Remo willed his essence tighter. He would never understand the physics of what he was attempting to do, any more than he comprehended the natural laws he bent every time he sent a forefinger through plate steel or saw as clearly as a cat in absolute darkness.
When he felt his mass to be nearly negligible, he allowed his shuttered ears to open. The wind was no longer a roar. Remo smiled. He was no longer dropping like a stone. But he was still dropping. He reached out to feel the wind, his fingers touching the palpable updrafts of heat rising from the desert floor. He was at one with those updrafts. They were his friends. He would ride them to a gentle landing on the ground far below. Remo opened his eyes.
He saw the sand. It was inches from his face. His smile broke into an open-mouthed shout. He never got any sound out because his mouth was suddenly full of sand, and his neck snapped back with a dry crack.
And in the black heart of the universe, angry red eyes snapped awake and a cruel mouth opened in howling rage.
Retired Master Sergeant Jim Concannon had been too young for World War II. By the time Vietnam came around, he had a paunch, although during his long Army career he had served in Pleiku and Da Nang.
But for the Korean conflict, Jim Concannon was just right. It was in Korea that then-Private Jim Concannon learned to fight, to survive, and to witness horror without being psychologically incapacitated by it.
But here, in peacetime, out in the Yuma Desert, as Bronzini's technical adviser watched more than five hundred young airmen fall to their death, he stood, his mouth agape, for once in his life paralyzed into inaction.
When the final body, which took an agonizingly long time to land, finally did strike, retired Master Sergeant Jim Concannon pulled the binoculars from his staring eyes and turned to Fourth A. D. Nintendo Toshiba.
Toshiba was smiling. It was a sick, twisted smile. Concannon jumped the Japanese.
Toshiba went down under his pummeling fists. Concannon took him by the throat and tried to squeeze his eyes out of his head. Then one of the crewmen in desert utilities came up from behind and knocked him flat with the butt of his AK-47.
Concannon was dimly aware of his being lugged into a waiting APC and unceremoniously dumped in back. His ribs hurt. As the APC started off, he understood why. He had been thrown onto a stack of boxes.
Concannon played dead while he slowly walked his fingers to the side of a crate. It smelled faintly of lettuce. A lettuce crate. He wormed one hand into the spaces between the rough slats and touched something smooth and nonmetallic. He pulled the object out and opened his eyes a crack.
Jim Concannon saw that he had his hands on a Chinese stick grenade. A Type 67. He suppressed a pleased smile. In Korea, he used to carry a box of grenades during patrols. He was laughed at for lugging all that weight. Until one day, outside of Inchon, when his unit was ambushed by a Red Chinese patrol. As his buddies were mowed down, Jim Concannon wrenched open the box and began pulling pins and tossing grenades in every direction. There was no science to what he did. He just let fly.
When the forest had fallen silent, Jim Concannon got up off his stomach. On all sides, there were Red Chinese corpses-corpses dressed much like the two lines of soldiers sitting in the back of the rolling APC nearly forty years later and half a world away.
Jim Concannon had saved his patrol that day back in 1953. He knew he could not save those who died on this day, but he could avenge them.
One by one he slipped stick grenades from the crate. When he had five, he unscrewed the blade caps at the ends, exposing the pull cords. He yanked the caps, igniting the time-delay fuses. Then he made his move. He rolled suddenly, and hurled the grenades.
There is no place to run in a sealed APC. Not that the Japanese soldiers didn't try. They saw the bouncing sticks and leapt to their feet, bumping helmets and tripping over one another's feet and suddenly-forgotten rifles in a desperate effort to escape.
But there was no escape. One by one, the grenades detonated, and although only three exploded-which was par for the Type 67 stick grenade-they rendered the human cargo of the APC unrecognizable.
Chapter 15
They came for Arnold Ziffel as he was having his morning coffee.
Arnold Ziffel always knew they would come. Sometimes they were Russian and sometimes they were Cuban. Other times they were black or Asian or even Mexican. The face of the enemy that coveted the Land of the Free continually changed in Arnold Ziffel's mind.
But Arnold Ziffel's resolve would never change, he vowed. That was why he had laid away a three-month food supply in his garage. That was why he kept his AR-15 assault rifle fully loaded at all times. He was not going down without a fight. The bumper sticker attached to the back of his pickup truck summed up Arnold Ziffel's philosophy perfectly: "My wife, yes. My dog, maybe. My gun, never!"
When they came, they didn't want Mrs. Arnold Ziffel. They kicked his dog, Rusty, out the front door and locked him out. They also locked out Arnold Ziffel's AR-15. It was in the back of his pickup.
"What do you want?" Arnold sputtered, rising from his breakfast nook as three soldiers prodded his wife into the room at the point of fixed bayonets.
"Christmas tree!" one of them screeched. "Where is?"
"My tree?" Arnold blurted. "You want my Christmas tree?"
"Where tree?"
"For God's sake, Arnold," Mrs. Ziffel said shrilly. "Tell them!"
Arnold Ziffel decided that he could live with handing' up his Christmas tree.
"In the next room," he said.
"You show!" the leader demanded. He was Asian. As he pulled Arnold into the den, he recognized their People's Liberation Army uniforms. He was a regular reader of Soldier of Fortune magazine. The funny thing was, these folks didn't look Chinese at all.
"Here it is," Arnold said, waving to a stunted Scotch pine growing in a tree box. It was tastefully decorated with alternating red and silver ornaments.
"Stand by tree!" the Chinese soldier said.
"Come on, Helen," Arnold said, taking his wife by the arm.
"What can they want?" Helen Ziffel whispered.
"Shhh." Arnold put his arm around his wife's thin shoulders. He felt her tremble. Suddenly, despite her faded pink housecoat and rat's-nest hair, she seemed more precious to him than his beloved AR-15. He was about to tell her so when the leader shouted something in a foreign tongue and into the den came other soldiers, lugging camera equipment and lights. They set up the lights in opposite corners of the den and turned them on. They hurt Arnold's eyes. Then the camera was put into position, and Mrs. Ziffel said something that sent a wave of relief through Arnold's wobbly legs. "Arnold. These must be the movie people."
"Is that true?" Arnold stammered. "Are you with the movie they're shooting?"
"Yes, yes," the leader said distractedly. He conferred with a cameraman. They were holding up a pocket device and trying to read the meter. It looked exactly like the light meter that came with Arnold's thirty-five-millimeter Nishitsu Autofocus.
"Arnold, do you suppose we're going to be in the movie?" Helen Ziffel wondered.
"I'll ask. Hey, friend, are you going to shoot us?" The leader turned, his eyes cold black opals.
"Yes, we shoot you soon. Wait, prease."
"Did you hear that?" Arnold told his wife excitedly. "We're going to be in a Bronzini movie." Arnold Ziffel had seen all the Grundy's twice, once for the story and then a second time to count the technical mistakes.
Then the cameraman got behind his camera and the leader called out to the Ziffels.