Timber Line

During a Brazilian expedition, researcher Karl Webenhaus discovers the copa-iba tree but is murdered along with his wife, Helga; their daughter Joey survives and is rescued by Oscar Brack. Twenty years later, a grove of copa-iba trees in the Sierra is under attack. CURE sends Remo Williams, posing as a federal tree reclamation technician; Chiun joins him. Remo commits a mass killing at a Cleveland mob summit (63 deaths by his count), then maims television commercial performers without killing them, before moving to the forestry assignment. At the grove, two armed saboteurs cut the heaters; Remo diverts their gunfire, killing both, and pins foreman Peer LaRue to a tree.

A Mountain High Society candle march is to be used by six men to start a fire, but Remo disrupts it with a snowball fight while LaRue buries the would-be arsonists in a snowdrift. A bomb destroys the A-frame after a tape recording lures Remo away; Chiun saves Joey. Brack, badly wounded, tells Remo that Danny O’Farrell took money from “the Association” to sabotage the project, then tried to quit; Brack dies after attempting to save Joey. Joey explains her seed treatment can shorten germination from decades to weeks, and Chiun proposes a pine/black-silk compost system to create a warm, moist microclimate without fuel-burning heaters.

Mountain High assistant Ararat Carpathian kills Cicely Winston-Alright, then shoots LaRue and stages the scene to implicate him. Carpathian publicly blames a Tulsa Torrent lumberjack for Cicely’s death. As he flees Remo, he slumps over the controls and his snowmobile runs off a cliff; Remo finds him catastrophically injured. The forest fire is started by Roger Stacy, who is aligned with an oil-backed Association and wants to stop the grove; he recalls murdering Karl and trying to kill Helga. Chiun redirects Stacy’s attack with a gold lumberjack hook, killing him. Quibble is revealed as Lance Alright, Cicely’s ex-husband, who rejoined the Association and says Cicely had to die as a martyr and LaRue was needed as a scapegoat.

He admits killing Carpathian by injection to keep him from talking, leaving the tape lure, and planning to kill Joey and switch off the grove heaters. The timing of the injection and Carpathian’s cliff fall remains unreconciled. The text never directly establishes that Quibble set the A-frame bomb. Joey trips Quibble, and Remo kills him with LaRue’s axe. Smith confirms the tape belonged to Quibble. The fire is being fought and the grove’s new growing method is planned for trial, but its success is not shown.