Uninterested, the Arab brushed dust from his kaffiyeh.
"Your colleague said it had a short range. This will be over soon. We are safe."
"No, we're not!" Babcock cried. "There could be a radiation-leakage problem before the bomb even goes off! It has a plutonium charge. If the shell gets pierced by a bullet while we're still in range, we could all end up with radiation poisoning!"
"I had not thought of that." Aruch frowned. "I suppose we could attempt escape."
To Bryce Babcock, sweeter words had never been spoken.
"How?" the interior secretary pleaded.
Aruch considered. "My car," he said finally. "It is closer than the trucks."
With saucering eyes, Babcock peeked around the side of the boulder. When he dropped back down beside Aruch, he was shaking his head violently.
"That's got to be a city block away," he said.
"An eighth of a mile. Perhaps a little less," Aruch said, reluctantly unholstering his handgun. As he was rising to a squat, Babcock grabbed his arm.
"We'll both be killed," the secretary whined.
Aruch's smile was thin. "Do you know how to drive?" he asked, cocking his automatic with calm assurance.
"Yes," Babcock admitted, momentarily confused.
"In that case, do not talk. Run."
With that, Nossur Aruch ran out from behind the rock. Keeping low, he raced for his big bulletproof car. Bullets screamed all around him.
Babcock gasped. He had no desire to follow, but he was more terrified of dying alone. Shaking in fear, he made an instant, albeit reluctant decision. Jumping out from behind the rock, he followed the terrorist at a gallop through the deadly cross fire.
REMO ASKED the first Arab they passed if he had seen Nossur Aruch. The scowl that appeared on the old man's face told Remo that he had.
"The traitor took the road to Nablus," the man snarled, spitting on the ground. It seemed to be a common Arab reaction to Aruch's name. "He thinks we do not know him in his bulletproof car."
The man was leading a rag-covered donkey down the lonely road. From his stolen truck, Remo observed silently that his style of dress and the beast of burden trailing behind him were a passport to another time. The man could have been transported to the same road two thousand years before and not attracted one second's worth of attention.
"Nablus. You know where that is?" Remo asked Chiun.
"Am I now a walking atlas?" the old Korean complained.
"Please, Chiun," Remo pressed.
The Master of Sinanju frowned. "Yes, I do," he admitted. "But I am getting you a globe for your next birthday."
"Beats pasting Stan Ronaldman's ratty wig in my scrapbook," Remo said. "And you're assuming any of us is having another birthday."
Tires spun, spitting clouds of dirt around the Arab and his donkey. With a desperate lurch, Remo launched the truck down the road.
BY FAVOR OF THE BLESSED Earth Goddess herself, Bryce Babcock managed to survive the Israeli-PIO cross fire.
Bullets ripped the air around him as he ran the final few feet to Nossur Aruch's waiting car. Arabs screamed curses dawn at Israeli soldiers. Some of the PIO men had already run out of ammunition. These were gunned down as they tried hurling rocks down the hill.
The PIO leader had dived for cover in the back seat of his sturdy sedan. Through the partially open window, fur-lined lips screamed encouragement to Bryce Babcock.
"Run, you fool, run!" Aruch yelled.
Panting from panic and exertion, the interior secretary's shaking hand grabbed the silver handle of the driver's door. Before he could pull, he felt something hard press into his back.
Babcock froze.
"Do not move."
The words came from a young Israeli soldier. The man had sneaked up around the PIO vehicles in order to get behind the firing Palestinian soldiers.
As his bladder drained down his leg once more, Bryce Babcock raised his hands numbly in the air. An angry hiss issued from the rear of the car. Through the crack where a moment before Aruch's lips had been, there came a flash of white.
Babcock's ears rang from the nearness of the explosion. The soldier hopped back, a fat red hole in the center of his forehead.
Hands still raised numbly in the air-trousers soaked through-Babcock watched the soldier drop to the ground.
Aruch's automatic vanished from the window. His fuzzy lips reappeared.
"Get in, fool!"
Heart pounding, Babcock scrabbled for the door handle. Springing the door open, he fell behind the steering wheel. The keys were still in the ignition. The engine started with a rumble.
Aruch was hanging over the back seat. "That way," he commanded with a sharp flip of his gun barrel.
Obediently, Babcock steered the car in a wide arc. They headed back down the road toward the waiting line of Israeli soldiers. Babcock winced as the Jewish troops opened fire on the runaway car.
"Do your worst!" Aruch shouted gleefully. "You will not pierce the skin of this mighty Palestinian beast!"
They plowed through the line of soldiers. Although the men continued to fire from every direction at the escaping car, their weapons had no effect.
Aruch bounced giddily from window to tinted window. Even though the men couldn't see him through the dark glass, he stuck out his tongue at them.
In the front seat, Bryce Babcock's eyes were sick as he watched the display in the rearview mirror. "How can you be so calm?" he asked in horrified wonder.
Nossur shrugged, settling back in his seat. "Welcome to the Middle East," he replied.
With bullets pinging off its rear windshield, the sturdy car raced down to the main, winding dirt road.
And on the rocky hill high above them, the red digital timer on the stainless-steel casing of the neutrino bomb continued to count remorselessly down to zero.
THE TRIO OF YOUTHS, each barely in his teens, carried old Russian AK-47s.
Remo was getting sick of having to ask for directions, but he didn't have much choice. He pulled alongside the teenagers.
"You guys seen Nossur Aruch?" he shouted across the seat, out Chiun's open window.
The name brought a reaction. The three boys raised their guns to Remo.
The Master of Sinanju was quick to react. Bony hands a blur of motion, Chiun snatched hold of each of the weapons, twisting barrels to useless angles.
The youths blinked. They looked at Chiun. They looked at their guns, which were now bent to boomerang angles and inexplicably pointing at the arid ground.
As if connected to a single brain, three frantic hands stabbed simultaneously in the same direction. "When are you gonna take that job counseling troubled teens?" Remo asked as he pulled away from the trio.
They hadn't gone much farther down the road before Remo felt a sudden strange sensation through the tires of the truck. Whatever it was, it was new to him. And huge. Face a granite mask, he glanced at the Master of Sinanju.
Chiun had felt it, as well. Expression grave, his gaze was fixed on the distant hills. When he saw the look on his teacher's face, tension thinned Remo's lips.
"It was too big for conventional explosives," he commented worriedly, his own eyes trained on the far-off landscape.
Chiun nodded. The yellowing white tufts of hair above his ears were ominous thunder clouds framing a troubled parchment face. "If it were nearby, we would have seen the flash," the old Korean replied in a subdued tone.
Although both Sinanju Masters were trying to gauge the direction from which the vibrations were coming, it was difficult to tell with an explosion of the magnitude they'd just felt. All the earth beneath them seemed to be trembling. It was Remo who came first to a tentative conclusion.
"South?" he ventured, unsure of his own deduction.
Chiun nodded slow assent. "The vibrations appear to be coming from that direction," he agreed. At the moment, they were driving south. Fast. "Hang on!" Remo yelled.