"You're thinking about that Diehl guy back home, aren't you?"
She looked up, startled. "No. No, really—"
"Don't start lying to me now," Remo said, smiling. "I'm just beginning to get used to you the way you are." A macaw shrieked overhead. "What happened at the waterfall between us was great, but I wasn't who you were thinking about," he said.
She looked into his eyes for a long moment. "You still surprise me," she said.
"How'd you wind up on top of a waterfall, anyway?"
She thought. "I came to somewhere in this forest," she said. "One of the Olmec showed up with the garland of flowers and put it around my neck. From then on, I don't remember much, except standing on top of the waterfall. I was trying to keep from falling asleep. I thought that's what the Olmec had planned for me— to fall asleep and then go crashing on the rocks at the foot of the fall. They'd taken my clothes....And then you were there." She stopped and pulled him to her. "I'd never been so happy to see anyone in my life."
He pulled away from her. "Not as happy as you'll be to see Dick Diehl again."
She sighed. "It's too late for that," she said, breathing in the clean, damp air of the rain forest with its thousand birds calling in the night. "I thought that if I could impress him with my brilliance, he'd want me. Now I only wish I had told him that I cared about him." She chuckled. "Not that Dick would have noticed, anyway. Anything that's not made of stone and over a thousand years old has no interest for him."
"Don't wait that long," Remo said.
"Now, don't you start lying to me," she said gently. "We're not going anywhere. Even if you get rid of the Olmec, we'll still be here. Cooligan couldn't get out, and his crew knew the machinery of that time module better than we do." She squeezed his hand. "So no false hopes between us, okay?"
"Okay," Remo said.
As they came closer to the volcano, Remo spotted a dot of red glowing at its peak. "Are you seeing what I'm seeing?"
"Lava. It's swollen, too."
"What, the volcano?"
"Look at the shape of it." She pointed to the black outline of Bocatan in the moonlit sky.
"It almost looks as if the volcano's pregnant."
"So she is," Lizzie said. "They get that way when they're about to erupt."
"Erupt when?"
"Can't say. Tonight, a month— it varies."
"Hey, that thing can't erupt," Remo protested. "It's been dead for years. At least not since the beginning of the town. As close as Yaxbenhaltun is, it'd get wiped out if the volcano blew."
"Sometimes volcanoes wait hundreds of years between eruptions. Bocatan may have last gone off before Yaxbenhaltun was built. Cooligan got things moving pretty fast, remember?"
Remo stood staring at the red glow for a moment. "I've got an idea," he said.
They climbed to the top of the volcano, feeling the mountain gurgle and swim beneath their feet.
"Look, if I've got a choice, I'd rather be zapped by a laser beam than drowned in lava," Lizzie said.
"Nothing's going to happen. Especially now." With a large rock he picked and pulled at the lip of the volcano until the eastern portion of it was two feet lower than the rest, exactly on a level with the bubbling lava inside.
"What's that for?" Lizzie asked.
"You'll see."
Back in Yaxbenhaltun, he announced the plan. "Po, I want you to get every available man to get to the volcano as fast as possible and collect all the stones they can, enough to make the lava overflow."
"You will start an eruption?" Po asked.
"Nah. You can't make a volcano blow with a few stones. I just want it to spill over a little onto the Olmec's side. I've fixed it so that it will."
He turned to Chiun. "Meanwhile, you and I will go back to the Olmec camp and take back the lasers. By the time the volcano begins to overflow, we'll have the guns, and the Olmec'll be scared out of their pants. That'll be where you come in with one of your Master of Sinanju speeches."
"I do not speak their language," Chiun said curtly.
"That doesn't matter. You point to the overflowing volcano, say 'Kukulcan' a couple of times, and they'll keep away from this place for the rest of their lives. And no lives lost, no interruption of history. It's worth a shot, isn't it?"
Chiun's eyes narrowed. "The boy is right. What if the volcano erupts?"
"I tell you, it's not going to erupt."
"Oh, yes it will," Lizzie said. "It shows all the signs."
"Well, it's not going to erupt tonight. Let's go through with this plan and worry about the volcano later."
Reluctantly they agreed. Po went out to gather all the able-bodied men of the city. Chiun and Remo stole out through the jungle toward the caves of the Olmec.
They stayed close to the river, keeping an eye on the glowing rim of Bocatan. The sky changed from black to blue to slate gray; the crisp crescent moon grew fuzzy and small overhead. By the first red streaks of dawn, the silhouettes of a hundred Mayan warriors stood around the volcano's red mouth.
"Oh, balls," Remo said. "They're not supposed to be there yet."
"It is a beautiful sight," Chiun said. "Worthy even of a stanza of Ung poetry."
"Poetic, maybe. But too soon. The idea was for us to get to the Olmec caves before the Mayans showed themselves."
"No plan works perfectly," Chiun said philosophically.
The Mayans remained on the mountaintop, bending and straightening as they placed their stones carefully inside the brimming volcano.
"Too early, too early," Remo muttered, skittering as quickly as he could through the slimy mud of the river's edge. At Bocatan, a thin stream of red lava poured down the side of the sacred fire mountain.
"Will you look at that," Remo said, disgusted. "The whole plan's ruined."
"It was a stupid plan," Chiun agreed. "But what can one expect of a white man?"
"Now the whole effect will be..." He stopped. "Hey, there hasn't been any effect. No yelling, no stampede from the caves, nothing."
"Perhaps the Olmec are not the dunderheads you assumed them to be," Chiun said.
"What does that mean?"
The old Oriental shrugged. "Only that your escape may have been detected. Did you think of that?"
"Well—"
"Of course not. At your age, one considers only action, never reaction. You never gave any thought to what the Olmec would do if they discovered your absence, did you?"
"What would you do if you were an Olmec?" Remo asked.
"Just what they have done. I would wait."
"Where?"
"Here."
The old man shoved Remo to the ground. In that moment, the sky lit up with six shafts of white lightning, causing the dark jungle brush to burst into flames and the water of the river to shimmer like silver. On the peak of Bocatan, no less than twenty men fell, their silhouetted postures those of men dying in agony.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"It was only now that I became certain of it. Find the men with the guns. They must go first."
They fought their way through the onrush of Olmec warriors, seeking the laser bearers in the rear flanks.
Accustomed to jungle fighting, the Olmec splintered and fled, scattering in all directions so that they could not be taken in a single assault. Remo worked his way through the ranks of warriors, but not a single laser blast was seen again.
"Where'd they go?" Remo said as he launched two Olmec into a double air spin to collide with the soldiers behind them.
Then they came again, the dazzling spears of light that bored holes into the sides of Bocatan. The origin of the beams was high overhead, and considerably closer to the Mayan camp than Remo and Chiun were.
"They're in the trees," Remo said despairingly. "We've been fighting down here, and those guys with the lasers have been moving ahead through the frigging trees." Without waiting for Chiun to speak, he climbed up a tall jujube tree and scrambled over its branches to the next.