"I'll hunt you down," the senator threatened. "You'll be exposed for the crackpot you are. I'll be cleared in a minute."
Remo slapped his forehead. "Oh yeah. There's one thing I forgot to tell you. Just slipped my mind, I guess."
"Whaf s that?"
"I don't exist," Remo said, and slithered down the face of the building minutes before the CIA car arrived.
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Sixteen
It was high noon on the parade grounds at Fort Va-dassar. Chiun grumbled and complained all the way up the barbed-wire fence.
"Is Emperor Smith never satisfied?"
"We just have this one last little job to do, Little Father, and we're done with the assignment." Remo paused at the top of the fence to get an overview of the base. "After this mess, I'd say we were entitled to a couple of weeks of R and R in the sun. The tropics, maybe. Jamaica, or Martinique—"
"Or Sinanju," Chiun said dreamily. "The sun shines nicely in Sinanju."
Remo cleared his throat. "Maybe Smitty'11 put us on another case."
"What else remains to be done here? We have eliminated the false priestlet. We have eliminated the red-haired woman. We have eliminated the senator. What is left?"
"We have to eliminate this army," Remo said grimly, watching Fort Vadassar's 100,000 recruits in drill formation. "They deserted in herds after the press conference."
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"But you said the newspapers would retract their statements today."
"That's not going to stop these zombies," Remo said. "They've been brainwashed. Anybody who tries to disband this army is asking for war."
He looked out over the parade grounds. The number of soldiers had swelled to fill the base, and all their faces bore the blank, burned-out stamp of Randy Noonefs control. Each platoon on the grounds was at least 8,000 men strong and led by top Quad officers, their telltale sabers dangling from their belts.
Remo shook his head as the officers shouted their commands. Each of the thousands of men in each platoon obeyed in perfect robot precision.
"Tahiti. If we get through this, we deserve no less than Tahiti."
"Sinanju," Chiun insisted.
"We'll talk about it later." Remo let go of the barbed wire and dropped to the ground. "Let's start in the officers' mess. If s lunchtime."
The officers' dining room hardly qualified as a mess hall. Silken draperies adorned the walls, and ornate filigreed brass outlined both entrances. Candles lit the room, their flickering light seemingly in rhythm with the droning ancient music in the background. The hearty laughter of men rang out over the babble of Quati spoken at the tables. On a small stage, a rotund woman in harem costume gyrated seductively. Other women similarly clad made the rounds of the tables, offering drinks and honeyed desserts.
Spotting Remo and Chiun in the doorway, two of the officers rose and asked them to state their business. Remo stuck a finger through one man's left
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temple. "That's my business," he said. Chiun dispatched the other officer with a swift kick to the crotch, causing the man's legs to part near his navel.
In an instant, the place was in an uproar. The woman hid, screaming shrilly. The men rushed toward Remo and Chiun, their sabers bared.
One by one they fell, their swords flailing wildly in the air. Remo and Chiun worked a double inside line attack, systematically knocking down the crowd of officers as though they were dominoes. When they had completed the inside line near the far entrance, they doubled back in an outside line, obliterating the rest.
"Your elbow was bent," Chiun snapped.
"Save it, Little Father. We've got too much work to do."
"It is important. Without a straight arm, it is possible to maim without killing. That is both cruel to your target and dangerous to you."
Remo was abashed. "I'll remember next time, Chiun," he said. "There's no time to check the bodies now. We've got to get to the parade grounds before someone shows up here."
"Very, very dangerous," Chiun said, visibly angry. They left through the back entrance.
Beneath the rubble of broken bodies, a hand moved slightly. It pushed to remove the weight of five men piled on top of it, but could not. The hand snaked slowly between the bodies as the owner of the hand gasped and panted for breath. Then the hand shot out past the topmost corpse, a little flag signaling the life Remo's faulty elbow had spared.
The man pulled and writhed his way past the grisly load bearing down on him. He was in great
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pain. Nearly all his ribs were broken. Occasionally his lungs would fill up, and he coughed and spat blood. He was dying.
Still, he wrestled with the remains of his fellow officers, trying not to look at their bizarre positions and blank stares.
For the first time in his life, he missed Quat.
An eternity beneath the bodies. Then air. The man passed out for seconds at a time. But between the blackouts, he crawled.
He crawled to the door and scratched at it like a dog until it opened from his feeble efforts. He crawled outside, where he could still see the small outlines of the two strange men, the American and the old Oriental, who had come from nowhere to kill the Quati at Fort Vadassar. They were heading for the parade grounds. They wanted the rest of the officers. They were professional killers, of that he was sure. But the younger one had been sloppy with him. He had made a mistake, a tiny mistake, a fraction of an inch, but enough to spare the officer's life for a few minutes. He would use those minutes now to see that the assassins paid for their mistake.
He crawled to a small building the size of-an outhouse and fumbled in his pocket for a key. Vomiting blood, the officer placed the key in the door and turned it. The door opened to a narrow stairway.
He wouldn't be able to crawl down the steps. He wouldn't last long enough. So he held his breath and propelled himself forward, bouncing down the wooden stairs like a withered, bleeding beachball. If he lived for five more minutes, the strangers would be dead. Five more minutes.
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"They'll listen to anybody," Remo said. "If we knock out one unit at a time, I think we can control them without a lot of casualties." He looked at his watch. "Smitty said he'd have troops here in twenty minutes. If the officers are gone by then, the recruits ought to go peacefully."
"Where will Emperor Smith send a hundred thousand men?"
"Who knows. But he wants them deprogrammed, not dead. We take out only the officers, right, Chiun?" Remo asked apprehensively.
"He is a very generous emperor, but none too intelligent, I fear. A hundred thousand enemy soldiers may not take to captivity with docility."
"The country will be up in arms if we kill the recruits," Remo said, trying to sound persuasive. "It's not really their fault they're in this place. They got suckered into it. They are Americans, after all."
"No one forced them to come here," Chiun said drily.