Fong had been in the act of turning when he heard a short rip of a sound. His stomach suddenly felt very empty, and something wet and heavy plopped onto his shoes.
He looked down and recognized the slimy grayish-white loops of human intestines. They were still piling up, and his heart gave a single dull thud when Fong realized that they could only be his.
The old Korean who Fong was certain was the Master of Sinanju was already moving on to his next target. There was not a trace of blood on his extended forefinger with its viciously long killing nail. But there was a hell of a lot of it gushing onto the sand under Fong's feet.
Fong folded up like a cheap telescope on the sand and tried to do something about his unraveling intestinal tract. It appeared intact. It was just hanging out of him. Then the bleeding began.
Fong was too professional to delude himself. There was no hope. He looked up to see how the others were faring and watched, helpless, as one by one his men were taken out with such expert skill that most of the other party goers had no idea what was happening.
A lean white man Fong had brushed past and noticed only because his wrists were freakishly thick stepped up to Lee and took hold of his pistol muzzle. It was a stupid thing to do. He might as well have attempted to fend off a stabbing sword by grasping the sharp blade.
Yet before Lee could squeeze the trigger and destroy the man's hand, the weapon was forced upward. The white guy's free hand came up, slapped full on. When it came away, there was red jelly where Lee's face should have been.
The white guy didn't even pause to watch the body fall. He moved on, found another Chinese agent and took hold of his gun arm by the shoulder. When he pulled, the arm came out of the socket like a cooked shoulder of ham, the pistol slipping unfired from dead fingers.
The dismembered arm was flung carelessly into the sea. The rest dropped into the sand to writhe and scream until a descending shoe imploded the screaming man's larynx.
It was that way all up and down the beach. Fong saw it all. The low kicks shattered ankles and kneecaps and brought exposed throats and skulls down to the sand where heels could be brought down with lethal force. That was the white guy's technique. The old Korean simply drifted up on the blind sides of Fong's dwindling agents and inserted one of those fingernails that looked like delicate ivory and were by reputation as sharp and unbreakable as tempered steel. Stealth and skill as one. And Fong's most highly trained men were no more than helpless children before the awful beauty of it.
Only one man, Wing, had the presence of mind to go for the target. He elevated the perforated muzzle of his Tec-9 and squeezed the trigger. The gun quivered. Wing cursed his weapon. It refused to fire. He pounded it with the flat of his hand. And then Fong recalled his own stubborn Beretta. He yanked it from his jacket, trying not to detach his guts, and saw that the safety latch had been mangled so it could not be undone.
Someone had obviously slipped up on him and accomplished this with great skill and care.
"The white guy..." he breathed. A trained US. agent would have spotted the shoulder bulge, unobtrusive as it was.
Denholm Fong would have thrown up except that his stomach was already slipping into the pile made by his escaping viscera. And then all life and consciousness was slipping out of his mortal remains.
While the light was going out of his eyes, Fong smelled a disagreeable body odor and sensed a heavy presence kneel beside him in the sand.
A growling voice said, "I am Kula the Mongol. Why are you not dead, Chinese?"
A Mongol! Fong thought, shuddering. They were more fearsome than Klingons.
"I will cut your throat to send you on your way to another life. Perhaps I will have the honor of killing you in that life, too, Chinese."
Denholm Fong never felt the blade that opened his throat and finished his dying. His last thoughts were of failure. Not of the miserable failure of his duty to the motherland, but the unrealized dream that had been his since he had come to America.
He would never see the worthy name of Denholm Fong up on the silver screen.
REMO Wits was making a pile of bodies in the sand.
The cream of Hollywood stood around applauding as if he and Chiun had been some kind of floor show. Maybe, he thought, if they saw the dead pile high enough without moving, they'd figure it out. But he doubted it.
"That was marvelous, Squirrelly," they were saying.
"The special effects were great!"
"That fake blood looks really, really real."
"It's just Karo syrup with a dash of red food coloring," a punky-looking man said. And he dipped a fried shrimp into a thick scarlet pool in the sand.
He bit down, tasted salt and not sugar, and turned green.
Everyone saw him turn green. Not everyone realized what that meant, but enough of them did. One actress in basic black, too-pale skin and cherry red lips dipped a finger in, tasted and kept tasting. One of the producers present was casting a vampire movie, and a girl had to stand out in this town.
"It's real!" a waiter gasped.
"It is?" said Squirrelly.
"Of course it's real," Remo shouted after depositing another body. "Unless you suddenly remember hiring someone to pretend to kill you."
"Why would anybody want to kill me?"
"Take a look at the guys. What do they look like?"
Lifting her long skirts, Squirrelly came down off the veranda on bare feet.
She looked at the bodies. Everyone looked at the bodies. They made faces. Some scratched their heads or other itchy parts of their anatomies.
"What do they look like?" Remo repeated.
"Dead?" Squirrelly guessed.
"Yeah. Squirl's right. They look dead."
"Okay. Given. They look dead," admitted Remo. "What else do they look?"
More head-scratching and face-making followed. No one offered any theories.
Then Squirrelly said, "Producers! They look like producers."
Remo sighed. "Chinese. They look Chinese."
"The Chinese are my friends," Squirrelly said indignantly. "I was a guest in their country. It was a paradise of sexual equality and happy, productive people living so close to the earth it brought tears of shame to my eyes to think that Americans are denied the kind of fulfillment even the poorest Chinese peasant enjoys as his birthright."
"You were given the VIP bullshit tour. Everybody knows that. And now that you've announced to all the world that you're going to liberate Tibet, they're out to snuff you."
"Remo is right," came the voice of the Master of Sinanju, indicating the stacked dead. "This is the true China."
Squirrelly looked blank. "The true China is dead?"
"The true China is treacherous."
"I don't believe it," said Squirrelly.
"Believe it," said Remo. "Now, before you call the police, we gotta get out of here. Our job is done."