Whui gargled his rage as the screen before him changed to a close-up of the stalled assault team. The vehicles were crippled by flattened tires and the drivers were dead in their seats. The tires and the drivers were identically impaled with glittering daggers of shattered glass.
There was movement. The back of one of the transport vehicles fell open and a pair of special-forces soldiers teetered on the tailgate. One had a foot of bloody glass protruding from his hip front and back. He collapsed to the ground, driving the glass back out by a few inches, then he began crawling with the heavy crystal trailing behind him. His companion was still on the tailgate, pincushioned with shorter daggers of glass that he was yanking out angrily. He never should have removed the one in his thigh. Blood started gushing down his leg by the pint. Seconds later, he collapsed from the tailgate and he didn’t get up again.
Sheldon Jahn watched the same show, but his view was better, watching it from the cameras mounted on the outside of the building. He had also seen the perpetrators of the killings. Well, maybe they had killed the Chinese soldiers. But how had they done it?
Who were these two? An old man in an outfit so flamboyant even Sheldon wouldn’t wear it onstage—except maybe at the Hollywood film awards. Anyway, they weren’t going to get past the internal security systems.
“Hi, guys.” Remo waved at the knot of gun-toting men in gas masks. The gas masks waited until Remo and Chiun let the door close behind them, then they dropped their grenades. Even as the metal cylinders toppled to the ground, Chiun and Remo filled their lungs with clean air and stopped breathing. The grenades popped and clouded the room with grayish gas.
Remo allowed the tiniest taste of the gas to enter his nose. Familiar, deadly, but only if he inhaled the stuff. It wasn’t going to eat at his exposed skin. Chiun made the same determination and they stepped through the clouds, removing the gas masks from the surprised guards. There were gasps and cries. Only one of them had the forethought to clamp his own nostrils shut and run for the exit. Chiun slipped in front and raised his flat hand. The runner slammed into the hand, which felt like an iron plate bolted to a concrete slab. His chest was compressed and the air forced from his lungs, which left him gasping involuntarily on the floor, and dying alongside his comrades.
Remo was tapping his chin and looking at a sign on the wall. It was in Chinese, so he made nothing of it. Chiun glared at him and they left the noxious corridor for the cleaner air in the next hallway. When it was safe to breathe again, Remo said, “I think we go this way.”
“It is the only way one may go,” Chiun pointed out, “and the sign merely informed one to not smoke on the premises of the ministry.”
Remo shrugged. “Guess the bunch back there couldn’t read Chinese, either.”
Sheldon Jahn was getting worried for the first time since becoming governor of Hong Kong. There were two unarmed men breaching his security. Who were they? One of them looked American and spoke American English. The other one spoke English, too, but with an Asian accent. A joint Chinese-U.S. special assault team of some kind?
There was a blip of noise and blur of motion when the pair walked directly beneath the security camera, hidden in the wall on the ground floor. Sheldon had a sick feeling in his stomach as he rewound the digital video feed and played the blip again. Then he slowed it. The digital recording wasn’t good, but it was good enough.
At l/64th speed he saw the young American turn to the camera, wave his hand and say, “Nobody’s going to be saving your life tonight, doofus.”
“Why must you taunt? Does it inflate your pride, like the child who bullies all other children in the village square?”
“Just trying to put a little bit of play into my day,” Remo said.
“Play? My comparison to the young bully holds true.”
“Why does killing people have to be serious all the time?” Remo asked. “Why not brighten things up with a little good-natured kidding?”
“This has nothing to do with our discussion on the plane, I hope. If so, you misunderstood magnificently.”
The way to the top floor required passing through the lower-level workspace where twenty desks sat abandoned, and the doors on the far side parted swiftly. A two-man crew spun out a portable, wheeled blast shield and another man standing inside poked his gun through the narrow turret. The barrel was too big for a gun, too small to shoot a grenade.
“Look, it’s the rocket man,” Remo said.
With a flash of flame, a tiny missile shot out and zeroed in on Remo. Watching it travel in the direction of his chest, he could tell what it was. Not heat-seeking. It didn’t waver with the lightning-fast adjustments a computer would make as it sniffed out body warmth. It did waver more slowly. It would be following the aim of the shooter, who had a red laser dot on Remo’s chest.
Remo stepped aside when the rocket was less than a yard from his chest, and he snatched the thing out of the air. It was the size of a spring roll and wiggled in his hand like an electric eel. He showed Chiun the flaring white flame shooting from its backside. “Rocket Man. Get it?”
“No.”
Another tiny jet flared to life and the next little rocket sped at Chiun. He stepped aside at the correct moment and allowed the rocket to crack into the wall with a sharp explosion. Remo’s rocket used up its propellant, and he held it in his fingers and tossed it across the room. It made a satisfying hollow-tube noise as it neatly entered the gun barrel from which it came, just as the next rocket was flaring to life, and they detonated against each other with force that blew the barrel open. The gunner’s transparent mask was torn off and his face with it.
“Must you always throw things?” Chiun said. “You looked like a lager-quaffing British pub patron hurling darts for amusement. I should have known better than to train an unreformed gun-toter.”
“It’s not like I’m using a weapon.” Remo grabbed the pair of cart-pushers and sent them flying into nearby walls, where they flattened and stuck like swatted flies. “It is precisely as if you are using a weapon.”
“What I mean is, I do not have to use a weapon. I didn’t have to use the little missile back there. I could have just as easily gone in and poked his lights out. You know it and I know it.”
“Why did you not do so?”
Remo thought about it. They were in the elevator that had disgorged the rocket-firing man. It appeared to be the only way up short of scaling the walls. Remo pushed the button for the top floor and they ascended.
“Their captain is not so fantastic or he would have thought to turn this thing off.”
“Answer the question. Why did you throw the tiny missile?”
“It just seemed like an interesting thing to do, I guess.”
“You did it for the novelty of the experience?”
Remo nodded. “Yeah. What’s wrong with that?”
“What is wrong with adhering to the noble tradition in which you are trained?” Chiun shot back.
“I do.”
“You don’t.”
“I usually do.”
“You often don’t.”
“So what?”
The elevator stopped between floors and Remo wordlessly jumped up, punched away the emergency hatch in the ceiling and followed it out into the darkness of the shaft. He landed on the roof, and Chiun emerged beside him. They started up the ladder rungs bolted into the wall. They were twenty feet above the elevator when Remo felt the tiny trickle of static in his fingers. He pushed away, from the rungs as the electric charge grew to levels fatal to humans. He was now hanging by the elevator’s safety chain, and when he looked between his feet, Chiun was also gripping the chain and looking perturbed.