When Remo was gone, Smith asked Chiun what he knew about hypnotism.
"Everything," answered Chiun. "I used to own five hypnotists."
If Smith knew what Rabinowitz was doing at that moment, he would have run after Remo on his hands and knees and begged him to be the sad Russian's friend.
Chapter 8
Two men, each with different keys, were needed to launch an American nuclear missile. Each missile was pretargeted. In other words, those who fired it did not decide where it would land. They only followed orders. There was a strict procedure. First, the airmen had to make sure the missiles absolutely did not go off accidentally, and second, when they did, it would be only on properly validated orders from Strategic Air Command.
"And where does the Strategic Air Command get its orders?"
"From the President, Ma. Why are you asking me all these questions?"
Captain Wilfred Boggs of Strategic Air Command, Omaha, did not like coffee shops, and especially meeting his mother in one. And what really bothered him was that his mother had been asking around town about where the big missiles were, the ones that were aimed at Russia.
Captain Boggs, on security duty, had been assigned to interrogate the person. Boggs thought he was to interrogate a Russian immigrant, something so ludicrous as to make him laugh when he first heard it.
"You mean to tell me that there's a Russian going around looking for our biggest in Omaha?"
"Says he was told the missile bases was out here," answered the local police liaison officer. "But don't be too mean to him. Fella's real nice. Wants to see you, anyone from SAC. I told him, you wanna see someone from SAC, you go around this city asking for the biggest missile and you'll see someone real fast."
But the local police had made the biggest mistake of their lives. It was Wilfred's mother whom they had arrested. "You want to speak to me, Ma, phone me."
"I'm here, so tell me. How do you fire a missile at Russia?" And that was how his mother began the questions of who controlled what and where in the Strategic Air Command. Of course he got her out of jail immediately and went to a more suitable place to talk, a coffee shop she insisted on because she liked pastries. He was lucky to get her out of jail, but the policemen seemed unusually willing to break a few rules for a person every one of them found very special.
The question Ma wanted answered most of all was: "You couldn't fire one for your mother?"
"Ma, it takes two."
"Let me speak to the other one."
"Ma, I don't have a key. I'm in security now. I don't fire them."
"All of a sudden you can't fire a little missile? This is what you're telling your mother?"
"I never could fire a missile even when I had a key. It takes two and then we have to have the proper orders. Even if two of us decided we were going to fire one of these things, we'd have to have the proper command sequence wired in to our station."
"Hold on. Just a minute already. We're into a lot of things I didn't suspect," said his mother, and she took out a little notebook and a pencil and said:
"All right, give it to me from the very beginning."
"Will you put away that pad and pencil? I can't be seen telling you the SAC structure with you taking notes. And why are you taking notes?"
"Because I'm trying to find out why a red-blooded American boy who will fire a missile if some machine says fire, won't fire one for his flesh and blood. That's why. One missile and you're making a big deal already. One little missile. How many missiles do you have? Hundreds, right?"
"It could start a war, Ma."
"It won't start a war," said his mother in a strange singsong, dismissing such an idea with a touch of her hand and a low sad nod. "Russia will learn not to bother innocent people. They respect that sort of thing."
"I don't know that the missiles at our base are aimed at Russia. It could be Eastern Europe. Asia. We don't know."
"You mean, you'd fire a missile and not know where it landed?"
"It helps. We don't want to know who we'd be killing. We might read books about those places and refuse at the last minute."
"So I've come all the way out to Omaha in Nebraska for nothing?"
"Not nothing, Ma. We haven't seen each other since Christmas. Boy is it good to see you. How're Cathy, Bill, and Joe? You've got to fill me in."
"They're fine. Everyone's fine. Everyone loves you, good-bye. Are you going to finish your Danish?"
"I don't like pastry, Ma. Come to think of it, neither do you. "
And his mother left without kissing him good-bye. Stranger still, when he confessed to the local police that he had released the subject they had put into his custody, the one who had been asking about missiles, his mother, all they said was, "Thanks. We owe you a lot. And we'll never forget it."
Spring in Omaha was like spring in Siberia. It was warmish nothing, as opposed to winter, which was frozen nothing.
Vassily Rabinowitz stood on the street corner with one single Danish pastry in his hand and the entire Soviet Union as his enemy.
Missiles were out. He had nothing against Russia, never had. All he wanted was to be left alone. All he wanted was to be able to walk around awhile without having people come up to him asking questions. He had thought America would be like that. Yes, one could walk around, but not for long. Muggers could get you before you could get them into a proper frame of mind.
So he had gotten himself a crime family, and from the newspaper reports, he was pretty good at it. He had become a criminal mastermind. And one single Russian commando unit had shown him that his crime family, his tough desperate criminals, were about as tough as a dozen cannoli in a paper box.
They had deserted him, and Vassily had been bound sightless and soundless and carried, terrified, over a long distance until the only family person he met in this country rescued him and then left. The man had been definitely friendly even without Vassily's influence.
But Vassily had been scared out of his wits. He knew the Russian government. A nice word to the government meant you were weak. Peace was weakness. How many times had he heard Russian generals comment, on hearing of a peace overture, that the country offering it was weak? Peace was weakness. Of course, when the other country armed itself, then it was aggressive.
"Why," Vassily had once asked a field marshal who had come to the parapsychology village for treatment of a headache, "are we not weak when we make a peace overture? These things have puzzled me."
"Because when we make a peace overture, we want the other side to disarm. That will make us stronger."
"Why do we want to be stronger?"
"If we are not stronger they will destroy us."
"And if we are stronger?"
"We will destroy them," said the field marshal happily. "And then where will we get all those wonderful Western goods if we destroy them?"
"I'm not in charge of politics," said the field marshal.
"Would you really want to cook your bread in a Russian toaster?"
"Don't bother me with politics."
"Have you ever had Russian Scotch?"
"You're being subversive," said the field marshal.
It had really been just another incident to prove to him what he already knew. What the Russians understood was absolute force. Kill, and they would talk fairly and decently with you. Show you could not kill, and they wouldn't even answer your mail.
Vassily Rabinowitz understood that if he could get a missile shot off at some place in Russia, he would be able to embrace his newfound American comrades as allies even before the nuclear dust settled. Only after he showed everyone he was a major danger did he have the slightest chance of being left alone.
Communist Russia had always been like this. It was they, not the West, who had signed the nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany. It was they, not the West, who had collided with the Nazis to take Poland. It was they, not the West, who had waited happily for the Nazis to destroy Europe, giving them whatever raw materials they might need
, including materials to build gas ovens.
In the end, of course, the Nazis invaded Russia, and then the propaganda machines went to work. It became Russia and the West against fascism, and then at the end of the war, when the West disbanded its armies, Russia kept its forces at full level and put up the Iron Curtain.
And if the West had not rearmed, there would have been a red flag flying over Washington.
To know anything about history was to know this about Russia. Vassily Rabinowitz, whether he liked it or not, would have to go into the army business.
He had gotten over his revulsion at his crimes in New York. The initial shame had turned to pride. If he could kill gang leaders, he could easily kill Russians. And probably outsmart them to boot, although one fact the West always seemed to ignore was that the Russians were very shrewd.
It would be quite a test. Unfortunately, as he finished his pastry on the street corner, he understood he didn't even have one missile yet. And his problem, he realized, was that he was starting at the bottom.
The lights went out, and the shooting started. They could see only gun flashes, and they shot at the flashes. But as they shot, their own guns gave off flashes, and they were hit. The room filled with the groans of dying, cursing men, and when the lights went on, the blood had made the floor slippery, so slippery that Anna Chutesov sent in a man to see if everyone of them was dead.
He came back with blood all over his shirt. He had slipped three times.
"Blood is more slippery than oil," he said.
"Are they dead?" she asked.
"No. Not all. Some are dying."
"That's fine," she said to the soldier. Men, she thought. I knew they would react like that.
But she did not say this to the young lieutenant who had gone into the room for her. Even now soldiers were running up stairways and down hallways with guns, looking for the source of the firing.
Men, thought Anna Chutesov. They are so stupid. Why are they running? What will they figure out faster by running? Most of them don't even know where the gunfire was coming from. But they run. They run because another man told them it was a good way to get someplace faster. Actually, walking had gotten Anna Chutesov farther in Soviet Russia than any man her age.
She was twenty-six years old, and despite her youth she had more influence in more places than anyone from the Berlin wall to Vladivostok.
And she did not get it because of her great beauty. She was blond. Soft honey-colored hair caressed her magnificent high cheekbones and her smile flashed with such perfect whiteness that some men gasped.
Of course, men would always gasp at beauty without ever figuring out how it got there. The real beauty of Anna Chutesov was in her presence. It was cool, friendly, and only hinted of sexuality.
Anna knew that average men became absolutely useless when in heat. A man in heat was like a telephone pole on wheels, virtually uncontrollable and completely dysfunctional.
She walked calmly through the running men, and by the time she reached command headquarters, fifteen stories down into the earth, sheltered from any possible American attack, she had been asked no less than ten times what had happened on the first floor among the special mission commanders.
Each time she answered that she did not know, and each time she thought how stupid the question was. No one gave out information freely in this command headquarters designed for the last struggle against capitalism in case of an American invasion.
It was a wonderful headquarters and the result of typical male thinking. It was here they could direct the remnants of Russian forces if America should be successful in penetrating Russian borders.
What no one bothered to ask was why America would penetrate Russian borders. There was only one reason: if there was a war in which America had to fight for its life.
One would be perfectly safe if everyone respected the status quo. But America looked on every rebellion in every stinkwater backward third-world country as a threat, and Russia, thinking it was weakening America, supported every one of those backward third-world garbage pits called countries.
America knew those countries weren't worth the sewage they couldn't get rid of, and so did Russia. But the men kept on building weapons and scaring themselves. And so, like the room upstairs where men trying to survive had gotten themselves killed or wounded, the leaders of Anna's country built silly defense networks like this one that went fifteen stories underground.
Whether there would still be something around to command after an atomic war was doubtful. But they had to play their games.
At the bottom floor, she entered a room with a long white table that reflected a harsh fluorescent light in the ceiling. The walls were concrete. They could have been fine porcelain. Fifteen stories down into bedrock, they weren't going to need any greater support.,
"Anna, we heard there was a horrible disaster on the first level. Someone got in and shot up a room full of special-missions commanders."
"No," said Anna Chutesov. "The only people who got in were in already."
"What happened? You always knew everything," said the heavy man with gold-braided epaulets bi.; enough for toy planes to use as aircraft carriers.
"No, I only seem to know everything," said Anna. The implication for anyone using a brain was that she appeared to know everything because no one around her ever seemed to know anything.
She received smiles of approval from the men she had just insulted. There was one other woman in this higher command. She was the one with the heavy mustache. Anna knew that person was a woman because she wore the colors of the female army corps. They played up her massive biceps very well.
"What happened?"
"What happened was that you are going to have to send me after Vassily Rabinowitz. There is no one else. The others have all just killed or wounded themselves."
"That's awful. Do you know General Matesev himself was killed trying to get Rabinowitz back to the country?"
"Yes," said Anna. "I believe we also lost the special force, and any chance of using similar techniques to penetrate America. I know it all, gentlemen. I know that Vassily Rabinowitz was wrapped like a bundle with tape and carried back to Matesev, where some other force rescued him."
"We're doomed. If they have him, we are doomed."
"We are doomed to the extent that he believes he is surrounded by a malicious world. I have gone through his dossier. All this man wanted for the years he was in the parapsychology village was to be left alone. Do you know what our response was? We sent in round-the-clock teams to find out why he wanted to be left alone. So he left. Now he is in America, and we don't know what on earth he is doing. If he is frightened, as he may well be, he could be planning to set off a missile right now. This very moment a nuclear warhead could be coming at our country. And do you know why? So he would not have to feel defenseless. And against whom? The people who would send a Matesev to bring him back. Shoot, kill, capture, and run. Lunacy."
"It was a good decision," said a KGB general. This did not tell Anna about how good the decision was, but that it had come from the KGB.
"A good decision, comrade, except the results were bad, yes?"
"Yes," said the KGB representative.
"Well, that's possible," said Anna. "We all can't be expected to know how everything will turn out. Except I will take that onerous burden. I will guarantee the results of my taking over. I take full and absolute responsibility."
"How can you guarantee the results?" asked the KGB representative. He did not trust her. He did not trust any women in important roles. A woman could be put in a post, paraded in a post, but a man had to be behind her. "Because I will do it."
"If the likes of General Matesev could not succeed, how can someone like you guarantee you will succeed?"
"The same way I could guarantee that I would get this mission after the special commanders killed themselves." Anna smiled.
"But you asked for this meeting yesterday. They only killed themselves just now."
>
"About ten minutes ago, five minutes after I told each of them someone was planning to kill them, I turned out the lights and threw in a firecracker. They acted the way I knew they would."
"You killed them! Do you think we will send you out on the mission after you connived to deprive us of our best special-missions commanders?"
"Yes. Of course. Deprived of every other avenue of action, in the end, my dear comrades, you will make a rational decision," said Anna Chutesov. "And in the end, that decision has to be to use me. You have no one else readily available."
A general from the armies in the East rose, pounding the table.
"That is ruthless, deceitful, and despicable. Do you expect us to send you on one of the most crucial missions in the history of the Soviet Union after you have done something like that?"
"Absolutely. I use the incident of upstairs as my main credential. Until this moment, gentlemen, I have not shown that I could kill. There is a room awash in blood on the first level that will attest that I can do this very well."
Most of the men shook their heads. But an older comrade, one who had been through the revolution of 1917 and through the years of Joseph Stalin himself, nodded slowly.
"She's right. Beyond a shadow of a doubt our beautiful Anna Chutesov has proved she is not only the best person for this task, but possibly the only one. Good for you, Anna," he said.
"But what if she decides to use Rabinowitz for her own ends?" said the other woman in the room, the one with the biggest biceps.
"Do you really think I would be so stupid as to try to control something that could convince me I was talking to my mother or father whenever it wished? Are you mad, or just acting that way because you are a woman in a room surrounded by men?" asked Anna.
"I am every bit as good as the men," said the woman.
"Yes," said Anna without sarcasm. "You certainly function at that level. Now, is there anyone here who remotely thinks I would wish to keep something like a Vassily Rabinowitz alive?"
There as no answer.
"My first job is to stop him before he gets his hands on the nuclear trigger or an army. This I may not be able to do. But you should be aware of what he can do, because a missile fired at our country may well not be the beginning of an atomic war. It could be some silly thing a frightened man would do, hoping to prove to us he is not as weak as he feels. Do you understand?"
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