Chiun shrugged. "It is obvious that the emperor is quite mad," he said. "But a contract is a contract."
The officer blacked out at the foot of the steps. He spat, but his lungs were weakening fast, and he couldn't remove all the blood that was building up in his throat. He was strangling.
An inch at a time he wormed toward a square on the wall. The entire building had been constructed around the contents of that square, and the officer would reach it. It would be his final act of vengeance against the two intruders.
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At the base of the wall, he curled his fingers and edged them up the wall. He had lost his sense of pain. He felt as if he were inside a vacuum as his blood streamed down the front of his shirt. He hated the American stranger now more than ever. He hated him for killing his countrymen, but more than that, he hated him for the wound he carried, which was so painful that it was beyond pain. It would have been better by far to have died with the rest.
The square. He had reached it. With a bitter smile, the officer stuck a fingernail into the edge of the square, and the small door opened easily. They would die now, the intruders.
With his last trembling effort, the officer pulled the red lever inside the square on the wall, and the wail of 40 sirens screamed in alarm throughout the base.
Overhead, the stampeding of a thousand feet thundered out of the barracks. On the parade grounds, the officers looked about them, their weapons drawn. Remo and Chiun stood in the midst of an army of well-trained, well-armed soldiers, who turned to face them, one platoon at a time, in eerie synchronization, as the first of their commanders shouted the order: "Kill."
The officer at the alarm switch let his hand fall heavily to the floor. With the last of his breath, he laughed.
"Kill." The command seemed to echo from flank to flank. "Kill." "Kill." "Kill."
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Moving as a unit, the blank-faced soldiers raised their M-16's to shoulder level.
"Halt!" Remo said confidently. In an aside to Chiun, he whispered, "I told you, they listen to anybody."
A bullet whizzed past Remo's head.
"Hey, what happened? You guys are supposed to stop."
The commander of the platoon sneered. "Now they listen only to us," he said. "My apologies." He raised his right arm. "Fire!" he called.
Chiun leaped into the middle of the nearest platoon, his long robes billowing. Remo followed. He didn't know what Chiun was doing, but this was no time to ask questions.
The old man was running through the platoon at nerve-shattering speed in a strange elliptical spiral pattern. As Remo followed in his wake, the soldiers in the platoon lost aim and turned, confused, upon one another, each blank stare confronting another expressionless face, their rifles clanking together as Chiun wound the formation of recruits into a dense, ever-tightening mass.
"Not with me," Chiun hissed. "Opposite. Reflect me. The ellipse within the ellipse."
What in the hell is that, Remo wondered, although he obeyed unhesitatingly. He swerved into a curve exactly mirroring Chain's movements, creating along with him a complex, orbiting double helix within the flank of soldiers. When the platoon was crushed into a chaotic group of men struggling to move like fish in a net, a strange thing happened. The mass began to move.
Suddenly Remo saw the impenetrable logic of
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China's words: The ellipse within the ellipse. For slowly, with each orbit Remo and Chiun made in opposite directions, they were moving the bewildered soldiers toward another platoon without ever exposing themselves to bullets outside the cramped mass of recruits. Inexorably, the platoon meshed, amoebalike, into the next, creating a rampaging confusion that made it impossible for the soldiers to fire.
"Kill them," a Quati officer screamed as he was spun helplessly into the teeming fray. Chiun made a tour near the officer and flicked a fingernail at his chest. The officer dropped. When the growing mass of recruits moved in its perfect ellipse toward the third platoon, the officer remained, trampled, on the spot where he fell.
The mass grew to cover nearly two acres, a beehive of restless, pulsating activity, as Remo and Chiun pushed the mindless unit toward another, their weapons at the ready.
They were on the verge of absorbing the fourth platoon when the commanding officer, a colonel, shouted an order and the platoon scattered to form a circle around the huge, bumbling entity Remo and Chiun had created.
"Fire!" the colonel commanded. The soldiers surrounding the group fired randomly into the mass. The recruits on the periphery dropped instantly.
"They're killing their own men to get to us," Remo yelled. But Chiun did not respond. Instead, Remo noticed a change in the pattern. On Chain's side, the unit bulged and receded like a bubble, absorbing each soldier within firing range one at a time. Remo repeated the pattern on his side, keeping the mass tight while he formed the tentacles that
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reached out to pull the soldiers on the outside into
it.
There were two platoons left. As Remo moved, he saw the two commanding officers signal one another, and the platoons turned to face one another.
At a second command, they marched resolutely together, forming one large unit that came at the beehive group of four captured platoons in a slow, deliberate offensive.
"They're going to sacrifice all of them, Chiun," Remo panted as he made what seemed like his ten-thousandth round inside the group. He was tiring, and running on reserve.
"Take one of the officers," Chiun said, passing by in a flurry of motion.
Remo looked at Chain's back unbelievingly.
The two platoons had marched into firing range, and the front line was kneeling. The rain of bullets
began.
"Are you kidding?" Remo yelled. "There's nothing between us and them but a million units of
ammo."
"Go," Chiun said, bis thin voice straining. "I will hold the formation. But I cannot move it forward alone. And I am growing weary."
A sliver of alarm streaked up Remo's spine. If he himself was bone-tired, Chiun would be exhausted. The Korean had passed the 80-year mark long before, and holding the formation meant traveling in double-time. Even before Remo left the group, Chiun's pace had quickened to a speed that made him nearly impossible to see.
Swallowing hard, Remo darted out of the mass and into the smoky field dotted with flying bullets. As he did, the two platoons 500 feet in the distance
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shifted their target from the unwieldy, stagnant group of soldiers held by the old Oriental to the single man in a black T-shirt, armed only with his hands. Remo saw the barrels of 16,000 M-16's more slowly toward him with terrifying accuracy.
Almost immediately a bullet grazed Remo's thigh. It helped. Inside his body, he felt his adrenalin pump to overload level, and he needed that for the pattern he would use.
Chiun had taught him the pattern—if it could be called a pattern at all—long ago, but he had never had to use it in actual combat before. It was an extension of the movement that allowed him to dodge a single bullet fired at him from point-blank range, a quick shifting of balance entirely without rhythm.