"Stay here, Little Father," Remo said.
The old man shook his head. "We go together."
"Can't risk it. Not both of us in there."
"I expect your superior knowledge of garbage to save me," the wizened Korean sniffed, reaching for the door.
"This isn't a debate," Remo snapped. "I'm Reigning Master. It's my decision. I need you out here."
Chiun saw the look of determination on his pupil's face. Jaw tightening, the Reigning Master of Sinanju Emeritus nodded sharp agreement. "Have a care," he warned.
Despite his concern, Chiun felt his heart swell. It was a moment of great import. Significant not just in Sinanju, but throughout the history of mankind. Fathers and sons. The passing of authority from one generation to the next.
Remo didn't seem to realize it. Like all the young, he was too concerned with the present.
Remo's face was grim. Whirling, the latest Reigning Master of Sinanju reached for the door.
THE PRESIDENT of the United States never dreamed he would meet his end like this.
Mayanan Executive President Blythe Curry-Hume had apparently gone insane. The President could see the crazed man's shadowy face peering down from the control booth.
There was nowhere to go. No way to call for help. The President and the other world leaders were effectively standing inside the Vaporizer. The President had seen the device being demonstrated on television. He understood what was about to happen to all of them.
Many of the others couldn't seem to accept the inevitable. Across the deck they kicked and screamed, pummeling one another with fists as they pounded on the door.
As the lights glowed brighter all around, the President stood his ground, determined to meet his end as a man.
In his mind he recited the Lord's Prayer. He didn't know he was speaking the words aloud until he heard the prime minister of Great Britain saying them alongside him.
The two men glanced at each other. The President gave a smile and a sharp nod. As he did so, he heard fresh shouts from over near the sliding door.
The other world leaders were backing fearfully away from the door, babbling in dozens of languages. As the President watched, hope tripping deep inside his chest, the door began to bow inward. The regimented lines of glowing lights stretched out across the bubbling surface.
With a shriek the door burst off its sliding track. Men scattered. Trailing wires, the door slid across the deck, bouncing off the chain-link fence and skittering away.
A man appeared behind it. With dark, deep-set eyes, he viewed the stumbling, panicked world leadership.
"There's six billion people out here who'll probably want to lynch me for this," Remo Williams grumbled.
And with an unhappy scowl, Remo grabbed the collars of two nearby diplomats.
With a sharp tug, the chief of government of the Principality of Liechtenstein and the president of South Africa were dropped to their backsides. The deck was black ice. The two men zipped across the frictionless surface and disappeared through the opening.
And like a shot, Remo launched himself out on the deck.
He had not donned a pair of frictionless boots. Forward momentum carried him on sliding soles. He snagged the prime minister of Niger and the president of Honduras. Both men were launched back across the deck.
Outside the open doorway, Chiun grabbed these two as he had the first. The old Korean stopped them, stacked them to one side and spun back just in time to accept the next pair.
Inside the Vaporizer, Remo was picking up speed. They flew in his wake-blurs of presidents, prime ministers, princes and kings. He banked off each set, changing direction in a slivered second, flying off to the next.
By the time he reached the President of the United States, prime minister of England and president of Russia, Remo was a barely visible blur.
Each man felt a sharp tug. In the next instant he was flying through the door of the Vaporizer and into the flashing hands of the former Reigning Master of Sinanju.
And in a flash Remo was off to the next set of world leaders, ever mindful of the awesome manmade power that was swelling up all around him.
AT FIRST JACK JAMES didn't see the commotion down on the upper level of the Vaporizer. He had been preoccupied watching the monitor. The device was nearly powered up.
When he glanced down, he blinked in shock. There were fewer men than had been there just a moment before.
Impossible. There was no way out. He had sealed the door himself. They couldn't have broken out. And yet there were definitely fewer world leaders on the deck.
As he watched in amazement, more vanished. It couldn't be. The device wasn't yet ready. Blurs across the deck. On the security camera he caught sight of men appearing through the door. The open door.
In that moment the impossible registered in his dull mind. Something was throwing the men to safety.
There was still a way. He had hoped to savor his victory, hoped to live to tell the tale. But the fools didn't know. Jack James would go, but he would take them all with him. And Jack James was eternal. Jack James was light. Yes, he would die this day but, after, he would live forever in glory while all the other, lesser beings were thrown into the dark, there to wail and gnash their teeth.
A light flashed green. The Vaporizer was at full power. James reached for the keyboard, tapping a single key. The instant he did so, a voice shouted at his back.
"Step away!"
James wheeled.
Petrovina Bulganin stood in the control booth, her pistol trained on the infamous Jamestown cult leader. James smiled a twisted grin of triumph.
"Too late!" he cried, laughing maniacally. "You can shoot me if you want, but you are all dead! They told me the machine needs to remain perfectly balanced. With the door missing, it's not. When it goes off, the Vaporizer will consume itself, this hill, these grounds and every last one of us. I've won."
For an instant Petrovina Bulganin weighed her options.
Abruptly she turned the barrel of her gun from James, aiming it at the upright computer nearest the Mayanan president. Petrovina unloaded her clip into the hard drive.
Sparks exploded in the small room. There was a spluttering hiccup in the swelling hum of power. "No!" James flew to the window. He didn't care that the Russian woman whom he'd carelessly left alive back at his presidential palace turned and ran from the control room. Didn't care about anything but his failed act of vengeance.
He had been too slow. As he watched, the lights in the upper level dimmed. The newer section would shut down first. The lower level still glowed brilliant white.
Not that it mattered. The deck was clear.
He saw something rocketing toward the pit. It had the blurry shape of a man.
For an instant as it struck the fence that surrounded the lower level, James saw a face frozen in time. The dark eyes of the Angel of Death himself stared deep into the cold black soul of Jack James.
The fence bowed out over the pit.
The lights still glowed bright. There was a flash. And the man with the face of doom promptly disappeared. Vaporized into oblivion.
Chapter 30
The force needed to hurl the final world leader out to safety created an opposite reaction that had to be channeled somewhere. Remo used it to propel himself back toward the fence that surrounded the deep Vaporizer pit.
Up and out into empty air.
The soles of his loafers hit the chain link, bowing it out over the pit. Brilliant white lights glowed beneath him. The charge of ionized particles filled the air. But the true forces of nature could not be known to mere machines.
Remo was a full Master of Sinanju, his body trained to the perfection that lived unrealized in all men.
Out over empty air, the vast blackness of certain death stretched out beneath him, Remo Williams, Reigning Master of the House of Sinanju, felt the world flood his senses. And to every last atom, all was right and perfect.