“Don’t push your luck, old man!” one of them snapped. “And get your fucking hands up!”
Chiun complied, the sleeves of his kimono fanning out like bat’s wings. When he turned and ran in the direction of a nearby maple tree, the gunmen spent a precious second gaping after him, then opened fire as one, their bullets fanning through the air behind him. They were astounded, gaping, as he ran directly up the tree trunk, then reversed directions like a squirrel and sprinted out along a limb that pointed in their general direction. When he leaped off into space, the shooters tried to track him with their weapons, but they had already lost their only chance.
Chiun fell upon them in a kind of cartwheel, slashing with his feet and open hands. The three men fell as if they had been cut down with a scythe, their bodies twitching on the grass as life fled from their battered flesh and broken bones. He left the useless weapons where they fell and turned away, moved on to find his son.
Those three had not faced Remo; he was sure of it, since they were still alive when they discovered Chiun. The first shots he had heard came from a greater distance, farther to the west, in the direction where he knew the so-called orphanage must stand. Remo had come directly to the site, with something like a twenty-minute lead, but it appeared that he had taken time to scout the property before he ventured into contact with the guards.
So much the better, then. They could complete the work in unison.
The Master of Sinanju did not run, but rather he seemed to glide across the forest floor. A fox or rabbit would not have heard him passing by; an eagle could not have glimpsed him dodging through the shadows. As for the men he hunted, they would neither see nor hear Death coming for them from the east.
Remo would see to that, distracting them, monopolizing their attention as they tried to rub him out. Chiun only hoped his son would leave a few more of the enemy alive for him to play with.
It would be a shame, he thought; to travel all this way and only send three zombies to their graves.
The first four had been easy. They were quick enough, and fairly accurate with firearms, but they had too much faith in automatic weapons: Push enough lead through a given space, the theory said, and you were bound to score a kill. Assuming, always, that your target waited for the bullets to arrive.
But Remo had not waited, scrambling up the nearest tree while they were wasting countless rounds on earthbound shadows, tearing up the landscape. Moments later, when the firing ceased and they were all below him, it was simple to jump down and take them out.
He saw the camera afterward and didn’t care. The firing would have given him away, in any case, and he was in the middle of it now, where strength and speed meant more than stealth. The home and several outbuildings were visible between the trees from where he stood, and Remo moved in that direction, conscious that the enemy was waiting for him, armed and ready for the kill.
How many?
He would have to wait and see.
The sudden burst of gunfire from behind him, several hundred yards away, took Remo by surprise. He hesitated, turned in that direction, but he saw no point in going back to find out what the guards were shooting at. Most likely they were spooked by shadows or some forest creature that had blundered into range. As long as they were wasting ammunition somewhere else, Remo was glad to leave them unmolested, thereby spreading more confusion in the hostile ranks.
If there was someone covering the security monitors—and logic said there must be—then they would have seen the four clones drop like rag dolls, massacred despite the weapons they were carrying. It couldn’t hurt to let his adversaries sweat a little, wondering how Remo pulled it off, what he would do to them if he got close enough.
When he got close enough.
Because of children on the grounds, presumably both clones and normal kids, they had not gone all-out with booby traps. There were no trip wires fitted to grenades, no Claymore mines, not even simple snares. The enemy had put his faith in cameras and men with guns to follow up on any images of strangers wandering the grounds. The necessary lapse gave Remo greater freedom, let him move with more haste than he could have in a military free-fire zone.
He thought again about the numbers he would have to face. Close to a dozen of the Hardy clones were dead now that he knew of, but the gunmen at the Dogwood Inn were proof that Dr. Radcliff’s force was not confined to home-grown soldiers. Even so, it seemed unlikely that the doctor would expose his most secure facility to strangers if he had a viable alternative.
Send in the clones, thought Remo with a smile.
He smelled the enemy before he saw them, sweat and gun oil mingling on the breeze. Most humans would have missed it, nostrils jaded by their diet and environment, but Remo caught a whiff from twenty yards, in time to save himself.
Before the guns went off, he bolted to his left, fell prone behind a rotted log and wriggled several more yards on his belly to the cover of a venerable elm. The ambush party—only two men, by the sound of it—was busy tearing up the landscape where they saw him go to ground, apparently believing he would be incapable of movement once he left the trail.
The firing slacked off moments later, like a passing squall, and Remo heard his adversaries stirring from their hideout, moving cautiously into the open. Any second now. It would be foolish to delay his move and wait for reinforcements to arrive, attracted by the sound of shots.
He watched them, braced himself, hung back until he verified that there were only two, both doppelgangers, armed with submachine guns, moving, toward the spot where they presumed his lifeless body would be found. He rose and moved into the clear behind them, silently approached the nearest of the two until an arm’s length separated them.
“Right here,” he told the gunner, almost whispering.
His adversary whipped around, his weapon coming with him, but he wasn’t quick enough. The punch that Remo threw was not flamboyant or dramatic, but it did the job, connecting with the shooter’s chin and lifting him completely off his feet as vertebrae were separated at the point where skull and spinal column meet. He caught the dead man falling, spun him with an easy maneuver that made the body look like one of those inflatable “companions” sold in shops that advertise their stock as “educational material” or “marital aids.” The flaccid, still-warm body made a shield for Remo as the second gunner spun and opened fire, his bullets flattening against the Kevlar vest his late companion wore.
It would have been a relatively simple thing to duck and fire between the corpse’s dangling legs, at Remo’s feet, but such a move requires coherent thought, perhaps rehearsal—in the mind, at least— before the actual, event. Right here, right now, the second gunner found himself strung out between the two extremes of rage and panic, firing in a kind of automatic reflex.
Remo tossed the body at him, closing in behind it as the shooter lost his balance, stumbled, going down with his dead clone on top of him. The submachine gun stuttered half a dozen futile rounds before the: shooter lost it, grappling with the corpse in an attempt to rise.
He never made it.
Remo was beside him in a heartbeat, one hand cupped beneath his chin, the other on his crown. A simple twist, mere leverage, and Remo felt the spinal column separate, the skull twist backward with a realism Linda Blair and Hollywood could never duplicate.
Six down, and Remo was unscathed—so far. Luck was a part of that, he understood, but only part. The plain fact was that his opponents, so far, had been no match for the powers of Sinanju. If they were going to be saved by luck, it would require a great deal more than they had shown yet.