When the hand came away, the door was as fixed to its frame as if it had been welded at lock and hinges.
Turning, the Master of Sinanju glided down the corridor. One threat had been averted. There was still Beasley, a much lesser problem. He would not be difficult to find and conquer.
Then, from beyond the thick walls of Fortress Folcroft came the concerted roar of motorboats and the beginning of gunfire.
"What is this!" Chiun squeaked. "What is this?"
Going to a window, he looked out with shocked eyes. He saw the boats converging as before, and the men in black with their loud weapons jump off to land in the mud of the bay.
"The gold!" he shrieked, and flung himself toward the stairwell like a moth on fire.
This time he would show no mercy to those who vexed him so.
Chapter 20
Warlord Mahout Feroze Anin was a crafty man. Everyone knew that. During the days before the UN had come to Stomique, he had scammed his way up from simple gunrunning to control of lower Stomique. When UN relief supplies began pouring in, his ragtag militia hijacked the food, stockpiling some and selling the rest back to various relief agencies.
The hungrier the Stomique people became, the more free food poured in. The more food that came ashore, the richer Warlord Anin became.
It was amazing how long it went on before the international community noticed that Warlord Mahout Feroze Anin had managed to become the indirect recipient of one fifth of all charitable contributions to the various United Nations relief funds.
Anin showed his craft by playing the US. off the UNOSOM and both off the international press until everybody lost and only Mahout Feroze Anin really won.
In the days after the UN-US. pullout, he consolidated his control over the countryside, enforcing his will by political assassination and starving those who didn't support him.
He deserved to die. Winston Smith was happy as a pig in shit to be the one to blast him to the boneyard.
If the guy would just stop bobbing and weaving.
Once he'd gotten his bearings, Smith had found his way to Anin's French colonial villa. Or his mistress's villa, according to Intelligence reports.
Anin did have a wife. She lived in Canada, where Anin had supposedly sent her to be safe from his political enemies. In truth, she was fat and over forty and lived off the largess of the Canadian dole while Anin happily porked a vast array of mistresses who opened themselves to him because he filled their bellies with pilfered UN-supplied relief food.
When Winston Smith got up into a sniper position in the crown of a banyan tree, he sighted Anin through the lighted window. The LED distance reader called it less than one hundred meters. It looked as if it was going to be a piece of cake.
Anin's head appeared almost immediately.
Smith brought the BEM weapon up and whispered, "Arm one."
"Louder," requested the gun.
"Arm one," Smith barked into the sight microphone.
"Arm one," the weapon replied.
That gave him five minutes. Plenty of time for a clean head shot.
Except Anin kept bobbing in and out of view.
At first Smith thought he might be doing push-ups. But as Anin kept going at it, his face darkened and the sweat crawled off his balding brown forehead. Then he started going faster.
Smith got it then.
"Damn."
Winston Smith debated the ethics of shooting a man when he was doing the wild thing. Should he wait? Or should he nail Anin while the nailing was good?
While he was giving it thought, the gun disarmed itself.
"Damn you," he said.
"Damn you," said the BEM gun.
Smith said, "Arm one."
"Arm one" came the reply.
He lined up on the window and used the night scope again. The laser would give him away. What kind of moron put a laser targeter and a night scope on the same piece of equipment anyway?
Warlord Anin seemed to be coming to the end of his exercise. He stopped, arms trembling, face flushed, eyes closing.
A woman's shriek of pleasure pierced the damp African night air.
It was a perfect head shot. So Winston Smith took it.
The trigger came back smoothly. He heard a click, and the gun said, "Congratulations. You have executed a perfect kill. Mission over. Return to pickup zone, please."
"What the fuck," Smith blurted.
"What the fuck," the BEM gun dutifully repeated.
Smith fired again.
The gun told him, "Twelve-point demotion for unnecessary fire. Return to pickup zone, please."
"Why don't you fire?"
"Antifiring interlock is armed," said the gun.
"Well, tell me how to disarm it!"
"See manual."
"My ass is hanging out a fucking tree! I don't have time for any goat-fuck manual!"
The gun said nothing, so Winston whacked it with his hand.
"Arm one."
"Arm one."
He fired a test shot at the low-hanging moon. Nothing happened.
Dragging the clips out one by one, he thumbed out rounds, holding them up to the moonlight. "Nothing wrong with these rounds. What the fuck!"
His shout was heard by Warlord Mahout Feroze Anin, who came to the window, buck naked except for a Dragunov sniper rifle.
Anin used it to methodically chop the branches surrounding Smith's perch to pieces.
Smith dropped to the ground and ran for his life, swearing softly but often.
The unwieldy gun swore back with amiable vehemence.
Chapter 21
Wayne Tardo had point. He was ready for armed IRS agents, heavily armed drug traffickers-ready for anything.
Except for what he did encounter.
It flew across the landscaped grounds of Folcroft Sanitarium like a vampiric butterfly. Face fierce, shrieking in fury or agony or God knew what, it tore directly at him on billowing black-and-orange wings.
It was not armed, so Wayne Tardo hesitated. The hesitation was brief and fatal.
The DEA agents bringing up the rear saw it all. So did the IRS agents who had flocked to the Folcroft windows, alerted by the roar of the speedboats and the battle cries of the DEA agents.
Everyone saw the same thing, and no one believed their staring eyes.
A monarch butterfly flew screaming at Wayne Tardo. Its shriek of fury froze the DEA agent in midstride. He had his Uzi up. He started to drop it into line. He looked as if he were moving in slow motion. Or perhaps it was only an illusion created by the headlong fury of the butterfly creature with the bald human head.
Its great wings suddenly spread, and from the tips great yellow bird claws seemed to sprout. It left the ground with a flutter of fabric like a boat sail cracking in a high wind.
The butterfly seemed to pass over Wayne Tardo's head. Its shadow fell across the paralyzed DEA agent's body. Its great wings obscured him only a moment, no more.
But when it passed beyond him, Wayne Tardo was gone.
That was what their slow eyes and brains told them when the onlookers saw the spot where Wayne Tardo had stood. The butterfly alighted a short distance beyond the spot and threw up his winged arms in the faces of the other agents of the DEA. One arm swept back, like a stage magician indicating a feat of legerdemain.
On the spot where the butterfly with the human head pointed, Wayne Tardo began to reappear. One limb at a time. A leg fell first. Then his head. It bounced and bounded toward the water.
By far the loudest sound came when Tardo's barrel-chested trunk went splat on the grass, ejecting fountains of blood from all five stumps.
The butterfly let out another shriek, this one articulate. "Behold the fate of those who defile this fortress!"
At first the DEA agents didn't quite know what to make of this. They stood wide-eyed and riveted in their heavy mud-caked boots.