and maggots."

The meager drops of water had returned her voice. It grew stronger, more mocking as the words flowed out. She perspired madly through the heat, through the pain. The groans in the field of torment where she lay dying grew louder. Others joined the derisive chorus.

"Cancer and maggots ...cancer and maggots... cancer and maggots..."

Sultan Omay's eyes grew wild as they swept the area. The Americans continued their scornful wail. Furious, the sultan was on the verge of ordering violence against the insolent Americans, but before the order could be given, the young communications soldier raced up bearing the sultan's small cellular phone.

"Sultan," the soldier cried, "the Saudi, al Khobar, is not available."

Rage distracted, Omay wheeled away from the murmuring Americans. His wrinkled hand clasped the hilt of his dagger threateningly.

"What! Why?"

The Eblan soldier swallowed nervously.

"They say he is 'taking a meeting,'" the soldier replied fearfully.

Omay's hand left the dagger.

The chorus of defiant groans from behind him had begun to subside. Some of the men were losing consciousness.

The sultan's brow pulled gravely over his watery dark eyes.

"That is not one of our arranged signals," he said.

"Do you wish me to try again?" the soldier volunteered. He held up the phone, finger poised on Redial.

"No," the Sultan said somberly. "Brave Assola is dead. The Americans have bloodied their infidel hands on yet another hero of Islam."

And privately Sultan Omay knew that his great hope for destroying Hollywood had died with al Khobar. The Americans had been stronger than he thought. He was certain they would have waited for a diplomatic solution, giving Omay time to spring both ends of his trap. And he had come so close. Al Khobar had been nearly ready.

Now there was nothing to wait for.

"Colonel, ready your army," Omay intoned ominously. Legs wobbling, he turned back to his tent. "Yes, 0 great Sultan," the colonel replied crisply.

"But what of these vermin?" He spread a hand out over the numerous sun-tortured bodies.

Omay looked down at the prone forms of Secretary of State Helena Eckert and her entourage. "Leave them to the desert sun," he sneered. "If any are left alive after today's glorious battle, tell them that they lived to see the end of Israel. Then kill them."

And with that the Great Peacemaker shuffled away from the vast field of torture.

Chapter 26

Bindle and Marmelstein nearly danced into their office. The workmen were on their latest coffee break, so the room was almost empty. Almost but not quite. However, even the sight of Remo sitting on their couch was not enough to put a damper on their joyful mood.

"What are you two pinheads so happy about?" Remo asked as the Taurus executives breezed through the door.

"Oh, nothing," Hank Bindle sang. He grinned at Bruce Marmelstein. Marmelstein grinned back. Remo shook his head. Obviously the two men thought they shared some great private joke. "Before the pair of you lapse into Prozac comas, you want to tell me where your little buddy al Koala is?"

The smiles vanished so quickly they left white creases in the movie moguls' salon-tanned faces. "Who wants to know?" Hank Bindle challenged. Remo knew immediately something was wrong. He got slowly to his feet. Without even a single word to either man, he crossed over to their desks. The latest matching desks ordered by the two executives were huge mahogany affairs that weighed almost a thousand pounds each. Near Bindle's, Remo bent at the waist, gripping the fat middle section of one of the curved legs.

He stood. Bindle and Marmelstein were shocked to see the desk rise with him.

Remo stood there for a moment, the thousand-pound desk held away from his body in the same casual manner he might have used to hold a squirt gun. The huge desk did not waver one millimeter in his outstretched arm.

When he was certain he had their attention, Remo flicked his wrist. The desk rocketed away from his hand as if yanked on a line. It cracked straight through the ceiling-to-floor window at the rear of the office.

Both the desk and several huge glass shards seemed to hover in the air for an infinitely long moment before vanishing below the sill. A mighty crash rose from three stories below two seconds later. This was followed by angry shouts in Eblan Arabic.

Remo turned away from the hole in the wall. Paint-smeared tarpaulins rattled in the soft, warm breeze. He set his dead-eyed gaze on Bindle and Marmelstein.

"Where is he?" he repeated.

"Bruce had him kidnapped," Hank Bindle blabbered.

Marmelstein whirled on his partner.

"Me?" Bruce Marmelstein snapped, shocked. "It was all your idea. Check the check," he said, spinning to Remo. "Hank's handwriting is on everything but the signature."

Bindle looked horrified.

"You told me you didn't want to wreck your manicure!" he shrieked.

"Liar!" Marmelstein screamed.

Hank Bindle desperately searched his repertoire for an appropriate comeback. The one he found gave him intense satisfaction.

"Hairdresser!" Bindle screeched.

The look of pure hateful rage that blossomed on the face of Bruce Marmelstein quickly transformed into one of intense pain. Before he was able to screech a response back at his partner, he felt an explosion of raw agony at the back of his neck, as if someone were extracting his spinal cord and all his body's attendant nerves through an acid-formed incision. Through panicked, watering eyes he saw that Hank Bindle was in similar agony.

When the two partners searched for the source of the sudden pain, they found Remo standing between them. He was clutching them both by the tops of their spinal columns and lifting them off the floor. His face was a mask of rage.

"Where is he?" he said through clenched teeth.

"I don't know." Bindle winced.

"With Reggio Cagliari," Marmelstein pleaded.

"But we don't know where they are," Bindle gasped.

"You'd better be able to find out," Remo threatened. "Or when the next desk drops, you two nitwits will be under it."

Dropping them back to the carpet, he spun for the door.

Wind still blew in through the gaping hole in the wall. Bindle and Marmelstein glanced at the remaining enormous desk. They gulped simultaneously. The threat was too real for comfort.

Shuddering at the thought, both men trailed Remo rapidly from the office.

FOR MOST OF THE MODERN WORLD, the Eblan-Israeli war began with an electronic whimper. So it was for Harold W. Smith.

Tired eyes glued to his computer screen, haggard face illuminated in weird, amber-fueled shadows, Smith tracked the troop movements as they were recorded by satellites stationed in geosynchronous orbit above the region.

Eblan forces that had been massed along the Anatolia Corridor in the desert between Syria and Lebanon had moved down into the mountainous Golan Heights region just over an hour before. There would be no turning back.

Smith dipped in and out of various reports. From the satellite information, he shifted to the raw data collected by U.S. intelligence services. This was augmented by CURE's secret pipelines into the Mossad and Israeli military command. Throughout all this, Smith utilized the screen-in-screen function, devoting a small corner of his monitor to the constant video feed from the ITN cameras at the scene of battle.

It was proving to be a massacre of unbelievable proportions.

With his announced intentions, Israel had had almost two days to prepare for Sultan Omay's invasion. The disputed Golan Heights had been packed with enough firepower to repel any assault that Ebla could mount. The Israeli level of preparedness was proving to be more than formidable.

The casualty figures had not yet been reported, but news correspondents on the ground were likening the outcome of the first Ebla-Israel engagement to the routing of Iraqi forces in Kuwait during the Gulf War.

Smith did not need casualty figures to tell him what was happening. He could see the bodies of the Ebla Arab Army soldiers as the Israelis swarmed over them. As yet Smith had not seen a single dead Israeli.

In isolation the war as it was unfolding would have been a cause for celebration for Jerusalem and its allies in the West. However there was another, darker factor at work in the region. The aspect that was not yet being covered by the press was the effect the Eblan invasion was having on other fundamentalist nations in the Mideast.

Already there were demonstrations in support of Ebla and its sultan in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. There were even radical elements in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia who applauded the decisive conduct of Sultan Omay.

As a result of the action of this one, insignificant little nation, all of the Mideast was ready to ignite. Even Israel would not be able to repel attacks from all sides.

Libya had already announced support for Ebla. It was eager to join the fray, yet was cautious enough to see how America would react to the aggression of others.

So far the United States had remained neutral in the actual conflict. While publicly denouncing the actions of Ebla-which he had done many times in the past few days-the President had ordered U.S. battleships in the Mediterranean not to engage.

American troops on the ground in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt had been put on a heightened alert status, but had been similarly instructed. Everyone knew this would last only until the rest of the Islamic world joined Ebla against Israel. When push finally came to shove, there was no doubt anywhere in the region, or indeed in the world, on whose side America's ultimate loyalty would fall. If it came to it, the United States would back its longtime ally, Israel.

And once the U.S. was actively involved, there would be no turning back. Other nations around the world would take sides. As a result of tiny Ebla's actions, the world was heading inexorably down a destructive path it had not ventured on in more than half a century.

It was a tricky situation. Even now the President had put on hold any attempt to rescue the secretary of state and the rest of the hostages lest the presence of American military personnel within its borders inspire Ebla to claim that the U.S. had joined Israel.

In the solitude of his Folcroft office, Smith scanned the minute-by-minute reports with forced detachment. There was no sense in pointless agitation. He had a sinking feeling that there would be enough of the real thing to go around in a very short time.

Chiun would soon be at ground zero.

The situation had become too grave too quickly. Smith was forced to intercept the Master of Sinanju's commercial craft in Honolulu. He had arranged for an Air Force flight out of Hawaii to take Chiun directly to Tel Aviv. But until the Master of Sinanju was in place and ready to defuse one end of Omay sin-Khalam's diabolical trap, Remo could not act.

Smith had not yet gotten hold of Remo to tell him the plan had been accelerated. When he tried reaching CURE's enforcement arm at Taurus, an effete secretary informed him that Remo had left the studio in the company of Bindle and Marmelstein. No matter. With the worldwide crisis that was brewing, Remo would surely not miss his usual check-in time. Smith hoped.

Watching the video images on his computer screen of bodies piling up on the parched mountainous desert of the Golan Heights, Smith realized that he hoped for a lot of things right now.

And as Hell erupted in the Middle East, all any of them could do was wait.

"WHAT DO THEY DO with thieves in Ebla?" Bindle asked.

They were driving through occupied Culver City. Remo was behind the wheel of the Taurus Studios jeep. So far the Eblan soldiers they had encountered had left them alone.

"Probably cut their hands off," Remo said, uninterested.

Hank Bindle was horrified. "But I use mine." He pouted.

Bruce Marmelstein was equally upset. "And my Rolex would have nothing to hold it on," Marmelstein argued. He waggled his new watch, which was a replacement for the Swiss watch with his face. The Swiss watch had broken an hour after he first put it on.

"Maybe you can ask for a substitute," Remo suggested. "I'd recommend your tongues."

The headquarters of Local 529 was in a small office in a complex off of La Cienaga Boulevard. Remo parked on the sunlit street out front and went inside. The two movie executives followed.

Lips Cagliari wasn't there. However they did find a similarly overweight Teamster who told them that Reggio had left about an hour before.

"Was he alone?" Remo asked.

"Sure," the man said. "He had me help load a crate in the back of his truck."

"Did that crate weigh as much as a skinny Arab with rotten teeth?" Remo asked.

The guy cocked his head. "Maybe. Reggio told me it was camera equipment. Say, I heard there's guys who are startin' to wanna fight after seein' that ex-cop on TV. You think old Lips went and joined the resistance against these A-rabs?" He scratched his ample belly as he spoke.

"Only if there's a paycheck in it," Remo said, shooting a look at Bindle and Marmelstein. "Do you have any idea where he might have gone?" he asked the man.

"I'm not so sure about that," the teamster mused. "Reggio always liked the zoo. The lion house is a pretty good spot for dumping purposes, if you know what I mean. If he bagged himself an A-rab, he might go there."

"Thanks." Remo turned urgently on the studio executives. "You guys know where the zoo is?" he asked.

"Ever been to Compton?" Marmelstein replied glibly.

Remo cuffed him in the side of the head.

"Ouch! Yeah, I know," Marmelstein complained, rubbing the edge of his hair plugs. "That hurt."

"Imagine how much worse it'll be without a hand to rub it," Remo said with a dour expression.

He headed back out the door.

Outside they found a group of Eblans standing suspiciously near the front of Remo's car. There were five of them in flowing robes and headdresses.

Two of the Arabs had been in a jeep; three had been on camelback. The camels were tethered to a nearby telephone pole.

"What is your business?" the leader of the group demanded. He was a short man with a thick beard and an even thicker accent.

"We're trying to scrape up a test screening audience for the latest Pauley Shore movie," Remo explained blandly. "So far people are happier with the occupation than the thought of having to sit through it. We're thinking a forty-million-dollar advertising budget."

The beard twisted into a frown.

"You are restricted to your homes unless granted permission otherwise," the confused Arab insisted.

"We're with Taurus Studios," Hank Bindle interjected. "I happen to be a close personal friend of Mr. Koala, who is a close personal friend of Sultan Omay."

This brought a reaction from the Arabs. At the mention of Taurus Studios, five automatic weapons were quickly raised. The Arabs aimed the guns at Remo's group.

"You are coming with us," their leader barked.

"Sorry," Remo apologized. "We're kinda pressed for time. Our projectionist's already on golden time."

Before the Eblan could react, Remo's hand shot forward, fingers stiff.

Their leader had been standing farther ahead of the rest and was therefore the first casualty. When the tips of Remo's fingers met the barrel of the Arab's gun, there was a shriek of protesting metal. With a pained cry the barrel split in two, folding back along its length like a peeling banana. One twisted side of half barrel punctured the heart of the gun's stunned owner. The other side curled farther back, splitting the breastbone of a charging Ebla Arab Army soldier. It came to rest in a second fluttering heart.

Even as the bodies fell, Remo swirled past them and into the midst of the other three Arabs.

Remo made short work of them. A toe caught a gun barrel, flipping it up through the forehead of a soldier. An elbow cracked a rib cage, collapsing it to jelly. Remo slapped the jaw of the last soldier up into his frontal lobe. As the man dropped to the hot concrete, Remo was already spinning back to the Taurus Studios car.

"What was with them?" Bindle asked, alarmed.

Remo's face was unhappy. "They know Khobar's missing."

"Cobalt?" Bindle asked. "Who the hell is Cobalt?"

"No. Kobe's arm," Marmelstein explained to his partner, deeply concerned. "It's missing. Did they cut someone's arm off for stealing?" he asked Remo worriedly.

"Hey, I don't remember approving any Pauley Shore movie," Bindle added, perplexed.

Remo rolled his eyes heavenward. "Get in the car, you mushheads," he said with more patience than he felt.

As he climbed in behind the wheel, he prayed that whoever the two executives had paid to kidnap and then murder al Khobar wasn't as stupid as them. Bindle and Marmelstein were just dumb enough to kill first and then try to interrogate the corpse later.

Leaving the bodies of the five Arabs to bake in the hot sun, Remo headed the studio car back out toward La Cienaga.

Dull eyes supremely indifferent, the three camels watched them drive away.

Chapter 27

Persuasion wasn't so hard, Reggio Cagliari knew. It was only a matter of having the right tools for the job. Reggio was never caught without the right tools. In fact he had all he needed in his hands right now.

One pair of pliers. A hammer. A handful of Sheetrock nails. Another pair of pliers was in his back pocket in case the first pair broke, which they sometimes did when he was working.

That was it.

It had been easy enough to nab Mr. Koala. Reggio caught him with a mallet to the back of the head when he stumbled on the Arab snooping alone outside the old Mammoth Studios lot.

The other Arabs were gone from the area. Reggio knew why. Their work must have been complete and they were bugging out. The evidence of that was all around.

While he loaded the terrorist into the trunk of his car, he saw the wires running in and around the big soundstages and into the office buildings all around the motion-picture studio. He'd seen the same wires wrapping around every other studio, some even before the occupation. Taurus had rented tons of space.

More than they would ever need for a single movie. Even Reggio knew that. But the Hollywood bigwigs had been too busy counting the rental cash to bother to find out what Koala and his A-rab cronies were cooking up under their own roofs.

Just to make sure, Reggio took a peek inside one of the empty soundstages. It was as he had expected. Koala must have been finishing up his last inspection tour. The last for anyone in this town. Ever. Reggio was glad he'd made this final deal. He'd take his money from Taurus and head off to South America. He'd go somewhere Don Vaggliosi never heard of.

First things first, however. He still had a little more persuading to do.

"Did you get that one?" Reggio asked. He was chewing on one of the cannoli he'd brought from his office. Powdered sugar dusted his dimpled chin. The pastel-pink bakery box lay open on the crate to which al Khobar was attached.

"This one? Yes, yes. Please." The voice was desperate. Pleading.

"Didja initial near da X?" Reggio questioned, taking the paper in one big hand. He blew the sugar off.

"Yes!"

Reggio inspected the paper. It appeared to be in order. He slid it in with the rest inside the manila envelope Bindle and Marmelstein had given him.

"Will you please let me go now? Please?" The words were slurred.

He was begging. Reggio liked it when they begged.

The portly man looked down at the terrified form of Assola al Khobar.

The Saudi terrorist was bleeding profusely from the mouth. A river of crimson poured down over his chin, dribbling to the concrete floor of the shed. The faint odor of manure mixed with some kind of ammonia-based cleaner was in the air.

The blood was really just a special effect. Reggio knew so much blood wouldn't come from a couple of small puncture wounds. Most of it was blood mixed in with buckets of saliva. It looked horrible, but was relatively harmless. The victim never thought so, however.

Reggio felt good. He was sitting on a stool near the kneeling form of al Khobar.

The terrorist was bent over a wooden crate. His lower lip had been pulled out as far as it could reasonably go without tearing. Four of the nails Reggio had brought with him had been pounded through Assola's lip and into the wood of the crate below. They successfully prevented the terrorist from moving. There were a few rotten teeth laying on the crate, as well, their bloody root ganglia dripping onto the wood. This had been the reason for the pliers. Where lips sometimes failed, teeth always worked.

When he was a young up-and-comer in the Pubescio Family, Reggio had had a habit of nailing people's lips to things. His affection for that particular part of the human body was what earned him his moniker "Lips." In recent years he'd gotten away from what had made him a kind of local legend. In a way it was nice to go through the old routine again. Even if it was only a one-shot deal.

"Gimme a minute here, Mr. Koala," Reggio said politely.

One thing everyone who knew anything about Reggio Cagliari knew. He liked to be certain of things.

Dusting the powdered sugar off his hands, Reggio fumbled at his front pocket. He pulled out the check from Bindle and Marmelstein, which had been the first thing he'd given Assola to sign.

Behind him a lion growled. He glanced over. There were several of the animals on the other side of a prisonlike cage door. Only one had taken a real interest in the activity going on inside the shed. Its nose was sniffing curiously at the bars as Reggio turned back to the all-important check. Reggio checked the signature carefully. He wasn't quite sure what he was looking for, but it seemed okay. He stuffed the check back into his pocket. "We're all set here, Mr. Koala," he said. "Sorry about all this." He shrugged as he passed a fat hand over the pulled teeth. "Business and all."

His work done, Reggio glanced around for the hammer he'd brought in along with the rest of his meager supply of equipment. He thought he'd left it on the crate near Koala's extracted teeth. It wasn't there.

Grunting, Reggio leaned one hand on the crate, careful not to touch any of the blood-and-saliva mixture.

Nope, the hammer wasn't there. He was beginning to think he'd left it in his truck.

"I can get you more than that," al Khobar said. His voice was close to Reggio. His tongue lisped through the newly formed gaps in his gum line.

"Thanks. I'm all set here, Mr. Koala," Reggio said.

Of course it wasn't in his truck. He'd used it to pound the nails into the Arab's lip.

Reggio exhaled loudly. A puff of confectioner's sugar blew from his large lower lip.

It must have fallen to the floor somehow.

With an effort Reggio got to his knees. They ached from the strain. He felt around the side of the crate.

Nothing.

There was really no place the hammer could have fallen. And wouldn't he have heard it?

"You Americans are all the same. Fools motivated solely by money."

Al Khobar sounded more confident now. Even with the nails which still fixed him in place. His voice came from above Reggio as the big man crawled on all fours around the side of the small wooden crate.

"Yeah, we all gotta make a living, right, Mr. Koala?" Reggio Cagliari asked, red faced.

"Death is my living," al Khobar hissed.

Reggio looked up in time to see the grimace of fierce intensity on the face of Assola al Khobar. He also saw his missing hammer. It was in the terrorist's hand and was even now in the process of swinging down toward Reggio's own head.

The hammer connected solidly. Reggio felt a surge of sudden, intense pain above his right temple before the world grew coldly black.

AL KHOBAR WATCHED the Mafia thug drop to the floor.

Red-rimmed eyes traced the hammer. The irony that it should be his salvation was not lost on the terrorist. He could almost hear the snide laughter of his billionaire construction-magnate father.

The pain in his lip was excruciating. Quickly Assola twisted the claw end around, slipping it awkwardly into the space beneath his nose. He pushed it under a nail head.

With a scream that made the nearby lions bellow in rage, he pulled the first nail free.

THE FIRST THING REMO SAW inside the Los Angeles Zoo was what appeared to be the half-eaten carcass of a metallic creature lying in the bushes just inside the main entrance. A mangy-looking pelt lay near it.

"Hey, what's my animatronic camel doing here?" Hank Bindle demanded.

Remo spotted the reason why a few moments later. They were zipping along the pedestrian path in their Taurus jeep when he caught a glimpse of several Arabs near the monkey house. They appeared to be handling one of their fellow Eblans roughly. As they shoved the man forward toward the gorilla cage, Remo recognized a familiar voice.

"Do you people have any idea how many Academy Awards I've been nominated for?"

Bindle and Marmelstein spun toward the shouted voice. From where he sat in the speeding studio jeep, Hank Bindle was only able to see the animals on exhibit.

"Hey, that monkey sounds like Tom Roberts," Bindle mused, nodding toward the gorilla cage.

"Monkeys can't talk," Bruce Marmelstein said, irritated. He had seen the Arabs and suspected who was really shouting. The Eblan soldiers vanished inside the monkey house.

"Oh," said Hank Bindle. "So I guess those ones must be animatronic."

No one bothered to explain the truth.

They found the lion cage a few minutes later. "Stay here," Remo ordered.

Bindle and Marmelstein didn't argue. They sat dutifully in the rear of the jeep while Remo trotted over to the lion paddock.

There was the familiar scent of blood in the air. Remo attributed it to the carcasses that were regularly fed to the jungle predators. He circled the large pen from west to east, keeping his senses tuned to their maximum.

The path he took brought Remo near a large shedlike structure built into the side wall of the pen. He noted as he passed around the front of the building that a gate at its rear, which led into the lion's pen, had been left open.

At the front of the building, he noted a pair of fresh skid marks in the asphalt. Someone had left here recently. And whoever it was had been in a hurry.

As he reached for the door, he caught another whiff of blood. Unlike the stale scent wafting from the main paddock, this was not from an animal that had been prepared for consumption by a zookeeper. The smell of blood here was fresh.

Pausing for a moment outside the door, Remo sensed a few large and distinctly nonhuman heartbeats coming from the interior of the shed. Having seen the open gate on the other side of the shed, Remo had little doubt what was inside.

If Assola al Khobar was alive in the small building, Remo would have preferred to leave him there. However, he couldn't afford to. Not with the unknown elements of Sultan Omay's trap still prepared to spring.

Placing the flat of his palm against its surface, Remo pushed the door steadily open. When the gap was wide enough for him to fit through, he slipped inside.

He pulled the door shut behind him.

Chapter 28

In his air-conditioned basement office in the Great Sultan's Palace in the Eblan capital of Akkadad, Mundhir Fadil Hamza was trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

Nothing seemed to add up properly. And as a fastidious bookkeeper, he was used to things adding up. Hamza was finance minister of the nation of Ebla and was perhaps the only man in the country not concentrating on the war that was raging at the mouth of the Anatolia Corridor. This was because he had a mission. One that was far more important than the war itself.

His mission had been given him in secret by none other than Sultan Omay sin-Khalam himself. As one of the sultan's oldest and most trusted friends, Minister Hamza had been put in sole charge of the Great Plan.

And it was a great plan.

It was a scheme that would ultimately and assuredly upset the political order in this region of the world, more than the war itself. Even if the sultan were to perish in battle-even if the battle were a complete disaster-the Great Plan would assure ultimate victory.

Hamza had learned in their parting conversation that the sultan never even expected to live until the end of the skirmish with Israel. If he was not killed by an enemy of Ebla, his illness would surely take him before his return.

But the war was only the foundation for a far more diabolical plan. Omay had revealed to Minister Hamza a singularly brilliant stratagem that would crush Israel and banish the influence of the West from the Mideast forever.

It could not fail. Not as outlined by Omay.

But something about the outline was not quite right. The Great Plan relied heavily on one element. This was the precise aspect that did not add up correctly for Ebla's finance minister.

Minister Hamza scrupulously checked and rechecked the finances of the Ebla sultanate. As he did so, and the answers kept coming up the same, he felt his stomach turn slowly to water. There were no errors.

It was not just the private area that was the problem. It was public, as well. It had happened quickly. Too quickly for the finance office to even be aware it was happening. The insidious tentacles stretched everywhere through the Eblan economy. And it seemed to come from one place.

Hamza reached a shaking hand out to his intercom. A woman's voice answered, muffled through a traditional chador.

"Please get me Taha al-Sattar," he said, head pounding.

As he waited for the call from Akkadad's premier banker, Hamza felt the first reflexive wave of panic grip his bowels.

Chapter 29

There were several large shapes within the small shed. A few lionesses had moved in around the open gate. Some had chosen to remain in the paddock outside. The rest were sprawled lazily in the cool interior of the shed.

A single lion, presumably the patriarch of this pride, was farther inside the shed than the rest. Remo saw it sprawled on its back near an overturned wooden box.

The scent of blood was strong inside. Remo saw a dark stain on one side of the crate. He spotted a few rotted and bloodied teeth scattered like used jacks on the floor. He recognized them instantly as Assola al Khobar's. No one else in Hollywood had teeth like that.

The lion near the box watched him slip through the door. Lying on its back, the animal had a small square of paper propped between its massive paws. As it followed the new intruder with a single wary eye, it continued to drag its big, rough tongue across the exterior of the paper.

Remo was barely inside the shed when he caught another odor, this one stronger than that given off by either blood or lions. It was the familiar smell of nervous human perspiration.

"Hey! Psst! Up here!"

The voice was soft and anxious.

Remo followed it up to the top of a stack of baled hay. An overweight man was crouched precariously atop the bales. They wobbled beneath his great girth, threatening to topple him into the center of the pack of lionesses. A thick trickle of half-congealed blood stained his forehead.

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume," Remo said dryly.

"No," the frightened man snapped. "Reggio Cagliari. Shit, pal, you gotta get me outta here." With a snap of its back and massive shoulders, the lion rolled over onto its stomach. The speed with which it moved was impressive. It let out a low snarl at Remo; however it made no move toward him. It went back to licking the paper.

Remo noticed that what so interested the lion was an ordinary manila envelope. It was smeared with some kind of thin white powder. Scraps of pink cardboard lay on the floor all around the animal.

"Oh, crap!" Reggio begged. "Don't piss him off!"

The lion began chewing contentedly on the envelope and the papers inside.

"Where's al Khobar?" Remo asked Reggio. Reggio didn't have a chance to answer. At that moment the door Remo had come through burst open.

"Get that away from it!" Bruce Marmelstein screamed desperately. He pointed to the envelope clasped between the lion's mighty paws.

The lion had been content to leave the other men in the shed alone until now, but at the abrupt entrance of the movie executive the head of the pride pushed itself hastily to its huge feet. Its roar was deafening inside the small room.

"Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!" Reggio screamed. He crawled as far away as he could on his wobbly haystack, pushing himself against the wall.

"Are you crazy!" Remo snapped at Marmelstein. "I thought I told you to stay in the car."

"I peeked in the window," Marmelstein said quickly. He jabbed a thumb toward a small window near Reggio's hay bales. "I need that." He pointed to the half-shredded envelope.

The lionesses rose to their feet. There were four of them, huge creatures with a grace and confidence that almost belied their great fierceness.

The lion tipped its head to one side, seeming to work its jaw into another, even louder roar. It would try to force them toward the females. They would then be responsible for the killing.

He was already partway across the room. While the lion was in midroar, Remo reached quickly over, snatching the crate off the floor. He held it out before him, feeling a bit foolish. With a whip in his other hand he could have applied for a job at the circus.

The lion's eyes had been closed while it roared. When it shut its massive jaws it seemed a bit surprised that its great bellow had not had the proper effect. Instead of fleeing, Remo was even closer than he had been.

The female lions were still near the door. This might be easier than he thought. Remo took another step toward the large creature. The lion was curious, but not fearful. It held its ground as he approached.

"Get that envelope first," Bruce Marmelstein's voice pleaded anxiously, too close to Remo's right ear.

"Get away from me," Remo snapped, elbowing Marmelstein in the gut.

The Taurus executive let out a gust of air, doubling over in pain.

This sudden movement was enough for the lion. Coiling the powerful muscles in its hindquarters, it pushed off into the air. In a split second it was hurtling toward Remo, front paws extended, razor-sharp claws splayed.

The animal cut the distance between them in no time.

The lion was fast. But Remo was faster.

When it was close enough that he could smell the stench of rotted flesh on its breath, Remo dropped low. He tossed the crate from left hand to right, keeping it out of the animal's way. Using his free hand as a fulcrum, he propped his palm up against the breastbone of the great beast as it soared above him.

In a move that seemed almost gentle, Remo flipped the creature up and over. Four hundred and fifty pounds of lion soared through the air, landing in a rough heap amid the females of the pride. Unlike a house cat, the lion did not land on its feet. A few of the female lions were knocked over by the male. All of them scrambled quickly to their feet. But Remo was already amid them.

Using the crate so as not to injure the creatures, he coaxed them all back out through the gate. Unlike their counterparts in the wild, these zoo lions didn't put up much of a fight. Remo was wrangling the last lioness back out into the paddock when the shed door that led into the park burst open yet again.

"Come quick!" Hank Bindle shouted urgently. Remo was replacing the bolt that Assola al Khobar had removed prior to his escape.

"Isn't anyone afraid of lions anymore?" he griped.

"This is it. We're dead," Bruce Marmelstein cried to himself. He was crouching on the floor amid the damp remains of his precious paperwork. The documents that would have implicated Assola al Khobar as the man responsible for the extravagant spending binge at Taurus Studios were in wet tatters. A bit of the powdered sugar that had attracted the lion in the first place still clung to the shreds of the envelope.

"Hurry!" Bindle insisted, ignoring his partner.

"What's wrong now?" Remo asked wearily.

"Monkeys don't talk!" he cried.

"Okay, that's it," Remo snapped.

Using the same crate he'd employed on the lions, but much less delicately, Remo knocked the two men back out the door. He propped the crate up against the knob to keep them from coming back in. When he turned back around, Reggio Cagliari was just climbing down to the floor.

"Man, dat was close," he panted. He was sweating profusely. Remo could smell the distinct odor of lion saliva on the man's face. There were remnants of damp powdered sugar there, as well.

"You were lucky," Remo told him. "So far."

"Males don't usually hunt," Reggio explained, still trying to catch his breath. "Females do. They must not have been hungry, I guess."

"I guess you know a lot about lions," Remo said.

"Hey, I get by," Reggio answered. The panic of a moment before was already given way to suspicion. The hood that was Reggio Cagliari was reasserting itself. "You a fed?"

"I don't have time for this," Remo said. "Where's al Khobar?"

"Who the hell's El Kabong?" Reggio asked, genuinely confused.

"Koala," Remo snapped.

Reggio balked. "Koalas?" he said vaguely. "Don't know if they got them here. I seen hyenas."

"I told you," Remo said, "I don't have time." Grabbing Reggio by the neck of his sweaty shirt, Remo spun around. He dragged the thug roughly across the floor toward the gate that fed into the lion paddock. As the gate swept toward him, the petty gangster decided that cooperation might be the best way not to while away the evening inside the digestive tracts of a dozen lions.

"He knocked me out!" Reggio cried. "I woke up with dat lion licking my face. I don't know where he went! I swear to God, I don't know."

He was telling the truth, Remo knew. But in this instance the truth was no help.

"Thanks," Remo said coldly. He reached for the bolt.

"Wait, wait!" Reggio pleaded. "Maybe I can give you somethin'." His voice was desperate.

"Doubtful," Remo said.

"Those wires all around town! All around the studios! Doncha wanna know what they are?"

Remo paused. He released his grip on Reggio's shirt. "I'm listening," he said.

Reggio took a deep, thankful breath. "They're hooked up to explosive charges," he said.

Remo frowned. "Are you sure?"

"Whaddya mean?" He sounded mildly insulted. "Sure I'm sure. I use ta use the same sort of stuff sometimes for the Pubescios back before I hadda go to work for dat skunk Vaggliosi. When I picked up Mr. Koala I even sneaked into one of the soundstages at Mammoth Studios just to have a look-see. Dese A-rabs have packed enough explosive crap into the studios around here to blow all of Hollywood down to Tijuana."

Remo thought about all the similar wires he'd been seeing all around the motion-picture capital. Like a picture that had previously been just slightly out of focus, the entire scheme of Sultan Omay suddenly became clear. Remo had a pretty good idea what had been on Smith's missing ship.

"Thanks, Reggio," Remo said with a nod. "You don't even know it, but you just helped out your country."

"Really?" Reggio asked. His eyes narrowed slyly. "Do I get a reward?"

"Absolutely," Remo said agreeably. Reggio smiled broadly.

"What is it?"

Reggio's reward was that he never saw coming the blow that severed his brain from his spinal column.

WHEN REMO STEPPED outside a moment later, a frantic Hank Bindle met him at the door.

"The monkeys!" Bindle cried. "They're not monkeys! They're people!"

"So's Soylent Green," Remo said, heading for the jeep.

Bindle leaped before him, eyes pleading. "You've got to do something!"

"What is your problem?" Remo asked, annoyed.

"I have to have my hands," Bruce Marmelstein groaned from the nearby jeep, unmindful of the others. He sat with the rear door open, his fingers gripping the damp remnants of paperwork. "People without hands don't get invited to the Oscars. I'll never be on ET. again. How will I floss?"

Bindle and Remo ignored him.

"Tom Roberts and Susan Saranrap are in the monkey house!" Bindle explained rapidly.

"Good. They'll be happier with their own kind," Remo said with an indifferent shrug. He turned to the jeep.

"You don't understand," Bindle pleaded, grabbing his arm. "Without Mr. Koala's signature on those papers, we're trapped." He pointed to the scraps of paper in Marmelstein's hands. "We have to make The Movie. And we can't make a movie without our stars."

"Tell me why I should even care about you or your dippy movie." Remo challenged.

"Chiun's script," Marmelstein ventured softly from the back seat of the car.

"What?" Bindle said, wheeling on his partner. Remo merely closed his eyes. He knew already where this was heading.

Marmelstein's eyes slowly came back into focus. Like a patient suddenly waking from a long coma. "His friend's script," Marmelstein explained to Bindle.

"Yeah," Hank Bindle said to Bruce Marmelstein. "Yeah!" he repeated, spinning back to Remo. "If you can save our stars, I promise you we'll give serious consideration to Mr. Chiun's screenplay."

"I thought you were already doing that," Remo said, peeved.

"We tell that to everybody." Marmelstein waved dismissively, rising from the back seat. He was alert now, his eyes full of cunning.

"To everybody," Bindle echoed.

"But we'll really look at his screenplay," Marmelstein promised.

"Really, really," Bindle agreed.

Remo's shoulders slumped. He knew without owning a timepiece precisely what time it was. His internal watch was more accurate than an atomic clock. It was not yet too late.

Omay's plan was finished. They now had an edge. Remo knew exactly what he was up against in California. And Chiun would not have even arrived in Greece yet, let alone Ebla. There was still time.

"You better appreciate this, Chiun," he muttered. Without another word he ran down the path toward the monkey house.

Chapter 30

When the order came down the chain of command at Pearl Harbor that Captain Stewart Sanger's U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcat was to be stripped of its 20mm M-61 cannon and attendant rounds of ammunition, as well as the four recessed Sidewinder missiles in its wing pallets, Sanger thought that it was a bizarre joke. When he found out that he would be flying into Israel in his newly unarmed aircraft, the joke that had not been very funny to begin with lost every last trace of humor.

"That's a damn war zone," he sputtered to his commanding officer.

"I'm aware of that, Captain. Good luck."

That was it. His load had been lightened. Speed was his only priority. He had his orders and he was expected to carry them out.

When the black government car screeched onto the dock next to the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan carrying the special passenger for whom speed was a priority over defense, the idea that this was all a joke reasserted itself.

"Are you shittin' me?" Captain Sanger asked no one in particular.

The man who was hustled up the gangplank was old enough to be Methuselah's grandfather. Hell, his great-great-grandfather. The walnut-hued skin stretched across his bald head was so thin that Captain Sanger swore he could see skull. His eyes were impenetrable slits. He wore a bright purple kimono and an unhappy scowl. The old man hurried up to the waiting F-14.

"You are the pilot?" the old man asked in a squeaky voice.

"Yes, sir," Sanger replied, not sure whether or not he should smile at the G-men who accompanied the old Asian. They seemed as confused as the Navy captain.

"I will consider you for a role in an upcoming major motion picture if you get me to our destination and back as quickly as possible," the old man said.

Without another word he scampered up the plane and settled into the rear cockpit. The government agents merely shook their heads apologetically.

Amazed once more that this was not indeed some colossal joke, Captain Sanger climbed dutifully if reluctantly up into the front cockpit.

NEARLY NINE THOUSAND MILES and three midair refuelings later, the Tomcat roared out of the sky over Israel.

Sanger was aware of the hands-off order that had been given to all U.S. military personnel in the region. America was giving Israel a wide berth during the conflict with Ebla. He was surprised, therefore, when his U.S. Navy aircraft was given clearance to land at Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion International Airport. Whoever his passenger was, he had friends in high places.

The plane had not taxied to a full stop before the old Asian popped the shield over his cockpit. As the tiny man was climbing out of the plane, Captain Sanger called to him over his shoulder.

"Sir, if you'll beg pardon, does this have something to do with the conflict?"

"Of course," the old man replied. He did not sound pleased. "As all good screenwriters know, conflict drives every story. Be ready for my return."

And with that the old man jumped to the tarmac. The last Captain Sanger saw of him, he was loping across the airport toward the main terminal, kimono arms flapping like the wings on some insane purple bird.

ARYEH SARID WAS DOZING behind the wheel of his taxicab outside the Tel Aviv airport when he thought he heard the door behind him click shut. There hadn't been a shift in weight to indicate that anyone had even gotten in the car.

He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and glanced up in the rearview mirror.

There was no one there.

Imagination. That's what it must have been. Sighing, Aryeh crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes once again. He nearly jumped out of his skin when a high-pitched voice admonished him from the back seat.

"I did not mount this conveyance to watch you sleep."

Eyes springing open in shock, Aryeh grabbed at the rearview, shifting it lower.

He caught sight of the old man sitting calmly in the middle of the back seat.

"I am so sorry," Aryeh apologized, clearing the sleep from his throat. "I did not see you."

"When one wishes to see, it helps to keep one's eyes open." The fare settled back in the seat. "Now, coachman, take me to Golan," he ordered.

"Golan?" Aryeh said, surprised. He turned around, placing an arm on the back of the front seat. "Do you not know what is happening there, old one?"

"Yes," Chiun spit. "Idiocy that keeps me from my true calling. And woe to me I have left my son in charge." The Asian tapped a finger on the seat. "Hasten, lest in my absence the callow mooncalf ruins all that I have worked for."

Aryeh shrugged apologetically. "I am sorry, but I cannot take you there. The farthest I can go is perhaps Tiberias. It is south of the Golan Heights."

"Oh, very well," the Master of Sinanju snapped. "Just be quick about it. I must kill Sultan Omay of Ebla and return to Hollywood before my son allows the buffoons who run my studio to cast one of the insipid Sheen offspring in my production. Or worse, a Baldwin." He pitched his voice low, leaning forward. "Those boys are box-office poison." He sat back knowingly in his seat.

The cabdriver's eyes narrowed. "You are going to kill Omay?"

"If this infernal machine ever moves," Chiun said with growing impatience.

Aryeh started the engine.

"For that I would drive you all the way to Akkadad."

Tires leaving a smoking trail of rubber, the car squealed away from the curb.

THEY DIDN'T GET as far as Akkadad. The cab did, however, manage to travel a good distance up around the northern edge of Lake Tiberias. It was stopped by a military blockade manned by members of the Israel Defense Force.

"Don't you know what is going on up here?" a young soldier asked of Aryeh when the cab had stopped.

"Of course," the driver said. "But I was taking this nice gentleman on a special mission. He is a famous screenwriter who also works as an assassin. He is here to kill Sultan Omay."

The soldier raised a skeptical eyebrow. Together with another Defense Force soldier, he went to the rear of the cab. When they looked in the windows on either side of the back seat, they found it empty.

Aryeh was surprised when the door of his taxi was opened and the soldiers began helping him out. They talked to him in soothing tones.

"But he was here," Aryeh insisted. "He told me how his son would probably ruin his one chance for success. I agreed with him and told him how the one time I trusted my boy with my taxi while I was in the hospital he almost-"

The story was cut short when one of the Israel Defense Force jeeps that had blocked the road into the mountains roared to life.

As the soldiers around it scattered, the jeep flew away at full speed, bouncing its way up the rugged road into the Golan Heights. So shocked were they at the sight of the figure behind the wheel none of them thought to fire a shot.

The wizened old man with the eggshell head and the purple kimono drove like a madman away from the knot of soldiers. Up into the thick of the raging battle.

Chapter 31

The explosions came at such a constant rate that they blurred into a single, endless, deafening roar. The sky was fire. Acrid smoke blew up all around the region, choking sight and filling lungs with dust and sand.

Israeli aircraft swooped down over the field of battle, skimming lines of advancing Eblan soldiers and unleashing wave after lethal wave of bullets and rockets.

The F-16s had just completed their latest devastating assault. An attack squadron of AH-1 helicopters soared through a moment after the airplanes had rocketed out, rattling endless rounds into the pride of the Ebla Arab Army.

The earth shook beneath the mighty treads of Israeli tanks-far more sophisticated than those of tiny Ebla. Across the battlefield lay the remains of countless Eblan heavy military vehicles, thick clouds of billowy black smoke curling up from their twisted metal hulks.

As he stood at the mouth of his tent, which had been propped up at the edge of the battle line, Sultan Omay sin-Khalam scowled. It seemed at once to be both a grimace of pain and one of intense displeasure.

This was not the glorious contest he had imagined. He had allowed himself the conceit that his men would be able to repel the Jewish infestation from the Golan Heights and retake the region for Islam. But that vain self-image had collapsed beneath the inexorable force of reality.

Ebla would lose this battle. Badly. But in so losing, it would ultimately win the war.

This thought was but a minor comfort as Sultan Omay watched the Israeli army slice through his poorly trained soldiers like a thresher through autumn wheat.

Omay was sitting now. A stool had been brought to the shaded canopy that stretched on poles beyond the closed flaps of his tent. He could no longer stand. In the past few hours walking had become almost impossible without assistance. Death gripped his soul. Yet he willed his body to live. Just a little longer.

His breath came in softly gurgling wheezes. Each time he filled his lungs, they burned with the intensity of the fires raging in the rocky desert plain before him.

The colonel who was his aide had left to lead units of the Eblan cavalry. Another soldier had been conscripted into service for the sultan. This young Arab held a pair of binoculars to the eyes of his ruler, so that Omay could get a better view of the great carnage spread across that part of the mountainous battlefield visible from his encampment.

As he was peering out at the line of advancing Israeli soldiers, the scene suddenly wavered. The field of combat blurred and vanished. Omay blinked at the sudden change in his vision.

The spyglasses were gone. An anxious face stood before him. His communications man. The young soldier held a cellular phone in his hand.

"O Sultan, I have received two urgent calls for you," the man said hastily. "One has broken in on the other."

Omay's eyes were watery. They seemed much farther away than even the nearby conflict.

"Who wishes to speak to me at so momentous a time?" he asked, his voice supremely tired.

"The first was Minister Hamza. He insisted that he speak to you on a matter of utmost urgency." Hamza? Omay's eyes were dragged back into focus. His thoughts turned to the Great Plan. His legacy.

"Give me that," he insisted.

The soldier hesitated. "It is no longer Minister Hamza, Sultan," he explained nervously. "This is now the one who broke in on the connection. It is the Saudi. Al Khobar."

Omay became even more animated. All thoughts of Minister Hamza vanished.

"Now!" he commanded. A hand wrapped in wrinkled, gray-tinged flesh shook impatiently.

The soldier dutifully handed him the telephone.

"Assola, you live?" Omay rasped anxiously, his words sounding far off.

"Yes, Omay sin-Khalam," the terrorist replied. It was almost as if it pained him to speak. His voice sounded oddly muffled.

"You have succeeded." It was a statement. The old man was so excited, he began to stand.

"No. Not yet," al Khobar replied.

Omay fell back onto his stool. "What has happened?"

"Something that could not be planned for," Assola explained quickly. "It is of no consequence. You have begun the attack already?"

"Yes, Assola," Omay responded, the life draining from his voice. "I had assumed you dead."

"The Americans have yet to invade here," al Khobar mused. "Yet it can only be a matter of time now that the war has begun there." The terrorist was thinking. "Though I have been put behind schedule, there are but a few trifling details to attend to here." His muffled voice steeled. "This I vow-we will this day claim victory for all of Islam against the hated American desecrators."

The connection was severed.

Omay returned the phone to his subordinate. He did not think to return Minister Hamza's call. "You will celebrate alone," the sultan said ominously.

As the young soldier near him held the binoculars up to his tired eyes, Omay returned his gaze to the field of battle.

Chapter 32

Even as the Eblan soldiers prepared to rape his common-law wife, Tom Roberts tried to understand their motivation.

"Are there socioeconomic roots in what you're doing?" he asked earnestly. His eyes were nearly swollen shut from the beating they had given him. Capped teeth jangled in his bloody mouth.

A soldier grunted something in the Eblan Arab dialect and brought a pointy-toed boot sharply into Roberts's side.

Roberts gasped, clutching at the soft area beneath his rib cage. "Reaganomics!" he wheezed. "This is all because of the greed of the eighties, isn't it?"

"For Christ's sake, shut up and do something!" Susan Saranrap screamed at Roberts.

She was lying on her back just inside the monkey house.

Two of the men held her arms above her head. A third wrapped a leather belt around her narrow wrists, lashing them to the bars of the chimpanzee cage.

"I tried reasoning with them," Roberts explained from his spot on the floor. Blood dribbled from his mouth. "But I'm really limited when dealing with them. Damn my school system for not having ethnic studies while I was growing up!"

Another boot silenced any further self-recrimination from the actor. Roberts collapsed into a heap on the floor, groaning in agony.

The five leering Eblans turned their attention solely on Susan Saranrap. One of them tore at the black robe she was wearing. While he did this, the rest began pulling at their own clothing.

Helpless to prevent what was about to happen, Susan Saranrap did the only thing she could.

She screamed.

REMO HEARD THE SCREAM as he raced down the zoo path. He hopped a fence and raced across a strip of grass.

As he loped onto the next path nearer the monkey house, Remo saw the carcass of a half-eaten zebra lying in the bushes next to the strip of asphalt. There were the remains of several more animals around it.

The Eblan soldiers who were occupying this part of California had apparently spent part of the past two days consuming the exhibits. Remo remembered the same thing happening at the zoo in Kuwait. Everyone assumed then that it was a matter of starvation that propelled the Iraqi soldiers to participate in something so nauseating. Remo now suspected otherwise.

Leaping at a full, outstretched hurdle, Remo cleared another low fence. He bounded into the fetid, gloomy interior of the monkey house.

Susan Saranrap was in the process of issuing a final caution to her assailants. Her eyes bugged crazily.

"Watch it, buster," the actress threatened the Eblan who was climbing atop her. "You don't know what I do to men. Didn't you ever see Zelma and Patrice?"

The man hadn't. And in another second he would never have the chance. The Arab was in the process of running his rough hands up the actress's pale, wrinkled thighs when he abruptly found that his hands were no longer his to rub anywhere.

The soldier screamed, struggling to his knees. Blood pumped from wrist stumps where his hands had been.

He turned in time to see Remo throwing a pair of very familiar objects into the chimp house. There were fingers attached to them.

A moment of shock gave way to an eternity of oblivion. Remo pivoted on one foot, the other braced against his calf. A kneecap crushed the forehead of the Eblan soldier.

The other men didn't have time to react to the initial assault before Remo was among them. Hands and feet lashed out in a furious concert of death. Four pelvises were mashed to damp powder. As the men collapsed one after another, toes took out throats. All were dead before they hit the floor. Remo waded through the pile of Eblan debris. He used the sharpened edge of a single fingernail to slice the cords around Susan Saranrap's wrists. She was shaken but unharmed. He helped the actress to her feet.

Rema then went over to assist Tom Roberts.

It appeared as if most of the actor's injuries were superficial. Still, he'd need to see a doctor. Remo propped him up by one arm and helped walk him to the door.

Susan Saranrap took Roberts by the other arm. "Why couldn't you do anything?" she demanded. "I had to wait for this guy to save me." She jutted her pointed witch's chin at Remo. "And he's not even in the Industry."

"My fault. Multiculturalism was the answer," Tom burbled through a mouth of blood. "I lacked understanding because of my accursed dead white European male perspective. Damn me!"

"Oh, brother," Remo griped.

Roberts turned his swollen eyes to Remo. "I wasn't talking to you, you ...homophobe!" he accused.

Remo looked puzzled. "Are you gay?" he asked.

"No," Roberts admitted. "But it seemed like the right thing to say."

"So does this," Remo said. "Good night."

He squeezed a spot at the back of Roberts's neck. The actor's head lolled forward.

They carted him the rest of the way back to the Taurus Studios jeep in blessed silence.

FIVE MINUTES LATER Remo was on one of the zoo pay phones with Smith. The jeep was parked and idling nearby. Bindle and Marmelstein were tending to Tom Roberts in the back seat while Susan Saranrap sat in the front, pointedly ignoring the activity going on behind her.

"Remo, where have you been?" Smith demanded urgently. "You have missed your check-in time by hours."

"No sweat," Remo said. "I've still got time to spare."

"No, you don't," Smith explained hastily. "Chiun landed in Tel Aviv more than an hour and half ago. According to what I have been able to find out, he may already be at the Eblan side of the conflict."

"What conflict?" Remo asked.

Smith told him of the incursion by Ebla Arab Army forces into the Golan Heights region. Apparently the news had not been big enough to merit mentioning on the West Coast.

"I hate Hollywood," Remo muttered when the CURE director was through.

"The United States Army is preparing to invade the occupied territory in California," Smith said. "If Omay has anything planned with al Khobar, it has not yet occurred."

"I think I know why, Smitty," Remo said. "Assola was kidnapped by a thug who worked for one of the studios out here, but he got away."

"That makes sense," Smith mused. "If Omay thought al Khobar had been killed he would have gone ahead and sprung his end of the trap. But we still do not know what they have in store for Hollywood."

"Oh, yes, we do," Remo said.

"What?" Smith asked.

"No time to explain," Remo said. "Before the Army rolls in here, get me every member of the L.A. bomb squad and every demolition expert the Army and National Guard have stationed near here. Put them in Arab clothes, stick them on trucks and have them meet me on the corner of Hollywood and Vine as fast as possible."

"The Eblan forces on the ground might object to their presence," Smith cautioned.

"The only way these dips would notice is if they rode in on animatronic camels. Hurry, Smitty." The CURE director did not ask about the enigmatic remark. Nor did he need to be prodded again. He quickly hung up the phone.

Remo raced back to the jeep.

Tom Roberts had just regained consciousness. "We can cover up the bruises with makeup," Hank Bindle was assuring the actor.

"I'm dumping all you dingdongs off someplace safe," Remo told them as he climbed back behind the wheel. He floored the jeep, and they zoomed away from the phone bank.

"Can't I go with you?" Susan Saranrap asked, supremely disappointed. Wind whipped her long, dyed hair around her age-ravaged face.

"What about your boyfriend?" Remo asked, nodding back to Tom Roberts.

She raised a disdainful eyebrow. It was drawn in with a pencil. "After today I don't want to have anything to do with him ever again."

In the back seat Hank Bindle's eyes sprung as wide as saucers. "What about our movie?" he pleaded.

"Especially that," Susan sniffed.

"Uhng. My heart," Bruce Marmelstein choked. He clutched at his chest.

Bindle abandoned Roberts to attend to his longtime partner.

"You're killing him, you know that?" he accused Susan Saranrap harshly.

In the front seat Remo Williams smiled. "That's showbiz, sweetheart."

The jeep bounced back through the main gate and flew across Griffith Park, away from the zoo.

Chapter 33

Sultan Omay's vision had not become so poor that he did not see the blue six-pointed star painted on the side of the jeep. It was the Magen David, the Shield of David. The star was at the center of a field of white. Two narrow blue bands ran parallel to one another at the top and bottom borders of the painted flag.

The jeep bounced through the Israeli lines unmolested.

It was the first to break through.

The Ebla Arab Army forces still alive in that area of the battlefield concentrated their fire on the rogue jeep. A violent hail of bullets rattled endlessly against the vehicle. Noise from ricochets and the thunking sound of metal penetrating metal filtered through the other heavy battle noise. But through it all, the jeep kept coming.

"We must retreat, Sultan," the soldier holding his binoculars insisted. There was fear in his young voice.

It was an effort now for the sultan to raise his head. He did so nonetheless. He regarded the frightened soldier as he might have an insect.

"We stay," Omay wheezed.

The jeep rounded a turn in the rocky terrain, disappearing behind a stab of pocked white rock. When it reappeared on the ancient road, it was much closer. Omay saw the driver.

He didn't appear to be a member of the Israel Defense Forces. Indeed at first glance he did not appear human.

Through the shattered glass of the windshield Omay could see a pair of hands gripping the steering wheel. They had to reach up to do so. A pale dome-like a fossilized dinosaur egg-poked up somewhere behind the hands. Every once in a while, when the jeep hit a rocky bump in the path, a pair of angry, narrow eyes popped up above the dashboard.

The Eblan forces were depleted near Omay's command post. The jeep had a straight, unmolested path to the sultan of Ebla. As the men around him drew their weapons, the Israeli jeep roared into the base camp, a cloud of dust rising behind it. It screeched to a stop.

The thing that Omay suspected for a time to be inhuman as the jeep raced across the field, proved itself to be nearly so. As the few scattered men around him moved to surround the jeep, the driver's door exploded open.

The two soldiers nearest the door were first to fall. Propelled from its hinges by a force greater than any in the arsenal of the nation of Ebla, the door rocketed into the alert forms of the soldiers. Every bone between their necks and ankles was crushed instantly. Their skin became a pulpy mass holding in their pulverized remains.

Omay had barely taken in the slaughter of the first two soldiers when a tiny shape emerged from the vehicle.

There were a dozen more men in the camp. At the moment the first men were falling, the rest opened fire.

Bullets savaged the air around the strange intruder. But as Omay watched, not one round of ammunition seemed to penetrate the air around the whirling purple dervish.

"You dare, Ebla offal?" the intruder shrieked. Enraged, he fell among the men.

Hands flew faster than the eye could see. The results, however, were plainly evident.

Necks surrendered heads like melons plucked from vines. Blood erupted from wounds in chests, stomachs and throats. Limbs fell and were crushed beneath swirling, stomping feet.

When the ancient figure finished a few seconds later, not one Eblan soldier remained upright. Only then did the hell-sent devil slowly turn his vengeful eyes on Sultan Omay sin-Khalam.

Fearful of the wraith, Omay tried to stand. He could not. He fell back to his stool as the demon in purple swept through the bloody arena and over to his command tent.

"You are sultan of Ebla?" the demon demanded.

"Yes, I am, 0 spirit," Omay stammered. His grayish skin had become flushed. He felt his head reeling.

"I am no spirit," the old one spit. "I am flesh and blood as you. Although my flesh is the proper hue and my blood is not flooded with the sickness that has befallen you in your weakness." He crossed his arms over his chest imperiously. "I am Chiun, Master of Sinanju," he intoned.

"Sinanju?" Omay asked, his voice weak. He was panting. "You are myth."

"So thought your ancestors. And it is because of this pigheaded disregard of fact that no work has ever come to Sinanju from the sin-Khalam sultanate."

Omay's sickly eyes grew suddenly crafty. "Then let me correct the errors of my ancestors," he said quickly. "I offer you employment, O great Master of Sinanju."

Chiun grabbed the sultan, dragging him to his feet.

"I have employment, Eblan filth." He raised a single curved index fingernail. "And hark you now. The death I will inflict upon you this day will be as nothing compared to the torment I will subject you to in the Void if my movie deal falls through."

With angry shoves Chiun propelled the sultan of Ebla toward his waiting Israeli jeep.

Chapter 34

Remo had to hand it to Smith. He worked fast. After dumping Tom Roberts, Susan Saranrap and the pair of Taurus executives at a doctor's office, Remo had sped to Hollywood and Vine. There he found a caravan of nine trucks already lined up along the curb. The insignia on their doors and license plates had been spray-painted over.

Remo jumped out of his studio jeep and ran up to the lead truck.

"Where's the LAPD guys?" he asked urgently.

"Right here," the driver of the first truck said. "Sergeant Jack Connell, bomb squad." He pulled back the veil that was draped over his nose, revealing a face far too pale to belong to an Eblan terrorist.

"Split your men up with the National Guard and Army forces," Remo instructed. "Make sure there's someone who knows the area well in every truck."

"Yes, sir," Sergeant Connell replied. He hopped down from the cab.

Running to the rear of his vehicle, the police officer began shouting orders to the men inside. Two dozen men in robes climbed down and began spreading out to the other trucks. Soldiers in similar costume ran back, making up the difference in the lead truck.

"Where'd you get the outfits?" Remo asked the officer during the manpower exchange.

Sergeant Connell grinned.

"Let's just say the California National Guard is looking at one mother of a linen bill," he said.

CHIUN WAS ONLY HALFWAY BACK to Akkadad when his gas finally ran out.

He had been well into his nineties the first time he sat behind the wheel of a car and as a result was still new to the vicissitudes of Western conveyances. Sometimes when a vehicle broke down on them in America, Remo would raise the hood and poke around beneath it. More often than not, after his pupil was through tinkering with the engine, the car would end up more broken than it had been. Chiun lacked even the meager automotive repair skills that Remo possessed. He didn't know why the jeep stopped, only that it had.

The Master of Sinanju climbed down from behind the steering wheel.

Omay sin-Khalam remained in the passenger's seat. He had been lapsing in and out of consciousness since their trip from the battle scene. For the moment his eyes remained closed. His chest rose and fell sporadically. The sultan lived, but not for long.

Standing beside the jeep, Chiun squinted at the horizon. They had moved down out of the mountainous region and were in a more level expanse of desert. A few thin blue mountains rimmed the periphery of the vast wasteland.

Chiun could see small specks of black circling lazily in the sky far ahead. Vultures. Beneath the large birds of prey were a few scattered tents.

A trail had been pounded from this site through the desert and up into the mountains. The newformed road was still visible, despite the shifting desert winds.

This was the spot from which the assault against Israel had originated. Chiun recognized some of the more distant landmarks that had been in the background of the second televised murder perpetrated by Ebla's monarch.

The Master of Sinanju hurried around to the passenger's side of the jeep.

Omay was sweating profusely. His eyes rolled open, turned sightlessly on Chiun, and then closed once again. It would be impossible for him to walk the distance back.

Angry, Chiun wrenched the door open. Hefting the unconscious body of Sultan Omay sin-Khalam onto his narrow shoulders, Chiun began trekking across the desert toward the ring of lazily circling vultures.