"Well, I'm glad to see you're not scared," came Rufus' voice. "I'm glad to see my quid went for nothing for the reading. She came up with the black stone of death over the green stones of life, she did. You can wager that one, man."

The laughter subsided. The sound got louder. The single-engine Beechcraft, on its precarious way from Mexico, would be landing soon. The pilot and its passenger had made a little mistake. They had made the kind of mistake one does not make if one intends to continue to successfully import heroin. They talked.

Oh, the conversation was casual and it was just a tentative offer to sell. But from that tentative offer to sell came the place. Then someone else deduced the time, the little plane was seen taking off and it was all put together into a telephone call, so here was Remo Williams sunning himself, listening to the soothing, sing-song talk of the Islands.

Here was Remo Williams, trained for nearly a decade as no Westerner had ever been trained, to do one thing better that any Westerner ever did before. To kill. With his hands. With his mind. With his body. Trained until he became something else.

Here was a planeload of men thinking the heroin they carried would get them maybe five to ten years if they had a bad lawyer or failed to buy favor from a judge. That is, if they were caught.

Well, there were other organizations, besides the courts, that dealt with crime. Organizations that thought maybe it was better that someone who imports heroin shouldn't. Organizations that thought that it was better that an importer die than a child.

All of which boiled down to upstairs telling Remo they wanted a simple heroin pop. Only with this heroin pop, you didn't pop your skin, you popped a supplier. Remo had been making these random pops for almost a year now. In between the big assignments. Like reading stupid geology books. He had been told that was a big assignment.

Remo watched the Beechcraft enlarge from a dot to a winged vehicle, going low over the Caribbean to decrease chances of detection. Must be a good navigator. No circling, just an approach. Remo looked at the plane to get the where and the feel of the men in it. Just staring at the white plane bobbing in the wind, an idea occurred to him; he felt immediately ashamed but intended to do it anyway.