Rain of Terror td-75

by Warren Murphy

  General Martin S. Leiber kept his suit on. He was a senior procurement officer with the Pentagon. No way was he going to get a face full of radiation. In fact, he wouldn't be here at all, but he happened to be senior officer at the Pentagon when word came from the White House. The President wanted to know if Washington was still standing. General Martin S. Leiber promised the President of the United States that he would look into the situation and get back to him within a few days. The fact that Washington looked perfectly normal from his office window was of little consequence. General Leiber was only five years from retirement. No way was he going to get his ass in a sling this close to the jackpot. Especially with a new President.

  General Leiber had returned to his poker game, looked at his hand, and decided to play it out. A major beat his two pairs with a royal flush. General Leiber called the game and ordered the major to get the poop on the Washington survivability question. That would teach the bastard.

  When the major returned with word of the possible missile strike on Lafayette Park, General Leiber saw stars. Specifically, one more on each shoulder. Although it was against his best bureaucratic instincts, he personally led the Air Force team to Lafayette Park. But just to make sure, he put Major Royal Flush in operational command.

  Now, with the sun climbing toward noon, the general walked up to the major, a serious expression on his gruff face.

  "What do you think this sucker is?" he demanded.

  "We have unusually high levels of magnetism," the major said. "But no radiation or other lethal agents. I think we should fish for a piece of whatever's down there."

  It sounded noncontroversial, so General Leiber said, "Do it!"

  A derrick was driven onto the dead grass. Its treads sank into the mushy ground at the edge of the hole. It looked as if it would tip into the pit, but eventually it stabilized.

  The steel jaws descended into the hole. And got stuck.

  They finally came up with a jagged swatch of metal that dripped water. The metal was black and pitted. The derrick deposited it on a white tarp that had been laid on the ground.

  The Air Force team swiftly surrounded it. The major tapped it with a retractable ball-point pen. The pen stuck too.

  "I don't understand," he said softly.

  "What's that?" General Leiber asked.

  "Iron. This appears to be solid iron."

  "I never heard of a nuclear missile with iron parts."

  "We don't know that this is any such thing," the major pointed out. "Could be a meteor. They contain a lot of iron."

  "Bull," said General Leiber. "NORAD picked it up at apogee. It was ballistic. What else could it be, if not a missile?"

  "Let's find out," the major suggested. "Bring up another piece."

  The next piece was iron too. Cast iron. So was the third. General Leiber began to feel very strange.

  Then the derrick brought up a crushed and charred object that was somehow attached to a pitted iron stanchion. Everyone took turns examining the object.

  "I'd say this crushed part is not iron," the major said, scraping at the charred surface with a thumbnail. He exposed a line of shiny brownish-yellow metal. "Looks like it was hollow and the impact compressed it. See this lip here? Some kind of opening or mouth."

  "What's that thing sticking out, then?" General Leiber asked. "A tongue?"

  The major looked. Out of the flattened mouth protruded a tiny ball of metal on the end of a rod. His brow wrinkled doubtfully.

  "This thing looks familiar. I can't place it. Anyone?" The object was passed from hand to hand.

  Finally someone offered a suggestion.

  "I don't know if this is possible, but I think this was a bell."

  "A what?" asked General Leiber.

  "A bell. A brass bell. You know, like you would hang in a church steeple."

  Then everyone looked at everyone else with the expression of children who had wandered into a very wrong place.

  "Let's get it out of the hole," General Leiber said swiftly. "All of it. Every piece. I'll requisition an empty hangar at Andrews. You boys can reconstruct it there."

  "It may not be that simple," the major said reasonably. "It's badly compressed and fused. We don't know what it might be. Where would we start?"

  "Here," General Leiber, said, slapping the crushed blob of brass into his open hands. "Start with this. If that thing in the hole is some new kind of enemy weapon, the future of your country may depend on learning what it is and what it was supposed to do."

  "What if we end up with a church steeple?" the major joked.

  "Then you better get down on your knees, son. Because if the Russkies have turned God Almighty to their side, America doesn't have a prayer."

  The major started to laugh. He swallowed his mirth. The general was not smiling. In fact, he looked serious. Dead serious. The major hurried off to carry out the general's orders.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and he couldn't remember ever being in this much trouble before.

  As he ran down the wooded road, his deep-set eyes searching the trees on either side, Remo Williams did not look like a man in trouble. He looked like a jogger. Except that he wore shoes of excellent Italian leather, gray chinos and, even though the temperature was hovering just under the freezing mark, a fresh white T-shirt.

  He clutched a coil of rope in one fist. The skin was drawn tight over his high cheekbones. His dark eyes looked stricken.

  A sporty red Corvette zipped past him and Remo broke into a floating run. Showing no apparent effort, he caught up with the Corvette and, checking the two-lane road to see that no cars were coming at him from the opposite direction, he drew alongside the driver's side of the car.

  The car was doing a decorous forty-five miles an hour. Remo knocked on the driver's window.

  The window hummed down and a blue-eyed woman with mahogany hair looked him up and down with a dreamy expression.

  "I'll bet you could go all night, too," she said. She didn't seem surprised to see a man keeping pace with a speeding automobile. Remo looked so ordinary that some people refused to accept the evidence of their eyes when they saw him perform the impossible.

  "Have you seen an elephant walking along this road?" Remo asked. There was no pleasure in his eyes.

  The woman raised an ironic eyebrow. Her smile broadened. "Maybe you could describe him," she suggested.

  "He's an elephant. Gray. Wrinkled skin. Small for an elephant. No tusks."

  "A lot of elephants fit that description," the woman said breathily. "Could you be more specific?"

  "Lady, I guarantee you he's the only elephant in the neighborhood. Now, have you seen him?"

  "I'm trying to think," she said slowly. "It's possible. Maybe if you drew me a picture. I have some crayons back at my apartment."

  "No time," Remo said, and pulled away.

  The woman frowned, and deciding that the conversation had ended prematurely, hit the accelerator. The needle jumped to seventy and clawed at seventy-five. But try as she might, the Corvette kept losing ground at each whipsaw turn in the road.

  The turns didn't seem to stop the man in the white T-shirt. She lost sight of him after he topped a rise in the road and never caught up. She decided to drive down this road every day at this time until she encountered him again. It was crazy, of course. But there was something about the guy. She just couldn't put her finger on it....

  Remo was close to panic. There was no way he was returning without the elephant. Chiun would kill him. Not literally, of course. Although Chiun was the head of an ancient line of assassins and could snuff out a man's life with a casual gesture, he wouldn't kill Remo. That would be too merciful. Instead, the Master of Sinanju would make Remo's life miserable. He knew many ways of doing that, most of them verbal.

  Seeing no sign of an elephant on the long stretch of open road before him, Remo plunged into the woods. For the thousandth time he wished he hadn't left the gate open.

  It had been Remo's turn
to water Chiun's pet elephant. Remo had led the pachyderm out of the shed where he was kept, and had gone to find the hose. The gardener of Folcroft Sanitarium where Remo and Chiun currently resided-had walked off with it. By the time Remo had talked the man out of the hose, the elephant, whose name was Rambo, had strolled out the opened gate of Folcroft.

  Remo had unlocked the gate earlier. After he had hosed Rambo down, he intended to take him for a walk. Opening the gate first was meant to make Remo's job easier. It was Remo's turn to walk the elephant, too.

  Remo had run out immediately, but the elephant had already melted out of sight. Remo hesitated near the gate, and decided two searchers would be infinitely better than one. He hurried to find Chiun, who would certainly understand when Remo explained the accident.

  Remo found Chiun doing his morning exercises. He sat in a lotus position on the Folcroft gymnasium floor, tapping a bar of chilled steel suspended between two uprights with his long fingernails. He was a happy little mummy of a Korean gentleman, with pleasantly wrinkled features and the merest wisp of hair on his chin. He wore a canary-yellow kimono. He looked frail enough to snap in a stiff wind.

  But when Remo blurted out, "I'm sorry, Little Father, but Rambo ran away," Chiun paused in mid-stroke. Then one fingernail continued down to sever the half-inch bar. It clattered to the pinewood floor in two neat sections.

  Chiun got to his feet, his venerable face turning to granite.

  "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I was only gone a minute," Remo repeated.

  "Find him." Chiun's normally squeaky voice was like chopsticks breaking.

  "I thought two heads would be better than one," Remo said meekly.

  "You thought wrong," said Chiun. "Why should I expend precious moments of my declining years cleaning up after your mistakes?"

  "It's your elephant."

  "Entrusted to you. And misplaced by you."

  "He walked off. It was his own idea."

  "And if he is now lying in some filthy ditch after being struck by a careless motor-carriage driver, I suppose that would be his fault too?"

  Remo started to get angry. He checked himself. "C'mon, Little Father. You can at least help out."

  "I will."

  "Good."

  "I will give you an additional impetus to search faster."

  "Huh?"

  "I will hold my breath until my precious baby is restored to me."

  And Chiun inhaled mightily. His cheeks puffed out like a blowfish. He stopped breathing.

  "Awww, no, you don't have to do that."

  When Chiun's cheeks puffed out further, Remo threw up placating hands.

  "Okay, okay. I'll find him. Stay right here."

  Remo ran out of Foleroft and down the road, knowing that Chiun was not bluffing. He would stubbornly hold his breath until Remo returned with the Master of Sinanju's "baby," no matter how long it took.

  Already it had been half an hour and Remo had found no trace of Rambo. He had no idea how long Chiun could hold his breath without exhaling. Chiun was a Master of Sinanju, the sun source of the martial arts. Masters of Sinanju were capable of incredible discipline. Remo was a Master too, and had once tried to test his own ability at holding his breath. He went exactly thirty-seven minutes before he got bored. Chiun, having trained Remo in Sinanju, was probably good for an hour. At least.

  So Chiun was in no immediate danger. But he would make Remo pay for every breath not taken.

  Remo found no tracks in the forest. He stopped in the middle of a stand of poplars, their dead, frozen leaves making no sound under his careful feet. He went up a tree to get a better view.

  Back the way he had come, Remo spotted a police car pulled over to the side of the road, its light bar painting the surroundings a washed-out blue. Two cops stepped gingerly from each door with guns drawn.

  They advanced carefully on a small elephant who looked like a corrugated gray medicine ball balanced on stubby feet.

  "Oh, hell!" Remo said, sliding down the tree. He flashed through the woods like an arrow.

  Remo skidded to a stop beside the police cruiser. "Hey, fellas, hold up," Remo called.

  The cops turned in unison. Behind them, the elephant regarded the scene with tiny dull eyes. His trunk seemed to wave to Remo.

  "Don't shoot him!" Remo pleaded.

  One cop jerked his thumb at Rambo. "Yours?" he asked.

  "Not exactly."

  Uncertain how to handle an elephant, the cops turned their attention to Remo, their weapons dropping into their holsters. They were in their mid-forties, with hulking shoulders and meaty faces. They wore nearly identical expressions, like clones. Remo decided they were typical for cops who had seen too much and liked so little of it that they had shut down emotionally long ago. Remo knew how it was. A long time ago, he had been a cop too. Back before he had been framed for a crime he didn't do and executed in an electric chair that didn't work.

  "Whose is it, then?" asked the first cop. Remo thought of him as the first cop because his nose hadn't yet been discolored by burst capillaries.

  "A friend of mine. And he's very anxious to get him back."

  "This friend. He have a permit to keep an elephant?" This from the second cop. The one with the Santa Clausred nose.

  "I don't think he's gotten around to it yet. The elephant's only been in this country a month. But I'll be sure to bring it up."

  "Is that a leash?"

  "This?" Remo asked, hefting the coil of rope. "Yeah."

  "Can you control this animal?"

  "He'll come with me if I approach him right."

  "In that case, we're going to ask you to leash the elephant and follow us to the station."

  "Why?"

  "You've allowed him to roam a major road, where he could be injured by a car. That's reckless endangerment of an animal."

  "He ran away on his own."

  "We'll look into that too. And you may have to prove ownership."

  Remo's shoulders sagged. He could neutralize these two faster than they could blink, but they were cops. And they were only doing their jobs.

  Then Remo suddenly had a vision of Chiun's face. It was red, on its way to turning purple.

  "I'll put the leash on him," Remo said, and started to approach the elephant.

  Rambo saw the rope in Remo's hand and reared up. His trunk waved like a wrinkled python. He trumpeted in warning. The two cops pulled their service revolvers just as two blunt forefeet came down on the hood of the cruiser.

  "Oh, no!" Remo groaned as Rambo smacked the light bar with his trunk. The light bar abruptly shut down. Then the elephant stepped off the hood. The hood bore a shallow dent.

  The first cop turned to Remo and said, "That's destruction of police property, buddy, and you're under arrest." The red-nosed cop took aim on the elephant's head and Remo knew that choice no longer entered into the picture. He disarmed the first cop in the simplest manner. He grabbed at the buckle of his gunbelt and tugged sharply. The gunbelt ended up in Remo's hand. He threw it into the woods. Then Remo tapped the cop in the exact center of his forehead. The man's bloodshot eyes rolled up in his head and he fell like a slab of beef.

  The other cop was about to shoot. Remo chopped at the side of his neck and the man fell into his waiting arms. Remo made a quick noose of the rope and snared the elephant's trunk. But Rambo threw off the noose and reared up on his hind legs.

  "Don't make this any harder than it has to be," Remo muttered.

  Rambo started to drop back to all fours. The way his trunk flayed the air told Remo he was upset. He would run the moment his feet touched ground. Remo moved in first.

  When the front feet came down, Remo was there to catch them. He pushed at the elephant's padded feet with both hands. Rambo trumpeted angrily. He pushed harder, his entire wrinkled weight leaning against Remo.

  Remo kept the stumpy forefeet above the ground. Seeming to exert no effort, he kept Rambo off balance. When the elephant tried to step back, Remo stepped forward, still pushing
.

  Anyone who had driven down the road would have been treated to the sight of a rail-thin man doing the minuet with an Asian elephant. And the man was leading. Remo kept the elephant off balance until the pachyderm began to tire. When he sensed that moment had come, he stepped back. Rambo's forefeet struck the ground. Remo lassoed the knobby head with a quick, easy motion. He tugged Rambo over to the side of the road and tethered him to a tree.

  "Stay," Remo said firmly.

  Then Remo hurried back to the prowl car. He dug into the glove compartment and found, as he expected, a flask. He uncapped it and poured a mouthful down the throat of each recumbent cop, kneading their larynxes so that they swallowed safely. Then he placed one behind the wheel and the other in the seat beside him.

  Before untying Rambo, Remo popped the hood and, balancing on the front fender, flattened out the dent with the palms of his hands. He looked like a cook kneading pizza dough.

  When he closed the hood, the car looked as good as new. And when the two cops woke up and realized that they had been drinking-even if they couldn't remember tasting a drop-they would dismiss what they'd seen as a hallucination.

  The Master of Sinanju wasn't purple when Remo found him. His face was blue. Light blue. Kind of a robin's-egg blue. But he was definitely blue.

  Remo figured he had been gone not quite two hours. "I found him," Remo said hastily. "He's outside."

  The Master of Sinanju folded his arms stubbornly. His cheeks still puffed out defiantly.

  "Look for yourself if you don't believe me," Remo said. Chiun shook his head, which was bald but for tufts of hair over each ear.

  "You want something else?" Remo asked frantically. Chiun nodded.

  "What?"

  Chiun did not say. His hazel eyes regarded Remo pointedly.

  "I already apologized," Remo said. Chiun nodded.

  "It won't happen again."

  Chiun nodded as if in agreement. "You want more?"

  Chiun raised a long-nailed finger in assent.

  "Look, if you want to stick me with some punishment, okay, but do you have to make me work for it too?" Chiun's eyes brightened. Remo was starting to get the idea.