When the Master of Sinanju grew tired of his sport, he grasped the rifle muzzles. The action was brief, but firm, and the soldiers never knew that Chiun had squeezed the muzzles shut.
"I am tired of this," announced Chiun, and he walked away with taunting unconcern.
The soldiers couldn't believe their good fortune. Sighting down their weapons, they fired in unison. The blowback shattered the receiving mechanisms and sent metal and wood shrapnel into the faces of the guards. They dropped, still clutching their useless weapons, like toy soldiers. Which is what they really were.
"That was excellent shooting practice," said Chiun. "How many did you get?"
"Two," Remo said.
"Three," said Chiun. "I win."
"No, I think we both lose. They're onto us."
"So much for blending in."
Chapter 23
They had taken Ferris D'Orr from the van still huddled in the cot. Soldiers did that. Soldiers in brown uniforms with the red Nazi armbands.
Ferris had peeked as they carried him into the big main building. It was dark. He was in some kind of compound, surrounded by guards and a high fence. There were many soldiers, and many buildings. Nazi flags flew from every roof. It looked like the photos of those places his mother used to harp about places like Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen-places he knew couldn't possibly exist on American soil.
"Oh, my God," Ferris said under his breath. "I'm in an extermination camp."
They took him into a homey dining room, and the blond, Ilsa, stripped the blanket back and offered her hand.
"We're here," she called.
Ferris refused to get up. He wouldn't let go of the blanket either. He clutched one corner of it in his hand.
"Come on," Ilsa said sweetly, "Get up."
"Perhaps Mr. D'Orr would like to freshen up," said the guttural voice of Ferris' nightmares. "A shower, perhaps?"
"No way!" screamed Ferris D'Orr. "I know what you people mean by showers."
"He is frightened after his long journey," said Konrad Blutsturz. "Let me speak with him, You start the oven."
"I'm not Jewish!" Ferris said, jumping to his feet.
The old man laughed. "You already told us that. Ilsa is merely going to start dinner. Do you have a preference?"
"Anything," said Ferris D'Orr, "as long as it's ham, pork roast, or pork chops."
"Any of those, Ilsa," the old man called as the girl left the room. "Come, sit by my side. You are a most peculiar young man, but then, you are a genius. All geniuses are peculiar."
"I want to go home," Ferris said, sitting in the chair with the same gingerly resignation of a death-row inmate settling into the electric chair. He suddenly, desperately, yearned for a lemon Coke, but they hadn't made them in years.
"Do not be frightened. You will be here only a short time. I need your expertise. And your nebulizer."
"It's yours. Just put me on a bus."
"Soon, within the week. Allow me to show you my plans."
Ferris watched as the old man unrolled a set of blueprints.
"Some of the parts are very delicate, as you can see, but we have the molds. Can your nebulizer cast such tiny parts?"
Ferris gave the blueprints a quick glance. "Easily. Can I go now?"
"After these parts are made and assembled."
"What are they going to be assembled into?"
"Me," said Konrad Blutsturz. "They are going to be assembled into me."
"But there are enough parts here to build a baby tank."
"Exactly."
All during that feverish night they brought in the molds and the chunks and billets of titanium. It was good-quality titanium. Ferris recognized the Titanic Titanium Technologies stamp on a few of the sections. They made Ferris melt the pieces into molds. When they were done, they had him weld the parts into mechanisms. The brown-suited soldiers took the finished components into the next room. Once, when the door opened wide enough, Ferris saw that it was an operating amphitheater.
He remembered his mother's stories of the grisly Nazi surgeries performed on conscious patients. Once he had seen in a book a photograph of two Nazi doctors. They stood with stupid pride over a sheet-covered body.
The body's legs stuck out from below the sheets and there wasn't enough flesh on the bones to satisfy a rat. Ferris D'Orr shuddered. He didn't know what he had become enmeshed in, but he knew that it was evil. And he understood for the first time why his mother was so determined to remember the holocaust.
It was happening again. Here, in America. And Ferris was a part of it.
"What's this all about?" Ferris asked Ilsa after he had finished casting the largest pieces of the mounting for a sicklelike blade of steel.
"It's about cleansing America," she said matter-of-factly. "Of what?"
"Jews, blacks, Asians, and icky people like that. Smiths, too. "
"Smiths?" asked Ferris, remembering the telephone-directory pages.
"Yes, they're worse than Jews or the others, much worse. A Smith put Herr Fuhrer Blutsturz into a wheelchair. But you will lift him out."
Ferris understood another thing. Hatred did not discriminate. All his life he had hidden his heritage from the world, half out of false shame and half out of fear. The evil that haunted his dreams had found him anyway. There was no escape from hatred.
"No one is safe," Ferris said.
"What, sweet thing?"
Ferris D'Orr stood up and shut off the nebulizer. A billet, beginning to liquefy, suddenly froze in its mold, only half-formed.
"That one's not done," Ilsa said.