"Take it easy," Remo said.
"She was so pretty."
"Yeah. Try not to talk."
"It was all I could do."
Remo looked over the dying man. "It was enough," he said. "You kept her alive."
Kains smiled once, as if he were watching something far away. Then a low, gurgling sound bubbled up out of his throat. The soldier tensed in one weak spasm and then died. Remo closed the man's eyes.
Before he could rise, a grenade exploding at his feet knocked him over in a violent somersault.
He dived for cover in a grove of piñon trees. A bullet cracked the air and kicked up a cloud of dust near his face. Five more shots were fired in rapid sequence, splintering a large tree nearby. On the monastery wall, the lone naked woman was replaced by a swarm of men in black moving like spiders along the fortification's outer edge.
Ducking the gunfire, Remo peered out to spot Chiun. The old Oriental was near the front gates of the monastery, walking forward with great dignity and ceremony. Behind him Wolfshy slinked, crouching in the shadow of Chiun's tiny frame.
He's drawing the fire away from me, Remo thought. It was the right thing to do. Remo needed a clear path.
Like dying crows, a rain of black hand grenades fell from the monastery wall onto Chiun and the Indian. Effortlessly, Chiun snapped them out of the air as quickly as they fell and lobbed them back to the other side with a flick of his finger.
It was Remo's cue. He aimed himself for the wall and barreled for it at full speed. As he neared the fortress, he felt the force of gravity pulling at his cheeks and lips.
Above him on the roof of the building could be heard the sound of women screaming. But they were screams of fear, not of pain, and the voices came from the opposite side of the roof from where Chiun had returned the grenades.
The old man had taken it all into consideration, Remo thought. By the time Remo reached the wall, he was almost flying. His legs kept moving at exactly the same pace as he ran out of ground and into a vertical stone wall, but because of his momentum, there was no difference in his stride.
Remo could climb walls from a dead halt, but it required delicate balance, and the act could only be performed slowly, by easing his feet and fingers along the surface. Moving so slowly, he would have made too easy a target. The way he scaled it now, the soldiers standing on the edge of the parapets saw little more than a blur as Remo vaulted over the top. Even before he landed, he was slashing with both hands, feeling two necks unjoint under his knuckles.
Remo did not need to see. From the moment he started his run in the valley, all of his normal sensations were blocked out, replaced by a feeling of occupied space. He himself was an object in that space, and so were the soldiers around him. They were all units of weight, and Remo could feel that weight as it shifted and turned around him. He kicked out behind him, not because he heard the soldier's stealthy tread or the whoosh of the weapon as it scraped softly against the man's uniform to rest in firing position, but because Remo felt the space behind him as the soldier occupied it. His foot struck the soldier in the abdomen. From the muted crack of vertebrae, which Remo felt on the sole of his foot, he knew the soldier's back was broken.
Effortlessly, without thought, he raised his elbow in a lightning-quick movement. It caught another black-garbed soldier in the jaw, spinning the man's head around with a sharp crack. Remo's arms moved continuously. As the space around him began to open up, he heard the throaty gurgles of the dying and the rapid tattoo of a man's boots on the tile roof of the monastery as he convulsed with his last breath.
Then the gunfire began. He had only, he realized, gone through the first line of defense. Forcing his eyes to work, he now saw a group of soldiers, armed with submachine weapons, lined along the wall on three sides. On the fourth side, behind Remo, huddled the screaming, naked women.
He could not let the soldiers fire on him. He himself could dodge the bullets if he had to, but the women could not.
The leader of the armed soldiers advanced, and the men along all three walls edged in closer toward Remo.
"Aim," the leader commanded.
The soldiers moved forward another step.
Then Remo saw it: a scrap of blue brocade billowing behind the moving line of guards; and he knew he was unstoppable now.
He raised himself off the ground in a jump so well-controlled that he seemed to be levitating; then he began his descent. He glided down in a flying wedge, his feet landing firmly on the chest of the lead attacker. The soldier screamed, his Uzi spiraling out of his hands. The force of the blow sent him flying toward the wall, where he caromed off the top edge, spun in midair as if by magic, and then hurtled head first into the valley below.
The others, surprised by the strange trajectory of their leader's path, hesitated a moment before firing.
A moment was enough. Chiun whirled through the formal ranks of soldiers in a neat inside line attack, killing each man in turn as he wove between them. The old man moved so fast that not even Remo could follow the motions of his hands and feet. But he knew that each blow was perfect from the crisp, rhythmic, deadly sounds of impact.
While Chiun worked, Remo gathered the women together and moved them as unobtrusively as possible toward the stairwell. One of them was so covered with lacerations and bruises that she could not walk. Her long dark hair was matted with blood. Her face was gashed and swollen, but despite her wounds, Remo could tell that she was a great beauty.
"Are you Consuela?" Remo asked, picking her up gently.
The woman nodded, trying to force open her bruised eyes.
"There's a dead man in the valley who loved you," he said. Then he stopped short.
He heard a sound from the other side of the bell tower, a sound that to him was as unmistakable as a baby's cry or the crack of gunfire: it was the sound of a helicopter.
Forgetting he still held the woman in his arms, he walked a few paces to see beyond the tower. The chopper was a large Grumman painted bright blue, and two men were getting inside. The first was dressed in stylish civilian clothes, the other in the all-black fatigues of the soldiers who'd defended the monastery. The civilian crawled into the helicopter without a backward look. The other glanced behind him briefly, turned away, then froze where he stood and turned again. He had recognized Remo.
And Remo remembered the soldier's face, too. It was a face of death and torture, of severed hands and dying children. For Remo, Major Deke Bauer possessed the face of war.
Remo's mind was suddenly a confusion of banished images and sensations: a skewered bird, roasted, its white plumes blowing in the breeze before a jungle downpour; a line of bodies suspended on wire, seeming to dance an eerie jig by morning's first light; the stench of rotting flesh.
A low groan escaped from his lips. The superhuman reflexes drilled into him through a decade of Chiun's teaching vanished. For him. now, there was no Sinanju. There was nothing but the war and the endless, futile comedy of the Hill.
As if it were occurring in slow motion, he watched Bauer snap his Uzi into position.
"A chopper'll be coming tomorrow with rations…." said a faraway voice in his memory.
"I took the Hill, and I'm going to keep the Hill, and I don't care if every last one of you bastards dies for it…."
"Put up a second wire. That'll teach 'em not to fuck with the U.S. Army…."
"Get down!" The voice, panicky and loud, startled Remo as he fell to the ground with the woman, screaming, in his arms. Sam Wolfshy's arms were still outstretched. And then he heard the bullets, and the Indian collapsed on top of Remo and the woman in a spray of blood.
"Oh, my God," Remo said, coming to his senses. "Sam!"
The chopper's whirling blades beat the air. It lifted off gracefully, hovered for a moment, and then sped off toward the horizon.
Chiun finished off the last soldier in his attack and came to them. With deft hands he lifted the big Indian off Remo and Consuela.
Sam's arm had been all but blown off at the shoulder. The old Oriental made a quick tourniquet from a length of silk torn from his robe. "He will live," he said. "For a while. How long I cannot say. But he cannot make the descent down the mountain, even if we carry him."
Remo remained where he had fallen, his face dazed. Vaguely he felt the woman slipping from his arms. "He saved us," Consuela said. "Otherwise, the bullets…"
"Yes. I saw," Chiun said. He looked down at the Indian. "I knew he had something of the hero in him," he said softly.
Wolfshy's lips curved into a smile. His eyes opened slowly. "I heard that," he whispered. "Think you can teach me Sinanju now?"
Chiun placed his cool hand on Sam's brow. "My son, courage such as yours is beyond any discipline."
Remo turned away. He had seen a man's face, and that look had probably cost Sam Wolfshy's life. It was the one unpardonable sin, and Remo had committed it. He had forgotten Sinanju.