"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.
Chiun had explained that the exercise was difficult because in all of nature, as in all of the training of Sinanju, rhythm played a crucial role in the scheme of survival.
Rhythm and balance. Without them, chaos, and nature would not abide chaos for long—not in the planets, nor in the human organism. Chaotic gene patterns created mutants that died early and could not reproduce. Rhythm and balance were everything. Remo's breathing was rhythm. Chiun's formation around his mass of recruits was rhythm. The bullets that were fired at Remo resulted from pure, mechanical rhythm with the triggers that fired them. It was as though each molecule ever created, as Chiun had once explained, had made a pact with nature before its existence not to disturb the rhythm of the universe.
But the secret of avoiding bullets was anti-rhythm, balance without rhythm, movement so fast and formless that it defied rhythm without throwing
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the balance of the body into chaos and the inevitable outcome of chaos, self-destruction.
Avoiding one bullet was easy. The loss of rhythm and the amazing speed required for it lasted only a fraction of a second. The damage wreaked on Remo's body was no greater than that inflicted by an insect bite. But to dodge—how many bullets? A million? Two million? He would have to create a pattern of anti-rhythm at perhaps 100 times the speed of a champion Olympic sprinter.
Remo appeared to be moving slowly and in a blur. It was easy for the soldiers to get a bead on the young T-shirted man but, inexplicably, impossible to hit hirnt
"Fire," the officers commanded.
"Fools, kill him!" Both officers took out their pistols and emptied their barrels at the weird, slow-moving target with fuzzy outlines. As he moved closer, one commander rubbed his eyes. The other squeezed his shut and shook his head. Neither could believe what he was seeing, for the young man appeared to have no face.
He was within ten feet of the front Ene, and still they could not hit Mm. At eight feet, one of the commanders reached an inescapable conclusion and related it shakily to the other: the man was unkül-able.
"He is of the undead," the officer said, his voice heavy with dread.
"There are legendsin Quat. . . ." the other replied slowly.
At five feet, the two of them ran screaming for cover.
Remo was losing his focus from the strain of the anti-rhythm pattern, but the two figures were large
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T
enough to tackle without perfect vision. Not waiting to regain his rhythm, he sprang on one foot toward the two officers, spiraling in the air like a football. He fell on them both, killed one immediately, and held the other in front of him by the collar.
"No," the man quavered. "My God, my merciful God—"
"Tell them," Remo whispered, his speech thick and slurred from the ordeal he had put his body through. As he spoke, the rifles of the two platoons turned automatically on Remo and the officer he held squirming in front of him.
"Hold your fire!" the commander screamed. 'In the name of all that is sacred on this earth, hold your fire!"
"Tell them not to try to harm us," Remo said. "Under any circumstances. And make them get rid of their rifles." He felt his eyes rolling back into his head.
"Maneuvers completed," the officer shouted. "Destroy your weapons. Repeat. Destroy your weapons."
In the distance, Chiun's group vibrated to a halt. The old man staggered outside the group, holding a hand to his forehead.
The sound of splintering rifles filled the air for minutes, then stillness settled over the parade grounds. The only noise was the whimpering of the Quati officer dangling in Remo's hands. Remo wound his hand slowly around the officer's neck and strangled him. Ahead, the troops observed the scene with faces as impassive as statues.
Remo dropped the man and walked over to Chiun, who had replaced his hands inside the
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sleeves of his robe. "Are you all right, Little Father?" he asked.
"Yes," Chiun said, nodding. "Are you?" He was dizzy. He was nauseated. He was cold. And the wound in his shoulder from the Quati archers still hurt. "Yes," Remo said, just before, he fainted.
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Seventeen
Remo came to at the sound of approaching tanks. "Here comes the cavalry, just after we need them," he said groggily.
"It is a trademark of all armies to be only in places where they are not wanted," Chiun said.
The tanks burst through the barbed-wire fence as if it were made of cobwebs, and ringed the parade grounds, trapping the recruits inside their circle. After the tanks came over 100 closed vans to remove the recruits from Fort Vadassar. The men entered the vans without resistance.
"I wonder if they will ever behave as normal men," Chiun said.
Remo shrugged. "Randy Nooner said something about 'Samantha's brew.' They're probably drugged. A couple of days in isolation, and it ought to wear off."
"Get moving," a voice from behind them said. Remo turned to see a burly American sergeant prodding recruits into a nearby van. "Hey, youse guys too. Get in here."
"Suck wind," Remo advised the sergeant
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"Leave those two alone," a one-star general ordered from a jeep moving toward them.
"Yes, sir," the sergeant said, snapping in salute.
The general's driver brought the jeep to a halt and scrambled out. "They fit the description, sir," he said.
The general rose. "Gentlemen, I've been instructed personally by the president to escort you to your destination," he said.
"And where's that?"
The general paused as a film of red rose from his neck to his cheeks. "To the No-Tell Motel," he said with as much dignity as he could muster.
"Smitty," Remo muttered under his breath. "Always looking for the cheapest rates."
Remo and Chiun climbed into the jeep. It rumbled past the convoy of tanks and vans to a rundown string of cabins 15 miles away, where they were dropped off with a salute from the general.
There was a reservation for them in cabin 5 of the No-Tell. The woman at the desk got the key for Remo. "Oh, just a second, there's a message for you, too," she said, unfolding a piece of paper stuck in the slot for cabin 5. "It says call Aunt Mildred."