Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was tossing people out of an airplane.

“Three, two, one, go!” He hoisted the skydiver through the open floor hatch with one hand.

“Ten, nine, eight!” Remo said loudly over the wind and aircraft racket, staring at his watch.

“I will exit under my own power,” declared the next skydiver, words muffled by the helmet enclosing his entire face.

Remo, who took his job as jump coordinator very seriously, shook his head. “Six! No room for error five! Four!” At zero the skydiver jumped, but not before Remo gave him a quick shove that sent him spiraling away from the plane at an unplanned trajectory.

The next skydiver curled his lip as Remo counted down the next jump.

“You touch me, I kill you,” the squat, powerful-looking man called.

“Four! Eat shit ’n’ die three!”

The skydiver stepped through the hatchway on three, only to find himself dangling in the thin subzero wind just outside the belly of the aircraft. The jump coordinator was gripping him by the harness in one hand as if he were holding an alley cat by the scruff of the neck.

“One! Wait for it, zero!” Remo released the jumper with a twist. The skydiver with the bad attitude went flopping end-over-end toward Earth.

Only one skydiver left, and he decided it was in his best interest to cooperate. This no-nonsense jump coordinator was clearly not a man to cross. Remo wasn’t bothered by the frigid wind. He sucked on a spare oxygen bottle occasionally, but it was almost as if he were doing it just for show. He was thin, but his wrists were so muscular he had to use a six-inch aircraft screw, bent like a twist tie, to extend the bands of his watch. The guy was either inhuman or a lunatic.

But he was a reasonable lunatic, anyway. The last skydiver behaved himself and in return Remo jettisoned him powerfully from the aircraft at exactly the right instant. The launch was smooth and straight—no out-of-control free fall to fight his way out of. The skydiver happily considered that his smooth exit was going to gain him a few vital seconds.

Outside the aircraft, fifty thousand feet above the earth, the skydiver deliberately forgot all about the strange jump coordinator and concentrated on what he was doing. He was a professional extreme athlete. Distractions were lethal to peak extreme performance. Taking control of his fall, he drew in his limbs to cut wind resistance.

The goal was to get to the surface faster than all the other divers. The winner of this competition was the jumper who used the least total time to get from fifty thousand feet to solid ground—without dying.

“This is a stupid sport,” Remo observed.

Free fall was the last place on Earth you would ever think to find yourself with unexpected company. The skydiver jerked and twisted until he found who had spoken.

It was the jump coordinator from the aircraft, the fool in the T-shirt, hovering just above him.

“What are you doing?”

“Skydiving, duh, what’s it look like?” Remo didn’t shout, but the extreme athlete heard him clearly through the wind noise and his face mask.

“You got no chute! No oxygen! No thermal suit!”

“The chute I’ll pick up later. It’s not like we don’t have time. We’re practically in orbit.”

“Come here, I’ll harness you in with me.”

“No, thanks.”

The skydiver sputtered and tried to give chase, but Remo turned his body into an arrowhead that slipped through the thin air faster than the skydiver in his bulky gear.

Remo was slightly peeved. He had thought the last man in the line would be the guilty one. It made sense, right? If you’re going to kill a bunch of your fellow skydivers, wouldn’t it be optimal to shoot down instead of up?

Remo’s boss had agreed with this theory, but the last skydiver had proven to be genuine in his fear for Remo’s safety. The guy didn’t have the heartbeat or the respiration of a man about to commit murder. You could tell those things, if you just know what signals to look for.

At least, Remo Williams could tell such things. He could read a man’s heartbeat, pupil dilation, breathing and other signs of nervous activity that were hidden even to a state-of-the-art polygraph—and Remo did it all without using any equipment at all.

Remo knew the martial art of Sinanju. Remo lived the art of Sinanju. In fact, he was the Reigning Master of Sinanju, which was roughly equivalent to having a thousand black belts in karate.

Karate, after all, was derived from crumbs of knowledge fallen from the table of the Masters of Sinanju, who had practiced their art for thousands of years. Kung fu, ninja, judo, all were but flickers of light pilfered from the Sun Source of martial arts, Sinanju.

Sinanju was far more than the other arts. Sinanju worked because it enhanced the senses. Whereas most humans tapped into ten percent of their bodies’ capabilities, the Masters of Sinanju used fifty percent. Sometimes seventy percent. In a few rare cases, even more.

Nothing on the planet could match the ancient practice that came from a dismal little fishing village on the shores of what was now North Korea. The Sinanju Masters worked as assassins, traveling the globe centuries before the great European explorers. They were employed by the most powerful rulers of their times, emperors and kings and warlords, and the Masters practiced their art, usually, without weapons or tools.

Remo would resort to using a parachute when jumping out of an airplane, when given the option. There were lots of parachutes around for the taking right now, but he wasn’t in much of a rush. These dingbats had jumped from way, way up and it was a long, long way down.

“Hey, got a minute?”

The next skydiver did somersaults trying to find out who was talking to him. “Who the hell are you?” he shouted when he finally found Remo closing in on him.

These knuckleheads weren’t so bright. “Jump coordinator, from the airplane.” Remo pointed up just in case the guy couldn’t remember where the airplane had been.

“You’re gonna die!”

Same story with the same result. The guy’s bad attitude was now frantic fear for Remo’s life. A brief chat convinced Remo that the extreme HALO skydiver wasn’t a would-be murderer and he moved on, getting irritated. Maybe there were no murders planned for this event after all.

Remo had kept a close eye on these guys on the airplane and convinced himself even then that none of them were acting like executioners. They were nervous, sure—they were risking their fool necks for a huge cash prize.

But Upstairs was convinced this competition was going to be sabotaged. If Remo didn’t double-check, Upstairs would nag him about it for days, maybe weeks. Upstairs was getting to be a real kink in the keister.

“How ya doin’?” he asked the next skydiver, who went into paroxysms that were quickly halted when Remo grabbed him by the harness. Their brief talk assured Remo this man was just another nonmurderer.

“Dammit!” Remo said. ‘This is a waste of time.”

The skydiver, amazingly enough, saw something so shocking it distracted him from his unexpected visitor.

Many hundreds of feet below them, the first skydiver’s chute deployed. It was way too early. The whole point of this competition was to get to the ground in the least amount of time, so the skydivers waited until the last possible second to release their chutes.

“Hey, you’ve got one smart guy in this bunch,” Remo said, although he was already second-guessing himself. What if that skydiver was deploying early so he could gain altitude over the others and shoot them down?

But that thought vanished when the skydiver’s chute collapsed, becoming a turquoise wad of flapping nylon.

“That can’t be right,” he told his companion, then steered himself away, cutting across a quarter-mile of open air to intercept the victim of the bad parachute. The chute was causing enough drag to lift the man toward him, and Remo snatched the lines in his fist.

Remo didn’t bother asking the man for an explanation. The skydiver was already dead, with his head swollen and his eyes bulging against the transparent face mask. Trickles of steam issued from his mouth.

Another chute deployed below him and melted as Remo watched. Then another. He craned his neck, looking for the cause, but found the skies empty in all directions.

“Son of a bitch!” he told the corpse, turned it and yanked the emergency cord. The melted wad of the nylon emergency chute expanded and created more drag, and Remo allowed the corpse to fly away from him.

He had living people to worry about.

He became a raptor, or a swift, or a kite, whatever kind of bird could dive at unbelievable speeds, and below him he watched the sickly blossoming of melted parachutes one after another. The timing was consistent, exactly ten seconds between them, thanks to Remo Williams’s careful jump coordination. Now his impeccable timing helped him decide what to do.

He knew how fast he could travel, relative to the falling skydivers, and knew exactly where he could intercept them before they were hit by whatever it was that was cooking them and killing them.

He cut through the air like a red-hot knife in cold water. He was in time to save the next man, but he hadn’t been able to account for the nature of the killing weapon. The weapon had begun its work already, and the skydiver was being roasted by his overheated gear. It was the harness frame that was actually getting super hot, melting the nylon and cooking the competitors.

As he flashed by the screaming man, Remo snatched the cord for the emergency chute, which deployed at the same instant the primary chute burst open in a steaming, pungent mass. The two chutes tangled momentarily, then the emergency chute filled with air and carried the man high above Remo. The skydiver would make it to the ground without cracking up, but Remo didn’t kid himself—he’d probably be dead of his burns by then.

Remo wouldn’t allow this to distract him as he banked and steered up on an intercept course to the next skydiver, who was just starting to feel the heat. The man never saw Remo speed by, but he felt the sudden yank of the emergency chute, which carried him out of the hot zone. Remo moved on up the line, snatching rip cords until he was back to the first man in the line and the last one to jump from the aircraft.

“Hi, again,” Remo called.

The skydiver had observed Remo in action and was speechless.

“I’ll take you up on that offer now.” Getting no response, Remo took it upon himself to buckle himself to the back of the skydiver, below the main chute, and reached around, yanking the cord.

He allowed his body to flow with the sudden jolt of deceleration as the canopy billowed above them, then he waited.

The smoking corpses of the first jumpers fluttered farther and farther below them on their ruined chutes.

Minutes later, Remo and his companion descended into the hot zone, but nothing happened. Below them the first jumpers began hitting the grassy plains of Montana with small bursts of dust. Remo was relieved to see that he had saved some lives. The jumpers he got to before they descended into the hot zone looked okay. The skydivers who left the plane first were hitting the ground like sacks of charred potatoes.

“Is extreme competitive HALO skydiving always this extreme?” Remo called up, making conversation.

“No,” answered his partner.

“Well, it’s still a stupid sport.”

“Yes.”

Five thousand feet later, Remo said, “I’m leaving before you talk my fool ear off.” He slashed through his strap with his fingernails and plummeted the last several yards to solid earth.

The skydiver’s parachute, freed of the extra weight, bobbed and lingered in the air for many seconds, then set the man on a hilltop near a small tree. He continued to sit there for a long time, thinking things over.

Remo snaked across the prairie until he found one of the dead victims. He gave the body a quick once-over, then relieved it of its equipment, wadding up the melted parachute and stuffing it back inside.

He had some phone calls to make.