Technically, flesh never touched hot ball. Instead, Remo drove a cushion of compressed air ahead of his fast-moving hands. The balls struck the air pillows, made hard as steel by the blinding speed of his hands, and rebounded off so that he felt their heat but not their impact.
Remo's redirection technique was good, but the return arc was off. Both attackers went down after each took a ball in the top of his head. They might not wake up for another day or three. But they would wake up.
Until he had a handle on what the hell was really going on, Remo didn't feel like taking anyone out permanently.
"Let's address the troops," he told Chiun.
As they approached, the still-standing Louisiana Costume Zouaves were busily ramming lead balls down their musket barrels. It looked like hard work. Most were sweating.
One soldier had the ramrod jammed down the gun barrel and set the muzzle against an oak tree. He kept trying to force the musket into the tree so the ramrod would go in. Instead, the ramrod snapped clean in two.
"I broke it," he sobbed as Remo tapped him on his blue silk shoulder.
"You won't be needing it."
"But it cost me a month's pay."
"That's the biz," said Remo, extracting the musket from the man's unresisting hand and plunging the barrel into the ground until he hit hard stone. Remo pulled the trigger, and the musket barrel split from sight to stock. Then he threw the foully smoking pieces away.
The man screamed in horror.
"It's only a rifle," Remo pointed out.
"It's my hobby."
"Let me get this straight," said Remo. "You came all the way from Louisiana to fight the Yankees because it's your freaking hobby?"
"That ain't it at all," he said. "I ain't come to fight Yanks."
"Then who?"
"I come to battle the First Virginia Recreational Foot."
"Aren't they from the South, too?"
"They are," the Zouave soldier admitted.
"Then they're on your side, aren't they?"
"Not in this sacred conflict!"
"You're siding with the North?"
"Never! My heart belongs to Dixie."
"And your brain belongs in the Smithsonian," snapped Remo. "If you're not with the North, who are you with?"
The soldier drew himself up proudly. He had to catch his tilting fez with both hands. "I came here to take a stand for palpable history."
"I don't follow."
"That is because you are trying to communicate with an idiot," said the Master of Sinanju, drifting up. "You! Cretin. What have the French to do with this outrage?"
"Nothin'. Except our uniforms are copied from a French-Algerian drill team that passed through the nation in the early 1860s. "
"Huh?" said Remo.
"It's true," the Zouave said. "At the beginning of the Civil War both sides took their uniform design from the French. Heck, it wasn't until the second year of the war that they got the uniforms standardized. Me and my troupe prefer the Zouave outfit. It kinda sets us apart from the common herd."
"Do tell," said Remo, eyeing the man's outlandish costume with a skeptical eye.
"And do tell us what lies behind this madness," said Chiun.
The Zouave soldier opened his mouth to speak. Musket fire crackled well back in the open area that was Petersburg National Battlefield.
Remo and Chiun looked west. Puffs of smoke were visible some distance away. They rose and mingled as volley after volley followed.
"What are they shooting at?" asked Remo.
"They are shooting up," Chiun decided.
Remo shaded his eyes with both hands. "Nothing's up there but news and Army helicopters."
"They are firing at the Federals perhaps," the Zouave soldier suggested.
"Could be they're firing at the press," Remo speculated.
It was impossible to tell. The choppers scattered like so many clattering, frightened birds. And the volleys kept coming.
"Maybe someone's trying to rescue those captured Union guys," said Remo. "Let's move in and see what we can see."
"What about these clowns?" said Chiun, indicating the cowed Zouave troupe.
"You wreck their muskets?"
"Better. I broke their ramrods, without which they cannot fire their foul-smelling blunderbusses."
"Fair enough. They're out of the fight for now."
"You bunch better stay out of trouble until we get back," Remo warned the others who stood about looking dejected.
The Zouaves said nothing.
Remo and Chiun entered the park.
"Wait till the press conference," the Zouave soldier shouted after them. "That's where the real battle will begin."
"Did he say press conference?" Remo asked Chiun.
"He is an idiot and speaks idiocy," scoffed the Master of Sinanju.
There were pickets set up at various points, watching the main approach, Crater Road. All wore Confederate gray with the squashed-down forage caps that Remo knew were also favored by the Union, except they wore blue versions.
The sentries were easily avoided, never suspecting that two of the most dangerous human beings on the face of the earth were slipping through their lines like drifting mist.
Remo and Chiun soon came to an open area where they saw the Crater itself.
It lay in open field, backed by a high hill. The hill was covered with grass, and the Crater, in the century or more since it had been blown in the earth, had healed over in a depressed scar of grass. It looked to be about one hundred fifty feet long, fifty feet wide and perhaps fifteen feet deep. Remo had expected something round like an impact crater from a meteor, but this was more along the lines of a gash. It was ringed by Confederate sentries, who guarded it while their comrades-in-arms methodically reloaded their muskets and pistols and poured enfilade fire into the sky.
After the helicopters had withdrawn to a respectful distance, the firing abated.
"That sure scared 'em off," a soldier chortled.
"You sure it was them?"
"I tell you, I saw the rodent's ears. Painted on the side of that contraption as big as all outdoors."
"I didn't see no rodent ears," another man grumbled.
"Maybe so, but they was there."
"They wouldn't have sent him in by helicopter. They wouldn't dare."
"Well, they don't dare send him in now. Them TV helicopters captured all the fuss on film."
"What are they talking about?" Remo asked Chiun.
"I do not know, but I aim to find out."
And tucking hands into the sleeves of his redtrimmed black kimono, the Master of Sinanju advanced upon the Confederate lines.
THE FIRST TO spy the tiny little man in black was Captain Royal Wooten Page of the Stonewall Detachment of the Virginia National Guard.
He looked harmless. He looked very harmless. Captain Page knew his Civil War history, as should a true native of Virginia, which meant he knew it very well indeed. Virginia had been the heart of the antebellum South. Richmond was the proud capital of the Confederate States of America. The Virginia theater had been the largest and most important theater in the arduous and bloody conflict. Page knew that in the early months of the war, before both sides had mustered true armies, the matter of uniform was left largely to each man. The blue and the gray of the later war years had not been established. Men went into battle wearing any old thing, uniform or not. Some wore turbans and fezzes. A few even marched off in their kilts.
Captain Page, who had appropriated a Confederate slouch hat to replace his National Guard helmet, did not quite recognize the uniform of the approaching man. It was not exactly in the Zouave style, which both sides had affected for a time. Nor was it a Garibaldi Guard uniform. But there was one thing Page did recognize. The red piping.
When the little man drew near, Page asked, "Artillery, sub?"