Slave Safari td-12

by Warren Murphy

  Butler untied the girl's ropes and stashed them in his small suitcase. From a back compartment of the bag, he pulled out two heavy brown-coloured plastic bags, shaped like army duffle bags.

  He stuffed the prostitute into one of them. The bag locked at the top with metal snaps but there was enough gap in the closure for air to get in. General William Forsythe Butler took the other bag out into the parking lot. There was no one in sight. Only three cars were parked in the lot, and those rooms were darkened, their occupants probably asleep. Butler opened the back door of the Buick, reached in and began to feed Hillary Butler into the bag. He handled her without tenderness, breaking the strap of her light nylon nightgown. The gown slid down, revealing a creamy white well-formed breast. Butler laid his black hand on her breast, feeling its warmth, looking in the dim light at the contrast between her skin and his. He tweaked the end of the breast viciously, and the girl flinched in her stupor. He grimaced to himself as he released her. Get used to it, honey, he thought. There's gonna be more where that came from. Your family's got a three-hundred-year-old bill to pay, and payment's gonna come right out of your fine white hide.

  Butler closed the bag with the snaps, then again glancing around the lot, slipped back into his room, picked up the bag containing the street girl and carried that back to the car. He tossed her into the back seat on top of Hillary Butler.

  Then he cleaned everything out of the room and left, wiping all the doorknobs free of prints, and leaving the key in the door of the room.

  Fifteen minutes later, his rented car was parked in a black unlit street, a scant hundred yards from the pier where the Liberian freighter was now coming to life, preparing to sail.

  Butler locked the doors of his car and went looking for the captain. He found him on the bridge of the ship and whispered a few words to him.

  The captain called a sailor to him and talked to him softly. "Your keys," the captain asked Butler. Butler gave them to the sailor who turned away.

  Ten minutes later, he was down on dockside below the ship with a big steamer trunk on a forklift.

  "Carry that trunk to my cabin," the captain told another sailor, who scurried down the gangplank and helped the other lug the heavy trunk aboard.

  Butler waited a few minutes, then went to the captain's cabin.

  The trunk was neatly in the middle of the floor. Butler opened it and roughly yanked the plastic bag out of the trunk. He opened the clips on top, glanced in and saw the prostitute wearing Hillary Butler's blue and white dress. Carefully, he pulled the plastic bag down until the girl's face and shoulders were free.

  Butler looked around the cabin. On a small table near the captain's big bed was a fourteen-in-long bronze statuette. Butler hefted it in his hand. It was heavy enough.

  He walked back and knelt alongside the unconscious whore. How peaceful she looked, he thought, as he raised the heavy statuette over his head and slammed it down with the force of a hammer into the girl's face.

  Butler was thorough. He shattered her teeth, broke her facial bones, and for good measure broke one of the bones in her left arm.

  He stood up, puffing slightly from the exertion. The carpet on the floor was spattered with gore, and with a towel from the captain's private bathroom, he mopped it up as best he could, then washed the statuette clean. He noted what looked like specks of blood imbedded in the link design of his gold ring, and carefully washed it out under running water.

  Butler snapped the dead girl back into the bag but left it on the rug in the middle of the floor. Before leaving the room, he checked to make sure Hillary Butler was still alive in her plastic cage, then slammed the lid of the heavy trunk shut.

  Back on the bridge, Butler called the captain to one side. From his inside jacket pocket, he took an envelope containing $5,000 in hundreds.

  "Here," he said. "Your fee."

  The captain pocketed it and then looked again at Butler with a bland open face.

  "What do I do this time to earn it?"

  "There is a bag on the floor of your cabin," Butler said. "When your ship is underway ten minutes and it is still dark, dump its contents overboard. It would be best if you were to do it yourself. Your crew should not know."

  The captain nodded.

  "And there is a trunk in your room. Inside there is another bag with another set of contents. You will follow our usual procedure with that, turning the trunk over to my man who will meet you at your next port. He will fly it to Busati."

  "I see," the captain said.

  Butler reached into his pocket and withdrew a half dozen of the foil packages of chloroform pads. "Take these," he said. "They may be helpful in keeping your cargo… let us say, pliable."

  The captain stuck the packs in his pocket "Thank you. By the way," he said, with a small smile at the corners of his mouth, "May I make use of this cargo?"

  The Busati chief of staff thought a moment, thought of Hillary Butler, thought of her warm white breast, thought of her next home in the house behind the pearl door button, and shook his head. "Not this time, Captain," he said. Hillary Butler was the last one, and random rape simply would not do. There just was not enough terror in it, at least not for one whose ancestors had given his ancestors their slave name. Nothing but gang rape under his own personal supervision would suffice. For a starter.

  "Sorry," he said.

  The captain shrugged.

  "Now don't forget with the other bag," Butler said. "Ten minutes out to sea, dump her. The current should run her ashore sometime tomorrow."

  "It shall be as you say, Colonel."

  "Oh, by the way, it's General now. I've been promoted."

  "I'm sure you're worthy."

  "I try to be," Butler said.

  He took his car keys, trotted lightly down the gangplank and returned to his car. For the first time since he'd reached America, he turned his air conditioner up high.

  Two hours later, he was back in the 707 jet, on his way home to Busati.

  The last name on his list, he thought. The legend was coming true.

  For a moment, a random thought of that American Remo and the elderly Oriental intruded on his mind, but he rejected it. By now, they would either be out of Busati or in the custody of the troops, in which case he would see that they were exiled from the country for good. The Loni legend was to be his alone to fulfil.

  CHAPTER NINE

  "Once we lived in palaces. Our buildings stretched to the clouds. Our land was rich and we were at peace."

  The girl turned away from Remo who lay on his back on a hillock, chewing a piece of grass. "And now, this is our world," she said bitterly, waving her arm across the field of her view. "A land of thatched huts and poverty, of ignorance and disease. A land in which we are hunted by the Hausa like game animals. We are a people from whose men the courage has been bred out, like milk-giving is bred into a cow."

  Remo rolled on his left side to look at the girl. She was tall and lithe, and silhouetted against the white daylight sky of Africa, she seemed blacker than was her dark skin. She wore only a short white robe in the fashion of a Grecian toga, but its outlines, too, looked dark against the hot white sky. Her back was toward Remo, and out in front of her, down at the bottom of the hill, he could see the grubby little camp which now represented the once-great Empire.

  "Could be worse," Remo said.

  "How?" The girl turned and came to Remo, and in a smooth graceful motion slid down to the grass alongside him. "How could it be worse for my Loni people?"

  "Take my word for it," Remo said. "You complain that civilization has kind of passed your people by. Well, you haven't missed a thing. I come from what they call civilization, and I prefer it here. At least, if you stay out of the Hausas way, you've got some kind of peace."

  He reached forward and took her left hand in his. She recoiled involuntarily from him, then tried to relax, but Remo released her hand. Princesses of the Loni Empire were virgins till they were wed; they knew not of men and no man entered into
them until it was by ceremony and custom ordained. His was probably the first male hand which had ever touched the beautiful artist's hand of Princess Saffah of the Loni Empire.

  "Do not release me," she said. "It feels warming, your hand. And you are right, it is peaceful here. But peacefulness is like rain. It is nice, but always to have it pressed upon you is quite another thing."

  She took Remo's hand up in hers, silent for a moment as if shocked by her own boldness. "You, for instance," she said. "You lie here now, sucking grass like a cow, and talking of how lovely peace is, and you know that as soon as you can you will go back to this world you hate."

  Remo said nothing; she was right. When he found and freed the slave girls and discovered what had happened to James Forsythe Lippincott, he would leave.

  "Could I stay if I wanted?" he finally said.

  "I do not know. The legend is silent"

  "Oh, yeah. The legend."

  Since he and Chiun first had arrived two days before, they had heard of little else but the legend. Chiun had been installed, seven steamer trunks and all, in the finest thatched hut the Loni had to offer. Princess Saffah who ruled this camp as her two younger princess sisters ruled the other two Loni encampments in the nearby hills, had moved out to make room for Chiun.

  "Dammit, Chiun, that's not right," Remo had said. "Move into some other place instead of moving people around."

  "Not right?" Chiun said. "What is not right? That the people of the Loni should not honour a man who has come thousands of miles across the seas to repay a debt centuries old and to put them back into power? They should not give up a hut to a man who will give them palaces?"

  "Yeah, but moving their princess?"

  "Princess? Suddenly you are a royalist. Remember this then. Princesses and princes and kings and queens come and go. But there is only one Master of Sinanju."

  "Talk about the world being lucky," Remo said sarcastically.

  "Yes, the world is lucky to have such a one. But even luckier are you who have been permitted to bask in the warmth of the Master's magnificence."

  And so Chiun had moved into the hut of Princess Saffah.

  In quiet protest, however, Remo refused. He insisted upon moving into one of the smaller huts of the village. The first night he was cold. The second night he was wet. The morning of the third day, he walked into Chiun's hut with his blanket in his hand.

  "I thought you might be lonely," Remo said, "so I decided to move in to keep you company."

  "I am happy you think so much of me," Chiun said. "But please, I would not want you to do anything against your principles."

  "No, that's all right, Chiun. I've made my mind up. I'll stay."

  "No," Chiun said. "I insist."

  "Sorry, Chiun, I'm not leaving. I'm going to stay here and keep you company whether you like it or not."

  "You are leaving this instant," Chiun said, and then called the entire Loni village to remove Remo by force if necessary. As Remo slunk away back to his own little mud hut, he could hear Chiun explaining behind him: "Sometimes the child forgets himself and must be reminded of his place. But he is young and will yet learn."

  Remo had wandered up the hill and Princess Saffah had followed him. She had come to console him.

  "Yeah, the legend," Remo repeated. "Look, you're a smart girl. Do you really believe the Loni are going to return to power because Chiun is here?"

  "Not just the Little Father," she said. "You are here too and you are part of the legend." She opened the palm of his hand and pretended to examine it. "Tell me, when did you die?" She laughed as she felt Remo's hand tense momentarily. "You see," she said laughing. "The legend speaks only truth."

  "You'd better tell me of this legend," Remo said. He was happy that she still clung to his hand.

  "Once," she began, "many years ago there was a Master from across the sea. And because he stood with the Loni, the Loni were a great and just people. They lived in peace; they inflicted injustice upon no man. In the ancient days, by your calendar, the great libraries of the world were said to be at Alexandria in the land of Egypt. But the greatest of all was at Timbuktu and it was the library of the Loni. This is true, what I am telling you, Remo, you could look it up. And it was the Loni Empire that gave to the world the gift of iron. That, too, is true. We had men who could repair damaged eyes; we had physicians who could heal those with twisted brains; all these things, the Loni had and did and we were a great people, blessed of God.

  "It was said of the Master that the Loni had given him their courage for safekeeping, while they used their heads for science and then hands for art. And then this Master from across the sea went away and the Loni who had relied on him were overwhelmed by an inferior people and our empire was lost. Our best men and women were sold into slavery. We were hunted and tracked like animals until we retreated, three small bands all that was left, into these hills where you now find us and where we hide from our enemies.

  "But this Master sent word across the years and across the seas and across the mountains that one day he would return. He would bring with him a man who walked in the shoes of death, a man whose earlier life had ended, and this man would face in mortal combat an evil man who would keep the Loni in chains. That is you, Remo, and this is truth I tell you."

  Remo looked up and saw that Princess Saffah's dark eyes were tinged with sadness.

  "Does the legend say whether I win or lose the fight?" Remo asked.

  "No," she said. "The legend is silent. But it tells what must happen. The Loni children must come home. And if you are victorious, the Lonis will again rule the land and children will be able to walk the streets and the blind again can be made to see."

  "It sounds like I'm doing all the work," Remo said. "What does the legend say of Chiun? Does he do anything except lay in your hut down there like Henry the Eighth?"

  Princess Saffah laughed, and the smile brought beauty back to her finely chiselled face. "You must not speak unkindly of the Little Father. Centuries of hardship have changed the Loni people. Where once we were kind, we are now vindictive. Where once we had charity, we now have malice; where love, now hate; where courage, now cowardice. It is written that the Master will purify the Loni people in the ritual of the sacred fire. In that fire, he will restore to the Lonis the goodness that once was theirs, so that they may again be fit to rule this land. The Little Father may perish in this task, which is why we revere him so."

  Remo rolled over and searched Saffah's deep eyes. "Perish?"

  "Yes. So it is written. The flames may consume him. He is a very great man to come back to us, knowing that here he may hear the clock strike the hour of his death."

  "Chiun knows this?"

  "Of course," Saffah said. "He is the Master, is he not? Did you not hear his words when first he arrived? No, of course not, you would not understand because he spoke the tongue of the Loni. But he said, 'I have travelled these ages from the land of Sinanju to stand here again with my brothers, the Loni, and to place my body on the sacred coals to purify their lives with my life.'"

  "He didn't tell me," Remo said. "He didn't say anything about any ritual fire."

  "He loves you very much," the princess said. "He would not worry you."

  "What about you, Saffah? You believe the legend?'

  "I must, Remo. I am first in the line of succession to the crown of the Loni Empire. My faith sustains my people's faith. Yes. I believe. I have always believed. I have believed in the past when others have come to us and we thought, perhaps here, perhaps this is the redeemer of the legend. But when they failed, it was just their failure, not the failure of the legend. Not long ago, another came and we believed that he might be the one but now, now that you and the Little Father have arrived, we know that he was not the one. You are."

  "We who are about to die salute you," Remo said.

  She leaned forward and said closely to his face. "Do you believe in sin, Remo?"

  "I don't think anything is wrong between two consenting or
ang-utans."

  "I do not understand." Her face assumed a look of quizzicality which softened when she saw Remo smile. "You jest," she accused. "You jest. Someday you must tell me of your jesting and what it means."

  "I will someday," he said. "No, I don't believe too much in sin. I think sin is not being able to do your job. Not much else."

  "I am glad you have said that, because it is said to be a sin for a Princess of the Loni to know a man before she is wed. And yet, Remo, I want to know you and I want you to enter into me."

  "Best offer I've had today," Remo said lightly, "but I think you ought to think about it some more."

  Princess Saffah leaned forward, pressed her lips against Remo's and kissed him hard. She pulled her head back triumphantly. "There," she said. "I have already committed the sin of touching a man. Now when your time comes, you will have no reason not to take me."

  "When I'm sure you're ready," Remo said, "no reason could have stopped me. But first duty calls."

  Duty for Remo meant two things: freeing the girls in the white house behind the iron gate and finding out what had happened to Lippincott

  But princess Saffah could give aim no answers to either of those problems, although she suggested that if evil was involved, it was probably the work of General Obode.

  "We have a friend," she said, "in Obode's camp. Perhaps be will be able to help you."

  "What's his name?" Remo asked.

  "He is a countryman of yours," Saffah said. "His name is Butler."

  CHAPTER TEN

  In the American circles that concerned themselves with the activities of the Four Hundred, it was well known that the Forsythes and the Butlers talked only to their cousins, the Lippincotts, and that the Lippincotts talked only to God or to whomever else could match His credentials.

  So when the body washed onto the beach a few miles from Norfolk, Virginia, pummeled and battered by the stones near the shore, it became a big story because the body was identified as that of Hillary Butler. The identification was made through her blue-and-white dress and from engraved jewellery the corpse wore.