"Hold it!" Fabrique cried, fishing the light around a wooden shack. "I found a bunch of paint."
The others joined in. Behind them the construction workers were pounding on the electronic airlock door. Without power, it refused to open. They were trapped.
And so they watched, helpless and profane, as the minions of Dirt First!! formed a fire-bucket brigade and ferried dozens of paint cans to the clear dome itself.
Brushes were brought up. Paint-can lids opened. The Dirt Firsters gathered around the dome and began painting three-foot-high slogans in praise of natural beauty-all of which were lost on the trapped construction workers, inasmuch as, from their vantage points, the letters were backward.
Some of them, witnessing the desecration of months of painstaking work undertaken in the worst construction climate of their lives, wept bitterly as the flawless Plexiglas collected oversize streaks of clumsily applied paint.
Others turned away. Still others pounded at the inner Plexiglas walls, as if they could shatter the impenetrable stuff and knock out the grinning teeth of the desert raiders only inches away, in clear view but beyond retribution.
Then something strange happened.
A grinning Dirt Firster shoved his face against the Plexiglas. They had been doing that all along to taunt the construction crew. But this one actually struck the transparent material with enough force to make it reverberate like a bell.
When the face withdrew, it left a smear of red that was not paint. He had been using green paint. Slipping down the rilling red liquid were two white Chicklet-like teeth.
The Dirt Firster hit the ground, his legs bouncing high before they struck the sand for the final time.
"What happened to him?" Ed Coyne muttered in surprise.
Before anyone could venture a guess, another Dirt First!! protester suddenly leapt very high into the air. He landed in the exact center of the Condome dome. Facedown. He didn't move after he struck. He just lay splayed there like a weary scarecrow. His nose formed a silver-dollar-size pancake in his face. It hadn't been that shape a moment before.
A cheer went up among the construction workers.
For out in the night, two fleet shapes went among the Dirt Firsters, wreaking havoc.
One was a lean man in a white T-shirt. Moonlight showed that much, no more.
The other was a wispily tiny figure in phantom gray.
The construction crew raced back and forth inside the dome, trying to follow the action. The pair seemed always to be one step ahead.
"Over here!" a man would shout. But by the time the crew surged to the spot, all that remained was a twitching body.
Once they caught a glimpse of a thick-wristed hand reaching out from the darkness to take a Dirt Firster by the back of the neck and use his long hair to clean off a particularly obscene scrawl. The Dirt Firster's face moved faster than it seemed possible for a face to move. And the crew realized it was simply because the motivating hand was moving with lightning speed.
In a twinkling, the wet scrawl was gone. So was the guy in the white T-shirt.
The Dirt Firster's face, now wet and Day-Glo orange, collapsed to the sand like a cast-off rag.
"Who are these guys?" Ed Coyne asked in awe.
"Who cares! Let's see what they do next."
What they did next was to make short work of the remaining members of Dirt First!!
Bodies flew in all directions. One man attempted to use a spike to defend himself from the wispy one in gray.
The attacker came on, spike held high. A single finger, somehow too long to be human, snaked up to intercept the descending instrument. The spike spat a spark and lost its point.
The Dirt Firster next tried to nail the one in gray with the ragged stump.
The ragged stump somehow changed direction in mid-stroke, taking a grasping hand along with it. It knocked out a savagely grinning row of teeth.
The man stumbled off, trying not to swallow the spike whole.
Then the excitement subsided. The victorious pair faded back from the dome as if unwilling to take a bow, despite the cheers and whistles and thunderous applause that shook the dome.
At that point a searchlight raked the dome. The crew looked up to see a familiar scarlet Sikorsky helicopter descend from the clear desert sky.
They sobered instantly, wondering if they would still be employed in the morning. A few thought the spectacle they had witnessed was worth the loss of pay.
Chapter 15
Remo Williams thought he had gotten most of them.
As another Dirt Firster bit the sand, a loose bag of broken bones, he looked around for Chiun. There was no sign of the Master of Sinanju on this side of the dome.
Then he caught a fleeting glimpse of gray silk through the transparent edge of the dome.
Circling, Remo came upon Chiun about to dispatch a scrawny Dirt Firster like a farmer harvesting a chicken.
Holding the man by the neck, but using only the awesome pressure of his impossibly long nails, the Master of Sinanju prepared to give a wrenching twist.
"Hold up, Chiun."
Chiun turned, pulling his intended victim along. "Why?" he demanded. "I am about to mete out justice to this foul murderer of rental agents."
"Not to mention farmers," Remo said grimly.
"He is not responsible for that," Chiun said flatly.
"We'll see. First, he tells us where the bomb is."
"Bomb?" asked Fabrique Foirade, his heart pounding high in his throat. He squirmed in the old Oriental's grip, but it was like his neck was impaled by a circle of supersharp darning needles. One wrong move might rip his own windpipe or sever his jugular.
"The neutron bomb," said the skinny guy. "Where is it?" Fabrique recognized him from La Plomo. The reactionary. It was amazing how well he could discern people now that he no longer wore his hair over his face like an unkempt Pekingese.
"Search me," he muttered, trembling.
"We know you and your walking mud pies stole the neutron bomb," Remo retorted. "Your filthy handprints were all over the pickup truck it was last seen on."
"Get real, man." Fabrique sneered. "It was abandoned. We just tried to salvage it, you know, for the ride home. I don't know about any neutron bomb-except they aren't kind to flowers and other living things."
"I suppose you don't know about the dead guy we found by the pickup, either?" Remo asked.
"Just that he was a really, really cool dude. Cool to the touch, that is. He was already dead when we got there."
Remo took a chance. "Can the crap. We have proof he was a Dirt Firster."
"Fat chance. He was so clean it was obscene. Mud is our blood! Our blood is mud!" he chanted.
Remo and Chiun exchanged bemused looks.
"My method is better," Chiun suggested.
"Little Father," Remo said, stepping back, "be my guest."
"It will be a pleasure to wring the truth from such a one as this specimen," said the Master of Sinanju gravely. "But he does not know the answers we seek."
Then, like a spiked dog collar turned inside out, the terrible needles began to close on Fabrique Foirade's scrawny neck.
The Dirt Firster had only begun to empty his lungs in a fearful scream when the scarlet helicopter descended, kicking up dust in whirling, stinging billows.
"Now what?" Remo said, throwing his forearm over his mouth and nose. He squeezed his eyes shut. The light from the helicopter turned the inside of his eyelids reddish-pink.
"Remo," Chiun called over the noise, "catch the dirty one! He is coming toward you!"
"Catch him? I thought you had him."
"I did-until this manmade dust storm was called down upon my poor head," Chiun pointed out in a squeaky voice.
"Wonderful," Remo muttered. Eyes closed, he lashed out, trying to gather up the air around him. But between the sound and the sand, he succeeded only in getting his forearms thoroughly sandblasted.