"I haven't slept that well in years," she said to Remo, passing on her way to make a pit stop in the forest. "That's some bedside manner, Dr. Ward."
"I try to keep my hand in," Remo told her.
"So I noticed. Don't waste too much energy today," she said in parting. "You'll be needing it tonight."
"I'll make a note."
Their breakfast was another freeze-dried meal, some kind of lumpy scrambled-egg concoction laced with colorful but tasteless cubes of meat and vegetables. Someone's conception of an omelet, Remo guessed, though he couldn't have sworn to the ID if he were under oath.
The best thing about bad food, he decided, was its tendency to vanish quickly; no one lingered to savor the experience before they were scraping plates and trooping down to the stream for K.P. duty. They were packed, including tents, inside of forty minutes from the time they first sat down to eat.
The jungle had begun to subtly change, thought Remo as they struck another trail beyond the clearing and resumed their eastward march. Not so much in appearance—which was standard tropic rain forest, from what he could observe—but more in terms of atmosphere. There was a darker feel about the new terrain; Remo would have been hard-pressed to put it into words, except to say that it felt dangerous, if not precisely evil. There was less room to maneuver on the trail, the jungle pressing closer on each side than it had the day before, and the mosquitoes came in greater numbers, reinforced by swarms of biting gnats and flies.
And they were being followed, yes indeed. The tail was back there, keeping a respectful distance, but maintaining contact all the same.
He thought once more about surprising their pursuers, falling back to search them out and wreak a little havoc for the hell of it, find out exactly who or what was on their trail. But Audrey kept on glancing back at Remo, smiling even when the heat and insects started getting to her, and he knew that she would sound the first alarm if she looked back and found him gone. Tonight, perhaps, if there was time and he could get a fix on their prospective enemies. A visit to the other camp in darkness might be just what Dr. Renton ordered.
In the meantime, Remo concentrated on the trail and his companions. Audrey working up a sweat in front of him, the rich aroma of her body wafting back to Remo on a sluggish jungle breeze. He put the stirring mental images on hold and checked the others, starting with their guide and working backward down the line. The men demonstrated varied levels of endurance, Remo saw, but none showed any signs of dropping from exhaustion. Up in front, their Malay pointman set a steady pace without demanding any superhuman effort. He appeared to have the oldest member of the team in mind, and Remo caught him glancing back at Dr. Stockwell every hundred yards or so, as if to reassure himself that the professor still had energy enough to carry on.
So far so good.
Three hours later, they stopped to rest for fifteen minutes, and Audrey winked on the sly before she settled next to Stockwell.
"Tell me, Audrey," the professor said, "have you seen anything unusual about the native flora?"
Audrey thought about the question for a moment, finally shook her head. "Not really, Safford. Much of what we see is rather primitive, of course—the ferns and fungi, obviously—but there's nothing I'd call prehistoric on the face of it. No fossil species sprung to life, by any means."
"An ordinary jungle, then?"
"In essence," she replied. "But we're not looking for a plant, remember. If I had to guess, I'd say that isolation would be more important to survival of an ancient species than specific flora. Even herbivores are fairly versatile, unless you're dealing with koala bears."
Their guide, Kuching Kangar, had seemed to follow the exchange with interest, though it was impossible to say how much he understood until he spoke.
"Nagaq eats meat," he said to no one in particular.
Professor Stockwell blinked and frowned. "A carnivore?"
The little Malay shrugged. "Eats meat," he said again.
"You've heard this from your people, I suppose?"
"Nagaq ate my datuk," the guide responded, slipping into Malay.
"His grandfather," Sibu Sandakan translated.
"What?" Professor Stockwell was amazed. "He surely cannot mean—"
"We hear him screams," the guide said, interrupting Stockwell. "Run down to the river where he go for water. Find his arm, kiri."
"The left one," Sandakan filled in, appearing shaken.
"Also, tracks left by Nagaq," the guide went on. "This big."
He held his hands apart, three feet or so, then let them fall into his lap. The story of his grandfather's annihilation seemed to conjure nothing in the way of strong emotion.
"When did all this happen?" Audrey asked.
"Two years gone, maybe three."
"What bloody rot," Pike Chalmers said. "It must have been a crocodile."
"No crocodile that big," the guide replied. If he was angered by the tall Brit's open skepticism, he concealed it well.
"My God, that's food for thought," Professor Stockwell said. "That is… I mean to say… "
"It's all right, Safford," Audrey told him, resting one hand on his sunburned arm. "I'm sure he didn't take offense."
"Nagaq eat meat," their guide repeated with a twitchy little smile, then scrambled to his feet and grabbed his pack.
"Rest over," he informed them. "We go now."
The Master of Sinanju had no difficulty following his quarry. Even on the river, it was child's play, watching for the point where they had landed their canoes and made a sad attempt at hiding them. The boats were tucked away behind some ferns, but no real effort had been made to sweep away the tracks where they were dragged ashore, and footprints from the several amateurs were everywhere.
The game was that much easier when they began the rough trek overland. Their clumsy boots left imprints that a blind man could have followed, tapping with his cane, and there were other signs, besides. A broken sapling. Scratches on a tree, where someone's gear had scraped the bark. A stone inverted, kicked aside to bare the worms beneath it. Fronds and branches cut with a machete where the trail was overgrown and they were forced to clear a path. Great imprints from their buttocks where they stopped to rest.
Remo was better than the others, granted, but he still left traces that the Master of Sinanju could detect with only minor concentration. In a contest, it wouldn't be good enough, but Remo surely would have chosen better footwear and equipment if the choice were his to make.
Chiun had started out a day behind the Stockwell expedition, giving them a night to sleep at Dampar, picking out a charter speedboat that would quickly shave their lead. He was an hour and a half behind them when he acquired the canoe, with no white men in the boat to hold him back once Chiun applied himself to paddling at speed. His quarry had no more than forty minutes' lead time when the Master beached his boat and took the time to hide it properly, where no man would discover it without a thorough, time-consuming search.
At that, Chiun was almost forced to view his tracking prowess as a handicap of sorts. He could have overtaken Remo and the others in an hour at the most, and shadowed them from killing distance, but he had no wish to baby-sit.
And after fifteen minutes on the jungle trail, he knew there was another problem that he must examine first, before he showed himself to Remo.
Stockwell's expedition had a tail.
He couldn't say another tail, because the faceless strangers had begun their hunt ahead of him. For all Chiun knew, they may have been in place before the expedition left K.L. They had made no effort to surprise the expedition yet, but they were armed and therefore dangerous—at least to whites with no appreciation of Sinanju.