At two minutes to eleven, the patrolman again turned the corner at the end of the street. He saw the truck still parked there. He had his ticket pad open as he walked down the block toward it.
As he drew near the truck, the back doors of the vehicle swung open wide. Two heavy metal ramps clanged out of the truck onto the street. The cop stopped. It couldn't be.
He blinked and looked again.
It was.
An Army tank, painted olive drab, chugged down the steel ramps. The ramps buckled under the weight of the tank, but the war machine reached the pavement in one piece. It totaled a Volkswagen in the parking spot behind the truck, then made a U-turn and headed toward City Hall.
The policeman wondered what to do. Leadership training hadn't covered tanks. Maybe he should call headquarters. On the other hand, maybe it was a tank for a parade. But if they were going to have a parade, they should have told him about it.
Leadership required that. It wasn't Armed Forces Day. It wasn't even Memorial Day. But who the hell knew? Everybody had parades nowadays. The Germans and the Italians and the Irish and the Puerto Ricans. Who knew? Maybe it was the annual parade of the Palestine Liberation Organization. They might feature tanks. He decided he would not embarrass himself by calling headquarters and appearing dumb. He would wait until he saw what happened. He put his ticket book away and walked slowly after the tank as it lumbered down the middle of the block.
It turned the corner into the street fronting City Hall.
The driver of a white diesel Oldsmobile saw it coming at him and drove up on the curb, smashing into a parking meter to avoid getting hit. When the car's engine died, the driver realized it was the first time in weeks that his ears hadn't hurt from the motor's noise.
The driver shook a fist at the tank. He was about to charge it and scream at the driver when he realized the driver wouldn't or couldn't hear him. He continued shaking his fist. He wondered what else he could do to vent his anger, when he saw the turret of the tank open and a dark-faced man with a swoop of thick black hair over his forehead stick his head out. He was carrying guns in both hands. The Oldsmobile driver decided not to argue with the guns. The eyes of the man in the tank turret were darting little pinpoints, flashing as he looked from side to side.
The policeman who had been trailing the tank reached the corner just as the tank turned in the middle of the street so that it was facing City Hall.
The tank stood still but its motor kept chugging. The Oldsmobile driver realized that the tank idled more quietly than his diesel did.
"Hey," the cop called. "Hey, you in the tank." He had decided that this was no parade, and even if it was, the assembly spot sure wasn't the middle of the street in front of City Hall. The man in the top of the tank turned toward him.
"Hey, you can't park there," the cop yelled at Mark Tolan.
"No?" said Tolan. The cop drew his ticket book from his right hip. Tolan shot him in the left side of the chest.
Inside City Hall, Remo and Chiun were in the mayor's office with Rocco Nobile, who was hanging his jacket on the old-fashioned coat rack in the corner.
They all heard the noise out front and went to the window. As they looked out through the large double panes of glass, they saw the cannon on the front of the tank lift up, until it was pointing at them like a long accusing finger. On top of the tank, half in half out, Remo recognized the looney who hated ping pong. Behind him, in the street, was a dead policeman. Remo gritted his teeth, then turned to Chiun, but Chiun was not there. As Remo continued turning, he saw Chiun race across the room, dragging Mayor Nobile to the floor.
"Down, Remo," called Chiun and Remo hit the floor just as an artillery shell slammed into the side of the building just below the picture window. Brick and mortar flew into the room, dropping on Remo's body. A foot-wide hole opened in the front of the building. The glass above Remo trembled and cracked, and glass shards fell onto his body.
"To the door," Chiun hissed.
Remo moved toward the big oaken doors. Behind him he could hear the faint sound of another shell before it slammed into the wall of the building with an ear-splitting crash.
He pulled open the door and Chiun dragged Rocco Nobile out of the office. Secretaries were scattering. Remo closed the oaken doors and turned to Chiun.
"Get him out of here, Chiun," said Remo.
"Where are you going?"
"After those nuts," Remo said. "You get to the parking lot and get him out of here."
Chiun nodded. Remo moved out into the marble-floored hallway. Behind him he heard another shell rip the front of the building. It had been years since he had heard tank shells exploding around him.
When he got to the front steps of the building, the tank was still firing away at the mayor's office. Remo saw that the hard-faced man had gone from the tank turret and when he got outside, he saw the man, waving two guns, running down the block on the left side of the building.
That would take him to the parking lot, Remo realized. That could have been the plan all along. To drive the mayor out of his office by tank and then pick him off with a bullet in the parking lot.
Remo followed the man. As he passed under the open windows of the mayor's second floor office, another shell exploded above him and rocks and debris fell down toward his body. He dodged the flying rocks and got to the sidewalk just in time to see the hard-faced Mark Tolan climb the fence into the parking lot.
Remo raced after him.
Chiun led the mayor down the back steps of the city hall building to the parking lot.
Before he stepped outside, he looked carefully both ways. No one was in the lot except the parking attendant with the rum nose and plaid shirt, who was sitting in a city car, reading Playboy magazine.
Chiun nodded to Nobile and they walked quickly toward the mayor's car.
Just as Chiun opened the door, he heard a voice behind them,
"Hey, Chinkie, that's as far as you go."
He turned to see the brooding dark-haired man staring at them. He had a pistol in each hand. Chiun moved in front of the mayor and hissed to him softly: "Into the car and down."
Nobile moved back from Chiun and into the car, trying to fit himself onto the floor on the passenger's side. His hand reached up to unlock the door, and he pulled the handle so that the door was open, in case he had to roll through it.
"That won't do any good," Mark Tolan said to Chiun. He had a smile on his face, a twisted smile that involved only his mouth. His eyes remained cold. "I'll shoot right through you to get to him."
"Have to shoot through me first," said a voice from behind Tolan.
Tolan wheeled just as Remo lightly vaulted the low cyclone fencing which surrounded the parking lot. He was ten feet from Tolan.
"Yeah," Tolan said. He savored the moment. Three people to kill and more maybe might come. Yeah, it was going to be a good day. A good day for dying.
"Well, well, well," he said. "If it ain't the other ping pong player."
"Are you The Eraser?" Remo asked.
"No. I'm The Exterminator."
"Cute," said Remo. "Any other fancy names?"
"The two guys you killed. That was The Lizzard and The Baker."
"Then who the hell's The Eraser?" Remo demanded.
"In the tank," Tolan said. "What's your name? Ping Pong?"
Remo looked across the ten feet of distance and smiled and his smile was colder and more heartless than Tolan's.
"Me?" Remo intoned the words softly. "I am created Shiva, the Destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds. You don't know what that means, do you?"
"No," said Tolan.
"It means you're done, axe-face."
They should have been in the parking lot by now, Sam Gregory realized, so he put his tank into "drive" and began to chug forward, around the corner back toward the lot, where he was supposed to pick up The Exterminator. He heard a few cartridges pinging off the heavy armor of the tank and smiled. Almost all done.