As the Master of Sinanju cranked down his window, the guard leaned forward slightly, holding the pistol aimed through the door at the old man. On the other side of the gate, alongside the towering white tanks in the near distance, four men with white helmets were piling into a jeep, and almost instantly the jeep was roaring their way.
When the guard repeated the question he'd asked of Remo-which was "What is your business here?"-Chiun replied with a blow. His hand flicked out through the window like a head of a snake; the fist was closed but soft. So quick, so devastating was the strike that the guard couldn't even pull the trigger by reflex. He dropped to his butt on the asphalt, helmet thunking as his head hit the ground.
Remo jumped out and raised the gate as fast as he could. But by the time he got back in the car, the jeepful of reinforcements was barreling straight for them. And two more jeeps from opposite ends of the complex had joined the party. They were racing across the open courtyard toward the gatehouse.
There was nowhere to go, and no time to get there. The first jeep screeched to a halt right in front of the rental car. The other two angled in from either side. Four security guards, armed with M-16s, piled out of each vehicle, their weapons leveled at Remo and Chiun through the rental car's windshield.
One of the dozen newcomers, a guy with a pencil mustache and sideburns, immediately started shouting something at them.
"What's he saying?" Remo said. "He's talking too fast for me. I can't make heads or tails of it."
"He says for us to get out with our hands up," Chiun told him.
Remo surveyed the semicircle of autorifle muzzles. "I think we'd better do what he says." He stuck both his hands out the driver's window, opened the car door from the outside, then very slowly exited the car. Chiun did the same.
The man in charge continued shouting a mile a minute. He seemed very agitated.
Chiun spoke once more, quite distinctly and with great dignity. Remo got the gist of what he said. The Master suggested that the man with the mustache should speak less rapidly so his stupid white companion could understand what he was saying without the necessity and bother of Chiun's making a running English translation of every word.
As if he were talking to a very slow three-year-old, the man in charge told Remo to step to the left. Which he did.
"Do you have any idea what these guys have in mind for us?" Remo asked Chiun.
As the Master also sidestepped, hands raised in the air, he said, "Why would I?"
"I don't know. I thought you might be able to read their energy levels or something. The guy giving the orders sure looks like a teeth grinder to me. Doesn't that tell you something?"
"Only that once again you have failed to grasp a fundamental concept."
The flash suppressors of the twelve M-16s tracked them as they moved past the gatehouse to a stretch of open fence, directly under one of the floodlights. Then the head guy yelled at them to stop.
The other guards lined up on either side of Mr. Mustache, switched their fire-selector switches to full auto and shouldered their weapons.
The man in charge barked a single word. A Chinese word that Remo understood.
The word was "Ready."
Still in denial, big-time, Remo found himself puzzling over the guy's inflection. Had he heard wrong, or hadn't the end of the word risen in pitch? Which would have made it a question, not a statement. If it was a question, it might damned well mean anything. Ready to take a break? Ready to let these guys go? Ready for a little Macarena?
His scant hopes vanished altogether when the mustachioed guard spoke again.
The word this time was "Aim."
Chapter 31
The Fings, their tiny lawyer and the entire staff of the medical wing stood transfixed by the images on the video monitors.
"They are bigger," one of the nurses gasped.
"Hugely bigger," an orderly corrected her.
"You're letting your imagination run away with you," Fillmore told them. "We've all worked practically around the clock. It's just the power of suggestion acting on our tired minds...."
Though Fillmore mouthed the words, he couldn't put any conviction behind them. They were a half-hearted, ill-considered and totally transparent attempt to quiet the panic he could feel building around him. Obviously, the test subjects were bigger.
In the space of half an hour, while the Fings and their employees had looked on, the patients had increased their muscle mass by fifty percent. And Sternovsky, the deserter, had been right about something else, too. The test subjects no longer looked human.
Even without the shaggy fur or the tails, the density of their muscles made them look like some other, as-yet-unidentified species. There was enough meat on the hooded fan of a single test subject's latissimus dorsi to make ample backs for three normal-sized Homo sapiens. And with the newly added bulk came a return to the insensate fury of their pre-peanut butter time.
The romance writer, her tail curled into a tight spiral behind her back, booted the inside of her door with the sole of her bare foot. The impact shook the walls and sent glassware crashing to the floor all along the corridor.
"Oh, my God," Koch-Roche said, steadying himself against the side of the golf cart.
The noise awakened an army of related devils. The other five test subjects began kicking their doors, too. In the narrow hall, it sounded like volleys of rolling cannon fire. And the force they unleashed against door frames and walls set the floor trembling, rippling as if from an earthquake. Glass walls everywhere shimmied and shattered, sending cascades of fragments whooshing across the hallway floor. The window in front of the wolverine's enclosure likewise dropped away in a spiderwebbed sheet, leaving the test animal stunned, blinking and extremely mad.
"The doors aren't going to hold much longer," Farnham warned. He pointed at the nearest door frame, which was already beginning to splinter away from the wall. The steel door was itself bowing out in the middle from the full-power kicks Toshi Takahara was raining on it.
At the far end of the hallway, the attendants abandoned their posts and started running in the direction of the bank-vault door. As they ran, they yelled at the tops of their lungs.
It was a nightmare come to life.
A horror dream so unthinkable that it froze the Fings, their lawyer and the surrounding medical personnel where they stood.
It did not freeze Dewayne Korb, though. The computer billionaire jerked his head out of the drum of peanut butter, his hair and face smeared with the stuff, his eyes wide with alarm. Thanks to his overdose on synthetic hormone and dietary fat, he had arrived at a new and advanced animal state. Every fiber of his being told him that much bigger dogs than he were about to break loose. It also told him that when these big dogs did free themselves, he stood no more chance against them than the frail, petrified humans. Before anyone else could blink, the billionaire took off, high-kicking. By the time the others regained their wits, he was out the heavy door and gone.
"Don't you think we should go, too?" Jimmy Koch-Roche said.
When no one replied, the lawyer turned around. It was only then that Filmore and Farnham had already come to that same conclusion. And acted on it. Their golf cart was speeding for the exit, with Fillmore driving. They had left poor Fosdick slumped on the hallway floor, broken wrist and all, to fend for himself. Mixed in with the sounds of the wrecking-ball chorus were the shrieks of lag bolts as they were ripped out of two-by-fours. In their frenzy to escape, the test subjects were pulling the wing down around them. The door closest to Koch-Roche buckled, bowing out so far that a hairy hand was able to thrust through the gap between door and jamb, out into the hall. Ten furry fingers fought to get just the right grip and proper leverage to pop the lock bolt out of its striker plate.
Everyone was running toward Koch-Roche and the exit. Running and falling as the floor shuddered and shifted underfoot. The panicked medical staff crashed down onto the heaps of broken glass, struggled up, only to fall as the floor heaved again.
The attorney had seen more than enough. But before he could climb into the remaining golf cart's driver's seat, the vehicle was commandeered by a pair of burly male nurses. The cart started to scoot away at once. Koch-Roche jumped for the back of the vehicle and managed to get a grip on one of the canopy posts. He hung on like grim death.
Behind him, the doors to the test subjects' rooms began to burst open. Dark, hairy monsters surged out into the hall.
And began to tear the terrified staff to shreds. "Faster!" the attorney screamed.
As they zipped past the wolverine's open cage, he got a brief glimpse of the experimental animal. It had managed to pull down some slack in the bundled wires and was gnawing through the connections, one by one. The cut electrical wires hung down from its shaved scalp like rainbow-colored strands of shoulder-length hair.
"Faster!" Koch-Roche howled.
But the golf cart was redlined. And to make matters worse, the test subjects seemed to lock on to and pursue anything that was running away. Like giant Airedales, a pair of them dashed down the hall after the cart, their mouths hanging open, their tongues lolling, their bare feet pounding the corridor floor. Behind them down the hall, Koch-Roche could see flying human bodies. The other test subjects were chasing down the fleeing medical personnel and bowling them over. Once the staff members were bowled, some of the beasts stood on their supine torsos and pulled off the limbs. Some just stomped a few times and then ran on. The ruined hallway was thick with huge, dark, darting shapes.
When the attorney looked ahead to try to gauge the distance to the heavy door and safety, he saw that the Fings had stopped their cart on the other side of the barrier.
And they were closing the door!