"Winter camo," Remo suggested, getting to his feet, as well. "It'd give them an edge in the snow."
"True Sinanju does not rely on parlor tricks to deceive the eyes of men," Chiun dismissed. "Therefore this whatever-it-is is false and stolen." He hiked up his kimono hems. "Come, Remo," he declared. "These brigands are already dressed for the Void. Let us dispatch them to the place where thieves dwell eternal."
He started down the hill. Remo ran to catch up. "We save one for questioning," Remo insisted.
"As you wish," Chiun said with crisp impatience. Eyes of hazel doom were directed on the men around the fire.
Their last words carried to the group of commandos. Ten sets of black goggles turned to the hill.
If there was shock beneath the masks, it didn't show.
Remo and Chiun hit the valley floor at a sprint. Near the fire, the ten ghostly figures jumped to their feet. A few managed to grab guns. Almost in unison, all ten shifted their weight just as Remo and Chiun caught up with them.
To any other eyes on the planet, it would have seemed as if they'd disappeared into the ether. Remo proved to the nearest man that he could still see him. He did this by planting the barrel of the man's own AK-47 deep into the center of his masked face. Both mask and face puckered. The man reappeared, harpooned on the end of his gun.
"Peek-a-boo, I see you," Remo said as he tossed the body onto the fire. Sparks shot into the air. Near Chiun, a white-clad figure threw out a sloppy power thrust, palm forward, fingers curled.
The cobwebs of Chiun's mouth drew tight at the affront.
"You dare?" the Master of Sinanju cried, his voice flirting with the fringes of outrage. A downward stroke of his own arm severed the offending hand of the commando. As the hand fell, a long talon slid deep into the man's occipital lobe.
The soldier fell like a cold white fog.
A thrill of panic coursed through the remaining eight.
One man tried to shoot Chiun. His smoking gun joined his steaming severed arms in the snow. "That is how Sinanju deals with thieves," the Master of Sinanju proclaimed, swirling into the midst of the men.
Near Remo, one commando attempted a familiar Sinanju attack stance. One balled hand floated like a feathery mallet before his blank white face.
"This one's not so crummy, Chiun," Remo called as he dodged a lightning blow.
When he missed his intended target, the man's shoulder snapped from its socket. He fell screaming to the ground.
"Okay, so I've seen better," Remo mused as the Russian rolled in agony in the snow. "But the pantry shelves ain't exactly stocked these days. Maybe I should keep him. In ten years he might be able to learn something."
"Take a Russian for a pupil and I will disown you," the old Korean warned.
Razorlike fingernails swept across a nearby pair of black goggles. Gashes raked the plastic. The eyes beneath popped like viscous balloons, sending streams of milky inner ocular fluid streaking through the air.
"Why?" Remo asked. "Hasn't there ever been an alcoholic Master of Sinanju before?" With a sharp toe to the forehead, he finished off the commando with the dislocated shoulder.
"Do not be ridiculous," Chiun snapped, eliminating the blinded soldier in the same way. "And pay attention."
Another soldier leaped into the fray.
Remo made an effort not to be distracted by the poetry of movement that was Sinanju. It had been a long time since he'd seen anyone other than Chiun or himself ply the art.
When the commando attacked, Remo bent back at the waist, his spine forming a backward forty-five-degree angle as a sweeping hand attacked the spot where his chest had been.
Another shoulder was dislocated as the commando's forward momentum carried him over Remo. Muscles and tendons strained and snapped, and he flew face first to the snow.
"These guys know about two moves," Remo frowned. A pirouette ending in a crunching loafer heel to the back of the prone man's head sent the soldier to sparkling eternity.
"It is two more than they have the right to know," Chiun replied, advancing on the next man like a vengeful dervish.
The latest soldier shed his goggles in panic. His eyes grew wide at the old man's approach. A muffled shout issued from the flexible white mask that covered his mouth.
Chiun's flashing fingers flew at the commando's neck. With nails strong as a lion's claws and as delicate as a surgeon's scalpel, he pierced the soldier's throat. A sharp twist snicked the spinal cord in three separate places.
His strings cut, the soldier dropped limp to the snow.
As displaced snow rose sparkling into the air, Chiun was already bounding over the corpse.
Behind him three men were charging Remo. Frightened now, they'd abandoned their basic Sinanju training. Knives drawn, they lunged in unison at Remo's flimsy windbreaker.
Before they could make contact, a thick-wristed hand flashed forward. The side of Remo's flattened palm snapped three successive knife blades.
"Lesson number one," he instructed as the shards of tempered steel rocketed skyward. "Weapons cheapen the art."
The three men slammed on the brakes. Eyes invisible behind goggles stared blankly at their naked knife hilts.
"Lesson number two," Remo continued, aiming a single index finger straight in the air. "Don't look up."
One of the men numbly followed Remo's finger rather than his advice. The returning knife blades shredded his upturned face to hamburger.
There was a sharp intake of air from the remaining two as their bloodied comrade slipped from between them. Panicked heads twisted back to Remo.
"Lesson number three-die with dignity." He gave them no time to do otherwise.
Hands darting forward, he grabbed a fistful of ski mask in each and brought them sharply together. Waterproof masks quickly became home to a pair of misshapen masses that had formerly been human skulls.
"Lesson number four," Remo said coldly as the bodies slipped from his hands. "Steal from the rest or face the wrath of the best."
He heard a slippery hiss behind him. Wheeling, he was just in time to see the steaming red sack that was the tenth and final commando's internal organs slopping from out a yawning incision in his abdomen. The man joined his insides on the ground. Chiun stood above the gutted body, a look of deep disdain on his leathery face.
"Dammit, you didn't save one," Remo groused. "Neither did you," the Master of Sinanju replied. He flicked an imaginary dollop of blood off his index fingernail as he padded over to his pupil.
"Perfect," Remo scowled. "We better start figuring out a schedule for whose turn it is to save one, 'cause we sure as hell can't keep doing this all the time." He pointed at one of the dead men. "That one yelled some Russian claptrap at you before you finished him off. What'd he say?"
Chiun folded his hands inside his kimono sleeves. "'It is you,'" he replied, his voice betraying mild curiosity.
Remo looked from the body to the Master of Sinanju. "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"
"I am Reigning Master of Sinanju. Perhaps my reputation has preceded me," the old man speculated.
"Right," Remo said skeptically. "Probably has your Topps rookie assassin trading card in a plastic collector's case on his bureau back home."