Harold Smith clutched his briefcase and held on firmly.
It did him no good. He was pitched from his seat, thrown unceremoniously into the aisle. The last thing he saw were the flying bodies of his fellow passengers.
The strange thing was that nobody screamed. Not one living soul emitted the tiniest bleat of surprise even as the shriek and scream of tortured steel filled the universe of chaos that had violently taken hold of their lives.
Chapter 4
Remo was preparing to conjure up a dragon.
He had stripped off his summer white T-shirt and stood on the passenger side of the big scarlet Dragoon APC. At his feet were an assortment of spray cans. He had bought them at a local hardware store, buying two of every color because it was easier than thinking the color scheme through ahead of time.
If he was going to paint his first dragon, it was going to be a spontaneous dragon. It was going to be a dragon never before seen. It would be a dragon among dragons.
The problem was, what kind of a dragon would it be?
There were dragons and there were dragons, Remo knew.
Some dragons were Chinese. Others Korean, Japanese and even English. There were probably Welsh dragons, too. Maybe even French dragons.
As Remo stood by the blank red canvas that was the Dragoon's armor, he tried to summon up in his mind the exact properties of Korean dragons.
There was only one hitch. Remo had never paid much attention to dragons before this. He was not a dragon aficionado. Or whatever dragon fanciers were called.
Feeling the pressure of eyes on the back of his head, Remo looked back and up.
At the bell-tower window facing the street, he saw the troubled visage of the Master of Sinanju abruptly pull back. Chiun had moved so fast Remo wasn't sure if he actually saw his true face or some kind of afterimage lingering in the void where he had been. But he had been there. No question.
Remo called up. "Hey, Little Father!"
No answer came.
"Hey, Chiun."
The face returned to the window, looking placid and innocent.
The window was heaved up.
"Did you call, Remo?" said Chiun, his voice all innocence and surprise.
Remo let the old fraud's imposture pass. "You still got that black kimono with the golden dragons?"
"Possibly," Chiun said thinly.
"Can I borrow it a sec?"
"Why do you wish it?"
Remo made his face placid. "Could be I want to try it on for size."
"Design your own dragon, plagiarist," Chiun said, snapping the window shut.
"So much for cunning," muttered Remo, eyes returning to the blank expanse of red.
Feeling eyes on him again, Remo got his inspiration.
Walking to the nose of the Dragoon, he stabbed out his right index fingernail. It looked as ordinary as he did. But the index nail was cut slightly longer than the rest. Remo did that purposefully, because while he had no use for long fingernails, the fingernail could be a potent weapon. Especially if one had been trained to use it correctly.
Touching the hard plate with the nail, Remo closed his eyes.
The problem was he still sometimes thought like a Westerner. A Westerner would sketch his dragon on paper first, transferring it to the canvas as a tracing. From that, the final drawing would be done and paint applied.
Remo was going to devise his dragon Eastern style. No tracing for him. Chiun wanted a dragon. He was going to get his dragon. And it was going to be whatever kind of dragon lurked in the red steel, waiting to be discovered.
Shutting his eyes, Remo stepped backward. One pace. Two. Then three. The nail screeched against the plate, making a shriek. A thin wire of scarlet peeled and curled away as Remo's nail-the product of long years of diet, exercise and training-scored the hard, complaining metal.
A long, undulating wave drew itself from nose to stern. When he reached the end, Remo allowed himself to peek.
Not bad. It had a dragonlike back. Repositioning his nail, he started forward.
The metal squealed a different tone going in this direction. He worked quickly, surely, instinctively. This was the Sinanju way. Remo had never done anything like this before, but Sinanju opened the mind, and the mind revealed all manner of hidden talents when it was open.
Hopefully it also revealed dragons.
Reaching the front, Remo stopped and peeked through one eye.
He was back at the point where he had begun. And now he had a long undulating form outlined in silver thread against red. Was it a dragon? Well, it wasn't not a dragon. It was a start. So, emboldened, Remo sketched in legs.
These he did with his eyes open. He made a front talon and a back claw. The tail was already there, so he edged it with short triangular spines. Yes, it was starting to look like a dragon, all right.
Now the head. That was trickiest. The front part of the dragon shape didn't really look like a head. He looked back. Actually the tail looked more like a head, and the head might pass as a tail. But if he switched ends; what were those barbs on the current tail?
Remo regarded his silver-thread dragon from every angle before he was seized by a brilliant inspiration.
Attacking the head, he made eyes and added teeth. Then he went to the back and performed a few operations there. Finally he added a curling, batlike wing.
Then, stepping back, Remo took it in in all its etched splendor.
It was blood-red-a good dragon color-outlined in silver. Silver went well with red.
Yes, it was a dragon. No doubt about it. And best of all, he had created it without resorting to messy spray paints.
As he took it in, Remo continued to feel a dull pressure on the back of his head that might mean a sniper was zeroing in on him but usually meant Chiun was watching.
He turned, grinned and said, "What do you think?"
Chiun was not there.