“Thank you, my friend,” the old Oriental said. “But we have no need of these weapons now. When we return, my son will wish to take one to show his people. But if your enemies attack, we will fight them with our hands and our minds. Nothing else is necessary.”

  “Forgive me, wise one,” the king said. “I should have known that Kukulcan would send other gods of different abilities, who fight in different ways.” He smiled, and his eyelids drooped. “I am grateful, so grateful,” he said, walking softly toward his gold and silver throne.

  “You are weary,” Chiun said. “Let us take you to your bed.”

  “No. I will remain here. There is much to be done in preparation for the attack of the Olmec. I will rest, but here, and just for a moment.”

  “As you wish,” Chiun said. They left quietly.

  · · ·

  From behind a panel of mirrors, a figure moved. The king was alone, and his heavy, even breathing filled the empty room. The man behind the mirror was dressed in a beggar’s rags, but on his neck hung the precious topaz amulet of Quintanodan, high priest of the Olmec. He moved slowly, quietly as a cat, to the king’s throne. Then, with practiced fingers, he encircled the old man’s neck and squeezed. The king’s eyes opened in silent terror.

  “I have waited ten years to find the magic spears of fire,” Quintanodan, the priest, whispered, staring directly into the king’s face. “And now you have shown them to me. The Olmec will kill your people, destroy your gods, and level your kingdom to ashes. When you are gone, there will be nothing left of you but your rotting bones.”

  The king opened his mouth in a futile gesture. No sound came out. His face started to shake with spasms; his eyes bulged. He reached up with one trembling hand and clasped the topaz amulet, cold against his hot, numbing skin.

  “Look in my eyes, old man, and despair,” the priest whispered as he choked the life out of the dying king.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “READ THIS,” LIZZIE SAID, handing Colonel Cooligan’s log to Remo.

  10/13/2033

  Today we have an interesting project. Major Bolam, now the kingdom of Yaxbenhaltun’s principal road builder, wants to construct a major trade route between this city and Chetumal Bay on the Gulf of Mexico, some 40 miles east. Bolam says the route will spur trade. I know what he’s got in the back of his mind, though—a transatlantic crossing. I suppose nothing will stop Bolam in his quest for knowledge.

  The main difficulty in surveying this route seems to be a local superstition about an area due east of here called, of all things, the Forbidden Fields. From all accounts, they lie between us and the caves of the Olmec.

  The people here claim that the Olmec, who worship death, have poisoned the air of the fields, and Bolam’s surveying team absolutely refuses to go. More than that, the king himself forbade my men to explore these so-called Forbidden Fields unless we use “magic” to protect us—meaning the oxygen equipment we were wearing when we first stepped out of the time module.

  So I agreed. I figure there’s no harm in wearing the equipment, at least until we’re out of view of our hosts. The Olmec themselves, I understand, keep far away from the fields, so I don’t think we’ll have any problems with them. I think it will just be a nice journey through some non-jungle countryside, and that will be a pleasant change for us all.

  We’ll build a road to the sea. Take that, Fate. Old Kukulcan, practically blind as a bat and no good for flying even if the Cassandra suddenly decided to work, is not so bad, after all.

  I’m proud of all my men. They all know by now that we’re never going to get out of here. Metters is even getting married to a local girl. When he does, I think I’ll let him dismember Cassandra’s wiring so that he can invent electricity. The town could really use a generator for water. One of the other men has begun to draw up plans for a sewage system here..

  Malaria’s already practically nonexistent now. That’s my contribution. God, every time I see a little sick kid get well, I think of Michael, dying the way he did, and I wish I could have helped him. Maybe by helping these others I’m sort of helping him, too, in a roundabout way. I hope so.

  We’ll be together soon, Sandy and Michael and. This disease I’ve got is supposed to progress geometrically. I guess the end will be pretty bad. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to invent morphine for the pain. Well, nobody’s perfect.

  I can’t say I’m glad about dying. It’s funny, after I lost Sandy and the baby, dying was all I wanted. But this time I’ve spent here in Yaxbenhaltun has changed all that.

  These people think the Olmec are the most evil thing they’ve got to worry about, but they’re wrong. Disease is worse. So is ignorance. And poverty. And despair. My men and I have changed that for them, maybe forever. We’ve shot all to hell the cardinal rule about not changing the course of history, but one look at how these folks live now tells me it was all worth it.

  Besides, maybe the king is right about this being our destiny. Who knows? Maybe one day the Mayans will be famous for being an advanced civilization. Maybe this is the course of history, and we would have changed it by not coming. Very weird.

  This has been the greatest adventure any man could want. My crew knows that, and so do I.

  I wouldn’t have missed this for anything in the world.

  The rest of the pages were blank.

  “I wonder what happened to him,” Remo mused.

  “Simple. Metters got the module to work, and they all went home,” Lizzie said confidently.

  “Yeah,” Remo said, trying to sound convincing. He knew that an experienced commanding officer who’d spent fifteen months trying to escape wouldn’t leave without his weapons and his log. Cooligan had grown to love the people he’d lived among. He wouldn’t have gone back to his time without saying good-bye. The colonel who had become a god had died, probably somewhere nearby.

  From down the palace’s long hallway came the terrified scream of a girl.

  “Nata-Ah,” Po said, jumping to his feet.

  They found the girl running toward them in the hall. “My grandfather,” she screamed, a topaz amulet dangling from her hand. “He is dead. The priest has murdered him.” She ran past them to the palace’s main entrance, shouting to the villagers to stop the evil priest.

  But there was no priest. On the outskirts of the city, close to the fortified wall, walked a solitary figure dressed in rags and carrying a large sack over his back. No one paid attention to the beggar, or bothered to look inside the sack, where six laser weapons of green metal, the magic spears of fire of the gods themselves, rested.

  “He’s got to be here,” the girl shouted. “Find him! Find the man who killed your king!”

  The palace guards rushed into the square. Then, seemingly from out of nowhere, a horde of men, inconspicuous except for the black ash dot each wore on his forehead, rushed out of a thousand hiding places.

  The guards fell first, their necks and chests spurting blood from the black knives that gleamed dully all around them. Then the screams of the villagers began as the Olmec blades sliced indiscriminately through the flesh of women and old men and those who had no defense.

  Nata-Ah, her face a mask of unbelieving terror, rushed up to one of the killers as Po, limping, cursing himself for his slowness, came up shouting behind her. The killer swung wide, just missing the girl’s throat. He forgot her immediately, lashing out with his long knife at others. Still fighting, he saw the limping boy out of the corner of his eye and kicked.

  The blow struck Po square in the knees. His legs buckled with the pain, his vision dimming. As he struggled to retain consciousness, he saw a blur of blue, a garment on an old man who moved as swiftly as a wild bird, fly past him and imbedded two delicate fingers into the spine of the killer, stopping him forever.

  “Take the right half of the square,” Chiun commanded.

  Remo obeyed, seeking out the black ash dots on the foreheads of the screaming, bleeding people in the square.

  A knife flashed near him for a moment, and in another moment the knife was gone, along with the hand that held it.

  A few yards away, a blade tore through the belly of a man fighting with a stick. The man screamed, watching his bowels spill onto the dirt in a gush of blood. Before the knife was withdrawn, Remo swatted the attacker’s head with a flick of his hand, hearing the neck snap under his fingers. Another ash dot rushed at him. He clasped it in the center of his palm, crushing the skull behind it with one movement.

  He let his body move automatically, instinctively. The days of frustration and inactivity were like an anger boiling inside him, and now he could permit it to come out. Too late to save the man with the stick, whose bloody entrails lay beside his corpse. But with speed, with thought, he and Chiun could fight for the others.

  Lizzie, sobbing, dragged the two stunned children back into the entranceway. “Don’t ever do that again,” she shrieked into their faces. “You could have been killed, both of you…”

  Her tears dried instantly as she saw two Olmec, crouching and guarding their path with vicious slashes of their weapons, heading slowly toward the temple where the Cassandra lay.

  “Oh, no. Not the pod,” she whispered, feeling her throat constrict. She stood, horrified, releasing the hands of the children. “Remo!” she screamed. “They’re going to destroy the plane!” But Remo was moving too fast to be seen.

  “Wait here,” she told Po. She ran as fast as she could toward the two Olmec warriors. “Stop it. Stop,” she called, clawing at their sweating chests with her fingernails.

  One of them clasped both her hands swiftly behind her back, his eyes flashing. The other smiled, with his mouth only, and nodded.

  A full set of ribs cracked and imploded beneath the force of Remo’s elbow. With a rattle of air, the warrior fell. Remo looked around. To his left, Chiun stood among the dead, his stance calm and ready. Around Remo lay the corpses, most of them with black dots on their foreheads. The remaining Olmec were in retreat, already disappearing into the thick jungle brush beyond the city walls.

  In the palace entrance, Po held the weeping Nata-Ah in his thin arms.

  “You two all right?” Remo asked.

  Po nodded. “But Dr. Lizzie…”

  Remo sighed. “What’d she do now?”

  “They took her,” the boy said. “She tried to guard the temple, but she was not strong enough to fight against the soldiers. They took her away with them.”

  Remo looked to the vast darkness of the jungle, feeling guilty about a certain relief he was experiencing. Lizzie had been nothing but trouble for them all since the beginning. Perhaps, now that she was gone, it would be possible to forget about her…

  “Leave her.” It was Chiun. He seemed to read Remo’s secret thoughts. “The woman is an unbearable harpy with no manners and no gratitude. You will risk your life for nothing.”

  Remo thought for a moment. “Yeah, you’re right,” he agreed, walking away from the palace.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get her,” Remo said resignedly.

  “Why?” Chiun’s voice was stern. “You are needed here. Who cares about her?”

  Remo turned around. “Nobody,” he said. “That’s why I’m going.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE TRAIL LEADING FROM the city was easy to follow. The rush of departing Olmec had worn the jungle undergrowth to a well-traveled footpath. It wound past Bocatan to a marsh, where the muddy, ankle-deep water still churned with the recent agitation of dozens of feet.

  Remo followed the marsh, swarming with mosquitoes and jungle rats, surrounded by giant ferns grown to the proportions of trees, until the water cleared. Where had they gone?

  The sky was fading to early twilight, that time of day when nothing is seen perfectly, when the sky is half light and half shadow, blue alternating with gray, the color of thunderclouds. He narrowed his vision to take in distance. Past the marsh was a row passing through a flat field, grassy as the savannahs of western Africa, where no trees grew. The row looked like flattened grass created by footsteps. But it was too narrow for all the Olmec who had left the square at Yaxbenhaltun. Had they walked in single file? Why?

  There was no time to think it over. He stepped out of the marsh to follow the path made through the recently trampled grass.

  Two sets of footprints. He was sure of it. Fading light or not, no more than two people had made the path Remo was following. It didn’t make sense, but he tracked it doggedly, the bottoms of his trousers growing wet from contact with the high, damp grass. The field stretched for miles, widening after the marsh so that it seemed to go on forever in all directions, green, green grass dotted occasionally by white flowers. As he went on, the flowers grew more numerous, bringing with them the sweet, drugged air Remo remembered. By the time he had followed the footprints for a mile, the flowers blanketed the ground.

  Remo’s eyelids drooped. He would have to slow his breathing to keep from falling asleep again. Slowly he pumped the air out from his lungs and breathed shallowly, ever more slowly, feeling his heartbeat drop from fifty beats a minute to forty to thirty to ten. His mind cleared somewhat. Still, the delicious fragrance of the field, looking as if it were covered with snow, seeped into his lungs and his mind and teased him with sensual promise.

  The Forbidden Fields…Kukulcan’s last mission, Remo remembered. Something about building a road. Going to the sea, and going blind. Cooligan of the Forbidden Fields. The flowers killed him, can’t you see?

  Remo gasped. The swift intake of air sent his senses reeling. He calmed himself, making the white-covered fields stop whirling around him. But when he did, the sight in front of him was still there. Not more than twenty feet away, the trail ended. It ended with the prostrate bodies of two men whose uniforms identified them as members of the palace guard.

  He turned them over. Their faces were blue, their bodies already beginning to stiffen and cool. A trap. The two men must have been taken prisoner and set off to walk through the Forbidden Fields until they dropped, while the Olmec took Lizzie on some other route.

  He looked around. The fields stretched to every horizon, broken only by the rounded tops of huge rocks. He stilled himself, forcing his breathing to come even more slowly, consciously enlarging his senses to take it every sight, every sound.

  There was water. Somewhere. The river, Remo said to himself. If he could find water—a stream, a trickle—he could follow it to the river and get his bearings from there.

  The sweet fragrance lingered. The air was thick with it; there was no way to blot out the cloying, sleep-filled scent of the white flowers that beckoned him to rest among their soft petals.

  Water. Follow the sound of the water.

  He dragged on. Night seemed to fall palpably as he walked, then crawled, following a sound he was no longer sure he heard. The wind in the flowers, sending up its thick, forgetful smoke, drowned out every other sensation with its haunting music.

  Remember the water.

  And there was water. A swirling river of it, crashing and dancing between a thousand white stones. He shook his head to see if the water were no more than a clouded vision. But it remained, he could smell it, he could feel its cool mist enveloping him. He stood upright, blinking against the lightheadedness that willed him back to the ground. He walked downstream, plodding like a man dying of thirst in the desert, until he stood beside the crest of a small, low fall where the water rushed white and bubbling. And on the crest was a woman, shrouded in mist, naked except for the thick ring of white flowers around her neck, her hair golden. She turned slowly toward him, holding out her arms.

  It was Elizabeth Drake.

  As if he were in a dream, Remo went to her, stepping through the shallow water at the top of the fall. She smiled. There was no hardness about her now, no cranky modernity. She was Woman, eternal and ageless, soft in her mystery, calling him silently to her.

  Without thought, he embraced her. In that moment, their lips touching, his body aching for her, he took in the scent of the flowers, luxurious, devastating, smelling of sin and ecstasy, and gave in to it.

  The sky darkened. The earth fell away. He was complete.

  He awoke next to her. His clothes were still wet from the mist of the waterfall, and they clung coldly to his skin. Beside him, on the stone floor where they lay, he could feel Lizzie shivering in her sleep.

  His head was pounding. He tried to sit up, but the movement was too difficult for him. Part of him, a great part, wanted just to go back to sleep, despite the cold and the wet and the uncertainty. But the other part of him, that part which was Remo, had to stay awake. He had to force himself out of the feeling of drunkenness and uncaring that seemed to hang over him like a sheet.

  He willed his eyes wide open. The first items they focused on were the barrels of the six laser weapons, surrounding the two prisoners in a circle. Their guards, six tall, rangy men with tattoos on their bellies and black ash dots decorating their foreheads, kept at a distance from them both.

  No sweat, Remo thought thickly. One turn, a spiral air attack, and…

  He couldn’t move. Thick ropes cut into his wrists and ankles. Ropes? How had he permitted himself to be tied like a pig going to slaughter?

  And then he smelled them. Fresh, enchanting, the scent of the white flowers assaulted his newly awakened senses from the heavy garland he wore around his neck. Lizzie wore one, too, and their perfume weakened and sickened him.

  They were in a cave. Behind the fragrance of the flowers, Remo could pick out the dank odor of damp earth. The walls, painted with pictures of grotesquely endowed human figures engaged in sexual activity, were lit by oily torches that sent up strings of black smoke.

  The guards seemed to be part of the tableau. Motionless, their fingers poised on the triggers of the lasers, they watched the prisoners. The flesh on their faces sagged with the effort of fighting off sleep.

  They’re getting drugged too, Remo thought. The white flowers around their necks were affecting the guards. It would be so easy. So easy…But Remo did not struggle against the ropes. There was still time for fighting, and he had no advantage now. He would wait.