"I have no fear."
"Your objective is the Blot."
"It is France's."
"It is already France's. Technically we own fiftytwo percent. Or our unfortunate banks do."
"Then I will destroy it."
"We can accomplish that with an atomic bomb, and may we do so at a later point as a lesson to others who would inflict their inferior culture upon us."
Then they handed him a pair of goggles with the lenses crisscrossed by impenetrable black electrical tape.
"What is this for?"
"To protect your eyes."
"From what?"
"The terror of the Blot," they told him solemnly, and Colonel Bavard felt a slow chill creep up his stiff Gallic spine.
"But how will I lead if I am blind?"
"We will guide you by radio from a hovering command helicopter."
"What about my men?"
"They, too, will be similarly goggled."
"That is fine, but how will they follow me?"
His commander allowed himself a slow smile. "You have hit upon the very reason why you have been chosen for this mission, mon Colonel."
And his commander handed Colonel Bavard a blue wedge of malodorous Roquefort.
"Excuse me," Colonel Bavard said, squeezing his cheeks together. Too late. The room was perfumed with the toil of his sensitive intestines.
"Bon appetit!" said his commander, clapping a respirator over his lower face.
WHEN HE EXPLAINED the mission to his men, Colonel Bavard told them it had an extremely low pucker factor.
In military parlance the world over, this meant that the mission was a low-danger one. The pucker factor being the degree to which the anal sphincter contracted with fear under combat conditions.
Normally low-pucker-factor missions were the most welcome.
Not in Colonel Bavard's unit of the French Foreign Legion. The higher the pucker factor, the easier the breathing.
"How low?" asked a lowly private during the premission briefing.
"The lowest possible."
The men looked stricken. Some, in anticipation of their immediate fate, stopped inhaling. Their red berets seemed almost to deflate in resignation.
"We expect to encounter poison gases?" a sergeant asked, unable to keep the hope out of his voice.
"No poison gases are expected."
"Should we not take our gas masks along just in case?" a private suggested eagerly.
"Gas masks are forbidden," Colonel Bavard said sternly. Some of his men, normally brave to a fault, actually quailed.
"You will don these." And he began handing out the taped goggles that sealed the eyes from bright lights.
The men examined the goggles doubtfully.
"If we are blind, how can we follow you into battle, mon Colonel?"
And to their utter horror, their colonel undid the flap of his blouse pocket and flung away the all-important roll of gas-absorbing charcoal tablets that Colonel Jean-Guy Bavard was never without.
"By your proud French noses," he told them.
WHEN THEY LEARNED that they were to assault Euro Beasley in an armored personnel carrier, the men under the command of Colonel Bavard almost deserted.
"Are you mice or are you Frenchmen?" Colonel Bavard demanded, chewing great gulps of cheese as the rear APT door gaped open. It was an AMX/10P APC, its fourteen tons looking like five due to the light desert camouflage streaking, and capable of conveying eleven men into battle.
"I will drive!" a chorus of voices volunteered.
"I will drive," said Colonel Bavard, to the relief of his men.
He sent the APC rolling through the French countryside of Averoigne, humming "La Marseillaise." In the back his men sang an old legion song. It covered the unsettlingly rude noises coming from the driver's compartment.
They barreled through the gates of Euro Beasley unchallenged, accelerated up Main Street, U.S.A., toward the redoubt itself. Still, no one challenged them.
"Goggles on!" Colonel Bavard cried when the drawbridge over the moat came into view. Bavard wore his own goggles high on his forehead and snapped them down. Holding the wheel steady, he bore down on the accelerator.
The asphalt under his wheels hummed. Then the sound became the rattle of rubber over wooden planking. Then a concrete zimming.
The AMX/10P slewed and pitched in response to the sudden pumping of the brakes. Grabbing up his MAT submachine gun, Colonel Bavard threw open the door.
"Out! Out! Out!"
The men tumbled out in confusion, utterly blind.
"This way, men of the legion," Colonel Bavard shouted.
There was a moment of indecision before the rude blatt his men knew too well cut the close air. They pivoted toward it. And when the awful odor found their nostrils, they charged toward it.
They charged, as history later recorded, toward disaster.
In his earpiece Colonel Bavard listened to the guidance of the spotters in the hovering Gazelle.
"You are seeking a niche directly north of the drawbridge," the control voice informed him.
"Oui!"
"In the niche there will be stairs."
"Oui."
"The stairs lead to Utilicanard."
"For France and the legion!" Colonel Bavard cried, trailing a coil of cheesy odor from his backside.
When his combat boots rattled onto the top step of an aluminium spiral staircase, Colonel Jean-Guy Bavard paused heroically. He might have been posing for a recruitment poster.
And despite the blackout goggles covering his eyes, his entire world turned scarlet.
Later those who survived the massacre at Euro Beasley disagreed as to the exact hue that had brought about their downfall. Some said the color was scarlet, others crimson, still others swore that vermilion was the color of the horror.
For his part Colonel Jean-Guy Bavard saw red. It burned through the black electrical tape like laser light. It stabbed his retina with the force of a blow. His brain, receiving input from his eyes, filled with fire.
A great rage exploded in Colonel Bavard's breast. It was pure anger at the cruel fate that had made him, at middle age, wifeless, childless and without any family but for the Foreign Legion. In that instant, he hated the Foreign Legion and all it represented. Hated the very unit that had enabled him to hide from the more discriminating world that could not abide him.
Screaming his red fury, Colonel Bavard pivoted, firing from the hip.
He never heard the first 9 mm round leave the muzzle. He could not. His thick, rangy body was busy being whittled to kindling by the combined firepower of his men, who also saw the red light clearly, although some saw crimson, some scarlet and others vermilion.
None of them saw Colonel Bavard. But they smelled him, and years of pent-up anger came pouring out of their mouths in the form of colorful curses and out of their rifles in the form of hot steel jacketed rounds.
Colonel Jean-Guy Bavard never knew what hit him. He went tumbling down the spiral aluminum staircase, shedding body parts that had been chopped from him by legion bullets,
In the Sorcerer's Chateau the remaining legionnaires, still seeing red, turned their weapons on one another, bespeaking minor faults, imagined slights and other infractions unspoken until the blood-red light of hell brought them out.
And under the castle, deep in the bowels of Utilicanard, Chief Concepteer Rod Cheatwood took his finger off the button labeled Optired.
"I can't keep this up forever," he muttered worriedly. "I'm running out of power."
Chapter 18
Remo was dreaming of his mother before he awoke in the hospital bed.
He had never known his mother. But an apparition had materialized before him months ago, and he had recognized the face. Some buried glimmering of memory told him it was his mother. She had told him to seek out his father, but not who his father was.
In the dream his mother was trying to tell him something, but Remo couldn't hear her words. Her pale mouth moved, formed shapes and vowels, and as Remo strained to catch the fragmentary sounds, he awoke to bright light.