And so it was then that the "punishment" of the hundred-mile death march through Siberia was determined. The hardships molded the crew into an even tighter unit.
When the commander of the blood faces heard his unit was finally going to be used, his only regret was that it was against one person. He wanted hundreds. He wanted to be outnumbered by ten to one. His unit could tear the throats out of animals with their teeth. They could fell squirrels with knives, and shoot out the eyes of birds with pistols. "Give us combat," Furtseva had said.
"You will have plenty," he was told by the smoothfaced KGB colonel with the rosebud lips.
He was given only one man.
And not only was that man not going to give him a chase, but he was coming to him. Just one man on those pathetically bare Vietnamese streets of this northern city, Hanoi.
Even worse, the commander of the blood faces had to explain several methods of killing, and promise to use them all. The officer, Colonel Ivan Ivanovich, was also having this entire execution photographed, convincing the commander that the people who ran Mother Russia were lunatics. On one hand they refused to use him because they wanted satellites to take the blame; on the other hand they were taking movie pictures of him, recording him, and making notes.
There were to be three men with knives, followed by an assault with pistols, backed up by snipers on the roof, grenade throwers, and then a three-man team. The KGB colonel had written this down.
"Do you really think any single human being is going to escape my knife fighters?" Furtseva had asked. He had been hoping for perhaps a little war with the Vietnamese, and that way they could fight their way out of Hanoi.
Colonel Ivanovich knew the commander was thinking that absurd thought or something like it. That was what made him so nervous. He did not know if Furtseva would frighten the American, but the commander of the blood faces certainly terrified him.
"He is advancing on us. We won't even have a chase," said Furtseva.
"Subject seizing the initiative," Colonel lvanovich said into his microphone. His words were written down for backup.
The knife fighters went out first.
Rerno saw them coming. They were healthy and moved well on their feet.
"Oh no! They're attacking us," screamed Kathy. She had thought Remo would do the attacking. Suddenly she felt very alone and frightened in this strange Communist capital. And the man she had entrusted to provide magnificent killings had suddenly gone mad. He was whistling. Remo liked to whistle occasionally while working. Not familiar tunes, but the rhythms of his body to make everything more harmonious. One of the problems with three people was that they had difficulty moving in unison. So when he caught the first knifer's wrist, he had to make a little adjustment to swing him around like a throwhammer. The stroke was good, accelerating as he brought the first man's feet into the second man's eyes, and then around again to catch the third in the stomach. Precisely in the middle.
The first knifer was good for the following screen of pistol wielders, except that his feet tended to wear out from impact. Remo was through the second screen, and up the walls toward the snipers, before Kathy had a chance to scream in delight. The snipers were duly surprised when their scopes showed the faces too close up, and then showed nothing because eyes whose accompanying brains had been turned to jelly tended not to focus all that well.
Colonel Ivanovich had caught most of it with his microphone. Every crushing death blow had sounded like an explosion before Furtseva's last line had a chance to throw grenades. The commander was running upstairs toward the action while Ivanovich was ordering the cameraman to pack, and everyone else to get out of there immediately.
The commander stopped his grenade throwers from finishing the man because he wanted him to himself. He lunged at the thin American, showing his teeth.
Remo saw the man drive toward him with his mouth open. The man obviously wanted to help, and Remo let him. He offered his throat momentarily, let the man pass, and then caught the back of the man's neck with his chin, driving a neck vertebra out through the man's mouth.
The man had obviously been trying to bite his throat. Chiun had told him that there would be a time when someone would be that foolish.
Remo never understood why anyone would expose himself like that. Chiun had explained that usually people that stupid were white. The man had been white. Remo made sure the grenades did not go off by implanting them through the mouths of the throwers into the cushions of the upper intestines. Then he went on through the building, looking for anyone who knew something about the fluorocarbon beam.
Outside, Kathleen O'Donnell was giddy. "I love you, Remo," she cried. "I love you."
Ivan Ivanovich ran past the laughing woman with his cameramen and note-taker. He thought for a moment that he should seize her, but he was sure from the horrible force of the noise coming from inside the building that he would not be able to get out of Hanoi alive if he laid a hand on her.
And he was going to get out of Hanoi alive. He paused only to make sure of the damage done by the lone American. The entire blood-face team had been dispatched like so much old cabbage. And according to Hanoi security, the American had gone on a killing spree and was still killing as of the phone call from the airport.
Colonel Ivanovich had caused a grave international incident, strained relations between two close allies, and, by his failure to stop the American, had launched a plague upon a capital city. Even now every policeman was looking for the killer, afraid to find him. What had the colonel done?
By the time Ivanovich and his photographers and notetakers reached Moscow, a formal message of complaint and the mounting damages had reached the halls of the Kremlin.
Alexei Zemyatin heard them all, and said when he received the trembling Colonel Ivanovich.
"Good. At least something has finally gone as planned."
Chapter 15
The man had used another human being like a whip. Everyone saw it.
"He used him like a whip," said someone in the darkness.
"No," said someone else.
"Slow it down. You'll see. He used him like a whip. I swear."
The picture stopped on the screen, and whirred back. "Who is it? Who is that man? Was this trick photography?"
The picture started again. A single man advancing into three. The three had knives. The single man had no weapon.
The pictures themselves seemed extraordinarily smooth. Everyone in the audience had seen pictures like that. If a top athlete were going to perform internationally, the coaches were allowed to use one very valuable half-hour of that film. It was for shooting at ten times the number of frames per second of ordinary motion pictures. While it couldn't stop a bullet, it could catch the bullet's blur going across a screen.
"Do I have to watch again?" A voice in the darkness.
"Either all watch this or we watch our cities being destroyed, our farms becoming barren, and a slaughter that none of us who live benefiting from socialism will survive." An older voice in the dark projection room.
"It is so bloody." The first voice.
"Why not soldiers? Why do we have to see these pictures? Don't we have commandos? Judo experts?" There was silence before the film was run again. The room had a certain pressure to it, as though the very air had been squeezed in. It was not easy to breathe. It smelled of fresh linoleum and old cigarettes. There were no windows, and none of the men were even sure what part of Moscow they were in, much less which building. They had been told that no one and nothing other than they were needed. They had been taken from all over the socialist bloc and brought here to watch these films.