Three of the other leaders went for their weapons, but Little Elk, always one step ahead of everyone else, ordered them to stop.
"It's over," he said. "Mr. Arieson is gone."
And then from nowhere, from the dust and from the lingering sweet-smelling smoke, came Mr. Arieson's voice. And it was laughing.
"Only the dead have seen the last of me," he said. On that day, Running Deere died from his wounds. General William Tecumseh Buel lost his chance to fight the second battle of the Little Big Horn, and Remo Williams notified Harold W. Smith, head of CURE, that after more than two decades, he was quitting the organization.
"Why? Where are you going? What are you going to do? Has something happened?"
"Yeah. Something has happened," said Remo. "Something bad."
"What?"
"I finally discovered that I'm useless. I've got to do something first."
"What?"
"I'm not sure. But I met something today that I should have known. I'm helpless. For the first time since training, I am absolutely helpless."
"But you put down the revolt."
"I've got a mystery here, little Smitty, and until I unravel it I won't be any good to you, myself, or anyone else."
"The mystery is what you're talking about."
"It wouldn't do any good to explain it, Smitty."
"Why not?" asked Smith.
"Because you're not from Sinanju and you've never read the scrolls."
"Where are you going?"
"To Sinanju."
"Why?"
"Because Chiun is there."
"Has he quit?"
"I think so. And so have I. So long, Smitty."
The line went out in the secured offices of Harold W. Smith, in the gigantic cover installation known as Folcroft Sanitarium on Long Island Sound.
Quitting? thought Smith. So that's what Chiun's message was about. The way Chiun had explained it, it sounded like he was going to give an even greater service to Smith, but was just taking some time to improve himself.
But hearing from Remo, Smith now understood that the flowery tributes to Smith's wisdom and genius, the promise of a return with stronger and better service, were really Chiun's way of saying good-bye.
What was frightening now was not any Indian rebellion, but the great question of how it could get started so easily, and why the normal protective measures of society seemed so pathetically useless.
The United States Army report was alarming. The Ojupa were just a simple group of men who, in a flash, turned into one of the great little armies of mankind, with a fighting spirit rarely seen on earth.
They had developed tactics on the spot that could rival Hannibal or Napoleon. They showed a fighting elan that the finest troops would envy.
But army analysts could not discover why this seemingly normal group of men could become so good, so quickly. The conclusion of this report was that if the same sort of situation turned up elsewhere in the world, neither the U.S. Army nor any other army could handle it. The report also went to the President of the United States, who told his Secretary of Defense not to worry because he had something special that could take care of it like it did at Little Big Horn.
He didn't know he not only didn't have those services, but the world was going to see those same tactics again very soon. Only the dead had seen the last of Mr. Arieson.
Chapter 4
General Mohammed Moomas, first Democratic People's Leader for Life, inventor of People's Democratic Islamic Revolutionary Social Justice-by which the nation Idra sought not only to live the perfect social and religious life but also to bring compassion, love, and justice to the rest of the world-had a problem.
General Moomas always had a problem. His tiny North African country floating on a sea of oil had spent over forty-two billion dollars fighting imperialism, Zionism, capitalist oppression, atheism, and man's general inhumanity to man, and all he had to show for it were thirteen thousand random murders, a half-dozen plane hijackings, four poisonings, fifty-seven kidnappings, twelve hundred tortures, and the unflagging support of several American columnists, especially when America tried to do something about it.
General Moomas had operated freely for years, financing any revolutionary group willing to throw a hand grenade into a hospital and then claim a victory for social justice. There were always comrade citizens unwilling to accept the total freedom, total joy, total growth and liberty of the Islamic Democratic People's Socialist Revolutionary Nation of Idra. This was understandable. Satan, Zionism, imperialism, capitalism, and oppression could reach the hearts of the innocent and foolish, and the General had to face the evil. But given a chance, and with the help of whips, chains, electric shocks, and the old-fashioned holy sword cutting pieces off their persons, many people renounced their evil ways.
The truly obstinate, of course, had to be killed. Thus no one spoke a word of unhappiness in General Mohammed Moomas' country:
All this changed when American bombers flew in low over the Mediterranean, outflew the General's latest Soviet planes, penetrated his latest Soviet missiles, and nearly destroyed his home.
For the first time, the people of Idra learned they might have to pay for their leadership in the revolutionary world. Someone out there was shooting back, and shooting at them.
Several colonels debated overthrowing the General. After all, oil prices were falling, and like so many third-world nations, they produced nothing else of benefit to anyone else on the planet. There was no industry in Idra. There was a steel mill once. They had brought it from Czechoslovakia. The steel would build homes and hospitals, tanks and guns. But when the Czechs left, it just rusted away, like all the weapons the Idrans bought from outside.
Thus, while there were demonstrations in London and Europe over the American bombing, and while several American columnists were screaming daily that bombing Idra did no good-it could not stop terrorism, they said-the General was almost overthrown.
A group of colonels stormed to his desert sanctuary. They all drove in their Mercedes-Benz sedans. There were fifteen thousand colonels in the Idra Islamic Revolutionary Socialist Defense Forces, roughly a third of all the military. The rest were mostly generals. But if one was a general he didn't have to leave his French-built air-conditioned home. Therefore the colonels did all the dirty work, like driving out to the desert to discuss the basic issue of Idra-what had they gotten for their oil money but American bombs?
General Moomas, a handsome man with curly hair and dark penetrating eyes, had not become a revolutionary leader without being able to handle a mob. He invited the entire fifteen thousand colonels to a traditional bedouin feast of lamb, so that from his hand to their mouths would only be sustenance.
General Moomas knew he could provide this traditional feast. A ship from New Zealand had docked just three weeks before and that meant plenty of lamb. Considering Korean stevedores had just arrived to offload, and an army of French cooks had just signed on for the Idra marines, and Italian mechanics were always on hand for the trucks, this traditional feast was now possible.
In years past, Idra women could outcook an army of Paris chefs, using only the meager fare of the Idra desert. But their skills had been lost during modernization, when they were assigned to learn computers and physics and all the things the Idra men found to be beyond them and assigned elsewhere to another gender. Since there was only one other gender in Idra, cooking fell, like all the dirty work for thousands of years, on the women, some of whom actually did become proficient in those subjects and promptly left for London, where they could find work other than posing for news cameras to show how modern Idra was.
Now, as the fragrant aroma of lamb roasting in a thousand imported ovens filled the cold night desert air, General Moomas confronted his brethren to offer an accounting of where all the billions had gone.