“He said you couldn’t be allowed to go alone,” Chiun said, nodding at the man in pain on the ground.

  “Were you watching?” Remo asked.

  “I saw you.”

  “Did you watch the people?”

  “If you mean, did I realize that your theory of General Liu’s disappearance in the Bronx was ridiculous, correct. No two men took him anyplace. They would have been seen. He disappeared alone. And like you, just now, aroused no interest at all.”

  “Then if he disappeared alone…?”

  “Of course,” Chiun said. “Didn’t you know that? I knew it immediately.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Interfere with Chief Ironsides, Perry Mason, Martin Luther King, William Rogers and Freud?”

  So, thought Remo, Liu had not been kidnaped. He had ordered the drivers off at Jerome Avenue. Then shot them. Then walked away from the car, caught the train and met his cohorts in Chinatown. He had sent people after Remo because Remo had represented the one threat to his plan to sabotage the President’s trip. And he had killed Mei Soong, who had known about it, before she could spill what she knew. And now he was back in Peking, a bigger hero and a bigger threat than ever.

  “The question is, Chiun, what do we do?”

  “If you wish my advice, it is this: mind your own business and let the world of fools hack themselves to death.”

  “I expected that from you,” Remo said. Maybe he could tell someone with the American mission. But no one on the mission knew him. All they knew was that he had return tickets for two to Kennedy Airport and was not to be bothered.

  Perhaps call Smith? How? He had enough trouble trying to call him from New York City.

  Leave it for the Chinese to settle. But it galled him, right to the gut, it galled him. The son of a bitch shot his wife, and didn’t care that millions might die in another war. He wanted this. That was bad. But worse was that he dared to do it. That he thought he had a right to do it, and that bothered Remo deep into his soul.

  He looked around the wide clean street with drably dressed people scurrying to their trivia of the moment. He looked at the clear China sky, unshrouded by air pollution because the people had not yet advanced enough to pollute the air, and thought that if Liu had his way, they never would be granted the gift of dirty air.

  Chiun was right of course. But because he was right did not make it right. It was wrong.

  “You’re right,” Remo said.

  “But you do not feel that way in your soul, do you?”

  Remo didn’t answer. He looked at his watch. It was almost time to return for their grand tour of the Working People’s Palace of Culture.

  General Liu’s aide, a colonel, had stressed what an honor it was. The Premier himself would be there to meet the rescuers of the people’s general, the colonel had said.

  Chiun’s advice on that subject was “watch your wallet.”

  The Forbidden City was truly a splendor. Remo and Chiun and their two guards walked past the stone lion guarding the Gate of Heavenly Peace, for 500 years the main entrance to the city which had once housed emperors and their courts.

  They walked across the vast cobblestone plaza toward the yellow pagoda roofed building which now housed the main museum but which had been a throne room. In a section of the plaza off to their left, Remo saw young and old men exercising in the highly disciplined moves of T’ai Chi Ch’uan, the Chinese version of karate.

  The building was beautiful. Even Chiun, for once, had nothing slanderous to say. But its contents reminded Remo of one of those New York auction houses that seem to be devoted exclusively to large and ugly porcelain figures. He did not listen to the rambling explanations of dynasties or thrones or vases or clumsy looking objects, all of which showed that China had discovered this or that or something else way back when Remo was still painting himself blue.

  By the time they reached the central vault where General Liu and the Premier waited for them, Remo had been verbally painted blue with enough coats to lather a Celtic army.

  Standing in the central vault under the fifty foot high ceiling, the Premier looked like a display porcelain. He was more frail than his pictures. He wore a plain gray Mao suit, buttoned to his neck, but while the suit was plain, the tailoring was immaculate.

  He smiled and offered a hand to Remo: “I have heard much about you. It is a privilege to meet you.”

  Remo refused the hand. “To shake hands,” he said, “is to show that I have no weapons. To shake hands therefore would be a lie.” The hell with him. Let him and Liu play their goddam war games with the President’s staff; they got paid to deal with these devious bastards.

  “Perhaps someday, no one will have to bear a weapon,” said the Premier.

  “In that case, it will no longer be necessary to shake hands to show you have no weapon,” Remo said.

  The Premier laughed. General Liu smiled. He looked younger in his uniform, but then, that was the reason for uniforms. To make the nasty business of killing impersonal and institutional, something separate from men and pain and all the other hassles of day to day life.

  “With the Premier’s permission,” said General Liu, “I would like to show our guests a most interesting exhibit. I hope you two gentlemen do not mind that we have soldiers present but the Premier must be protected at all costs.”

  Remo noticed on a narrow step a few feet away were eight soldiers, all of them seeming rather old for the privates’ uniforms they were wearing. They had their guns trained on Remo and Chiun. Well, sweetheart, Remo thought, that’s the biz.

  General Liu nodded with stiff politeness and walked to a glass case, containing a stone-encrusted sword. His leather shoes made clacking sounds on the marble floor and his holster slapped against his side as he walked. The room itself was chilly and badly lighted, blocking out the sunlight and its joy.

  “Gentlemen,” said General Liu. “The sword of Sinanju.”

  Remo looked at Chiun. His face had no expression, just an eternal calm that hid wells deeper than Remo’s reasoning.

  It must have been a ceremonial sword of some sort, Remo thought, because not even a Watusi could wield a sword seven feet long, and flaring out to become as wide as a face, before it came abruptly to a point. The handle was encrusted with red and green stones. It appeared as unwieldly as a wet sofa. If a man’s hands were tied to that weapon, you could spit him to death, Remo thought.

  “Do you gentlemen know the legend of Sinanju?” General Liu asked. Remo could feel the Premier’s eyes upon them.

  Remo shrugged. “It’s a poor village, I know that. Life is hard there. And you people never treated them very fairly.” Remo knew Chiun would love that.

  “Truth,” said Chiun.

  “But do you know the legend? Of the Master of Sinanju?”

  “I know,” said Chiun, “that he was not paid.”

  “This sword,” said General Liu, “is the sword of the Master of Sinanju. There was a time when China, weak under the monarchistic system, hired mercenaries.”

  “And did not pay them,” said Chiun.

  “There was one master of Sinanju who left this sword after slaughtering slaves and then a favorite concubine of the Emperor Chu Ti.”

  Out of the side of his mouth, Remo whispered to Chiun: “You didn’t tell me about the nookie.”

  “He was assigned the concubine and was not paid,” Chiun said aloud.

  General Liu went on. “The emperor, realizing how foreign mercenaries were destructive to the Chinese people, banished the Master of Sinanju.”

  “Without paying him,” said Chiun.

  “Since then we have prided ourselves in never asking for the services of the Master of Sinanju or his night tigers. But imperialists will hire any scum. Even create the destroyer for their evil designs.”

  Remo saw the smile disappear from the Premier’s face as he looked at General Liu with questioning.

  “In a society where the newspapers function as an arm of the government, word of mouth becomes the believable truth,” said General Liu. “Many people believe that the Master of Sinanju is here, brought by the Imperialist Americans. Many believe he has brought Shiva, the Destroyer, with him. Many people believe that the American imperialists do not seek peace but war. That is why they have sent the Master of Sinanju and his creation to kill our beloved Premier.”

  Remo noticed Chiun look to the Premier. There was a slight shake of Chiun’s head. The Premier remained cool.

  “But we will kill the paper tigers of Sinanju who have killed our Premier,” General Liu said, raising a hand. The riflemen on the balconies aimed their weapons. Remo looked for a display case to dive under.

  Chiun said, looking at the Premier: “The last Master of Sinanju to stand in this palace of emperors was not paid. I will collect for him. Fifteen dollars American.”

  The Premier nodded. General Liu, still holding one hand in the air, took his pistol from its holster with the other.

  Chiun laughed then, a resounding, shrieking laugh.

  “Rice farmers and wall builders, hear you now. The Master of Sinanju will teach you death.” The words echoed through the high-ceilinged chamber, bouncing hollowly off the walls and corners and coming back, until it seemed as if the voice came from everywhere.

  Suddenly, Chiun became a blurred line, his white robes swirling about him as he moved toward the Premier, then left across General Liu’s line of fire. And then the glass case was shattered and the sword seemed to fly into the air with Chiun attached.

  The sword swished and blurred with Chiun, whose voice rose maniacally in ancient, high-pitched chants. Remo was about to dart up to the step to go after one of the riflemen and work from there, when he noticed the guns were no longer pointing at him or at the Premier or at Chiun.

  Two men clung loosely to their weapons, one whose pants showed a dark wide blotch, growing wider. The other just trembled, his face whitening. Another was vomiting. Four had run. Only one still aimed his rifle but the butt was pressed firmly to a shoulder that had no neck, just a round, dark gushing wound where a head had been. Remo spotted the head, one eye still squinting, rolling to the base of a cabinet where it stopped rolling and stopped squinting. And the sword, now dripping blood, spun faster and faster in Chiun’s hands.

  The Premier’s face was impassive as he stood, his hands folded in front of him. General Liu squeezed off two shots which chipped into the marble floor then bounced into walls with dull thumps, sounding through the museum. Then he stopped squeezing shots, because where his trigger finger had been, there was only a red stump.

  And then the hand itself and the pistol were gone as the sword continued to whistle through the air with Chiun seeming to dance under it.

  And then, with a shriek, Chiun was without the giant sword. He stood motionless, his arms at his sides, and Remo heard the sword whirring above him, toward the ceiling. Remo looked up. The sword seemed hung in history just a breath from the ceiling, and then it descended, the giant blade turning slowly, until in one last graceful turn, it came down into Liu’s looking up face.

  With a whunk, it split the face and drove straight down through the body, stopping only a foot from the hilt. The clean tip of the blade nicked marble, and then began to gather blood from above. It looked as if General Liu had swallowed too completely the seven foot sword of Sinanju.

  In awesome silence, he tottered, then backward fell, skewered on a sword, creating small flowing lakes of blood around him on the gray marble floors. The hilt seemed to grow from his face.

  “Fifteen dollars American,” said the Master of Sinanju to the Premier of the latest China. “And no checks.”

  The Premier nodded. So he was not part of the plot. He was one of the peacemakers. In blood was peace sometimes baptized.

  “Sometimes, according to Mao,” said the Premier, “it is necessary to pick up the gun to put down the gun.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Remo.

  “About us?” asked the Premier.

  “About anyone,” Remo said.

  They escorted the Premier to a car outside and Chiun anxiously whispered to Remo:

  “Was my wrist straight?”

  Remo, who had barely seen Chiun, let alone his wrist, answered, “Sloppy as hell, Little Father. You embarrassed me no end, especially in front of the Premier of China.”

  And Remo felt good.

  THE DESTROYER

  SLAVE SAFARI

  AUTHORS’ INTRODUCTION

  ANY resemblance between the African nation of Busati in this book and the actual country of Uganda is purely, maliciously intentional.

  In the early seventies when Slave Safari was written, the common wisdom was that the new leaders who were taking over the countries of Africa had to make some drastic changes to free their nations from the burden of colonialism. There was nothing basically wrong with these leaders. Oh, no. How could there be? Didn’t most of them rename their countries the People’s Republic of something or somebody’s Socialist Democracy? And didn’t they all hate the United States? How could there be anything wrong with them?

  So, with their apologists cheering from the sidelines, these leaders redelivered Africa to the dark ages. Countries that had fed themselves for centuries suddenly, under centralized farm planning, faced starvation and were reduced to the status of the world’s beggars. The only thing that grew were the numbered Swiss bank accounts, swollen with money stolen from aid and relief programs.

  Civil liberties vanished, the free press vanished, and anyone foolhardy enough to speak up in opposition vanished, too. In countries where some of the people were forbidden to vote, equality was introduced: Everybody was forbidden to vote and anybody who didn’t like it might wind up as granola for crocodiles.

  The awful thing is that the tragedy that is Africa continues to unfold, even today. It’s only in books like this one that occasionally a story ends happily.

  —DICK SAPIR and WARREN MURPHY

  August 1985

  A WORD OF AGREEMENT

  OF course this book has a happy ending. Every one of these so-called Destroyers has a happy ending because at last the abysmal thing is finally over.

  In this deplorable excuse for a book, the two scribblers write words in what they claim is Swahili. Do not be deceived. This is not the elegant formal Swahili language spoken by cultured people of many lands. Instead, it is a gruesome type of gutter slang that is an affront to the ear.

  But why expect good Swahili from these two when even good English is so obviously beyond them? You read junk.

  —CHIUN, MASTER OF SINANJU

  1

  WHILE Europe was a collection of warring tribes and Rome merely another city-state on the Tiber and the people of Israel shepherds in the Judean hills, a little girl could carry a sack of diamonds across the Loni Empire in East Africa and never fear even one being taken from her. If she suffered an injured eye, here alone in all the world were men who could repair it. In any village she could receive a parchment for her jewels, take it to any other village, then collect gems of exactly identical weight and purity. Waters from the great Busati River were stored in artificial lakes and channeled into the plains during the dry season, long before the Germanic and Celtic tribes that later became the Dutch ever heard of dikes or canals. Here alone, in all the world, a man could set his head on pillow without fear of attack in the night or hunger in the morning.

  Historians do not know when the Loni ceased to care for their canals and dams, but by the time of the Arab slavers, the Loni were no more than a small tribe, hiding in the hills to escape mass slaughter. The plains were death dry; the Busati River flooded at will; and one in ten were blind for life. The land was ruled by the Hausa tribe, whose only governmental policy was to track down and to kill the remaining Loni.

  Some of the Loni could not successfully hide, but instead of being killed, they were often taken to a spot on the river and traded for food and a drink called rum. Sometimes the person who took them went the way of his merchandise. Whole villages disappeared in chains to serve the plantations of the Caribbean Islands, South America and the United States. The Loni were very valuable indeed because, by this time, it had begun to be written that the men were strong and the women were beautiful and the race lacked the courage to resist.

  In the year one thousand, nine hundred and fifty-two, dated from the birth of a god worshipped in Europe, the Americas and small parts of Africa and Asia, the colony called Loniland became independent. In a stronger wave of nationalism in the 1960’s the colony became Busati, and in a yet stronger wave in the 1970’s, it expelled the Asians who had come with the British to open stores, when the lands along the Busati River had been called Loniland.

  When the Asians fled under the policy called “Busatinization,” the last people capable of mending an eye left the land of the Loni. Little girls dared not venture into the streets. No one carried valuables for fear of the soldiers. And high in the hills, the scattered remnants of the Loni Empire hid, waiting for a promised redeemer who would restore them to the glory that once was theirs.

  2

  JAMES Forsythe Lippincott yelled for his boy who was somewhere in the Busati Hotel, which still used towels labeled Victoria Hotel and still had the ornate V’s inscribed, embossed and sewn all over halls, drapes, busboys’ uniforms and water faucets.

  There had been no hot water since the British left, and now with the last planeload of Asians having taken off from Busati Airport the day before, there was no cold water either.

  “Boy,” yelled Lippincott, who, back in Baltimore, would not even call a nine-year-old black child “boy.” Here, he was yelling for his porter. According to the new Busati tradition, published the day before in the last edition of the Busati Times, any foreigner, most especially a white, who called a Busatian “boy” could be fined up to a thousand dollars, thrown in jail for ninety days and beaten with sticks.