Warren Murphy: Lords of the Earth

Chiun entered the office and with a sinking sensation Ndo looked past him to see his bodyguards lying in a heap in the reception area.

Ndo said only one word. "Again?" Chiun nodded.

Like a beaten man, the director general packed Ga into his vest pocket, picked up a briefcase, and followed the Korean outside, in the direction of the airport.

Chapter 20

It was a typical summer day in Uwenda, sweltering and fetid at daybreak and growing even hotter as the day wore on.

A bandstand had been erected in the square of Ndo's home village. The square itself was little more than a brown patch of trampled earth where the town's one public facility-a well once dug by a group of American volunteer students and now a monument-stood. Shortly after the American students left, the well had been poisoned by Ndo's brother, the military commander in chief, who mistook it for a community urinal, a mistake repeated innumerable times by the soldiers of his army. Another villager decided that the well's pump, once decorated with colorful grasses and rings of red pain, would make an excellent African artifact and sold it to a prominent European collector of primitive art.

Now the well sat unused and stinking, but the site was still where visiting dignitaries chose to speak as they incited the villagers to rise and to protect against Western imperialism.

When their motorcade arrived in the village, Ndo left the car and began talking to members of his native tribe.

Minutes later, he returned to the car and said to Smith, "You seek a white man?"

Smith nodded curtly.

"He is here," Ndo said. "A man arrived last night and has been seen driving throughout the area."

Remo looked through the car window with disgust. "Great. How are we going to find anybody in this barren waste? He could be anywhere. It was a stupid idea to come here in the first place."

"Then we can all return to New York?" Ndo said, ready to give a signal to his chauffeur to turn the car around.

"Not so quickly," Smith said. "The man we seek wants people. I think we should put a lot of people together in one place for him."

"Do you want to give away money?" Ndo said. "That always draws a crowd."

"Too obvious a trap," Smith said. "Well, then how do we attract people?"

"Think of something," Remo said. "You're the politician."

"I know," Ndo said, looking at Chiun for approval. The old Korean's face was turned from him, however, staring out at the long bleak landscape. "I will give a speech."

"Keep it short," Remo grumbled.

The bandstand was hastily constructed from stone and wood once used to store grain, another imperialist ploy to entice the citizens of Uwenda into an alliance with the warmongering West. It was decorated with the latest flag of Uwenda, a pink-and-black-striped field on which three seersucker lions leapt. Ndo's aunt, official flagmaker to the President for Eternity, had barely had time to cut the lions out of the old dress used for flagmaking and to paste them on the flag with Super Glue before the speeches were to begin. Villagers were rounded up at bayonet point and herded into the square.

When Amabasa Francois Ndo approached the speaker's stand, there was not a sound, not a ripple of applause, until the soldiers who ringed the square clicked off the safeties on their rifles. Suddenly the crowd went wild greeting the ambassador.

Ndo waved his hands in the air and grinned. His teeth sparkled in the brilliant sun.

"My people," he began.

There was no applause. He stopped, put his hands on his hips and glared at the General for Life, his brother, who snapped a command to the troops. The troops dropped to their knees in firing position, their weapons pointed at the crowd. A deafening roar of approval for Ndo went up from the throats of the crowd.

Ndo smiled and waved down the applause cheerfully.

"My friends. Four score and seven years ago . . ." In the back of the crowd, Remo glanced at Smith. " 'The Gettysburg Address'?" Remo said.

"You warned him no anti-American stuff," Smith said. "Maybe this is the only other thing he knows."

" . . . dedicated to the proposition that all men . . ." Remo's eyes continued to patrol the area around the village square. Then he saw it-a jeep that had just stopped behind one of the small tarpaper-and-wood shacks that constituted the village's residential area. He began to move away from Smith, but the CURE director restrained him by grabbing his arm. "Look," Smith said, turning Remo's glance to the speaker's platform.

" . . . in a great civil war testing whether that nation or-" Ndo stopped speaking and swatted at a fly buzzing around his face. The sudden silence convinced the villagers that the speech was over. Unprompted by the soldiers' guns, they gave out one perfunctory cheer and began to turn back to their homes.

"Damned fly," Ndo shouted, slapping his fat little fists together.

No one saw the red-winged fly bite Ndo on the back of his glistening neck, but everyone stopped when he suddenly roared in anguish.

They turned to see Ndo, his hands balled into fists, crumpling the pages of his speech. He tossed the pages into the air, then spun in a circle, before beginning to flail about him on the bandstand.

He grabbed the pole holding the Uwendan flag and snapped it in two. Then he shoved the flag itself into his mouth and tore it to shreds with his teeth.

He jumped to the ground, grabbed a support base of the bandstand and shook it until the middle section of timber came loose in his hand. He crushed the wood to powder and the bandstand creaked and then collapsed around him.

The crowd watched for a moment, hushed, and then Ndo rose from the wreckage like some giant primordial beast climbing out of the slime, his throat emitting a sound that no human should have been capable of making.

The villagers, used to Ndo's long boring speeches about Marxism, jumped up and down in glee and began to applaud.

"Musca perriweatheralis," Barry Sehweid said excitedly. "Perriweather's here. He's released the fly. Do you hear, Harold? He's here."

"Didn't even give us the full forty-eight hours," Smith said. The CURE director looked to both sides. Remo and Chiun had moved away from him and were walking slowly toward Ndo.

The IHAEO official's brother approached the bandstand. He extended a helping hand to Ndo.

Ndo seemed to smile, then as the man moved within the reach of his arm, he swung his arm around in one long sweep and cracked his fist against the side of his brother's face.

Like a brown ball, the general's head bounded off his shoulders, bouncing through the dust toward the community well.

A villager screamed. Then another. The soldiers started to raise their weapons toward Ndo, but it was too late. The politician grabbed one of the riflemen, impaled him on his own weapon, and then spun the soldier around over his head.

He roared a growl as blood sprayed from the man, sending up little puffs of dust where it hit the sunbaked ground.

"Naaaaargh," Ndo roared, his eyes bulging wildly from his head.

"He says 'Naaaaaargh' too, Little Father," Remo said. "Maybe that's how we'll be able to tell whoever gets bit. He'll say 'Naaaaaargh.' "

"Good thought," Chiun said.

The villagers bolted and ran. They brushed past Remo and Chiun, as Ndo held the dead soldier over his head, and then tossed him, as if he were a light stick, into the midst of the other soldiers.

The Uwendan Army dropped its rifles and ran, and suddenly almost as if by magic, the square was empty of people, except for Remo, Chiun and Smith at one end, and at the other ... Smith's heart sank.

Barry Schweid was standing near Ndo, slowly waving his blanket. The pudgy young man's eyes were glazed. Ndo looked toward him and his lips curled back in a savage parody of a smile. The fluttering blue blanket in Barry's hands caught his attention. Like a bull in an arena, Ndo charged it.