While he was still screaming, the captain went ballistic.
Had he not been wearing his helmet, his head would have been split open against the overhead conduit pipe. It was as large as a sewer main, and as heavy.
The helmet protected the top of his skull from being caved in. It punctured the pipe and hung there, forming a solid cup that collected the compressed remnants of his pulped head.
The other soldiers looked up at the dangling white boots, to the skinny guy with the thick wrists, and remembered the captain's unfinished final order.
They trained their weapons on the old Asian. Fingers squeezed triggers.
Remo moved among the soldiers. He came in low, bent at the waist, and slammed the AR-15 muzzles ceilingward, like a handball player deflecting a rebounding ball.
Bullets erupted straight up, riddling the pipe and making the limp body of their captain jerk and jitter and string blood from points along his torso.
The overhead pipe suddenly cracked apart with a roar and a section crashed down, spewing assorted paper trash, soft-drink cans, used camera-film boxes, and colorful napkins. All propelled by a hurricane of air.
Remo and Chiun retreated as the soldiers were swiftly inundated.
"What the hell is going on?" Remo shouted over the din.
"I do not know."
"What the heck is that thing?" Remo said, retreating from the spreading sea of refuse.
From the relative safety of several yards down the corridor, Remo and Chiun watched as the soldiers, weapons forgotten, tried to wade from the snowstorm of debris. They were not fast enough. The stuff covered them faster than they could wade. They slogged waist-deep, then shoulder-deep, and then, like men drowning in some frothy white water, their helmeted heads were soon covered.
Somewhere someone must have thrown a switch, because with a silence that made their ears ring, the whooshing roar ceased and all was quiet.
A final paper cup tumbled out of the fractured ceramic pipe, and all was still.
Remo and Chiun walked around the mound of trash, their faces bemused.
"They must have a whole division under arms, from the look of all these food containers," Remo pointed out.
The Master of Sinanju noticed a corner of the mound shift. The gleam of a white helmet appeared.
With the heel of his hand, he gave it a tap. The emerging helmet rang like an old bell, and fell silent.
Then the Klaxons started.
Remo looked up and down the gleaming corridor worriedly. "Uh-oh. Now we did it."
"Perhaps this might be the correct time to escape, my son," Chiun pointed out, his bearded chin indicating the severed pipe.
"Just a sec."
Remo went to a wall-mounted video surveillance camera and with an extended forefinger shattered the lens, blinding it.
"No sense leaving a trail," he said over the Klaxon howl.
Remo got under the ruptured pipe and took hold of its cracked maw. He pulled himself up. The Master of Sinanju, being somewhat shorter, leaped high, fading into the maw like a spider slipping into a web hole.
Crouched low, they moved along the pipe. It was dark and surprisingly clean, in spite of being a conduit for trash and food refuse. The inner walls were teflonslick.
The way was dark, but their visual purple compensated for the lack of illumination.
At a bend in the tunnel they came to a clump of trash.
Remo cleared it with distaste on his hard features.
They continued on.
They found the body of Comandante Leopoldo Zorilla wedged in a catch basin, where the pipe angled up into a sheer vertical well.
"Guess he was too heavy to make the turn," Remo said, checking the body's carotid artery and finding no pulse.
The body of Zorilla had landed in a kind of tangled ball of outflung limbs. They dragged him free and laid him out. There were no obvious marks or wounds. The man's eyes were wide, and already turning to dull glass. Remo noticed that his mouth was open and there was something in it.
He pried the jaws apart and saw the pink wad crushed against his wisdom teeth.
"Gum," he said, dismissing it without a second thought.
Remo went through the man's pockets and found a pack of gum in the blouse pocket. He barely glanced at it before tossing it aside. There was an INS green card, and a plastic syringe filled with liquid. The needle was stoppered. That was all.
"Must have been a drug addict," Remo said, dropping the needle.
"Or a gum fiend," sniffed the Master of Sinanju, retrieving it. He tossed the instrument aside after examining it curiously.
Remo straightened. "Well, they wasted him without wasting any time. Serves him right, too. Murdering his own men like that."
The Master of Sinanju moved to the point under the vertical length of pipe. His wise old face frowned tightly.
"It is time to see what lies above," he said firmly.
"Want me to go first?" Remo offered.
"No," said Chiun, making a fist like a block of old bone and punching a dent at the level of his head. He reached up and made another off to one side.
Then, leaping high so that one sandaled toe caught the lowermost dent and the other the next one up, the Master of Sinanju quickly created a ladder of indentations, climbing as he went.
Remo followed. He was halfway up when he heard a metallic screech.
Past his head came a ball of twisted steel.
"What was that?" he called up.
"An inconvenient propeller."