"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.
It was morning. It shouldn't be morning. His internal clock read a little after one in the afternoon. Even in sleep it kept track of the passing hours. Yet the sunlight streaming into the white-walled room where he awoke was morning bright.
Then he remembered.
Remo snapped himself up from his pillow-and the world reeled.
The door flew open with a crash, and Remo slapped his hands over his ears because they seemed suddenly as sensitive as the skin under his fingernails.
"Lazy slugabed! Get up. Get up."
"Chiun?"
The Master of Sinanju began tearing off sheets and bedclothes. "I have been up for hours. Why do you worry me without reason?"
Remo grabbed his head to make the white-walled room stop spinning before his eyes. "What happened?" he said thickly.
"You succumbed to vile sorcery."
"I did?"
"It is no shame."
"Wait a minute. What happened to you?"
"I rescued you, of course," Chiun said casually, as if dismissing a trifle.
Remo glared. "Chiun."
The Master of Sinanju turned his back on his pupil. Remo recognized the evasive set of his shoulders.
"Chiun, it got you, too, didn't it?"
"Why do you say that?" Chiun said aridly.
"Because if it didn't, you'd be telling me how you mounted Sam Beasley's head on a post somewhere."
"Do not speak that name to me."
"You talk to Smith?"
Chiun turned. "I have not had time."
A doctor entered. She carried a clipboard in one hand, and a stethoscope hung around her neck. She was fifty and wore her brown hair up in a bun. "Ah, I see you're awake."
Chiun blocked the way. "Lay not hands on my son."
"I'm his doctor."
"You are a woman. It is not proper."
"I examined you when they brought you in, too, you know," the doctor said.
Chiun blushed bright crimson, and if steam didn't exactly escape from his ears, he gave a good impression of an embarrassed boiler.
The doctor came over and inserted the earpieces of her stethoscope into her ears and laid the other end against Remo's chest. "I'm Dr. Jeffcoat. How are we feeling today?"
"What happened to us?" Remo inquired.
"You tell me. I couldn't get anything out of your friend."
Chiun snorted loudly. "I am not his friend. I am his father."
"Adopted," corrected Remo.
"Which one of you is the adopted one?"
"He is," Remo and Chiun said together.
Dr. Jeffcoat said, "Tell me the last thing you remember."
"Green."
"Green what?"
"Just green. It was a vicious green. I hated how green it was."
"It frightened you?" the doctor asked.
"Maybe," Remo admitted.
Chiun laid a palm over his purple-trimmed black velvet kimono. "He is fearless, but I am even more so."
"Didn't I see you run out of that truck like a bat out of hell?" Remo asked Chiun.
"You did not!"
Dr. Jeffcoat said, "You were found unconscious in your own vomit. Both of you."
Remo cracked a smile. "Good thing I was wearing clean underwear." Then, in a more serious tone, he asked, "Can you explain it?"
"Not from what you just told me. But something caused a massive con
vulsion of the vagus nerve."
"The what?"
"Vagus nerve. It's in the brain stem. You've heard of the fight-or-flight reaction?"
"Sure," said Remo. "People get scared. Some run, some fight. It depends on the person."
"Unless you train it out of him," Chiun grunted.
"Part of the fight-or-flight response involves an involuntary reaction of the part of the vagus nerve which terminates in the stomach," Dr. Jeffcoat explained. "It causes the stomach to contract with great violence. I guess that's so if you run from danger, you're carrying a lighter load and there's less chance of the stomach cramping if it's empty."
"I don't remember being scared."
"From what you described and the way they found you," the doctor said, unplugging her stethoscope, "you were scared green."
"Scared by green," Remo corrected.
"Have it your way." Dr. Jeffcoat started for the door. "By the way, I hope you're both covered by insurance."
"We have universal health care," said Chiun loftily.
"No one has that yet-if they ever will."
"Ask your President if you do not believe me."
"Cash okay?" Remo asked.
"Cash," Dr. Jeffcoat said, closing the door, "is king around these parts."
After she was gone, Remo said, "Time to call Smith."
Chiun rushed to Remo's bedside.
"Do not tell Emperor Smith of my embarrassment," he pleaded.
"What'll you give me?"
Chiun frowned. "What do you want?"
"How many thousand years do I have to cook dinner for you?"
Three.
"Let's cut it to two, shall we?"
"Robber!"
And Remo laughed as he dialed. His stomach felt as if it had been boiled in carbolic acid. He couldn't remember the last time he had thrown up.
HAROLD SMITH SOUNDED as if he had been gargling with carbolic acid when Remo got him on the line. His voice was haggard.
"Yeah. Who'd you think?"
"I have heard nothing from you for two days. I thought you were dead."
"Neither of us are dead."
"What happened?"
"We ran into Beasley. He was stage-managing everything, I guess."
"Where is he?"
"Search me. Chiun and I are in a hospital somewhere recuperating."
"One moment." The line hummed. "Remo, you are in the popular Spring Hospital."
"How'd you know that?"
"Telephone back trace."
"Beasley got us with something green."
"What do you mean by something green?"
"A light or something. It was the ugliest green you ever saw, Smitty. It made me sick to my stomach. The doctor said my vagus nerve went crazy."
"Are you saying your flight-or-fight response was tripped by a green light?"
"I'm saying I pitched forward into my own puke and it's a day later."
"Two days."
Remo closed his eyes. "Fill me in, Smitty."
"The Beasley U.S.A. matter has been resolved. There is a truce. All combatants have agreed to stand down until the Virginia State legislature has decided the disposition of the parcel of land adjoining Petersburg National Battlefield earmarked for sale to the Beasley Corporation."
"Then it's over."
"It has just begun. We have a problem in France."
"We always have a problem with France."
"This is different."
"Smitty, I'm not up to dealing with the French. Not on an empty stomach, anyway."
"Remo, listen to me. Two days ago French warplanes bombed Euro Beasley."
"Is that good or bad?"
"We have an international crisis brewing. The French have entirely surrounded Euro Beasley and are refusing to allow anyone to enter or leave."
"Is that good or bad?"
"The French National Assembly have rushed through emergency legislation forbidding the speaking of English within the borders of France."
"Huh?"
"American businessmen and tourists are being thrown out of the country. Our Senate has threatened retaliation. A U.S. mob was intercepted in boats near the Statue of Liberty. They were carrying acetylene torches. One confessed to a plan to dismantle Liberty and send her back to France in pieces. Someone blew up the French pavilion at Epcot Center. Quebec is in an uproar. We are on the verge of a war with France."
"Over a theme park?"
"The specifics are difficult to determine. But you and Chiun must go to France and find out why Euro Beasley is under seige."
"Probably the admission prices," muttered Remo. "What about Beasley?"
"Do you know where he is?"
"No," Remo admitted. "I only know where I am because you told me."
"We will deal with Beasley later," Harold Smith said in a biting tone of voice. "Right now I want you and Chiun in Paris as soon as possible."
"I'm not up to this."
But Harold W. Smith had already disconnected.
Hanging up his phone, Remo turned to the Master of Sinanju and said, "We're going to Paris, Little Father."
"That dump," sniffed Chiun.
AT THE CUSTOMS STATION at Charles de Gaulle International Airport, Remo defenestrated a French customs officer for speaking French to him.
Remo had started to say "I don't speak French," when the customs officer inspecting his passport pulled a whistle from his uniform blouse and blew on it shrilly.
"Il ne parle pas francais!" he cried.
"What'd he say?" Remo asked Chiun.
"You do not speak French," Chiun translated.
"I just said that."
"Il parle rebut americain!" the customs officer shouted.
"He said you speak junk American."
"Il faut qu'il se comportat."
"And must be deported," Chiun added.
"You're deporting me over your dead body," Remo told the customs man in English.
"Do you not mean over my dead body?" asked the customs officer, also in English.
"Exactly," Remo told him darkly.
Then, catching himself, the customs man clapped his hands over his own mouth. "I have been contaminated!"
Another customs officer strode up and arrested the first. They began arguing. In French.
"What's going on?" Remo asked Chiun.
"He has been arrested for speaking English," explained Chiun.
"Good."
Then a third customs officer tried to arrest Remo and Chiun for speaking English within the natural and eternal borders of the Republic of France.
That was the customs official whom Remo flung through the nearest plate-glass window. He screamed something that sounded inarticulate, but was probably just high-speed French. Both sounded the same to Remo.
Whistles blew shrilly, and airport security converged on Remo and Chiun. They were yelling excitedly in French, and since Remo didn't understand the language, he decided to put the worst possible construction on what they were trying to tell him and began resecting their frontal lobes with his index finger.
By some fluke he got a few speech centers, because the excited shouts stopped while the excited gesticulating continued as the airport security men decided to give the two English-speaking demons a wide birth.
Outside, Chiun hailed a waiting Mercedes cab in perfect French, which, he complained to Remo as they got into the back seat, was not perfect at all, but an abomination.
The cab driver, hearing English spoken in the back of his cab, which was technically French soil, brought the car to a screeching halt and ordered them out.
Since he gave the order in fluent French, Remo felt no obligation to obey and sat tight.
The Master of Sinanju, on the other hand, took immediate offense and hurled a long string of insults back in voluble French. The Frenchman hurled back as good as he got, and after a minute of shrieking cacophony Remo ended the argument by the simple expedient of giving the back of the driver's seat a sharp, sudden kick.
&
nbsp; The driver flew out his own windshield, slid off the hood and onto the parking lot.
After Remo got behind the wheel, everything was fine except for the fact that the steering wheel was on the wrong side, and the wind blew back saltlike granules of shatterproof glass off the hood and into his face as he drove.
"So," Remo said as they entered highway traffic, "which way to Euro Beasley?"
"I do not know."
"Damn. That means we're going to have to ask directions from the locals."
They were already out of the city and into what appeared to be farmland dotted by small villages. So Remo pulled off the highway and asked a farmer.
"Euro Beasley?"
The farmer held his nose.
"You're a big help," said Remo, driving on. The next farmer spit when Remo repeated the name.
"How do you say 'Which way to Euro Beasley?'" Remo asked as they continued.
" 'Ou est Euro Beasley?"' said Chiun.
"Say again?"
"'Ou est Euro Beasley?'"
"I don't suppose that's spelled the same way it's pronounced."
"Of course not. It is French."
When Remo repeated the fragment of French for a peasant woman, she picked up a roadside stone and bounced it off their back window. She was shaking a malletlike fist at them as they drove away.
"What'd I do wrong?"
"You mangled that woman's tongue."
"You ask me, her tongue was mangled by its inventors. You know, Little Father, I had three whole years of French at the orphanage."
"Yes?"
"Yeah. French I, French I and French I. After my third French I, the nuns gave up on me and speaking French. Latin, I could handle, though."
"French is to Latin what Pidgin English is to your mother tongue," said Chiun. "And the French spoken today is doggerel."
"Tell that to the French," said Remo. "Hold on, I see some police cars coming up on us fast."
"Excellent. We can ask directions of them."
"My thinking exactly," said Remo, slowing.
In the rearview mirror three caterwauling French police cars came barreling up, driving abreast of one another. They were tiny white Renaults, with flashing blue roof bubbles and rude sirens. The car in the middle dropped back while the two side machines surged forward.
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