"I will drive!" a chorus of voices volunteered.
"I will drive," said Colonel Bavard, to the relief of his men.
He sent the APC rolling through the French countryside of Averoigne, humming "La Marseillaise." In the back his men sang an old legion song. It covered the unsettlingly rude noises coming from the driver's compartment.
They barreled through the gates of Euro Beasley unchallenged, accelerated up Main Street, U.S.A., toward the redoubt itself. Still, no one challenged them.
"Goggles on!" Colonel Bavard cried when the drawbridge over the moat came into view. Bavard wore his own goggles high on his forehead and snapped them down. Holding the wheel steady, he bore down on the accelerator.
The asphalt under his wheels hummed. Then the sound became the rattle of rubber over wooden planking. Then a concrete zimming.
The AMX/10P slewed and pitched in response to the sudden pumping of the brakes. Grabbing up his MAT submachine gun, Colonel Bavard threw open the door.
"Out! Out! Out!"
The men tumbled out in confusion, utterly blind.
"This way, men of the legion," Colonel Bavard shouted.
There was a moment of indecision before the rude blatt his men knew too well cut the close air. They pivoted toward it. And when the awful odor found their nostrils, they charged toward it.
They charged, as history later recorded, toward disaster.
In his earpiece Colonel Bavard listened to the guidance of the spotters in the hovering Gazelle.
"You are seeking a niche directly north of the drawbridge," the control voice informed him.
"Oui!"
"In the niche there will be stairs."
"Oui."
"The stairs lead to Utilicanard."
"For France and the legion!" Colonel Bavard cried, trailing a coil of cheesy odor from his backside.
When his combat boots rattled onto the top step of an aluminium spiral staircase, Colonel Jean-Guy Bavard paused heroically. He might have been posing for a recruitment poster.
And despite the blackout goggles covering his eyes, his entire world turned scarlet.
Later those who survived the massacre at Euro Beasley disagreed as to the exact hue that had brought about their downfall. Some said the color was scarlet, others crimson, still others swore that vermilion was the color of the horror.
For his part Colonel Jean-Guy Bavard saw red. It burned through the black electrical tape like laser light. It stabbed his retina with the force of a blow. His brain, receiving input from his eyes, filled with fire.
A great rage exploded in Colonel Bavard's breast. It was pure anger at the cruel fate that had made him, at middle age, wifeless, childless and without any family but for the Foreign Legion. In that instant, he hated the Foreign Legion and all it represented. Hated the very unit that had enabled him to hide from the more discriminating world that could not abide him.
Screaming his red fury, Colonel Bavard pivoted, firing from the hip.
He never heard the first 9 mm round leave the muzzle. He could not. His thick, rangy body was busy being whittled to kindling by the combined firepower of his men, who also saw the red light clearly, although some saw crimson, some scarlet and others vermilion.
None of them saw Colonel Bavard. But they smelled him, and years of pent-up anger came pouring out of their mouths in the form of colorful curses and out of their rifles in the form of hot steel jacketed rounds.
Colonel Jean-Guy Bavard never knew what hit him. He went tumbling down the spiral aluminum staircase, shedding body parts that had been chopped from him by legion bullets,
In the Sorcerer's Chateau the remaining legionnaires, still seeing red, turned their weapons on one another, bespeaking minor faults, imagined slights and other infractions unspoken until the blood-red light of hell brought them out.
And under the castle, deep in the bowels of Utilicanard, Chief Concepteer Rod Cheatwood took his finger off the button labeled Optired.
"I can't keep this up forever," he muttered worriedly. "I'm running out of power."
Chapter 18
Remo was dreaming of his mother before he awoke in the hospital bed.
He had never known his mother. But an apparition had materialized before him months ago, and he had recognized the face. Some buried glimmering of memory told him it was his mother. She had told him to seek out his father, but not who his father was.
In the dream his mother was trying to tell him something, but Remo couldn't hear her words. Her pale mouth moved, formed shapes and vowels, and as Remo strained to catch the fragmentary sounds, he awoke to bright light.
It was morning. It shouldn't be morning. His internal clock read a little after one in the afternoon. Even in sleep it kept track of the passing hours. Yet the sunlight streaming into the white-walled room where he awoke was morning bright.
Then he remembered.
Remo snapped himself up from his pillow-and the world reeled.
The door flew open with a crash, and Remo slapped his hands over his ears because they seemed suddenly as sensitive as the skin under his fingernails.
"Lazy slugabed! Get up. Get up."
"Chiun?"
The Master of Sinanju began tearing off sheets and bedclothes. "I have been up for hours. Why do you worry me without reason?"
Remo grabbed his head to make the white-walled room stop spinning before his eyes. "What happened?" he said thickly.
"You succumbed to vile sorcery."
"I did?"
"It is no shame."
"Wait a minute. What happened to you?"
"I rescued you, of course," Chiun said casually, as if dismissing a trifle.
Remo glared. "Chiun."