Last War Dance td-17

by Warren Murphy

  "I'm okay. I can go on," said Van Riker.

  "No, you can't. You are breathing wrong. Rest."

  This time Van Riker did not argue. He waited. Then his eyes drifted upward, and he saw the night sky and the stars and was awed by the universe and his own smallness in it. Even the Cassandra would not be a speck on one of those stars out there.

  "Magnificent," he said, mostly to himself. "How can one give thanks for such awesome magnificence?"

  "You're welcome," said Chiun, somewhat surprised because he had not shown this strange fellow much, nor did he think this fellow would understand if he did see something impressive.

  "The head of your organization said back in that hangar in Raleigh that you are the finest assassin in the world," said Van Riker, passing time until he got the signal to move again.

  "Smith is not the head of my organization. I am the head of my organization, and I consider what he says silliness."

  "How's that?"

  "If he is not the finest assassin or even the second finest, how would he know? What do I know of your Cassandra if I am not of the wisdom of your house of science? What do I know?"

  "I see," said Van Riker. "That's the effectiveness of the Cassandra, you know. That we are dealing with people who understand what we have. If they didn't understand, then we wouldn't have a weapon."

  Chiun placed a hand on Van Riker's chest. The breathing was good, but he was not ready to move, not for what Chiun wanted him to do.

  "It is a bad weapon," said Chiun. "Of weapons I know, and the greatest is the mind. But this Cassandra is bad. If I had been advising the emperor, you never would have made this bad thing."

  "We don't have emperors—we have presidents."

  "An emperor is a president is a czar is a bishop is a king. If you call the man who rules you a lotus petal, still your lotus petal is an emperor, and your emperor made a mistake. That is a bad weapon."

  "Why?" asked Van Riker, intrigued by the reasoning of the strange Oriental, who was supposed to have such awesome killing powers.

  "The weapon is a threat. Correct? It is," Chiun went on, not waiting for a reply. "But the weapon is also a danger to your country. Otherwise you would not be here with me. You have created a weapon which has no direction. You might as well have created a tornado. No. A good weapon points only at the enemy."

  "But the Cassandra had to be a superpowerful weapon to be an effective deterrent."

  "Wrong. Your weapon had to be powerful in only one place, but you made it powerful in two, and that is why it is bad weapon," said Chiun, pointing toward the lights of the monument. "There the weapon is in the wrong place… where it can hurt your own kingdom."

  Chiun pointed to his own head. "Here, in the mind of your enemy, is the rightful place for your weapon. That is where it belongs—in his fear—because that is the only place it can really work. If it works at all."

  "But we had to construct one, give enough accurate details to let them know we had one. How do you make them believe you have something you don't?"

  "I am not in the habit of working out petty details for military failures," said Chiun. Then, feeling Van Riker's heart again, he added, "You are ready. Come."

  They moved through the darkness across the plains, with Chiun leading Van Riker between gopher holes. When they came to a dark section, just before the lights at the ring of marshals' posts, Chiun told Van Riker not to move. To wait. To think about his breathing and the stars. But no matter what happened not to move.

  Then Van Riker saw something he could hardly comprehend. The ancient figure in the dark kimono was before him, giving him instructions, and then he was not before him but part of the darkness. The lights at one federal marshal's outpost dimmed, and then another dimmed, but there was no sound, not even of a man being struck or of a man moving after being struck. There was the light, and then there was not the light. And while trying to see where Chiun was, he felt a tap on his back.

  "Move," he heard the master of Sinanju say, and Van Riker walked straight ahead. As he passed the marshals' outposts, he saw that the men appeared to be sleeping.

  "You didn't kill them, did you?"

  "Look again."

  Van Riker turned his head back toward the ring of marshals, and he saw the lights were now back on, and the marshals still stood with their backs to him and the Oriental, their guns cradled in their arms, their hips jutting out in relaxed slouch. They tossed pleasantries at each other—all as if they had been waiting there, bored and uninterrupted, for hours.

  "How did you do that?"

  "A mere nothing," said Chiun. "In our village children can do it."

  "But how did you do it?"

  "How did you build the Cassandra?"

  "I couldn't explain just like that."

  And Chiun smiled, and he saw the man understood. When they were close to the monument, Chiun insisted they wait. Even as the sky lightened, threatening morning sun, they waited in the open plain and no one seemed to spot them.

  "Remo is back now," Chiun said. "We will go. Just walk with me."

  "How do you know that?" asked Van Riker. "Then again, why should I doubt that you know it?"

  A television news truck turned toward the spire of the church up ahead. A pack of men and women surrounded it and began unloading.

  Van Riker saw Remo leap from the cab. There was a special silent grace in the man's movements, almost a reduction of all effort to a simple gliding motion that seemed familiar to Van Riker. Where had he seen it? In the Oriental, of course.

  Remo saw Chiun and Van Riker inside the marshal's lines, and he started toward them. Just then a RIP guard with shotgun and six-shooter staggered to his feet, clinking hollowly as he walked across the aluminum beer cans sprinkled outside his sandbagged trench. "Halt there, you shits," he said to Chiun and Van Riker.

  "Good morning," said Remo to the guard, who turned around into two fingers that shattered his nose. He went flew backward, horizontal at first. He saw the dark blue morning sky of Montana, then he saw the brown dirt prairie, and then he didn't see very much of anything at all.

  "Very subtle," said Chiun, chiding. "You, Remo, are of a race of litterers. Beer cans, bodies. Litter."

  "How's Van Riker?" asked Remo, seeing the scientist coated with dried mud.

  "He shows a good primitive aptitude for martial concepts. Who knows what he might have been if his instincts had been encouraged in civilization."

  "We must get to the Cassandra," said Van Riker. "And above all, please don't refer to it as the Cassandra. Call it the monument or something."

  "Then let us hurry to the something," said Chiun, and he cackled and repeated the comment and cackled again and repeated the comment. As they walked through the crowd ripping open frozen dinners and rolling around in sugar-coated cereal and sucking the white fillings out of Twinkies, Chiun kept repeating his joke.

  Van Riker was surprised to see the crowd part before him as people jumped from the path of the master of Sinanju, seemingly of their own volition. This was no Papasan, thought Van Riker.

  "The great spirits have given us back our buffalo," cried Lynn Cosgrove, who had climbed to the top of the truck. "We are cleansing the land of the white poison which is in it."

  A gust of wind caught her deerskin skirt and raised it, and seeing this, one of the braves threw a half-eaten Twinkie up between her beautiful white legs.

  Remo, Chiun, and Van Riker pushed on. When they were within forty yards of the monument, Van Riker's broom began to crackle.

  "Oh," said Van Riker. His knees became weak and wobbly, and Remo and Chiun had to hold him upright. He closed his eyes momentarily. Then he pushed aside a little shield at the base of the broom, which looked like a brand name. Beneath it was a needle. Van Riker looked at the needle, blinked and smiled vacantly at Remo, who noticed a sudden burst of wet darkness around Van Riker's fly.

  "Is there a bathroom here?" asked Van Riker hoarsely.

  "Too late," said Remo.

  CHA
PTER EIGHT

  "It's going to blow." Van Riker's face was suddenly as damp as his trousers.

  "Well, stop it," said Remo. "What do you think the government's been paying you for all these years? To stand around, peeing your pants and saying Gloryosky, Zero, the sky is falling?"

  He looked toward Chiun for moral support. Chiun was shaking his head in disgust at Van Riker. The white-haired general was busy checking the needle on the broom again, tapping it with his right index finger.

  "I can't stop it," the said. "The triggering mechanisms are all buried under the cap seal."

  "So take off the cap seal, whatever that is," said Remo with all the outrage he thought was allowed to one whose logic is impeccable.

  Van Riker had begun to regain his composure. He walked toward the giant black marble monument and pointed to the two bronze disks on its right side.

  "Those are the cap seals," he said, "and we can't open them. They're machine fitted to tolerances of less than a hundred thousandth of an inch. After they were put in place, expanders opened inside, locking them on tight. Then the unit which opened the expanders was removed. The only way to open them is with a special sealing tool. And that's in Washington."

  Remo smirked. "Chiun, open that for him, will you?"

  "One side or both sides?"

  "Will you two stop fooling? This is serious," Van Riker said. "We don't have the tools."

  Chiun slowly raised his hands before his face. "These are tools, foolish toy-maker. One would think that after all these years your species would have learned to use them, too. Or is it because they do not break six months after you acquire them?"

  "How much time do we have?" asked Remo.

  Van Riker looked again at the hidden Geiger counter. "Fifteen minutes at the outside, I think. It's approaching a critical point. And then it can't be stopped. Everything blows." He paused. "You know… it's a strange feeling. I have this idea I should say 'Quick, everybody ran, try to escape.' But in fifteen minutes, you couldn't get far enough to escape."

  "Chiun, go open it, will you please?" asked Remo. "It'll be daylight pretty soon."

  Chiun nodded and turned away from them.

  "Those lights," said Van Riker. "Everybody's going to see him." He pointed to floodlights mounted atop two forty-foot poles, one at each end of the monument.

  "We'll see," said Remo. He moved away from Van Riker for a moment. Van Riker heard a wrenching sound and turned. As he looked, Remo was walking away from the nearest light stanchion. The pole had been twisted around in its deep concrete base, and now the light shone out onto the prairie, away from the monument.

  "How…?" started Van Riker.

  "Do I ask you how to build a stupid missile?" asked Remo.

  Outside the reach of the light, Chiun, dressed in his black nighttime robe, seemed like a supershadow as he bent over the first brass plate. His movements were obscured in darkness, but suddenly tremendous thudding sounds, like hammer meeting bell, tolled through the night.

  Then there came another sound. It was the nimble of voices, and Remo realized it was drawing nearer.

  "Kill the devil. Off the pig."

  "White-eyed oppressor of the people."

  Through the glare of the floodlights, directed once again toward the monument, came the RIP members, led by Dennis Petty. Twinkie cream still glittered on his face, matching the wild flashing of the whites of his eyes, as he stomped heavy-footed along in front of the rampaging RIP.

  "There he is," yelled Petty to the crowd, pointing an accusing finger at Remo. "There's the traitor."

  Remo stepped forward and went to meet them before they got too close to where Chiun was working. "Hi, fellas," he said. "How's the food?"

  "Oh, white oppressor," moaned Petty. "Prepare to take your soul to that big chicken stand in the sky."

  "What's the matter?" asked Remo. Behind him in the darkness, he could still hear Chiun's hands thudding against the metal caps. Remo knew he would have to keep these looneys away from Chiun while he worked. "What's the matter?" Remo repeated. "You got the food in the sacred buffalo—right?" he demanded pointing to the van. "I can tell," he said, "because you're wearing it all over your faces."

  "You promised us provisions for the big battle."

  "Right," said Remo.

  "And you brought us Twinkies."

  "And meat and milk and bread and cheese and vegetables and…"

  "Ahah," said Petty. "Right. But no whiskey."

  "No whiskey. No whiskey. No whiskey," roared the voices behind Petty. "And not even any beer, either," someone piped up.

  "I thought it would be best," said Remo, "not to bring you the evil white man's firewater, since you now begin the most difficult struggle of your lives. Guarding your sacred lands and sacred heritage against the evil men from the big chief who art in Washington."

  "Oh, fuck Washington."

  "Screw the president."

  "Down with the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

  "Disband the House of Representatives."

  "My soul rises from Wounded Elk," came a voice that could only have been Lynn Cosgrove's.

  "Oh, shut up, dummy," yelled Petty. "You're as bad as white-eyes here. You went with him for the food and forgot the booze."

  As he turned back toward Remo, Jerry Lupin stepped forward and hit Lynn Cosgrove with the butt of his rifle.

  "Now what are you doing to do about it?" Petty demanded of Remo.

  "Suppose I give each of you a buck," said Remo. "Then you can buy a couple of six packs."

  "Beer is a cruel white hoax to deprive the red man of the firewater which is rightfully his."

  Thump, thwack, crack… Chiun was still at work. Then there was silence. He must have opened it. Van Riker might need help dismantling the unit. It was time to disperse the party.

  "All right, boys," called Remo. "Back to the Episcopal tepee. Keep your wigs warm."

  "Racist joke!" screamed Petty. "Oh, my heart plummets like the dying dove."

  "Fun's fun but enough's enough," said Remo. "Go home."

  "Are you alone?" asked Petty.

  "Right," said Remo. "Alone."

  "Charge!" screamed Petty. Startled by his roar, the forty RIP members charged. Half got confused and charged in the wrong direction. Half of the remaining half charged into each other and started fighting among themselves. Only ten got moving in Remo's direction. The first one to reach him was Petty, whom Remo immediately put to sleep. Then Remo lifted Petty up over his head and tossed him at the nine other charging men.

  "Leader sickum," said Remo. "He need heap big medicine. You takeum him home and fixum him up. Or I breakum your asses. Move it!"

  Shocked by Remo's terrible audacity in knocking out one of the forty men who had planned to kill him, the Indians retreated to plan their new strategy.

  The new strategy revolved around some news they had gotten just that evening. Perkin Marlowe, the Hollywood star who was one 256th Indian if you could believe him, although no one had ever yet found a reason to, was on his way to Wounded Elk. He would set everything right. As Petty had pointed out, hadn't Marlowe just played a Mexican bandit who outwitted a whole army? If he could do that for mere Mexicans, who knew what wonderful things he could do for Indians?

  As the RIP members trudged away, Remo turned back toward the monument to help Van Riker. But just then he heard another voice. Attracted by the noise, Jerry Candler of the Globe had slipped past the marshals' lines. He was standing now in the glare of the floodlight, only ten feet from Remo.

  "Atrocities!" he screamed, pointing to Petty, who was being dragged away by the arms. "Atrocities!"

  The tendons stuck out in his neck as he screamed, making him look like a chicken with a muscular neck. He was small, and his skin, which seemed stretched too tight, took on a vague fluorescence in the dazzling, light.

  "Oh, shut up," said Remo.

  "Attica! Chile! San Francisco! And now Wounded Elk!" shouted Candler. "Well, I will expose this bestiality."

&
nbsp; He looked hard at Remo, then swallowed and said, "Oh, my goodness. You've killed them."

  "Killed who?"

  Candler was looking past him now, into the darkness. Remo turned and followed his eyes. He saw that the caps had been removed from the access holes in the monument and Chiun had lifted two bodies out of the twin cylinders. Van Riker was scrambling down into the cylinder on the left. Only a few minutes remained of the fifteen Van Riker had given that part of the world.

  "I think there's something wrong with your eyes," said Remo.

  Candler sneered. "There's nothing wrong with my eyes. I can recognize murderous genocidal brutality when I see it."

  Remo shook his head. "Oh, no. There's something wrong with your eyes. Something definitely wrong."

  Impressed by his sincerity, Candler raised his right hand to his face and touched the sockets around both eyes. "What's wrong with my eyes?" he asked.

  "They're open." Remo moved forward and tapped Jerry Candler on the back of the neck, and the reporter's eyes closed as if his eyelids were weighted. Remo let him drop to the ground, then went back to help Chiun and Van Riker.

  Inside the cylinder he could hear Van Riker breathing heavily, occasionally grunting with the exertion.

  "How's it going?" Remo asked.

  "This is a nation of messers," said Chiun. "There were dead people in the cylinders."

  "Oh, that's awful," said Remo. "The nerve of America, exposing you to death that way."

  "Yes," agreed Chiun, "it is thoughtless."

  They listened to more grunting, and then Van Riker's head emerged from the cylinder.

  "Done," he said.

  "It's disarmed?" asked Remo.

  "Right. Harmless as a newborn babe." He lifted a twelve-inch part up over his head. It looked like some kind of transmission gear. "This out makes it safe."

  He put the part down carefully and hoisted himself out of the hole. He stood there for a moment, brushing the dirt from his caked silver suit. "I just don't know how you got that seal off," he said the Chiun.

  "You watched me. Now you should be able to do it."

  Van Riker smiled weakly. "Science, I guess, does not know all the world's secrets."