Chapter 10

Shund Beila, prime minister of Ayounde, raised his hands. “Who among you can confirm the identity of the man in the leading car?”

His hastily assembled cabinet of ministers all began talking over one another again.

“Enough. Fudende, what’s your assessment?”

Minister of Internal Security Antoine Fudende was attempting to get his arms into his uniform jacket, but every time he stuck an arm in, it was pierced by one of the medal pins. There were countless medals on the jacket and he couldn’t find the open pin. He helplessly sat down with one arm in the jacket, another arm not. “My people say it is the genuine Michele Rilli in the car, Mr. Prime Minister. For one thing, the cost and resources that went into staging this demonstration must have come from someone very wealthy and with very strong ties to grand prix racing.”

“Or one of a hundred wealthy, insane individuals known to us in Europe, Australia and Latin America,” added the minister of foreign security.

“Also, the coverage of the event by the media is tremendous. We estimate there are more video news production crews inside Ayounde at this moment that there has ever been.”

“Ever?” the minister of foreign security demanded. “I know for a fact that your media-activity records only date back to the 1950s.”

“Since the 1950s, then,” Fudende stormed.

“Enough. Fudende, how are we preparing for this ‘spectacle’?” the prime minister asked.

“All our troops are standing by. None is deployed.” Fudende looked nervous, but no one was alarmed by this lack of readiness. Even the exterior security minister nodded with his eyes.

“My honor guard?” the prime minister asked. “They’re in full dress and ready for any call to duty.” The prime minister sighed. “We should arrest him and put him in jail.”

The ministers murmured in alarm.

“That would be disastrous,” said the minister of tourism gently. “He’s a star in every corner of the world except the States. The networks claim the demonstration is intended to bring a grand prix into our country. To arrest him would be to shoot ourselves in the foot.”

“I know that!” The prime minister was scowling. “So how should we respond to this reckless display?”

The minister of internal security felt a rush of indecision. There was the warning from the United States government to consider. The Americans claimed that Rilli was trying to stage a coup in Ayounde. They said that such a coup had already occurred in a place called Newfoundland, which sounded like a blatant fabrication. Surely not…

He actually opened his mouth to voice the alarm. The know-it-all minister of foreign security looked at him expectantly, his broad mouth already showing his amusement at whatever bit of foolishness Fudende had to say next.

Fudende said nothing.

“The entire cabinet of ministers are moving all together,” Chiun announced. He listened to another stream of Ayounde patois from the radio announcer. Chiun never seemed to run up against a human language that he couldn’t understand. “The prime minister is among them.”

“To safety, I assume?” Remo cranked the wheel and sent the stolen Chevrolet taxicab tearing around a near empty corner in the city of Ayounde.

“To National Square in the center of the city,” Chiun, said. “The prime minister’s honor guard is clearing the way and the national police are being asked to keep the public safely away from the race route.”

“It’s like they want to be conquered,” Remo griped. Fruit stands were untended. Electronics shops were standing unlocked and empty. Even would-be looters were on their way to the grand prix route as the stragglers streamed toward the city center.

“They sure didn’t take Smitty seriously. They’re actually getting themselves all bunched together so Rilli can send them to heaven without exerting himself.”

“You must transport us to National Square in time to prevent it,” Chiun said.

Remo already heard the sound of the excited crowd, still several city blocks ahead of them. The timbre of the crowd told him there were more human beings than he had expected. “Depends how close we park.”

“We will not be close. We will be on the opposite end of the square from the national pavilion.”

Remo glared at him. “If you knew that, why didn’t you say anything?”

“You are the driver,” Chiun sniffed. “It would have done no good. We are too late to approach in this vehicle.”

As if by magic, the city with the auras of a ghost town turned into an African version of Carnival, with blasting music and intense, happy crowds. Remo hit the brakes.

“We hoof it.”

“You have hooves. I have feet.”

Remo slithered through the densely packed population of the city, moving as if through the reeds in the swamp shallows, and by unspoken agreement he followed in the wake of a figure that moved with even less notice. Chiun, the ancient Master of Sinanju Emeritus, was brilliant in his kimono colors but remained unseen. Even Remo couldn’t help but admire the stealth of the old Master. He was tiny, light skinned, dressed in expensive silks in primary yellows with red-and-green bands of flashing gold stitch work. Logic said he would have contrasted sharply with the tall, dark-skinned African peoples in drab earth tones and occasional tribal colors. Instead, Chiun was a sprite, glimpsed peripherally or not at all.

As Remo followed Chiun, he found the people excited and distracted by the coming demonstration. They were poor by his standards, but then, he was born and raised in America. The Western world didn’t know how good it had it

The Ayounde people were positively flush with riches by the standards of Africa, where nation upon nation suffered from malnutrition, generations of civil war and the persistent lack of recognition by the rest of the world.

But Ayounde was making strides of some sort. Somehow, they had gotten past the tribal conflicts and stifled the power grabbers—the cause of endless misery in one African nation after another. Not as many starving kids in Ayounde. Not as much rampant disease. Those were the things that mattered, weren’t they?

And now some idiot race-car driver was going to try to subvert the nation, making it ripe for fresh destabilization.

That ticked Remo off big-time.

He hoped he was going to be in time to do something about it.

But a moment later, he knew he wasn’t.

The cars streamed into National Square from every direction, and Remo went into the air, hopping atop a bronze statue along the roadside and finding himself sitting high over the happy crowds. Finally, he had the lay of the land, but his spirits sunk. They were still more than a mile from National Square, with a sea of Ayoundis packing the street ahead of him and the square itself. Six streets converged on vast National Square, and parade routes opened on all of them as the race cars rumbled toward the square,

“Chiun!” Remo called, spotting the flicker of the old Master, who seemed to float from the ground and land with all the weight of a bird atop a vendor’s canopy of mottled scarlet. Chiun assessed the situation at a glance.

“I go this way,” Chiun snapped. His voice was a squeak that was easy to distinguish from the cacophony.

Chiun slipped from the canopy and slithered toward the next intersecting street.

Remo bounded into the open parade route, which filled quickly in the path of the racers. Remo put on his own best speed, but the racers were moving dangerously fast. It was a miracle none of them had hit a spectator. He was on the rear racer in seconds and gave the tire a snap-kick that blew it open.

As the rear end swerved abruptly into the mass of spectators, Remo was leaping over the vehicle and delivering another kick that exploded the other rear tire, and its forward momentum dragged the rear end back to center. As Remo left it behind, the racer’s rear chassis ground noisily on the pavement and shuddered to a stop.

It took just seconds, but Remo knew it was too slow.

There were a lot of cars to kill and not much time for the killing. When he reached the second car, he bashed his fist on its rear end, tearing off the spoiler like a paper towel and crashing the back end of the car as if a wrecking ball had dropped on it. The tires exploded, the body panels withered and the mechanics inside the rear end became scrap metal—and then Remo realized his grave error.

He felt the pressure wave coming, an explosion, killing force. Weapons inside the car. Remo hit the deck with inhuman speed and lashed out powerfully at the crushed end of the car.

As it exploded, the car’s rear jumped skyward and the starburst of ugly orange fire and black shrapnel flew above the heads of the Ayoundis—mostly. The car stood on its oddly intact nose a moment. The driver dripped out of the cockpit in chunks and splashes. Then the car collapsed slowly onto its belly once more.

Remo was on his feet. The crowd was screaming. People were bloodied. One man was flat on his back with a gash in his head. Amazingly few casualties, Remo thought in the small corner of his brain that was still capable of being rational.

Most of his brain had stopped being rational many, many jiffies ago. Most of it was screaming.

Remo ran like something white-hot that is propelled from a volcanic crack in the earth. When he caught up to the next car, he hit the part in the middle—the soft, human part. That stopped the car just as well, and nothing exploded into the crowds except for a few flecks of brain matter. Remo kept moving. Fast. Still screaming, silently.

Idiot! Idiot! How many people had he wounded? How many would die because of him?

He came upon the front car as it was about to turn into the mile-wide parade wing within National Square. Remo slithered up to the side of the car as it slowed to forty miles per hour, hopping over it and batting at the helmeted driver—just hard enough to turn everything inside to jelly. The car missed the turn and hit the decorative stone wall, grinding along the wall until it stopped.

Chiun had done as well or better than Remo at neutralizing another avenue of race cars, but there were four more attack fronts coming, pulling into National Square even now. The people were cheering them, but now the awareness of trouble was spreading. The race cars slowed abruptly as they entered the makeshift track around National Square. The national police were getting the message and moving quickly into new positions.

National Podium, the great central dais that stood out in the open at the north end of the square, was getting the message late. Remo could see them now, the ministers in their perfect suits and medal-festooned military uniforms. Even a mile away Remo recognized the prime minister from the photo Smitty provided. The prime minister was said to be a pretty smart guy, but right now he looked as dull-witted as the rest of them, squinting at the smoke and the wreckage of the cars. Now the honor guard was showing signs of alarm. But they were standing on National Podium with crowds on all sides of them. They had no easy way to escape. But also, the attackers had no easy way in.

Or so he assumed.

Idiot! he thought. Why didn’t he ever think the worst of people? People always did the worst thing you could imagine them doing. At the first signs of trouble, the race-car drivers escalated their attack timetable. They veered off the parade route—directly into the crowd of onlookers.

There was a traveling tide of horror as arms of flame protruded from the nose of each racer into the people, who fled from the cars, some of them burning. Remo could see clear plastic canopies sliding into position over the tops of the driver cockpits. They were in attack mode. He scooted among the crowd, but even he was having trouble finding room to maneuver as the concern turned to panic. He moved up onto the fight posts, clinging and leaping onto the high-tension lines that stretched between them with banners bearing patriotic and advertising messages. Remo moved hand over hand, fast, as the sea of humanity became a shocked swell just inches below his feet.

He could hear the individual screams, but he could hear, too, the ugly sound of a population in terror. The swell pushed relentlessly. People began to go down in the crush. Many of them would never get up.

No matter if Remo had saved ten or twenty lives by diverting the explosion on the packed street—the true death toll was going to come from the riot of panic that gripped the tens of thousands of Ayoundis.

He found himself in the open, hard on the heels of an attacking column of race cars. What kind of morons was he dealing with here, attacking in frigging race cars? He hit the ground and ran fast, catching the front racer and leaping onto it. The driver inside showed surprise when the white man suddenly perched on the cowling of the racer. The facer veered hard right and left, and somehow the man with the thick wrists stayed where he was, as if his scuffed Italian shoes were glued to the Milkie Queen logo.

“This will get you off!” shouted the driver inside his cockpit, and he stabbed at the fire button on his flame thrower. One of those Italian shoes was just inches from the nozzle….

Remo felt the mechanical movement inside the car as the discharge valve snapped open and the high-pressure tanks pushed out a powerful stream of flammable liquid. He grabbed the nozzle and gave it a quick twist, just as the igniter snapped. The torrent of flame drenched the car from front to rear and the tires burst open, bringing the car to a halt.

Remo stepped off and caught a glimpse of the driver, gazing in horror at the plastic shield just an inch above his head. It would have protected him from defensive gunfire, but now it was melting in the intense heat and in seconds it would start to drip on him. Remo wondered how good his helmet and driving suit would be at protecting him.

Not much, he decided, when the screaming started.

Already the Master of Sinanju was moving like a shadow around the fire tongue from the next car. His training taught Remo long ago that one might step aside from any projectile, be it rock or bullet or slow-moving flamethrower. The driver discerned the failure of the flame and quickly turned to more conventional firearms, tattering the square with machine-gun fire. Remo dodged the fusillade. A bullet, after all, was just a fast rock.

But he was painfully aware that the good people of Ayounde didn’t know how to dodge bullets. He put a halt to the gunfire by leaping like a feather into the air, then falling like a boulder onto the protruding muzzle of the weapon. The canopy collapsed under him, crushing vital components, but Remo kicked out the tires for good measure. He delivered an identical kick to the plastic cover over the driver.

The plastic didn’t budge. It didn’t shatter, or even crack.

The infuriated driver laughed heartily at Remo. “You couldn’t get me with a bleedin’ sledgehammer!” he taunted.

“But I can get you with this finger,” Remo replied, and he used it to tap the plastic in a few places. Even over the sounds of confusion he could hear and feel how the plastic resonated with each tap, until his brain had identified a weak spot in the plastic. Then he tapped that spot quickly, creating a destructive vibration. The plastic shattered.

“Son of a—”

That was as far as the driver got. Remo palmed his head by the helmet and withdrew him from the cockpit, stretching him out and dragging him into the jagged shards of leftover plastic. He moved the driver in a circle, gashing his throat open completely all the way around.

Remo spotted the smoking ruins of another column of cars and glimpsed the rapid flash of Chiun heading toward the podium. Remo was already on his way—and it was already too late. Another column of cars was already reaching the podium, reaching it from the side opposite himself and Chiun. A pair of cars was making widening circles around the podium, driving back the crowds and cutting off the officials on the podium.

Remo heard another sound above the whine of the racers. A helicopter was coming. That couldn’t be good news.

Remo came upon a flame-throwing car so quickly the driver never saw him. He leaped, landed and took the front wheel of the racer in both hands, bringing it to a sudden halt. The other front wheel tried to move but shuddered on the pavement as the rear end flew up. The driver wore a shocked look. The racer landed upside down, flamethrower still spurting and creating a pool of flaming liquid under the car.

The second flame-throwing racer came straight at him, revving up, spurting flame, and Remo ran to meet it. It looked like a suicidal game of chicken. Remo was feeling a great deal of satisfaction from the fact that the crowds had fled. He had lots of room to work with. He skirted the line of flame and walked onto the cowling of the grand prix racer, grabbing the flamethrower nozzle and making a quick adjustment.

The driver yanked the car into a series of quick swerves, but the g-forces didn’t dislodge the attacker. The man simply jogged over the top of the car, perfectly balanced, which was impossible. Right? The driver pulled the car into a hard U-tum and found the stranger running toward the podium faster than was humanly possible. But the race car was faster than that. It had to be. The driver accelerated and jabbed the flamethrower. He’d barbecue the intruder yet.

The driver noticed too late that the flame nozzle was now pointed straight up, and the column of flame that flew skyward became a mushroom. Burning incendiary liquid rained down.

The driver forgot the man he was trying to kill and focused all his concentration on attempting to outrun the fountain of flame coming from his own car.

Ayounde Prime Minister Shund Beila couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. His people were being herded out of the square at gunpoint. The attackers were using race cars, of all things, and the race cars were turning out to be extraordinarily effective.

“Where’s the emergency-response units?” Beila demanded.

“Assembling, Prime Minster.” Minister of Internal Security Antoine Fudende looked in every direction, except into Beila’s eyes.

“Assembling? What’s that supposed to mean? Why are they deploying now?”

“They were, uh, dispersed,” Fudende reported. “So it seems.”

“So it seems? You’re supposed to know!”

“They were, against orders, not in a state of readiness. Watching the race, Prime Minister.”

The prime minister stared at him. Then turned back to the spectacle. The grand prix racers had cleared a path through the crowds. The PM’s own honor guard engaged the cars, and the ministers saw the sparks of ricocheting gunfire. The cars deflected everything the honor guard had to send them.

Beila had already seen the racers use gunfire, but they didn’t return fire on the honor guard. Instead, they waited until they were in range to use their flamethrowers and let loose with streams of flame. The soldiers in the honor guard—all brave, proved fighters—died writhing and screaming.

Beila began to pray silently. The minister of finance leaned over the railing of the large podium and was sick over the edge.

“Oh, shit, there’s a video crew! They shot they whole thing!” exclaimed the minister of tourism. “We’re not going to have vacationers in this country for ten years!”

Beila wanted to belt him, but he was pulled away by another development. More columns of attacking racers were now visible—and they were being defeated. But Beila couldn’t see who was defeating them.

“I thought I just saw a little old man in a dress disable that car,” said one of the executive assistants.

Beila saw him, too. He was little. He was in a colorful robe. He was light skinned. He disabled a heavily armed grand prix racer with a flying kung fu kick that flattened the cockpit and crushed the driver.

Beila didn’t have time to think about how impossible that was. The brave old soul was going to be killed before his eyes. Two grand prix racers roared down on the old man with their flamethrowers spewing fire.

The old man was trapped. He seemed to see his doom and he raised his arms to either side, as if in a gesture of penitence to whatever god he worshiped. The twin tongues of flame swept over his tiny body.

Or did they? The old man seemed to shimmer out of existence for a moment, as if he had soared up and over the tongues of flame at the moment they would have engulfed him—but not before his hands slid over the front end of the racers.

Beila was amazed when the front tires flattened where the old man had stroked them with his fingers, and the two racers veered violently into each other, slowing and bathing each other in flaming liquid.

And the old man was still standing there, as if he had never moved. His brilliant Oriental-looking robes were not even singed.

A blast drew Beila’s attention back to his honor guard, just as a knot of them were engulfed in a billow of white-hot flame. The internal security minister screeched and fell to the ground with a tiny hole smoking from his arm. Inside was a tiny burning speck, like an impossibly hot burrowing worm. The internal security minister went quickly into mute shock.

Beila had never felt so helpless. All around him were horrific dramas. He didn’t know what might happen next. He saw a young white man now, gliding like a ghost toward the pavilion, unarmed, but behind him was a spinning grand prix racer that was trying to outrun a fountain of flame coming from its own flamethrower. Beila instinctively knew that the young man had somehow accomplished this; it was no stranger than what the old Asian man had accomplished a few seconds ago. The grand prix racer might actually have survived if he had not been so frugal with the use of his flamethrower. He was still ten seconds away from exhausting its tank of incendiary liquid when he turned the wheel a little too tightly and skidded the tires just slightly. It slowed the grand prix racer just enough to allow the fountain to drench the vehicle. The tires melted to mush and the car wobbled to a stop, covering itself with fire.

Beila was so engrossed in the scene he failed to notice the helicopter.

Remo heard it coming but he wasn’t prepared for it. The helicopter that soared from beyond the rooftops and soared over National Square was a long, gangly-looking bird with a pair of huge and powerful rotors. This wasn’t any sort of military chopper. It was a piece of construction equipment. He’d seen them carrying air conditioners to the tops of skyscrapers—that kind of thing.

He hadn’t expected to see it here, at the scene of a coup d’etat. There had to be a reason. It was dangling a set of three steel claws at least six feet long and held in an open position as if about to grab something.

But what?

Couldn’t be good, whatever it was. He ran for the pavilion, and the helicopter sped up to beat him there. The helicopter won, pulling up hard as it came over the pavilion and its dangling hooks clanged against the pavilion roof. Remo hadn’t been paying attention before, but now he observed that the pavilion was constructed of wrought iron and polished brass.

The ministers fell flat when the claws slammed into the structure. As a few men scrambled down the steps on hands and knees, they were met with a murderous wall of flame. One of them rolled down the steps, a writhing fireball, but the other man pulled back slapping at his burning suit jacket sleeve.

The helicopter whined and strained, and it yanked the pavilion off the ground. It was nothing but a welded iron cage that shed its roof shingles and wooden floor as it became airborne Remo forced himself to run faster, to get to it in time, and yet he knew he would never make it. He looked around for Chiun, hoping the old Master had somehow managed to be close enough to do some good.

Chiun was not. He appeared at Remo’s side as they came to the place where the pavilion had once been. Now it was a hundred feet overhead, swinging wildly from the helicopter claw. As they watched, something in the structure of the cage snapped and the iron bars collapsed in upon themselves. More wooden floor pieces fluttered across National Square, along with a spattering of blood, before the helicopter disappeared over the rooftops.

The surviving grand prix racers were in retreat.

Remo made an ugly sound, and he went after them, not caring if Chiun joined him or not.