Ramirez craved a glass of rum, but knew that it wouldn’t be wise for him to begin drinking now, with less than two hours to go before he met Kidd and the other buccaneers. There would be liquor flowing at the camp, he knew, and it was critical that Carlos keep his wits about him every moment that he spent in the presence of those locos.

  Rum could wait. There was no time, at the moment, to mix business with pleasure.

  At the very least, he had another stolen boat to purchase from the buccaneers, blood money changing hands. If there was treachery afoot, as Fabian suspected, then Ramirez would be forced to deal with that, as well. A little killing might even help settle his stomach, after spending so much time at sea.

  The thought made Carlos smile again, with feeling this time.

  Perhaps, after all, it would be an enjoyable day.

  “You have to understand,” said Ethan Humphrey, “what it’s like to have a dream come true, when you’ve been hoping for it—waiting for it—all your life.”

  “Some dream,” Remo said. He was standing off to one side of the ex-professor, in the cockpit of the Mulligan Stew.

  “It must seem absurd to you, I realize,” the old man said.

  “Absurd doesn’t quite say it,” Remo said. “Try demented.”

  “My academic life—my whole life, dammit—has been dedicated to a study of the buccaneers who plied these waters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From childhood onward, they provided me with hours of escapist reading, academic study—in short, pure enjoyment. A reason for living, as it were.”

  “All fine and dandy until you start living it out, Professor,” Remo said.

  “These men are purists, don’t you see that?” Humphrey frowned and shook his head, red faced in a way that had nothing to do with the afternoon heat. His topic clearly moved him in the same way that politics or religion moved other men, to the point of fanaticism and beyond.

  “Pure killers, would that be?” asked Remo. “Pure hijackers? Or maybe it’s pure rapists that you had in mind?”

  “Their ethics represent another time, another era,” Ethan Humphrey said, apparently unfazed by Remo’s comment. “It’s unfair to judge them by the standards of the modern era.”

  “You’ve discussed this with their victims, I suppose?”

  A frown creased Humphrey’s face. “You see me as a man devoid of sympathy,” he said. “No doubt, you find me heartless. But consider this, my friend—the world today is overcrowded. Men lead lives of quiet desperation, in the words of Henry David Thoreau. Are you aware how many innocents are murdered every day in New York, in Chicago, in Los Angeles?”

  “I’d look it up,” said Remo, “if I figured it was relevant.”

  “But everything is relevant,” said Humphrey. “Don’t you see? So many sacrificed for nothing, while a handful put their puerile, wasted lives to better use.”

  “As fish food?” Remo asked.

  “Sarcasm.” Humphrey nodded like a wise man who expected no better from his intellectual inferiors. “I understand that you have difficulty grasping what’s at stake here.”

  “Lives and property, you mean?” asked Remo. “It’s a stretch, all right, but I can just about catch hold of it.”

  “I’m speaking of a race, a culture,” Humphrey said. “What are a few lives in the balance, when it means the preservation of a cultural tradition?”

  “Maybe you should ask the victims that,” said Remo.

  “Victims!” Humphrey spit out the word with a genuine expression of contempt. “Throughout recorded history, the sea wolves had been scrupulous in preying on the wealthy parasites who fatten on the lifeblood of society like ticks or leeches. Who else owns the yachts and other pleasure craft worth stealing? Who else can afford the ransom for a high-priced hostage?”

  “So, if they’re rich, you figure they’re unfit to live. Is that about the size of it?” asked Remo.

  “The wealthy breed like roaches,” Humphrey said. “Look at the Kennedys, for God’s sake. You can’t swing a dead cat from Hyannis to Miami Beach without hitting some millionaire third-cousin of JFK’s grandson. What on Earth do they contribute to society, beyond the weekly crop of tabloid headlines?”

  “So, your pirates are a bunch of Marxist revolutionaries,” Remo said. “The Pirate Liberation Army. It’s a quirky twist, Professor, but I’ve got a problem with it.”

  “You miss the point. I merely meant to say—”

  “They’re killing people for the hell of it,” said Remo, interrupting him. “Sometimes they let the women live, I understand, but those who do regret it, when they get to know your noble savages. We also have good reason to believe they’re selling boats they steal to narcotraffickers from South America, to help the cocaine trade along. Of course, in your view, I suppose that’s just another way of keeping up tradition.”

  Humphrey recognized that there would be no winning Remo over to his cause. His jaw was set now, lips compressed into a narrow slit below his nose, eyes fixed on the horizon.

  “They’ll be waiting for us,” the professor said. “You know that.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Never mind,” he said. “Just make damn sure that you don’t lose your way. I understand the sharks are hungry hereabouts.”

  Chiun spent five minutes searching for the herbs he wanted. He found them, yanked the tuber out of the ground and into his kimono sleeve while his rather stupid guard was looking bored at a tree, then continued to search.

  “Hey, slow down, would you?” the guard demanded.

  “Do not tell me you cannot keep up with a bent old man such as myself,” Chiun chided the guard.

  The guard huffed along behind him.

  There was indeed a small outcropping jutting from the jungle. It was of a black rock that contained many gaping spherical shelves.

  Chiun scanned the rock, looking for bone fragments and found none. But that meant nothing. If this was the rock described in the Sinanju scrolls, then its shelves would once have contained the skulls of pirate victims. But that was three hundred years ago, and it was unlikely that they would still be here, where the exposure to the elements would have eaten them away long ago.

  “I thought you was looking for spices. This is a rock.”

  “You are a very smart man,” Chiun remarked. “But what I look for is a kind of flavorful spoor found in certain lichens. I see none here—are there any more such escarpments?”

  “Any more what?”

  Chiun smiled at the guard benignly. “Big rocks.”

  “Oh. No. Just this one. Everything else is all sand.”

  “I see,” Chiun said with disappointment, but inside he was frolicking with delight. Only one such formation on the island and the description matched that in the histories.

  This was the first marker.

  He circled to the north side of the rock formation and found, as promised, a small vertical ridge in the rock, at the bottom of which was a small natural rock shelf on which a man could stand, a few inches off the ground. He stepped up onto it, peering at the rock. His guard watched him for a moment, then got bored and looked elsewhere.

  Chiun immediately turned and faced out, north, and looked for the Two-Headed Tree.

  It was gone. Of course it was gone. There had been only the smallest chance that a tree in these climes would still exist after all this time.

  With no two-headed tree, Chiun didn’t know in which direction to walk. His treasure hunt was over almost before it had begun.

  But not for long. This was just a start, really. There would be other ways, perhaps, of continuing the hunt.

  He stepped up to within spitting distance of the daydreaming guard.

  “Finished!” he clamored. The pirate jumped off the ground.

  “Jee-zus, old man, you trying to get yourself killed!”

  “I try to make feast for captain. He be velly angry you not get me back to camp fast.” Chiun thought he did a pretty fair imitation of what an American would think an ignorant Chinese would sound like.

  “All right, just don’t go yelling at me like that anymore, will ya?”

  “Velly solly!” Chiun screeched, louder than before.

  Chapter 16

  “What is it?” Fabian Guzman asked the lookout, eyes narrowed to dark slits as he stared across the sun-dappled water.

  “A boat, jefe.”

  “I can see that, idiot! Give me the glasses!”

  He snatched the binoculars and raised them to his eyes, adjusting the focus once he had the boat framed in his viewing field. It was approaching from the west, and while no name was painted on the bow, one glimpse told Guzman that the boat was not official. It wasn’t Coast Guard or DEA, not Haitian or Jamaican or Dominican. An older boat, privately owned. Logic dictated that its presence, here and now, had to be coincidence.

  And yet…

  Suppose that he was wrong—then what? Guzman had been the strong right arm of his amigo, Carlos, for more years than he cared to think about, since they had risen from the mean streets of the barrio in Cartagena to command an empire stretching from Colombia to the United States and Western Europe.

  The two of them hadn’t survived this long by taking chances, banking on coincidence.

  “Shall I fetch Carlos?” the lookout asked, nodding back in the direction of the cabin as he spoke.

  “You mean Señor Ramirez, eh?”

  “Sí, jefe.” The contrition in the lookout’s voice seemed genuine enough. It should have been, considering the penalty that insubordination carried in the family Ramirez and Guzman had built up for themselves.

  “Stay here,” he told the lookout. “If that vessel should change course or try to overtake us, let me know immediately. Is that understood?”

  “Sí, jefe!”

  Guzman left him standing at the rail and moved back toward the flying bridge with long, determined strides. He climbed the ladder swiftly, ignoring the helmsman as he reached out for the radio, adjusted the frequency and hailed the Scorpion. Another moment, and recognized the voice of the Scorpion’s first mate, a stone-cold killer named Armand Sifuentes.

  “We have company,” Guzman announced without preamble.

  “I see them,” said Armand. “What should we do?”

  “Take three men in the motor launch,” Guzman replied. “Be careful. Use whatever means you must to get aboard.”

  “And then?” Sifuentes almost chuckled as he asked the question. There could be no doubt about what Guzman had in mind for those aboard the aging cabin cruiser.

  “Do what must be done,” Guzman replied. “No witnesses.”

  “My pleasure,” said Armand Sifuentes, sounding very much as if he meant exactly that.

  Time crept along at a snail’s pace while Guzman waited on the Macarena’s flying bridge for the Scorpion’s motor launch to appear with its cargo of gunmen. After a moment, Guzman realized that he was holding his breath, and he released it with a whistling sigh between clenched teeth.

  Should he have checked with Carlos first, before he sent the gunmen off to deal with the intruders? Possibly, but he had judged that there was no time to be wasted in the present situation. Anyone aboard the weather-beaten cabin cruiser could identify the Macarena and the Scorpion from legends painted on their transoms. Granted, they were still miles from their destination, but Guzman had trained himself to think ahead, anticipate such problems and eliminate them in the embryonic stage.

  Carlos would almost certainly agree with him, but Guzman would have wasted precious time by then. And if Carlos did not agree…what then?

  Then Carlos would be wrong.

  It startled Guzman, thinking in such terms, but he didn’t regard it as betrayal of his lifelong friend. The best and wisest men still made mistakes from time to time; it simply proved that they were human, after all. A friend stood ready to prevent such lapses of humanity from turning into fatal errors.

  There! The motor launch was setting off from the Scorpion’s port side, three gunmen leaning forward on the thwarts, while a fourth manned the outboard engine’s throttle. Their weapons were nowhere in sight, but Guzman knew they would be close at hand, ready to open fire at the first indication of a threat from the old cabin cruiser.

  In moments, they would draw abreast of the intruder. Moments more, and they would be aboard. A brief delay, while Sifuentes tried to determine if the new arrivals on the scene posed any threat to Ramirez and company, but it would make no difference in the end. Once they had stormed the cabin cruiser, everyone aboard would have to die. They were potential witnesses, and while the boat wasn’t worth stealing, in and of itself, it could be scuttled, lost at sea.

  Another mystery of the Caribbean, perhaps unsolved forever.

  And if Carlos was displeased with the result, well, Guzman knew that he could reason with his old friend, given time. Their business with the loco pirates took priority, and nothing else could be allowed to slow them down.

  He leaned against the rail and lit a cigarette, watching.

  Waiting for the distant sound of guns.

  “Stay cool,” Remo advised the ex-professor.

  “I don’t recognize these men,” said Humphrey, squinting in the late-afternoon sunshine as he watched the power launch approaching.

  “Just remember,” he warned Humphrey, “when the guns go off, you’re standing in the middle.”

  “I don’t recognize these men,” the former academic said again. “Who are they?”

  “Let’s just wait and see.”

  Remo slid down the ladder and found a hiding place from which he could observe and overhear the new arrivals as they came aboard. The moments ticked away, Humphrey hauling back on the throttle as the strange craft approached. A voice hailed Humphrey from the launch, and Remo frowned. Their spotter didn’t seem to recognize the old man, and he had what sounded like a South American accent. That wouldn’t rule out a pirate, in itself, and yet…

  There was a soft thump as the launch kissed hulls with the Mulligan Stew, and then boarders were scrambling over the rail, boot heels clomping on deck. Humphrey was agitated, calling down to them from his place on the flying bridge.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded. “What are you doing with those guns? This is—”

  A stutter of automatic gunfire rattled overhead. Remo waited, half expecting a squall of pain, perhaps the sound of Humphrey’s body sprawling on the deck above him, but instead he heard a scramble of feet as the professor ducked out of sight.

  “Stand up, pendejo,” one of the boarding party demanded. “There are questions joo must answer.”

  “This is a flagrant violation of—”

  Another burst of gunfire silenced Humphrey, bullets smacking into bulkhead, one round glancing off the tarnished brass rail with a high-pitched whine.

  “All right!” the old man shouted. “Please, stop shooting! Tell me what you want!”

  “We gonna search joo boat,” one of the shooters said. “Joo gonna tell us why joo’re here.”

  “Look anywhere you want,” the old man answered, groveling on the deck. “I have nothing to hide.”

  Remo heard footsteps on the deck, approaching his hideout. This was a nice spot, he decided. Out of sight of any binocular trained on the Mulligan Stew from the boat these losers came from.

  He concentrated on the footsteps of the gunman who was closing on him, marking others as they moved off toward the bow.

  The man who came around the corner was a twenty-something Latin, carrying an Uzi submachine gun in both hands, across his chest. Dark eyes went wide at the sight of Remo, but he had no chance to use his gun or shout a warning to the others in the split second of life remaining to him.

  Remo grabbed the Uzi, grabbed its owner and inserted the former into the latter. The Uzi went pretty far down the gunman’s throat, and with a little pushing and twisting it went in a lot farther.

  Remo hoisted the gunner’s deadweight and sat him in a bench seat in the cabin cruiser’s galley. Above him, on the deck, more footsteps. Remo could hear someone shouting at Humphrey, the sound of an open hand striking flesh, a cry of pain and outrage from the ex-professor. Whatever kind of search was under way, it seemed haphazard and disorganized.

  Remo emerged from the companionway into sunlight. Most of the noise was coming from his left, the starboard side, so Remo moved to port. He knew there was a gunman above him, grilling Humphrey, and another somewhere to starboard. That left the one making footsteps in Remo’s direction.

  “Uh—” the gunner said.

  “Bye,” Remo said, rapping his knuckles on the gunner’s rib cage. The gunner’s eyes went wild as his heart rhythm revved out of control. Remo held the guy’s mouth closed with one hand to keep the screams from escaping, stepped on both the man’s feet with his own and pulled the spasming body taut to keep him from making any loud noises. A few seconds later the gunner had stopped making noises forever, and Remo dropped him.

  Remo went looking for gunner number three. The Mulligan Stew was a sort of floating sounding board, and Remo could easily track everyone on board by the sound and vibration of their footsteps. That meant the hunt for gunner number three wasn’t even a challenge. He just walked up behind the man. The gunner turned to face Remo—his head, that was in Remo’s hands, turned to face Remo. His body stayed facing front. The gunner was dead before he had time to figure out why the world had suddenly started turning in circles.

  That left the man up top guarding Humphrey.

  “Wha’ joo doin?” the apparent leader of the boarding party called down to his team of thugs, not knowing the gun squad was, each in his own unique manner, very dead. Remo saw a bulky shadow moving toward the port rail of the flying bridge as he came up on it.

  The commander of the boarding party was a stocky man, solid muscle underneath a layer of camouflaging fat. He had some kind of submachine gun and he brought it into play when Remo rushed him and struck at his gun arm.

  The stocky man was confused as to why his gun was silent. Then he heard an abrupt splash off the side of the boat. He looked over just in time to see his submachine sinking in the turquoise Caribbean water, dragging his arm down with it.