The cameraman swallowed hard. He had no choice. Cheeta Ching could have a man hired and fired on the spot. It was rumored she had eaten her last cameraman alive when he'd screwed up. Not chewed him out, but actually cannibalized him. At least, that was the way he'd heard it. If the story had been about anyone but the Korean Shark, he would have laughed it off.
Cheeta worked her way to Fifth Avenue and boldly strode up to the sidewalk before the brass-framed Rumpp Tower entrance. Under the huge letters RUMPP TOWER, anxious faces stared out.
"Pan along the building," she directed. "I want every gut-churning, scared-white face on the six o'clock news."
"Yes, Miss Ching."
The cameraman began to pan. Evidently some of the trapped recognized the unmistakable features of Cheeta Ching.
They waved and seemingly called her name. But their voices didn't penetrate the thick glass.
"What're they saying?" Cheeta asked, frowning.
"I dunno. Can't hear them."
"Peculiar."
"What is?"
"They're supposed to be trapped, but it looks to me like a person could just walk right out the front door."
"Then why don't they?"
The moment the words were out of his mouth, the cameraman knew he had made a mistake. There were two kinds of mistakes a cameraman working for Cheeta Ching could make: recoverable ones and irrecoverable ones.
The cameraman understood, as if by divine revelation, that he had made a mistake of the irrecoverable variety.
His fears were confirmed by Cheeta's next orders.
"Go up to the door and ask them."
He gulped. "Is it safe?"
"I'll let you know," Cheeta said flatly.
"Miss Ching, we're already in violation of the fire marshal's orders."
Cheeta whirled, teeth flashing. "What's your problem? Are you leaking testosterone out a pinhole in your scrotum? This could be your chance to become a hero."
The cameraman wasn't concerned about his heroism. He was just hoping to live through the assignment. All he had been told was that there was a big story at the Rumpp Tower. From the looks of it, it was a terrorist thing. Someone had wired the tower and was holding its occupants hostage, or something.
"Miss Ching," he croaked. "I'd rather not. Please."
Cheeta Ching got around in front of him. She was in stiletto heels, which made her almost as tall as the cameraman, who stood five-foot seven. Cheeta Ching slowly rose up on her heels, like a creeping yellow vine. As she came up to his exact eye level, her poisonous red mouth broadened to expose her too-perfect teeth.
"Has anyone ever told you how . . . tasty you look?" she asked in a glittering tone.
Suddenly the cameraman had no fear of terrorists or high explosives or any ordinary threat to his bodily integrity. He was staring right into a flat, predatory face with dark, glittering eyes and excessively sharp incisors. If human evolution could be traced back to sharks and not apes, he thought, the face of Cheeta Ching would represent the highest state of mankind's long evolutionary climb.
"For God's sake," the cameraman pleaded, "I have a family!"
Cheeta grinned wickedly. "I'll bet the baby would taste just great microwaved."
The cameraman's eyes rounded perfectly. "But-but you're going to have a baby yourself!" he stammered.
"More oxygen for my baby, if yours stops breathing."
The cameraman reacted as if a brick had knocked him between the eyes. He took a faltering step backward. Then he turned woodenly, like a man ascending the scaffold to the hangman's noose. Except that he was heading straight for the Rumpp Tower.
A police officer stationed within shouting range spotted him and yelled for the cameraman to stop.
He walked on, oblivious, his footsteps as leaden as a sponge diver's.
Cheeta Ching had taken possession of his camera and now had it up on her padded shoulder, tape running.
"Pick it up, will you?" she said spitefully. "I don't want to run out of tape."
Someone had a bullhorn, and he began exhorting the cameraman to turn back. Inside the tower, the trapped grew panic-stricken. They tried waving him away. A man picked up a clothes rack in a famous clothing store and rammed it toward the glass, in an attempt to frighten the cameraman into changing his mind.
He didn't know his own strength. The heavy rack went through the glass, shattering it.
The expensive bronze solar panel didn't shatter in a normal fashion. It cracked apart. But there was no crystalline sound of breaking glass. There was no sound at all.
And because there was no noise, the cameraman, his dull eyes fixed on the looming entrance, completely failed to notice what happened to the glass.
Cheeta Ching noticed. With instinctive speed, she swung the videocam lens over toward the action. The camera recorded the glass falling and striking the ground.
The big triangles and trapezoids of solar panel might have been raindrops, or glass spun of candy cane touching a moist surface. The glass immediately melted into the broad sidewalk.
Cheeta blinked and brought the camera off her shoulder, a stupefied look on her heavily pancaked features.
"Am I seeing this?"
Under the circumstances, it was an intelligent question. Cheeta thought briefly of commanding her hapless cameraman to walk over to the mysterious spot and investigate, but decided that getting one of the hostages to speak on camera was more important. The chump could do that later.
The cameraman was almost to the door now. Inside the lobby, a security guard and several others were trying to hold the doors shut.
The cameraman's body blocked Cheeta's view, so she didn't really catch what happened next.
It appeared that the cameraman had reached for the door handle of polished brass. His hand jumped back, as if it had received a shock.
His voice was shocked, too.
"I can't touch the door!" he screamed.
"Try kicking it," Cheeta shouted.
"You don't understand! I can't touch it!"
"Yum-yum, baby!" Cheeta called.
If the cameraman hadn't already been frightened out of his wits, he never would have attempted what he next attempted to do.
He stepped back and, lifting his right foot, drove it toward the unyielding door.
He went through the glass door like light through a screen. Literally. The glass remain intact. He kept going.
Inside, trapped shoppers recoiled.
And the cameraman fell into the floor and kept falling. He twisted, as if in quicksand. His mouth was making horrible shapes. Oddly, no screams reached Cheeta Ching's pointed ears. Or worse, her directional mike.
Keeping the camera balanced, Cheeta tried to get his attention with a waving hand.
It worked. The horrified cameraman looked imploringly toward her. His eyes were wounded. It was as stomach-churning a sight as any ever captured on halfinch tape.
Cheeta shouted encouragement.
"Scream louder! I'm not getting a sound level!"
Chapter 5
Because of the nationwide cutback of military bases, Remo Williams was forced to catch a commercial flight out of Buffalo for New York City.
That was bad enough. Since nearly two-thirds of the nation's airlines had slipped into bankruptcy, there were no direct flights to Manhattan, and Remo was forced to change planes in Boston.
At the Boston gate, unmistakable signs that it was Halloween were apparent. The lounging stewardesses wore paint masks. A passing pilot lent a ghoulish air with his plastic skull face.
Remo noticed the passenger in flowing black especially.
It was hard not to notice her. She was tall and willowy, with jet-black hair parted down the middle of her pale scalp, lashes that resembled hair on a tarantula's legs, and a lipsticked mouth that might have been caked with blood.
Her gown made her look like she had been dragged through a mixture of coal dust and old cobwebs. All she needed was a conical black hat and broomstick to complete her ensemble.