Warren Murphy: Unite and Conquer

"So?"

"So it might be the tree now."

"How can it be a tree when it is still there?" Verapaz wondered aloud.

Remo studied the way the stone shoulder and the tree root were meshed.

"Damn, damn, damn. Now we're going to have to cut down the whole tree to make sure."

"Hah! You can no more cut down the cypress of Tule than you can break the moon with your naked fist."

A squeaky voice from behind them said, "We will do what we must to defeat the monster, Gordons. "

"Coatlicue," Verapaz corrected. "Her name is Coatlicue."

Remo turned. "Chiun, I thought I told you to stay with the chopper."

"I did. Now I am here. For my skills are more needed here than elsewhere." And shaking back his kimono sleeves, the Master of Sinanju bared pipestem arms that ended in ten long nails of fierce strength and wickedness.

Chiun floated up to the prostrate idol of stone.

He examined it critically.

"Hello is all right?" Chiun said.

Nothing happened except the spit of raindrops off stone.

Chiun knocked on the stone tentatively.

"Hello is all right," he said again. It was Gordons's mechanical greeting. Somewhere he had been told that was a typical greeting, and never learned to leave off the last three words.

"Could be playing possum," Remo said guardedly.

Setting himself, Chiun brought the edge of his palm against a corner of the hard stone shoulder. It broke off. The Master of Sinanju looked at the separated piece, saw that it seemed solid and stamped it once with his sandaled foot.

It powdered under the force of his stroke. There was nothing metallic in the gritty pile, his sandaled toe determined.

Attacking again, Chiun dislodged another chunk. It fell, came under the heel of his sandals and a larger pile of rock dust was made.

Having created a line of attack, Chiun next closed his fist until only the index finger stuck out.

Then, with swift, sure strokes he began sectioning the shoulder by slicing off wedges of stone. They piled up swiftly.

"Need help?" Remo asked.

Chiun did not look back. "Why is the green-eyed one still breathing?"

"Because."

"That is no answer."

"Look, it's supposed to look like natural causes, and we have witnesses."

"The Thunder Dragon blow was meant for situations such as this."

"Are you speaking of me?" asked Subcomandante Verapaz.

"No," Remo and Chiun said together.

And under Remo's watchful eyes, the Master of Sinanju continued sectioning the great stone idol, exposing the gashed tree root until it was no longer in contact with any part of Mr. Gordons.

"This is too easy," Remo said. "Sure you don't want my help?"

"What I do not want is for you to hog the credit for the man-machine's defeat."

"I didn't defeat him. He slipped on a Mexican or something. Before that, all those lightning strikes must have fried his circuits."

"Pah. Mere incidentals. It will be written in the Book of Sinanju that Chiun the Great finally defeated the Colossus of Mexico."

"You can't write that!"

"I am Reigning Master," Chiun said, going to work on the torso. "The truth is whatever my goose quill inscribes."

"I still say this is too easy," Remo said, deciding the job would go more quickly if he started in on the legs.

ALIRIO ANTONIO ARCILA, being no fool, began backing away. He did not know who these two were, but they obviously possessed fearsome powers and an utter disregard for his cause. And the way they regarded him filled him with a chilly unease.

Their helicopter idled nearby. He could not pilot a helicopter himself, but through the rain he seemed to see a pilot just sitting there with nothing to do. Perhaps he was a fan. In fact, given that it was a Mexican army helicopter, the odds of this were very great.

On the way to the helicopter, his heel struck a thick tree root. Stumbling, he threw one arm back to catch himself.

And to his everlasting astonishment, the root snaked up and caught Antonio instead. It whipped around his chest, pinning him to the ground and, like a python, began squeezing the air from his lungs. Antonio discovered a terrible fact then. With all the air out and none coming in, screaming for help was impossible. He barked once weakly, and that ineffectual Chihuahua sound took away the last of his lung power.

As he lay there, his jungle green eyes growing wide with horror, the thick root insinuated itself into his open and gasping mouth and dropped something down his gullet.

Going down, it felt cold and metallic. It was very much like a steel baseball as it slid down a throat painfully not large enough to handle it, making his inability to inhale utterly moot.

By the time it dropped heavily into his belly, Antonio no longer cared about his lack of oxygen or anything else in the universe. He was brain-dead.

REMO PAUSED in his labors.

"This is going to take all day," he complained.

"Not if you cease interrupting me," Chiun snapped as he stamped a loose stone heart to grit.

Chiun was working, furiously. The thick slices of Coatlicue were coming off the knees now-or where the knees should be. They were piling up like home fries.

Not all of it was stone, either. Some was distinctly organic. A few times actual blood flowed.

It was grisly work, but Chiun refused to let it faze him. Each time a section came away, they checked it for any sign of Gordons's electronic brain. It was the small, irreducible heart of the assimilator. Every time they had crushed a Gordons form, the assimilator always found a way to another host, animal, vegetable or mineral, and rebuilt itself. Only by obliterating the brain could they ever be sure he would never return to haunt them again.

The trouble was, they had no idea what it looked like. Only that it was very small.

Remo was hacking away at the other leg now. The first lay shattered and unrecognizable now. His technique was different. He felt along the rough outer skin until his sensitive fingers found a weak spot. Making a fist, he hammered away.

Cracks formed. Rock dust squirted. Liquid squirted, too. The stone fell into large sections that in turn crumbled because they had been disrupted on the molecular level.

"It's not fighting back or reacting," Remo said hopefully.

"Therefore, it is dead," said Chiun.

"So where is the brain?"

"Talk will not find it," said Chiun, face tight, not looking away from his task. "Only force."

It took a while, but in the end the Coatlicue statue lay in heaps like a rock pile after the chain gang had finished. They stamped these into grit and mush.

"No brain," said Remo, looking around.

"No brain, no gain," said Chiun, eyeing the heavy-branched cypress tree with wary concern.

Remo frowned. "This is bigger than the both of us."

"No tree can defeat a Master of Sinanju, much less two."

"No argument there, but I think we have better ways to pass the next year." Remo looked around.

He was wondering how many antitank rockets it would take to blow apart a two-thousand-year-old tree when his gaze fell on the helicopter where Winston Smith and Assumpta waited for them with remarkable patience.

Subcomandante Verapaz was calmly walking toward it. He walked with very jerky steps and was taking great care how he placed his feet on the rainslick ground.

"Damn," Remo said. "Verapaz is trying to escape."

"Do not worry. I disabled the craft so it cannot fly-"

"How?"

"By disabling the pilot's ability to fly."

WINSTON SMITH WAS FUMING. His feet were on the chopper's pedals and he couldn't work them. His hands hung limp at his side, like spaghetti.

In the passenger seat, Assumpta was just as helpless. Her eyes kept looking toward him. Every time their gazes met, he had to look away. They were like a knife in his gut. It was a sickening feeling. He wanted to fly her away. He wanted to find some place where they could just live. Screw Verapaz. Screw the UN. Screw everyone. It wasn't worth it. Assumpta was worth it. He saw that clearly now.