Mistaking Chiun for a pushover, the soldier had dropped his submachine gun and pulled his combat knife out. It was a bad error in judgment. Chiun might have put him down with a quick blow otherwise, but the soldier gave him an irresistible opportunity.
"We don't have all day," Remo called over as the Master of Sinanju deflected a knife thrust and stripped the soldier's forearm skin on the return.
The soldier started to notice he was losing strips of hide. But he was game. He shifted hands. Chiun obligingly shifted hands, too.
The rest was a forgone conclusion. It was only one knife against ten fingernails.
Chiun extended a deadly sharp fingernail and parried every blow. The clash of tempered steel and flexible nail sounded like metal on horn. The thin, bamboolike nail gave just enough not to break.
The blade gave not at all. That was its undoing.
In the middle of a flurry of parries, the blade just broke.
The soldier heard the brittle snap and mistook the sound for imminent victory.
Grinning, he took a step back, preparing to plunge the blade into the old Korean's thin chest.
Then he noticed his blade was not sticking out from the handle anymore. A comical expression crossed his face. He looked down the way a man looks down when he hears the clink of a quarter falling out of his pocket.
The Master of Sinanju floated into the opening and inserted his fingernail directly into the man's navel.
Chiun turned his hand like a key.
The soldier's feet left the ground in his torment. He screamed and wailed, and as Remo stood off to one side with his arms folded, tapping a foot impatiently, the Master of Sinanju looked over his shoulder to see that Remo was paying attention.
Remo made a snap-it-up motion.
And Chiun turned the key the other way.
If right was pain, then left was oblivion. The soldier made a disordered pile of khaki at the Master of Sinanju's feet.
Padding back, Chiun made a show of displaying his bloodless nail, blowing on it the way a Western gunfighter blew gunsmoke from the muzzle of his Peacemakers.
And that was the end of the grooming lesson intended for Remo's benefit.
"Show-off," said Remo.
"I merely demonstrated techniques that will cease to be practiced if the next Reigning Master continues on the path of stubbornness."
The muttering light tank started up. It clanked toward them. The steel tracks rolled over the fallen, breaking their bones and shredding dead flesh.
Remo and Chiun patiently watched their oncoming doom.
At the last moment they casually stepped out of the way of the steel hulk, each going in a separate direction.
The driver was not happy with this. Jockeying the vehicle, he attempted to follow the Master of Sinanju. Walking backward, Chiun led him toward the side of the road.
Meanwhile, Remo slipped up to the back and gave one spinning track a hard kick.
The tank rolled off its track, leaving it behind like a discarded serpent of segmented steel.
After that the tank rolled in slow impotent circles.
"Jou are under military arrest, senores!" the driver said angrily once he got his steed stopped. He was peering out from a crack in his half-opened hatch.
"What's that?" Remo asked.
"I said, 'Jou are under military arrest.'"
"Can't hear you over the echo. You'll have to come out."
The soldier eased the hatch higher to see up the road. The rest of his column had continued on, thinking he had the situation under control. Now they were too far away to help him out of his predicament.
"I am not coming out," he said flatly.
"You can't arrest us until you come out," Remo said firmly.
"Jou are under arrest anyway."
"Fine. We're under arrest. We'll see you later. Come on, Little Father. This guy is too chicken to arrest us."
"I am not chicken! Jou come back here. At once!"
"Make us," taunted Chiun.
The tank driver popped his hatch all the way and came out clutching a Belgian-made FAL rifle.
"See? I am not afraid of gringos. As I say, jou are under arrest."
"Guess he's got the drop on us, Little Father."
"We are captured." And Chiun shook his aged head in mock defeat.
The soldier advanced, and Remo and Chiun awaited him, their hands loose-fingered by their sides.
"Stand steel!"
"I think that means stand-still," said Chiun.
"Jou are under arrest."
"You wouldn't know where we can find Subcomandante Verapaz?" asked Remo.
"Jou are Juarezista?"
"No. Verapaz owes us something."
"What is that?"
"His life."
"Hah! I do not know where the masked one is. But jou are both under military arrest."
"And you are under cardiac arrest," returned Remo.
The soldier didn't see Remo's hand come up like a striking serpent that threw his rifle skyward. Nor did he feel the malletlike fist of the Master of Sinanju strike his rib cage over his wildly beating heart.
The soldier felt the air go out of his lungs and his heart go into overdrive. Then he fell onto his back and lay there jittering until the heart muscle burst from the strain.
"That is how the Thunder Dragon blow is properly delivered," Chiun said to Remo as they walked back to the waiting Humvee.
"I'll take that over Fu Manchu fingernails any day."
"The day will come when the lack of talons will be your undoing."
"Not as long as I have you by my side, Little Father."
"That day, too, is coming," Chiun said aridly.
Remo said nothing. It was the truth. Nobody lived forever. Not even a Master of Sinanju.
Chapter 16
The president of the United States of Mexico had never seen such times. He had never heard of such times. His beloved Mexico had suffered much in times past. She had suffered incredibly. Sometimes, during the centuries since the conquest, it seemed that she was cursed to endure endless cycles of hope and desperation, desperation and hope. Every time the golden sun came within reach, she was cast down into perdition. Each time she had sunk into the lowermost depths of Hades, a ray of light would filter down to stir that cruel demon hope once again.
The straining toward the sun would resume, and so would the casting down into torment.
It was muy Mexican. It was quintessentially Mexican.
The president of Mexico knew that condundrum now. He felt it keenly as he paced his ruined office in the National Palace, fielding the frantic telephone calls as he saw through the shattered windows the city that was his capital lying in ruins under an ashy shroud.
It was a gray city now. Its whiteness was all gone. It was like the end of the world. Pompeii must have resembled this landscape. But Pompeii had never suffered so before being extinguished.
Mexico City suffered interminably, and the boon of extinction refused to come over it.
The initial earthquake had been the worst ever. Aftershocks ran as high as 6.9 on the Richter scale. This number was repeated over and over into his numbed ears. No one could say what that meant. Damage was extensive. Many of the same buildings that had been weakened in the 1985 convulsion were crushed once more. The dead were beyond counting.
Then after the earth had settled down, Popocatepetl had erupted in warning, and the earth shook anew.
Buildings that tottered precariously had fallen into rubble. The survivors, trapped but awaiting rescue, had been snuffed of all life. Fires not yet banked had roared anew.
Then came the ash.
Mercifully it had cooled somewhat while descending. It burned hair and blistered flesh, but did not consume. There were scattered fires as a result. But people could breathe the brown air if they held wet cloths to their faces. They could see if they blinked often enough.