Prophet Of Doom td-111
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"Freeze in your tracks!" the patrol leader commanded with a burst of nervous rage. He pointed a stubby finger at the lone remaining soldier. "I order you to remain where you are!"
But when he made the mistake of blinking, he re-
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alized with a feeling of sinking horror that he was all alone in the forest.
This time the moment the last soldier disappeared, the patrol leader thought he heard the faint rustle of leaves.
Sweat drooled down his cork-blackened features.
Suddenly a face loomed before him. It was smiling broadly.
And it was familiar.
"Hi," Remo said brightly. "Remember me?"
The raccoon-eyed man counted down the seconds on his watch and, when the proper time came, he flicked two toggle switches on the board before him, saying, "Now!"
His dormant monitor screens lit up with the same pale green phosphorescence as the others.
On her own suddenly active screen, Buffy saw the death blow land.
The assailant's thick-wristed hand seemed to move in slow motion toward the patrol leader's chest. The soldier attempted to swing his weapon around at the intruder. But his movements appeared sluggish compared with those of the thick-wristed man. That's when Buffy realized the intruder only gave the appearance of moving slowly.
The patrol leader realized the same thing a split second later.
Buffy watched the Ragnarok soldier drop silently to the wooded path. Only then did his attacker turn toward the camera.
Her look was as surprised as his, for she recognized him as one of the strange duo Esther had sent her to
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greet once before. Now he was back. Buffy wondered who he was and what he had done to warrant a full-scale alert.
The camera was set into a cleft in a nearby aspen tree, and the man on the screen glared up at her through the wireless connection. His hard, high-cheekboned face was a thundercloud. He seemed upset at being caught by the camera's unflinching eye, but his initial anger soon melted away.
He then did something that sent a chill up Buffy's spine.
There was no audio feature, which made the weird, green-cast spectacle all the more surreal.
The man stood rigidly beneath the camera, bowed once, as if receiving thunderous applause, and then proceeded to dance a little soft-shoe for his unseen audience. When he was through, he bowed once more before he abruptly hefted the body of the soldier that had lain next to him throughout the entire scene. Without preamble he launched the corpse at the camera.
As if the lifeless shape could hit her, Buffy flinched. The screen filled with a jumble of gray static.
"My monitor's gone off-line," Buffy announced.
She glanced over at the adjoining monitor station. It showed a different angle. But it was the same thick-wristed intruder.
Raccoon Eyes jumped as a rotted log flew up toward his camera. Just prior to the point of impact, a second before the next screen became a hissing square of static, Buffy was certain she saw a pair of legs sticking out of the log's jagged end. On all of the monitor stations around the bunker, two screens hissed angrily at the worried Ragnarok acolytes.
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Whoever this stranger was, he was dangerous. And he was coming their way.
Remo had quelled his initial anger at being detected.
He wasn't upset so much because he had lost the element of surprise, though that was cause for concern. A Sinanju assassin was never caught by surprise. No, Remo was angry at himself for allowing the camera to spot him in the first place. Something that amateurish wasn't supposed to happen.
Chiun would have been livid had he known. But Remo doubted if even the Master of Sinanju could have avoided the pair of surveillance cameras that had been suddenly trained on him.
Remo was sensitive to all electronic equipment and especially so to the many high-tech devices commonly used by security forces to detect enemies. In this case the cameras that had found him had been inactive when he first stepped into their range of vision. In this state, they were about as threatening to Remo as empty coffee cans. For this reason he had failed to note them. When they suddenly whirred to life, it was too late to move. It was almost as if they had known the precise moment he would be standing in front of them.
The cameras had been set up several yards apart on the same side of the path and were arranged so that even if one missed his movements, the other would catch him.
They couldn't possibly have known he was coming again, Remo thought.
Remo kicked the remnants of the nearest camera deep into the woods. The other camera, though
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smashed, still hummed quietly beneath the body of the Truth Church patrol leader.
Remo considered his situation.
The worst that had happened was that he had lost the element of surprise. No big deal. With all of the Ragnarok guards crawling through the underbrush, that probably would have been inevitable before he had reached the ranch.
So what if Esther Clear-Seer knew he was coming? It would give her time to make her peace with the Devil before he sent her off to her final reward.
Remo glided down the path toward the Truth Church encampment, every sense keyed up to maximum alertness. No one was going to catch him unawares again.
"Did you pick up the signal, Prophetess?" Raccoon Eyes asked anxiously.
"Yes, we did." Over the speakerphone Esther Clear-Seer's voice vibrated like a bass violin string. "Are the rest of the cameras ready?"
"They are," he replied.
"Do a systems double-check. Make sure we get those pictures back here."
"Yes, ma'am," he said. "And Yogi Mom?" he added, timidly.
"What is it?"
"Is this an agent of the Old Evil One?"
Her reply hissed angrily over the line. "Don't bother me with that crap now. I'm trying to save my ass."
With that she severed the connection.
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The others glanced at Raccoon Eyes during the awkward silence that ensued.
"The intruder must be in league with the Antichrist," he said with a solemn grimace.
The others nodded, and returned to their stations.
Buffy's eyes hadn't strayed far from her own monitors. Only the two screens were out, and she watched the others in concern as the ghostly images of Truth Church patrols trekked back toward the ranch. Esther must have given the recall command over their radio headsets.
The intruder didn't appear on any of her monitors, but Buffy assumed he was heading toward the ranch, as well. The acolytes were closing in behind him, sealing off his escape route like so much living caulk.
She chewed her lip nervously as she watched for the mysterious man to reappear on her monitor screens.
Beside her, Raccoon Eyes turned his attention to the digital clock mounted at his monitor station.
The toggle switches to the two dormant cameras, as well as a third scarlet switch, sat enticingly within his reach.
Remo paused at the edge of the forest.
The patrols were concentrating in the woods behind him. Nothing stood between him and the Ranch Rag-narok perimeter fence except one hundred yards of Wyoming greasewood prairie.
From high atop the nearest guard tower, halogen flood lamps raked the barren ground. While the beams played back and forth along the forest's edge with earnest diligence, they never quite managed to pin Remo.
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He spotted four other towers, two to the south, the other due west. The lights from these moved relentlessly back and forth, as if searching for someone. For him, Remo understood.
He felt more than heard the hum from the electrified fence and Remo decided that he had better think of an alternate route into the compound. While a defense of this nature wasn't generally a major obstacle, he was in an unusual position. Those inside were alerted to his presence and he couldn't afford the few vulnerable seconds he would have to spend working on the electrified metal.
The tower exterior was rough and chalky. The structure had been built out of cinder blocks skimmed over with several coats of concrete to eliminate any hand-or toeholds between the heavy bricks.
Remo pressed his palms flat against the concrete surface and flexed his fingers. His loafers left the dry earth as he established a kind of suction and repeated the motion with his hands, pushing both inward and upward simultaneously. Spiderlike, he began ascending the tower.
There was a nest of razor wire encircling the concrete silo some three feet below the railed upper platform. Remo paused for a second, letting the pressure of his right hand and toes hold him in place. He snaked out his free hand and took a pinch of wire between thumb and middle finger, making a snapping motion.
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With a tiny pop, the wire sprang apart, falling limply in two neat sections.
Remo moved up between the dangling wires and oozed over the tower rail like so much black smoke.
He was met by the startled eyes of four Truth Church acolytes. Two were operating the spotlights, and the other pair had been peering out toward the woods where the first Ragnarok patrols had already begun moving in a parody of stealth from out of the forest.
The two guards on lookout duty hastily trained their rifles on Remo. Unfortunately for them, Remo had positioned himself in such a way that the guards found themselves standing on either side of their target, so that to open fire each guard would be forced to mow down the other.
Sure enough, that gave them pause.
While they were puzzling over how to proceed, Remo snatched a rifle barrel in each hand and, with a quick, jerking movement, crossed his forearms. Each man lurched forward. The force Remo exerted was enough to drive the business end of each extended rifle into the face of the man opposite.
Both men looked as if they had suddenly and inexplicably sprouted a shiny new AR-15 from the bridges of their noses. The bodies collapsed in two khaki heaps.
The guard manning the nearest spotlight made a move to unholster his side arm. With a casual backhand slap Remo fused the chunk of metal into his pelvis.
To stifle any outcry, Remo then took him by the back of his British-style ribbed black combat sweater
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and jammed his head into the center of the spotlight lens. The glass beneath the outer cage of wire mesh cracked, along with the guard's skull. The body twitched its last as the beam from the broken spotlight faded from bright white to a timid orange glow.
The remaining guard recoiled from the bodies of his fallen comrades and, reflecting on his situation, did the only sensible thing he could think to do. He jumped.
Unfortunately for him, his pants snagged on the broken strand of razor wire. He hung upside down, flailing. As he struggled to free himself, he unwittingly swung into the electrified hurricane fence.
Zzzzappp!
"Yarrrghh!"
When his charred remains dropped from the smoking fence moments later, his horrified scream trailed off into a gurgling hiss.
Remo glanced over his shoulder. About forty armed Truth Church guards were skulking across the grease-wood toward the electrified fence.
Cursing inwardly, he hopped the three stories from the tower into the Ragnarok compound.
"What's happening out there?" demanded the voice of a Truth Church security monitor. His video screens had just captured the carnage at the guard tower. In the strange green twilight of the cameras, he saw the smoking pile of garbage at the base of the three-story block of concrete. Only when he spied a pair of combat boots sticking from the glowing mass did he recognize the charred lump as one of his fellow monitors. "It's him," Raccoon Eyes said with horror-filled
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certainty. "It is the Evil One himself. He's coming for all of us."
As he watched the hordes of silent green guards swarm out of the woods, he swallowed hard. On another screen he saw a guard deactivating the gate near the burned remains of the tower guard. The other soldiers nearby covered their mouths to ward off the stench.
Raccoon Eyes could almost smell the sickly stench himself. The cameras captured several guards vomiting as they caught their first whiff of burned body.
"This is the end," Raccoon Eyes said to himself. His weary eyes seemed to recede farther back in their sockets as he glanced sickeningly at the remaining dormant toggle switches. He knew he didn't want to see that deadly face again, but he had a responsibility to his church.
With weakened resolve, he refocused his attention on the digital clock. Wouldn't be long now, he told himself.
Beside him Buffy Brand watched her monitors in silence.
Remo sensed the presence of electronic-surveillance equipment within the compound. There were heat sensors and motion detectors immediately beyond the perimeter fence, but those were not placed beyond a twenty-yard distance from the guard tower. The subtle vibrations Remo felt now came from additional security cameras.
From the number of cameras he counted in this zone of the compound alone, it was pretty clear that Yogi Mom didn't put a lot of faith in her own disciples. He
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thought it was odd that he hadn't sensed this many cameras on his last penetration. Probably dormant during daylight hours, he decided.
Not a twig snapped, nor did any dried leaf crackle as Remo slid through the darkness, a silent shadow among shadows.
It wasn't any conscious thought that told him there was a pole-mounted camera to the right up ahead; he simply knew it was there. So he faded into the shadows, and out of the camera's limited range.
The camera whirred on its anchoring bridge of metal. A sound like fingernails on a blackboard scratched across Remo's ultrasensitive eardrums. He scrunched his face up at the noise. Didn't these Truth Church wackos own an oil can?
By the time the camera—guaranteed by the manufacturer to be completely silent—had squeaked, buzzed and rolled its way back in a return arc, Remo was already twenty feet beyond it.
He found the next one not quite as noisy and continued moving through the tufts of burned-out scrub brush toward the main cluster of buildings. Behind him Remo could hear the throng of advancing Rag-narok guards. And there seemed to be some kind of movement up ahead....
Remo was wondering how he was going to ice Esther Clear-Seer and get back to his car without having to take out the entire Truth Church congregation when a pair of surveillance cameras simultaneously snapped on ahead and off to his right, capturing him between them.
Remo became very, very still.
"What the ding-dong hell?" he muttered.-^"
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And in the nearby security bunker, hell was on someone else's mind, as well.
"HE'S penetrated the compound," gasped Raccoon Eyes. "The heathen has violated our sacred soil."
Not far from him, Buffy Brand hovered around one of the rear consoles, which featured the thick-wristed man who had wiped out the patrol in the woods. In the strange twilight of the night-vision camera, the man's deep-set eyes were two angry smears of black in a macabre green skull.
Raccoon Eyes made certain that the signal was being routed back to the temple monitors even as he watched the terrifying image on his own screen.
He had helped install most of these cameras himself earlier in the evening. This pair had been as carefully positioned as the rest—one on a watertower, one on a flagpole just above the windsock. They should have been completely undetectable—but the man whom he had dubbed the Evil One had spotted them the instant they had been turned on.
Frantically, he opened the line to the temple. Esther grunted her acknowledgment.
"He's here," Raccoon Eyes announced in a frightened voice.
"I know," she snapped back.
He heard Esther barking orders into th
e radio headsets just before she severed the connection with the security bunker.
Raccoon Eyes looked at the others in the room. Some were praying quietly to themselves. Others merely stared dumbly at the monitor screens, not comprehending the horror about to overtake them.
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There didn't seem to be enough people in the cinder-block room and Raccoon Eyes glanced around, trying to force from his mind all thought of impending doom. For an instant the image of the Evil One vanished as he realized why the room looked emptier.
Buffy Brand was nowhere to be seen.
It was just like before. First the cameras had been off, then they were on.
Remo had been trained to recognize and deal with any kind of threat, potential or real. But, just as in the woods, the cameras hadn't been a threat.
What Remo's senses had disregarded as a lump of metal, plastic, glass and circuitry suddenly hummed itself into a camera, and it was already too late for him to get out of the way.
It was as if the Ranch Ragnarok cameras knew exactly where and when he would show up.
But suddenly the cameras became the least of his worries.
Across the field stretching before him, dozens of high-intensity spotlight beams blazed to life. All were trained directly on him.
They had caught him again.
Remo would have sensed what was about to happen had the lights been manned, but these were operated remotely. There must have been thick cables trailing off to some central location that would have eliminated the usual telltale nervousness that telegraphed the intentions of human operators. The ambush was effective precisely because no human being on the scene was responsible for throwing the switch.
But that didn't mean there weren't people there.
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There were two dozen of them lined up just beyond the spotlights. They popped up as if from nowhere. Probably spiderholes or trenches.
When he focused his eyes to filter out the distracting brightness, Remo let a cool smile crease his set features. He would have laughed, but this would be unprofessional.
The men were set up in two overlapping semicircles beyond the lights in a variation of the old British method of attack that had lost His Majesty the Colonies in the Revolutionary War.