He had to remind himself that these men weren't innocents. In spite of the promise of universal love they preached, these Truth Church crusaders had killed at least one FBI agent and possibly dozens of their own cult members.
Regardless of their reason for being here this night, they were unlucky enough to find themselves between Remo and Esther Clear-Seer.
The eight soldiers moved loudly through the woods. The leader had positioned himself in the middle of the pack, thinking that he would be better protected from attack with the rest of his command surrounding him. Two of the others had been part of the original group
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that had collected Remo and Chiun, and one of these fanned out before the rest, taking point.
Remo slid silently behind a tree, and waited for the men to approach.
The path veered sharply to the right, and for a moment the pointman dropped out of sight of the others.
Remo reached a hand out from behind the tree and wrapped his fingers around the barrel of the rifle. He pulled.
The soldier had no time to react. His feet left the path and he disappeared into the woods, still clutching his weapon. There was a short snap—no louder than a breaking twig—and then nothing more from the limp sack of camouflage-dappled meat.
Remo used the butt of the rifle to stuff the body into the hollow of a fallen log. It felt like tamping powder into an old-fashioned cannon. Most of the man fit, and those parts that didn't Remo covered with a few strategically placed handfuls of pine needles.
As the body of the patrol filtered down the path, Remo slid back into the shadows, circling around behind them.
The soldiers had started to miss the pointman. Some were puzzled, while others were beginning to grow fearful. One of the men began to recount how they had encountered two men in the woods not long before who seemed able to appear and disappear at will.
The patrol leader ordered silence and feigned a lack of concern. But Remo could smell the fear building up around him like an odor of bleach.
As the Ragnarok patrol picked its way through the spot where the pointman had vanished, Remo slipped up behind a pair of soldiers at the patrol's rear. With
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a single swift, fluid motion he reached out and wrapped his fingers around the tops of their spines. He exerted pressure. Bones creaked and snapped under the pressure. And before the men had time to cry out, their spinal columns snapped free of their skulls. Two bodies collapsed like discarded marionettes in Remo's outstretched hands.
He drew them silently back into the woods, their boots dangling free of the ground.
Their disappearance went unnoticed for only seconds.
"Where's Adams and Caine?" the patrol leader demanded.
The remaining five soldiers looked fearfully about. "Maybe they're taking a leak," a man offered nervously.
"Abel is gone, too," another muttered soberly. A quick head count revealed that there were now only four of them.
"Where did he go?" the leader demanded. "I don't know," a soldier said, hanging back by the sentinel pines. "He was next to me, and then he was just gone."
"Like Wainwright," another soldier announced. A moment later the group didn't need a head count. What had started out as eight strong had now become two.
"Freeze in your tracks!" the patrol leader commanded with a burst of nervous rage. He pointed a stubby finger at the lone remaining soldier. "I order you to remain where you are!"
But when he made the mistake of blinking, he re-
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alized with a feeling of sinking horror that he was all alone in the forest.
This time the moment the last soldier disappeared, the patrol leader thought he heard the faint rustle of leaves.
Sweat drooled down his cork-blackened features.
Suddenly a face loomed before him. It was smiling broadly.
And it was familiar.
"Hi," Remo said brightly. "Remember me?"
The raccoon-eyed man counted down the seconds on his watch and, when the proper time came, he flicked two toggle switches on the board before him, saying, "Now!"
His dormant monitor screens lit up with the same pale green phosphorescence as the others.
On her own suddenly active screen, Buffy saw the death blow land.
The assailant's thick-wristed hand seemed to move in slow motion toward the patrol leader's chest. The soldier attempted to swing his weapon around at the intruder. But his movements appeared sluggish compared with those of the thick-wristed man. That's when Buffy realized the intruder only gave the appearance of moving slowly.
The patrol leader realized the same thing a split second later.
Buffy watched the Ragnarok soldier drop silently to the wooded path. Only then did his attacker turn toward the camera.
Her look was as surprised as his, for she recognized him as one of the strange duo Esther had sent her to
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greet once before. Now he was back. Buffy wondered who he was and what he had done to warrant a full-scale alert.
The camera was set into a cleft in a nearby aspen tree, and the man on the screen glared up at her through the wireless connection. His hard, high-cheekboned face was a thundercloud. He seemed upset at being caught by the camera's unflinching eye, but his initial anger soon melted away.
He then did something that sent a chill up Buffy's spine.
There was no audio feature, which made the weird, green-cast spectacle all the more surreal.
The man stood rigidly beneath the camera, bowed once, as if receiving thunderous applause, and then proceeded to dance a little soft-shoe for his unseen audience. When he was through, he bowed once more before he abruptly hefted the body of the soldier that had lain next to him throughout the entire scene. Without preamble he launched the corpse at the camera.
As if the lifeless shape could hit her, Buffy flinched. The screen filled with a jumble of gray static.
"My monitor's gone off-line," Buffy announced.
She glanced over at the adjoining monitor station. It showed a different angle. But it was the same thick-wristed intruder.
Raccoon Eyes jumped as a rotted log flew up toward his camera. Just prior to the point of impact, a second before the next screen became a hissing square of static, Buffy was certain she saw a pair of legs sticking out of the log's jagged end. On all of the monitor stations around the bunker, two screens hissed angrily at the worried Ragnarok acolytes.