Ground Zero td-84

by Warren Murphy

  "Please?" Remo said. "I hate to admit this, but I kinda miss those old legends of yours."

  Chiun's set features softened like wax hovering at its melting point.

  "You might find the lesson of Master Vimu particularly instructive," he allowed in a quieter tone.

  "So, tell it," Remo prompted.

  "Look it up," Chiun said, compressing his mouth in a manner that suggested aeons of silence to come.

  Remo folded his arms. He hit the seat-recline button and settled back. "Count on it," he growled.

  The moment they were on the ground, Chiun began speaking again.

  "It is almost eleven o'clock," he said.

  "Yeah, it's late. I hope we can get a rental this late."

  "I mean it is nearly time for the eleven-o'clock news."

  Remo snapped his fingers. "Your press conference!" he said suddenly. "Too bad, Little Father. Out here they don't have eleven-o'clock news. The late news comes on at ten."

  "You mean I have wasted my breath on those lunatic press persons for nothing!" he fumed.

  "Join the legion of past victims," Remo said, entering the airport lounge.

  An airline representative told him that the only rental agent was a convenient quarter-mile down the road.

  "Convenience," Remo told her glumly, "means in the airport. Not near it."

  "I just work for the airline," she told him.

  They took a cab to the rental agency. Remo paid off the cab and pushed into the counter area, almost tripping over the body.

  The body lay in the middle of the floor. Remo knelt beside the man, quickly ascertaining that he had died of multiple spike wounds. He knew it was a spike because one stuck up from his head like a rusty pumpkin stem.

  "Either Palm Springs has a serious vampire problem or Dirt First has been here," Remo told the Master of Sinanju.

  Chiun stared at the body with flinty eyes. "Why has this man been crucified, Remo?"

  "Who knows?" Remo said, looking around the empty office. "Maybe in the dark they mistook him for a sequoia."

  "This is clear proof of their perfidy."

  "They'll pay for it," Remo promised, lifting a key off the counter rack. The round metal tag matched the license plate of a white sedan they commandeered from the parking lot.

  Remo sent it out into the desert, his face angry.

  "Master Vimu, huh?" Remo said as they rode under a California desert moon. "Care to hum a few bars just to get me started?"

  "You could not carry the tune," Chiun told him, falling silent once more.

  Connors Swindell loved toys. Big ones. At the height of his career in development, he got to play with real wrecking balls, bulldozers, and concrete-eating pneumatic nibblers.

  The last toy he was going to relinquish, he vowed to himself, was his personal helicopter.

  Once he had had a small fleet of them stationed at strategic nerve centers, the better to visit the many construction sites he had had, in his glory days, sprinkled all over the country.

  Now Swindell was down to one active site, a handful of overpriced condos, and one helicopter. And he would be damned if he would lose this handy little eggbeater to his creditors.

  It was a scarlet-and-cream Sikorsky, and it ferried him from his private Palm Springs roof pad into the desert.

  "We ought to be coming up on it any minute now," the pilot was saying.

  "About damn time," Swindell told him.

  "She may need an overhaul," the pilot added.

  "What makes you say that?"

  "The balance is off. She's flying a little rotorheavy."

  "Seems all right to me. A nice smooth little ride, as always."

  "Oh, there's no danger. It's just that you get sensitive to the feel of these birds, and this one's gone tail-heavy."

  "Let me worry about maintenance," Swindell snapped. "You just earn your flight pay."

  "Yes, sir," the pilot said unhappily.

  Twenty minutes later, the pilot's voice came in the earphones with more than a suggestion of edginess.

  "Umm, Mr. Swindell . . ." he began.

  "What?"

  "We've overshot the site. I don't know how it happened, but we should have overflown it ten minutes ago."

  "You on course?" Swindell asked, more perplexed than angry.

  "Absolutely. By the compass."

  Swindell looked out the bubble. "I didn't see any floodlights," he said uneasily. The rotor chopping made his teeth vibrate.

  "Same here. Do you suppose they're out?"

  "Out?" Swindell asked. "We have our own generators. And backups. How could both go out?" He looked down through the chin port.

  Swindell's mouth dropped like a steam shovel's jaw. It hung there, agape. Then he answered his own question. "Those damn Dirt Firsters!" he snarled.

  There was only one road snaking through the Little San Bernardino Mountains into the desert. So Remo knew he stood little chance of becoming lost. He knew that the Condome site, like most construction sites, would be ablaze with floodlights to minimize pilferage of the open-air material stockpiles.

  Remo saw no floodlights.

  But he did smell something unpleasantly familiar-the combined body odor of a dozen unwashed human beings.

  "We're close. Real close," Remo told Chiun.

  "I see nothing," Chiun said petulantly.

  "Take a whiff. The Dirt Firsters are in this area. If they're close, so is the Condome project."

  "I do not know this word 'Condome.' "

  "Welcome to America in the nineties," Remo sighed. "I'm still trying to transcend Madonna."

  "Your religion is your concern," Chiun sniffed.

  If there was any doubt Dirt First!! was in the vicinity, the sight of Day-Glo yellow blotches on passing palm boles dispelled that. They marked fresh spikes. The occasional broken-armed cactus stood as mute testimony to Dirt First's attempt to adapt their environmental consciences to the desert.

  "We'd better hurry before the cholla cactus ends up on the endangered-succulent list," Remo muttered.

  Remo discovered the presence of a Dirt Firster blocking the road in an unmistakable way: he almost ran one down.

  His headlights picked up a woman's wounded-deer eyes in a near-invisible face. Remo had mistaken her for a road kill because she lay across the road like a human log coated with sand.

  "Hang on!" Remo called, wrenching the wheel to the left. The car sailed off the road and into a dune. It bounced along before coming to a stop, oil pan scraping sand.

  Remo killed the ignition and plunged out of the car. He wasn't sure if he had struck the woman or not.

  When she sat up and shook a sandy fist in his direction, he received his answer.

  "You idiot!" she complained. "You almost ran me over!"

  "You're lying across a dark road practically in camouflage and you're calling me an idiot?" Remo snapped back. "You're damn lucky a tire didn't burst that melon you think is your head."

  "I happen to be monkey-wrenching," she said tartly, examining her beaded Indian skirt for damage.

  "Committing suicide is a better term for it," Remo said, roughly pulling the woman to her feet.

  "We call it monkey-wrenching. Impeding undesirable progress in the cause of Mother Nature."

  "And I call this getting to the heart of the matter," Remo said, suddenly twisting the woman's plump wrist in a painful direction.

  "Ow! Ow! This isn't fair."

  "Losing a nuke always brings out the worst in me," Remo snapped. "Right, Chiun?"

  The Master of Sinanju floated up to examine the woman's squirming figure. She noticed him and in the dark made a misidentification.

  "Hey, Desert Chief. How about telling your pale face friend to let a blood sister go? I ain't done nothing."

  Chiun looked his question.

  "She thinks you're an Indian," Remo supplied.

  Chiun grimaced. "The woman is blind," he said. "But I will open her eyes." One yellow claw of a hand drifted out to her earlobe,
took a pinch, and slowly increased the pressure.

  The Dirt Firster's reaction was not that of a person with a pinched earlobe, but one who had somehow gotten her tongue caught in a light socket. Flinging out her arms, she howled as if to raise the dead.

  "First question," Remo said. "Where are the rest of them?"

  "Over . . . there," she gasped. "At the . . . ow . . . Condome. Monkey-wrenching it. Please! That's my triple-pierced ear!"

  "Second question. Pay attention. This is important. Who has the neutron bomb?"

  "Umm, Russia?"

  "Wrong."

  "China? The U.S.? I'm not big on current events. "

  "You can do better than that," Remo warned.

  "How should I know?" she asked, squeezing her eyes.

  "You're with Dirt First," Remo explained. "We know they lifted the bomb. Is it here?"

  "Nobody told me about any bomb. Honest Injun."

  Remo frowned. He turned to the Master of Sinanju. "She sounds like she's telling the truth," he said reluctantly.

  "I am telling the truth, you conterprogressive!"

  "Third and last question," Remo said. "Did your people gas La Plomo?"

  "No!" Tears streamed down her face, making flesh-colored vein patterns on her dirty cheeks.

  Remo watched as Chiun applied increasing pressure. When the woman simply repeated "No!" several times in quick succession, Chiun shifted his tormenting hand to the base of her spine. He gave a tap. The woman flopped to the road like a bouncy sack of suet. She did not get up again.

  "What did you do that for?" Remo demanded. "We didn't get any answers."

  "Yes, we did," Chiun said tightly. "We learned the truth."

  "Yeah? Well, maybe she wasn't in on it. They recruit new people all the time." Remo looked away. "Okay, let's shake up the rest of them."

  They went in search of the Condome site.

  Fabrique Foirade was immensely proud of himself.

  After another ignominious retreat, he had regrouped his forces and shifted tactics with what he believed was the oppression-honed brilliance of a Ho Chi Minh.

  "Okay," he had said. "Now they know we're serious. They're cowering in that ugly dome of a thing. So we fall back on some good old-fashioned monkey-wrenching."

  "Like what?" he was asked.

  "First, we fill the gas tanks of every vehicle with sand."

  "But we didn't bring any sand!"

  "We're standing on tons," Fabrique pointed out.

  Everyone noticed this for a fact.

  "Gee, if we use real desert sand, won't that wreck the local ecosystem?" Fabrique was asked.

  This point was hotly debated for several moments. Fabrique Foirade won the argument by the simple expedient of braining the most vocal dissenter with the blunt end of a handy spike.

  "Any other objections?" he inquired stonily.

  He received none. Fabrique took this as a textbook example of the perfect application of socialist dialogue.

  "Okay," he urged, "sand in the tanks. Cut every wire and break every tool. And somebody dump Joyce across the road as an obstruction. She'll know what to do when she wakes up."

  This proved to be easy enough to accomplish. The surplus of sand was a tremendous boon. Soon the outside gas generators were sputtering into silence. The lights died out.

  "Maybe we should have saved the light for last," a man who was so coated with sand that he resembled walking sandpaper suggested timidly, after the overwhelming darkness put a stop to further ecotage. Dirt First!! kept bumping into one another.

  Someone found a battery-powered flashlight. Foirade took possession of this and started rooting around. The others merrily broke everything the light illuminated.

  "Hold it!" Fabrique cried, fishing the light around a wooden shack. "I found a bunch of paint."

  The others joined in. Behind them the construction workers were pounding on the electronic airlock door. Without power, it refused to open. They were trapped.

  And so they watched, helpless and profane, as the minions of Dirt First!! formed a fire-bucket brigade and ferried dozens of paint cans to the clear dome itself.

  Brushes were brought up. Paint-can lids opened. The Dirt Firsters gathered around the dome and began painting three-foot-high slogans in praise of natural beauty-all of which were lost on the trapped construction workers, inasmuch as, from their vantage points, the letters were backward.

  Some of them, witnessing the desecration of months of painstaking work undertaken in the worst construction climate of their lives, wept bitterly as the flawless Plexiglas collected oversize streaks of clumsily applied paint.

  Others turned away. Still others pounded at the inner Plexiglas walls, as if they could shatter the impenetrable stuff and knock out the grinning teeth of the desert raiders only inches away, in clear view but beyond retribution.

  Then something strange happened.

  A grinning Dirt Firster shoved his face against the Plexiglas. They had been doing that all along to taunt the construction crew. But this one actually struck the transparent material with enough force to make it reverberate like a bell.

  When the face withdrew, it left a smear of red that was not paint. He had been using green paint. Slipping down the rilling red liquid were two white Chicklet-like teeth.

  The Dirt Firster hit the ground, his legs bouncing high before they struck the sand for the final time.

  "What happened to him?" Ed Coyne muttered in surprise.

  Before anyone could venture a guess, another Dirt First!! protester suddenly leapt very high into the air. He landed in the exact center of the Condome dome. Facedown. He didn't move after he struck. He just lay splayed there like a weary scarecrow. His nose formed a silver-dollar-size pancake in his face. It hadn't been that shape a moment before.

  A cheer went up among the construction workers.

  For out in the night, two fleet shapes went among the Dirt Firsters, wreaking havoc.

  One was a lean man in a white T-shirt. Moonlight showed that much, no more.

  The other was a wispily tiny figure in phantom gray.

  The construction crew raced back and forth inside the dome, trying to follow the action. The pair seemed always to be one step ahead.

  "Over here!" a man would shout. But by the time the crew surged to the spot, all that remained was a twitching body.

  Once they caught a glimpse of a thick-wristed hand reaching out from the darkness to take a Dirt Firster by the back of the neck and use his long hair to clean off a particularly obscene scrawl. The Dirt Firster's face moved faster than it seemed possible for a face to move. And the crew realized it was simply because the motivating hand was moving with lightning speed.

  In a twinkling, the wet scrawl was gone. So was the guy in the white T-shirt.

  The Dirt Firster's face, now wet and Day-Glo orange, collapsed to the sand like a cast-off rag.

  "Who are these guys?" Ed Coyne asked in awe.

  "Who cares! Let's see what they do next."

  What they did next was to make short work of the remaining members of Dirt First!!

  Bodies flew in all directions. One man attempted to use a spike to defend himself from the wispy one in gray.

  The attacker came on, spike held high. A single finger, somehow too long to be human, snaked up to intercept the descending instrument. The spike spat a spark and lost its point.

  The Dirt Firster next tried to nail the one in gray with the ragged stump.

  The ragged stump somehow changed direction in mid-stroke, taking a grasping hand along with it. It knocked out a savagely grinning row of teeth.

  The man stumbled off, trying not to swallow the spike whole.

  Then the excitement subsided. The victorious pair faded back from the dome as if unwilling to take a bow, despite the cheers and whistles and thunderous applause that shook the dome.

  At that point a searchlight raked the dome. The crew looked up to see a familiar scarlet Sikorsky helicopter descend from the clear desert sk
y.

  They sobered instantly, wondering if they would still be employed in the morning. A few thought the spectacle they had witnessed was worth the loss of pay.

  Chapter 15

  Remo Williams thought he had gotten most of them.

  As another Dirt Firster bit the sand, a loose bag of broken bones, he looked around for Chiun. There was no sign of the Master of Sinanju on this side of the dome.

  Then he caught a fleeting glimpse of gray silk through the transparent edge of the dome.

  Circling, Remo came upon Chiun about to dispatch a scrawny Dirt Firster like a farmer harvesting a chicken.

  Holding the man by the neck, but using only the awesome pressure of his impossibly long nails, the Master of Sinanju prepared to give a wrenching twist.

  "Hold up, Chiun."

  Chiun turned, pulling his intended victim along. "Why?" he demanded. "I am about to mete out justice to this foul murderer of rental agents."

  "Not to mention farmers," Remo said grimly.

  "He is not responsible for that," Chiun said flatly.

  "We'll see. First, he tells us where the bomb is."

  "Bomb?" asked Fabrique Foirade, his heart pounding high in his throat. He squirmed in the old Oriental's grip, but it was like his neck was impaled by a circle of supersharp darning needles. One wrong move might rip his own windpipe or sever his jugular.

  "The neutron bomb," said the skinny guy. "Where is it?" Fabrique recognized him from La Plomo. The reactionary. It was amazing how well he could discern people now that he no longer wore his hair over his face like an unkempt Pekingese.

  "Search me," he muttered, trembling.

  "We know you and your walking mud pies stole the neutron bomb," Remo retorted. "Your filthy handprints were all over the pickup truck it was last seen on."

  "Get real, man." Fabrique sneered. "It was abandoned. We just tried to salvage it, you know, for the ride home. I don't know about any neutron bomb-except they aren't kind to flowers and other living things."

  "I suppose you don't know about the dead guy we found by the pickup, either?" Remo asked.

  "Just that he was a really, really cool dude. Cool to the touch, that is. He was already dead when we got there."

  Remo took a chance. "Can the crap. We have proof he was a Dirt Firster."