Soldiers rushed up and used their spike bayonets to poke among the cushions. Finding nothing, they started spearing them and hurling them away.
"Hey! Be careful! That's my best palanquin"
She was ignored. Behind them the train of the Bunji Lama stood somberly and spun their prayer wheels.
Surreptitiously Squirrelly signaled them to spin faster.
The prayer wheels cranked in agitation, varicolored tassels becoming blurs.
Squirrelly smiled. This was great. Look at that backdrop. The wedgewood sky. The cast of extras. It was the perfect panoramic wide-angle-lens shot. This wouldn't be just another Squirrelly Chicane movie. This was going to be an epic. Maybe the last of the epics. She could already smell the box-office dollars.
Suddenly the PSB official flung her purse to ground. He was holding her roach clip. It squeezed the burned-down butt of her last reefer. Digging farther, he came upon her stash of bhang.
"Contraband!" he barked.
"Oh, give me a break," Squirrelly snapped. "It's less than an ounce. Personal use. Savvy?"
The PSB shouted something in Mandarin and waved for the skirmish line of soldiers to advance.
"What did he say?" Squirrelly asked Kula.
Kula gripped his bone-handled knife and hissed, "He has ordered our arrest."
"Arrest?"
"We are to be taken to prison."
"Prison?"
Windburned eyes narrowing, Kula unsheathed his silver dagger.
Squirrelly knocked it from his hand. "Are you crazy?" she spat. "Put that thing away."
"We will not be taken by Chinese," Kula said through tight teeth.
"Don't go Klingon on me. Don't you see this is perfect? The misunderstood and cruelly persecuted Bunji Lama is summarily hauled off to prison. That's our second act!"
Chapter 21
On the outskirts of the frontier town of Zhangmu, just inside Tibet, Remo Williams stood by the side of the NepaleseTibetan Friendship Highway waiting for an Isuzu WuShiLing to come by.
So far, all he had seen were the clunky old green Jiefeng trucks. He was starting to think he'd have to settle for a Dongfeng, which, according to the hitchhikers' guidebook he'd picked up in Hong Kong, was not as roomy as a WuShiLing, but definitely faster than a Jiefeng.
Normally Smith's connections could get Remo to almost any spot on earth. But the Chinese had cut off Tibet's few commercial airports, sealed its borders to foreigners, and only necessary commercial truck traffic was passing through ground checkpoints.
Remo had checked in with Smith when he reached the Hong Kong airport.
"There are reports the Bunji Lama has crossed the border of Tibet," Smith had told him, his voice grim, "followed by a train of upward of a thousand pilgrims.
"Any word of Chiun?"
"No," Smith had said.
"Maybe you should call 1-800-GENGHIS. "
"I beg your pardon?"
"Boldbator Khan has an 800 number of his own."
"You are joking."
"I called it myself."
Over the miles of intangible phone line, Remo could almost hear Harold Smith mentally debating whether or not to accept Remo's word.
"Can't hurt to call," Remo prompted.
"One moment," said Smith.
He came back a moment later, saying, "The line is busy."
"Must be a run on looting and pillaging," Remo said dryly. "But it was Boldbator who hired Chiun to find the Bunji Lama. Maybe he's trying to chisel another roomful of gold to save her from the Chinese."
"And there is no doubt if Miss Chicane and her entourage have crossed the border, PLA units will be sent to intercept them," Smith said tightly.
"So what do we do?"
Smith was silent a moment. "Change your plans. Do not fly to New Delhi. Go to Nepal. From Katmandu you can enter Tibet and reach any number of points as developments warrant. Contact me when you arrive."
In Katmandu, Remo had called Smith again.
"Squirrelly Chicane has been arrested by the Chinese authorities," Smith reported. "It just came over the wire."
"So much for the First Lady's guarantee."
Smith cleared his throat unhappily. "I believe the charge is drug possession. This could be extremely embarrassing for the First Lady."
"Can't have the First Lady embarrassed," Remo said. "Congress might faint dead away. So what do I do now?"
"Miss Chicane has been taken to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Cross the Nepalese border on foot. Once you bypass customs and Public Security Bureau posts, it should be easy to hitchhike to Lhasa along the Friendship Highway."
"Hitchhike? Is that the best you can do?"
"Unfortunately, yes. In Lhasa, make contact there with Bumba Fun."
"Who's he-the local Bozo the clown?"
"Bumba Fun is a member of Chushi Gangdruk. Tibetan resistance."
"The Tibetans have resistance fighters? How come I never heard of them?"
"Because when they are successful," Smith said dryly, "the Chinese occupation suppresses news of their exploits, and when they are not they are tortured and executed in secret. Bumba Fun will be your guide."
"I don't need a guide."
"Do you speak Tibetan?"
"No."
"Can you pass for Tibetan?"
"You know I can't. "
"You will need Bumba Fun."
AND SO REMO now on a dusty road on the outskirts of a truck depot just inside Tibet waiting for a modern WuShiLing, or at least a semimodern brown Dongfeng. But definitely not a Refeng truck, because the guidebook had warned him they were slow and breakdown prone, and there was hardly any room in the cabin for the driver, never mind a passenger.
After two hours of nothing but Jiefengs, Remo gave up. The next Dongfeng or Jiefeng that came along, he decided, was his. He just hoped the driver had bathed some time in the past six months.
The next truck turned out to be a shiny new WuShiLing, so Remo figured his luck was starting to change.
Following the guidebook's directions, Remo popped his thumbs up, stacking his fists while making butter-churning motions.
The driver brought his truck to a screeching, dusty halt. He had a wise old windburned face with merry eyes. He might have been thirty; he might have been fifty. The harsh mountains aged people mercilessly. He wore a tight-fitting winter hat with hanging earflaps. When he stuck out his tongue in greeting, he reminded Remo of a middle-aged fourth-grader.
"Lhasa?" said Remo.
"Shigatse," said the driver.
"Is that near Lhasa?" asked Remo.
"Yes, yes. Only one, two hundred mile nearby."
"Close enough for government work," said Remo, climbing in.
The driver got the truck in gear and asked, "What your name?"
"Remo."
"Re-mo. Good name. No other name?"
"Buttafuoco," said Remo.
"It is a proud name."
"Back in America you can't hardly go a day without hearing it."
"Journalist?"
"I'm with the Socialist Workers' Weekly."
The driver spit.
"But I'm really a CIA agent," Remo added.
The driver gave his chest a pound that made his earflaps dance. "CIA good. Kick Communist behind. Why you go Lhasa? Much trouble there."
"I got a date with the Bunji Lama."
"Tashi delek."
"What does that mean?" asked Remo.
The driver laughed. "Good luck. Good luck to you and Bunji Lama. He-he-he-he."
The road was a snake track. Every road in Tibet, it seemed, was a snake track winding in and around towering mountains, scarps and snowcaps and then dropping into valleys that were yellow with mustard and lush green gorges.
Mostly, however, Tibet was a place of mountains. Every time they put a mountain behind them, up ahead loomed three or four new snowcaps. It was like driving through a video-game landscape of repeating horizons, except these were not monotonous but breathtaking in their sheer e
ndlessness.
Remo had never been a big fan of mountains, but he couldn't take his eyes off these.
The driver double-clutched like a madman, taking hairpin turns with a reckless joy. Several times Remo was sure the wheels on his side were spinning over thin air. He kept one hand on the door handle in case they went over and he had to jump free.
The road degenerated to gravel, and in other places was a narrow passage through the remains of a longago rockslide. The wreckage of abandoned cars and trucks rusted along the side of the road. The ones that had gone over a too-narrow mountain pass lay smashed among the boulders.
The terrain became barren, windswept, inhospitable.
The air grew thinner. Remo adjusted his respiration rhythms. In Sinanju, breathing was all. Correct breathing, which Chiun had taught him, powered the human machine, turning every cell in the body into a miniature furnace of limitless potential.
Remo slowed the cycles of his breathing, extracting more oxygen with each slowed-down breath. He had dealt with high altitudes before, in Mexico City and elsewhere. But Tibet was the roof of the world. Its mountains were higher than any others. He hoped he could function normally on the lean mixture of Tibet's thin air.
After two hours the throbbing in his oxygen-deprived brain subsided. It was a good sign.
"When do the mountains stop?" Remo asked at one point.
The driver gestured vaguely in the direction of the incredibly blue sky. "Mountains never stop. Go up to sky. Go on forever."
From time to time the driver had to slow to allow a yak herder and two or three black hairy yaks to pass by. Once they flew around a corner and ran into a knot of goats. The goats scrambled up the mountains, jumped off the cliff and dodged every which way.
The driver laughed as if he thought it was the funniest thing on earth.
Looking back, Remo saw, miraculously, no goat roadkill. They had all survived. Even the ones that had jumped had landed on ledges and were now pulling themselves up again.
"How many I get?" the driver wanted to know.
"None."
The driver slapped his steering wheel so hard it should have broken. He grinned. "I best damned driver in Tibet."
"That's what scares me," Remo said glumly.
THEIR LUCK RAN out as night fell. Up ahead flashes illuminated the mountains, throwing them into momentary relief. It was as if God were taking flash pictures.
"Maybe Chinese tanks," the Tibetan muttered.
But it wasn't, they saw as they drew into a valley. It was an electrical storm. The sky blazed and sizzled. Thunder came cannonading toward them, bouncing off mountains that acted like natural amplifiers.
Then the rains came, falling in drumming sheets that made the windshield swim and driving impossible for any reasonable person.
In response, the Tibetan driver pressed the accelerator harder.
"Pack it in!" Remo shouted over the engine roar. "Pull over!"
The Tibetan shook his head. "No. River ahead. We can make."
"Are you crazy? Even if you can see the river, it's gotta be choked by all this rain."
Before Remo could stop him, the driver bared his teeth like a wolf and gunned the engine.
The truck roared ahead-and suddenly the color of the water on the windshield turned sloppy brown. The vibrating chassis abruptly settled down.
"We reach river," the driver said, pleased with himself.
The wheels were throwing up muddy water and complaining. Then all of a sudden they stopped.
Remo cracked his window and stuck his head out. His hair was immediately plastered to his head.
He saw that they were floating downstream. The truck was turning a slow circle as the torrent bore them along.
"We're afloat," he told the driver after getting the window cranked up.
"Good. Save gas."
"What if we sink?"
"Can you swim?"
"Yeah."
"Good. I cannot. You must rescue me."
They floated along two or three miles until they struck a rock and the truck reeled and tipped over.
Remo was ready. He got his door open and pulled himself out. Then he reached in and hauled the driver out by his greased hair. The man was already covered with mud.
Remo got him up across his shoulder in a fireman's carry and jumped onto a rock. There were other rocks by which he could make his way to shore.
After letting the driver down, he said, "Nice driving."
"Truck will dry off by winter," the driver said unconcernedly. "We walk rest of way."
"How far?"
"In rain, twice as far," said the driver.
"That's too far," said Remo. But there was nothing else he could do. They started off.
Heads down, eyes squeezed tight against the downpour, they walked more than an hour through slashing rain that quickly made agitated ponds in the arid plateaus. The thunder was constant. Fortunately the lightning was far to the north.
"Won't this rain ever stop?" Remo grumbled.
The driver shrugged. "We have saying-humans say that time passes. Time says that humans pass."
All at once the rain stopped. The lightning and thunder continued. The air had a cleanness to it that Remo, who'd spent most of his life in American cities, rarely tasted.
As he walked, Remo willed his body temperature to rise. Steam began escaping his clothes. After twenty minutes of walking, he was bone-dry.
"Tumo. Good," said the Tibetan approvingly.
"Tumo. What's that?"
"Lamas use it. Make body warm, dry off fast. You smart American."
"Not bad for a white eyes, huh?"
"What you talk? You not white eyes."
"What do you mean?"
"White eyes gray or blue. Your eyes good color. Brown."
"Someone must have steered me wrong," Remo muttered.
Somewhere in the middle of the night, they topped a rise and suddenly they were standing on the brink of an unexpected valley. There was a city down in the valley. Here and there people stood on the roofs of stone houses and the larger buildings.
They were black silhouettes against the intermittent lightning flashes. The electrical storm was coming in.
"Don't those people know enough to get out of the storm?" Remo asked.
"They cannot help themselves. Chinese make them do it."
"Make them do what?"
"Make them catch lightning."
"What do you mean-catch the lightning?"
"Chinese make examples of some Tibetans who displease them. If they catch lightning, they die. If they don't, they live."
The rumble of thunder drew nearer.
"What if they refuse?" Remo asked.
"Entire family killed before their eyes," said the Tibetan sadly. "Man who refuse get bill for bullets used to execute family. It is Chinese custom."
"Maybe it's time to introduce a new custom," said Remo, starting down off the plateau.
Chapter 22
It was written that when the Chinese oppressors confronted the Bunji Lama, the Lamb of Light did not resist them, but allowed herself to be taken by skyboat to the Drapchi Prison in Lhasa.
Not all of her train were taken to Lhasa. Only the Bunji and her immediate retinue. Some say the rest were driven back to the holy land. Others that they were divided into Indians and Tibetans. And as the Indians trudged back to their homeland, the rattle of guns punctuated by grenade explosions and screams smote their horrified ears. After which came a profound silence, and the air filled with the metallic scent of blood.
Being devout Buddhists, they held their anger deep within them and continued their homeward journey.
The truth was never learned. The scriptures recorded only that when the Bunji Lama returned to Lhasa, she arrived on the wings of a Chinese skyboat and no Tibetan who toiled in the fields or in the machine shops knew that the Buddha-Sent One had come at last.
SQUIRRELLY CHICANE took one look at her cell and said, "You have got to be kiddi
ng!"
She whirled and got up on her tiptoes, hoping to lord over the heads of the soldiers of China.
"If you don't get me better accommodations, the First Lady is going to hear about this. And don't think she won't."
"This best cell in Drapchi Prison."
Squirrelly looked at the cell again. It was a box. Stone walls. Drippings. Sand on the floor. Not even straw. No toilet. No running water.
"Does this look like the kind of place you'd throw a Bunji Lama, the Bunjiest Lama who ever walked the earth?"
The soldiers looked at one another, their glances unreadable. And unceremoniously shoved Squirrelly Chicane into her cell. The iron-barred door was slammed shut, and the key in the lock was turned. It took two grunting guards using all their strength to turn it.
After they had gone, Squirrelly took a deep breath and said, "Yoo-hoo. Kula. Can you hear me?"
"I am in cell."
Lobsang droned, "I am in a cell, as well. It is cold."
"Listen, we gotta escape."
"Escape?" Kula grunted. "Bunji, you insisted that we submit to these Chinese demons."
"And we did. Okay, I've got my second act now. But I don't like the accommodations. What is this bucket? Oh, peeew. It stinks."
"The Bunji is very fortunate to have a bucket," Lobsang said dolefully. "I will have to go in the sand that is for sleeping."
"Try to hold it in, because we're blowing this Popsicle stand."
"How, Bunji?" asked Kula. "These doors are very stout."
"So? You're a big, strapping Mongrol. You're even stouter. Don't tell me you couldn't bust out if you put your mind to it."
"All things are possible," Kula admitted, "if they are predestined."
Squirrelly summoned up her best little-ol'-me Southern-belle accent. "You can do it, Kula. I know you can. Listen, you get us out of here and you can be my costar. Of course, you won't actually play yourself. Lord knows you're a hunk, but I've seen you act. Strictly wood. Maybe Richard Gere, if he bulks up, can pull it off."
"I do not understand your words, O Buddha Sent. What is it you wish me to do?"
"Get us out of here. Please. The Bunji will bless you a thousand times if you succeed."
Squirrelly listened as the big Mongol began throwing his shoulders against the ironbound door. It shook. In fact, the entire corner of the prison shook. But the door held.
"I have failed you, O Bunji. Forgive me."
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