"Eject! Eject!" he called, hitting his ejection button. The canopy popped. Then he felt a gorge-lifting kick in the butt as the ejection-seat charge exploded. Then everything exploded. The F-15 burst like a pressurized can in a microwave, going in an instant from magnificent winged metal bird into so much slicing shrapnel.
A section of wing decapitated Captain Steele before he realized what had happened. His backseater was too slow hitting his ejection button. He went down with the plane.
High above, two F-1S Fighting Falcons with Rising Sun markings streaked away like fugitive arrows. When Davis-Monthan Air Force Base informed the Pentagon that they had lost contact with their scout planes, the joint Chiefs of Staff were assembled. Admiral- William Blackbird, chairman of the joint Chiefs, ordered two Marine F/A-18 Hornets to the Yuma Marine Air Station, which had also stopped communicating with the outside world. Then he put in a call to the President of the United States.
He was told by the President's chief of staff that the President was pitching horseshoes in the new White House pit and would he mind waiting for a callback.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the chief of staff that a callback would be just fine. Then he turned to the assembled Joint Chiefs.
"It's ours. That idiot chief of staff must think that if we don't scream emergency, then the Pentagon can wait. So what's the situation on those Hornets?"
The commandant of the Marine Corps held up an annoyed hand. Then he clapped it to an ear while he listened to a voice on the other end of the telephone line. When he lifted-his head, his face was pale.
"We've lost contact with the Hornets."
"What happened?"
"The Air Force shot them down."
The silence in the room was palpable.
"Check all bases," Admiral Blackbird ordered. "Find out what's going on."
"We're doing that, Admiral." All around the room, the combined leaders of America's military command structure were doing what they did best: making phone calls.
One by one, they updated the chairman. All other bases and units reported normal situations.
"It seems to be confined to the Yuma area," suggested the chief of Naval Operations.
"This could be a diversion. I want a worldwide status report. "
The order was carried out at once. All over the continental United States and Europe, U.S. bases were contacted. KH-11 recon satellites shifted in their orbits.
Telephone and telex activity centering on the Pentagon grew frantic. It threatened to jam the phone lines of official Washington.
As the hours passed, word came back that there were no unusual events anywhere in the world. There was only Yuma.
And out of Yuma, there was only silence. Remo Williams closed his eyes.
It was not to block out the macabre bouncing of the airmen's bodies as they struck the desert floor. Too many of them had hit like rag dolls for it to hold meaning anymore. The screams were faraway in his ears, masked by the rushing of air as Remo fell in the so-called "dead-spider" free-fall position.
Remo closed his eyes to better focus on his breathing. For in Sinanju breathing was all. It unlocked the reservoirs of potential that lay in every man. Some men, when faced with a crisis, could summon up a portion of that inner power. Great strength, inhuman speed, impossible reflexes-all were within the spectrum of human ability. Remo, because Sinanju training put him at one with the universe, could utilize every aspect of that spectrum in simultaneous harmony.
People had fallen out of airplanes before and survived, Remo knew. Usually they shattered every bone in their bodies. And those were the lucky ones.
Remo intended to survive. He shut his eyes, the better to attune his breathing to the universe. He locked out all sound and sensation and looked within himself.
And somewhere deep in the pit of his stomach, a cold fire began to burn. Remo willed himself into that point. He willed every essence of his being to compress into a pinpoint of icy fire. The wind roaring in his ears cut off as if they had been shuttered. He felt his fingertips go numb. And his toes lose feeling.
The feeling drained from his limbs and rushed, like blood, to his stomach-according to Sinanju teaching, the seat of the human soul.
Remo felt lighter, as light as a snowflake. But even a snowflake fell. Remo dared not strike the desert with the force of a falling snowflake, for in this state, his bones were too fragile to survive. All his mass was concentrated in one point. He weighed no more than a snowflake. His bones were as hollow as a snowball. But, like a snowball, he was bound by the irresistible pull of gravity.
Remo willed his essence tighter. He would never understand the physics of what he was attempting to do, any more than he comprehended the natural laws he bent every time he sent a forefinger through plate steel or saw as clearly as a cat in absolute darkness.
When he felt his mass to be nearly negligible, he allowed his shuttered ears to open. The wind was no longer a roar. Remo smiled. He was no longer dropping like a stone. But he was still dropping. He reached out to feel the wind, his fingers touching the palpable updrafts of heat rising from the desert floor. He was at one with those updrafts. They were his friends. He would ride them to a gentle landing on the ground far below. Remo opened his eyes.
He saw the sand. It was inches from his face. His smile broke into an open-mouthed shout. He never got any sound out because his mouth was suddenly full of sand, and his neck snapped back with a dry crack.
And in the black heart of the universe, angry red eyes snapped awake and a cruel mouth opened in howling rage.
Retired Master Sergeant Jim Concannon had been too young for World War II. By the time Vietnam came around, he had a paunch, although during his long Army career he had served in Pleiku and Da Nang.
But for the Korean conflict, Jim Concannon was just right. It was in Korea that then-Private Jim Concannon learned to fight, to survive, and to witness horror without being psychologically incapacitated by it.
But here, in peacetime, out in the Yuma Desert, as Bronzini's technical adviser watched more than five hundred young airmen fall to their death, he stood, his mouth agape, for once in his life paralyzed into inaction.
When the final body, which took an agonizingly long time to land, finally did strike, retired Master Sergeant Jim Concannon pulled the binoculars from his staring eyes and turned to Fourth A. D. Nintendo Toshiba.
Toshiba was smiling. It was a sick, twisted smile. Concannon jumped the Japanese.
Toshiba went down under his pummeling fists. Concannon took him by the throat and tried to squeeze his eyes out of his head. Then one of the crewmen in desert utilities came up from behind and knocked him flat with the butt of his AK-47.
Concannon was dimly aware of his being lugged into a waiting APC and unceremoniously dumped in back. His ribs hurt. As the APC started off, he understood why. He had been thrown onto a stack of boxes.
Concannon played dead while he slowly walked his fingers to the side of a crate. It smelled faintly of lettuce. A lettuce crate. He wormed one hand into the spaces between the rough slats and touched something smooth and nonmetallic. He pulled the object out and opened his eyes a crack.
Jim Concannon saw that he had his hands on a Chinese stick grenade. A Type 67. He suppressed a pleased smile. In Korea, he used to carry a box of grenades during patrols. He was laughed at for lugging all that weight. Until one day, outside of Inchon, when his unit was ambushed by a Red Chinese patrol. As his buddies were mowed down, Jim Concannon wrenched open the box and began pulling pins and tossing grenades in every direction. There was no science to what he did. He just let fly.
When the forest had fallen silent, Jim Concannon got up off his stomach. On all sides, there were Red Chinese corpses-corpses dressed much like the two lines of soldiers sitting in the back of the rolling APC nearly forty years later and half a world away.
Jim Concannon had saved his patrol that day back in 1953. He knew he could not save those who died on this day, but he could avenge them.
One by one he slipped stick grenades from the crate. When he had five, he unscrewed the blade caps at the ends, exposing the pull cords. He yanked the caps, igniting the time-delay fuses. Then he made his move. He rolled suddenly, and hurled the grenades.
There is no place to run in a sealed APC. Not that the Japanese soldiers didn't try. They saw the bouncing sticks and leapt to their feet, bumping helmets and tripping over one another's feet and suddenly-forgotten rifles in a desperate effort to escape.
But there was no escape. One by one, the grenades detonated, and although only three exploded-which was par for the Type 67 stick grenade-they rendered the human cargo of the APC unrecognizable.
Chapter 15
They came for Arnold Ziffel as he was having his morning coffee.
Arnold Ziffel always knew they would come. Sometimes they were Russian and sometimes they were Cuban. Other times they were black or Asian or even Mexican. The face of the enemy that coveted the Land of the Free continually changed in Arnold Ziffel's mind.
But Arnold Ziffel's resolve would never change, he vowed. That was why he had laid away a three-month food supply in his garage. That was why he kept his AR-15 assault rifle fully loaded at all times. He was not going down without a fight. The bumper sticker attached to the back of his pickup truck summed up Arnold Ziffel's philosophy perfectly: "My wife, yes. My dog, maybe. My gun, never!"