The Sky is Falling td-63

by Warren Murphy

  "What for, sir?" came back the voice. It was crisp and lemony with sharp New England consonants.

  "I don't know, dammit. Just have them ready. You come down here, too. I want you to listen in. I think the world is going up and I don't know what the hell is going on."

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and he walked among the explosions. But that was nothing special. Any man could walk safely through this particular minefield. The mines were not designed to kill the person who touched them off. They were meant to kill everyone around him. Guerrillas used these mines, the Vietcong especially.

  They worked this way: a company would walk along a trail. One man, usually the one walking point, would step on the buried pressure-sensitive device and set it off. Ordinary mines usually exploded upward, making hamburger of that man. Not this mine. It expended its force outward, not upward, and the singing shrapnel would cut down everyone in the vicinity. Except the one who caused the carnage. A soldier alone, conventional military wisdom said, was useless. No army fought with lone soldiers. Armies worked in platoons and companies and divisions. And if you built a mine that left one soldier standing alone, you rendered him useless.

  So the mines went off under his feet, sending pieces of shrapnel cracking loudly along the prairie grass of North Dakota, setting fires where steel spanked off rocks and sending sparks into the dull dry grass. Remo thought that he heard someone laughing up ahead. That was special.

  To hear a small sound in a great one was to be able to hear one hoof in a cavalry charge, or a can of beer opening during a football game.

  He heard the laughter by not blocking out sounds. That was how most people dealt with loud noise, by defending their eardrums. Remo heard with his entire body, in his bones and with his nerve ganglia, because his very breathing vibrated with that sound and became a part of it.

  He had been trained to hear like this. His aural acuteness came from his breathing. Everything came from his breathing: the power to sense the buried land mines, the ability to ignore the shock of the blasts, even the speed that enabled him to dodge the flying steel pellets if he had to. And there, as clear as his own breath, was the laughter up ahead. A very soft laughter coming from the high granite building set like a gray mountain in a plain that had no mountain. From its parapets, a person could see for fifteen miles in every direction. And they could see a thin man, about six feet tall, with high cheekbones and deep-set brown eyes that lay in shadows like the holes in a skull, walking casually across the minefield.

  Remo heard the laughter from a mile away, from a thousand yards, and from ten yards. At ten yards, there were no more mines. He looked up at the parapet to see a very fat man with a gold hat on his head. Or a crown. Remo couldn't tell. He didn't care to tell. It was the right fat face and that was all that mattered.

  The man yelled down from the parapet.

  "Hey, you! Skinny. You know you're funny," said the man.

  "I know. I heard you laughing," said Remo. "You're Robert Wojic, the Hemp King of North America. Right?"

  "That's legal. And so are the mines. This is my property. I can shoot you for trespassing."

  "I've come to deliver a message."

  "Go ahead and deliver it and then get out of here."

  "I forget the message," said Remo. "it has to do with testimony."

  The barrel of an AK-47 poked out of one of the stone slots in the parapet. Then another. They came from both sides of the Hemp King of North America.

  "Hey, you're a dead man. No one tells Robert Wojic what to say in court. No one tells Robert Wojic anything. Robert Wojic tells you. And Robert Wojic tells you you are dead."

  Remo thought a moment. There was testimony that was needed from the fat man, but what? It was specific. He knew it was specific because he wrote it down. He wrote it down and then he did something with the note. What did he do with the note?

  One of the rifle muzzles quivered in an obvious pre-fire sign. The man behind it was about to squeeze the trigger. It was on a white paper that he wrote the note. The rifle fired. It fired a burst that sounded more like a string of firecrackers to Remo, each pop separate and distinct. But his body was already moving toward the castle wall where the man couldn't get a firing angle. The bullets thudded into the ground as the crack of a second burst followed. Another gun opened up, this one trying to comb the wall free of Remo. Making his way up it now, he felt the stone against his fingers. He didn't climb by grabbing and pulling, which was how most people climbed and the reason why they couldn't do verticals. He applied the pressure of his palms to the wall for lift, and used his toes to keep level between hand movements. It looked easy. It wasn't.

  He had written the note with a pencil. There were three key points to the testimony. Good. Three points. What were they?

  Remo arrived at the top of the parapet and stopped the AK-47 from firing by ramming it through blue jeans into something warm and moist, namely the natural opening into the triggerman's lower bowels. Then he pushed it into the upper bowels and slapped in the man's belly with a hard short blow, setting off the rifle and sending the top of his cranium toward the blue North Dakota sky.

  The other guns ceased because the men firing didn't want their weapons muzzled the same way. They dropped them on the stone walkway as they reached for the sky. It was as though the ten men, as one, suddenly became strangers to violence, their weapons foreign objects which had mysteriously appeared at their feet. Ten innocent men with innocent expressions gingerly nudging their rifles away with their toes.

  "Hello," said Remo. He had just shown the Hemp King that his military books that asserted a man alone was useless were themselves useless.

  "And Robert Wojic says hello to you, friend," said Wojic, looking around at his useless gunmen. They had their hands in the air like a bunch of petrified pansies.

  "I need your help," said Remo.

  "You don't need no one's help, friend," said Wojic. And then to the toughs he had picked up in the waterfronts of the world: "You there. Put your hands down. You look like you're going to be frisked. You gonna frisk them?"

  "No," said Remo.

  "Put your hands down. All of you. This whole castle. Everything. Useless. A lousy investment. Listen to me, friend. Robert Wojic, the Hemp King, biggest importer and exporter of hemp rope around the world, tells you here this day: castles suck."

  "I need your testimony on three points."

  "Oh, the trial," said Wojic, shaking his head. "I got a right to remain silent, not to testify against myself."

  "I know, but there's a problem with that," said Remo.

  "What's that?" asked Wojic.

  "You're going to."

  "If you force me, my testimony will be thrown out of court," said Wojic triumphantly, very satisfied with his legal point. He was sitting in a very large chair encrusted with gold. He wore a purple robe trimmed in white ermine, and hand-tooled cowboy boots of Spanish leather peeped out from under the robe. Hemp rope did not pay for all these luxuries.

  "I am not going to force you," said Remo, who wore just a white T-shirt and tan chinos. "I am not going to apply any untoward pressure to make you testify. However, I will push your eardrums out through your nostrils as a way of getting acquainted."

  Remo clapped both palms against Robert Wojic's ears. The slap was not hard, but the absolute precision of the cupped hands arriving simultaneously made the Hemp King's eardrums feel that indeed they would come out of his nostrils at the slightest sniffle. Robert Wojic's eyes watered. Robert Wojic's teeth felt like they had just been ground by a rotating sander. Robert Wojic could not feel his ears. He was not sure that if he blew his nose, they would not appear in his lap. He did not, of course, hear his own men laughing at him.

  And at that moment, Robert Wojic suddenly knew how to help this visitor to the prairie castle. He would give Remo the three pieces of information needed to help the prosecutor in his case. Wojic explained that the three pieces of information had to be the names of three cocaine
runners. Wojic's hemp-import operation covered for them, and his international contacts allowed them to move the drug and the money freely. That was how Robert Wojic could afford such luxury from importing a material that wasn't much in demand since the invention of synthetic fibers.

  "Right," said Remo. "That's what it was."

  And Robert Wojic assured Remo that he would testify to this willingly because he never, ever wanted to see Remo come back for a second favor. Perhaps he would be killed by the angry cocaine runners; but Wojic wasn't concerned. He had seen death just moments before, and the man lying on the parapet with his brains blown out of his skull looked a hell of a lot more peaceful than Wajic himself felt as he checked his nose. Nothing was coming out. Then he felt his very tender ears.

  "So long, friend. Will I see you in court?"

  "Nah," said Remo. "I never have to go."

  Robert Wojic offered to have one of his men give Remo a lift into town. All ten said they would personally have been willing to drive the stranger who climbed up walls, but they had immediate appointments in the other direction.

  "Which direction is that?" wondered Remo.

  "Where are you going?" they asked in chorus.

  "That way," said Remo, pointing east, where Devil's Lake Municipal Airport lay.

  "Sorry, that seems to be in the general direction of New York and I'm heading for Samoa," observed one of the triggermen. "I don't know about these other guys."

  As it turned out, they, too, were headed for Samoa. Immediately. All of them. So Remo had to walk to the airport alone, back the way he came over the scorched prairie grass where hidden mines were supposed to reduce a company of men to a single quivering human being.

  At a push-button pay phone in Minnewaukan, Remo had to punch in a code to indicate that the job had been successfully completed. The code was written on the inside of his belt, along with an alternate code that indicated a problem and the need for further instructions. This was a new system. He was fairly certain the "mission complete" code was on the right. He punched in the numbers, suddenly wondering if Upstairs had meant his right or the belt's right. When he got a car wash, he knew he had copied down the codes wrong. He threw away the belt and caught a 747 for New York City.

  On the plane, he suddenly realized that throwing the belt away was a mistake. Anyone finding the belt could punch in one of the correct codes and throw the entire organization Remo worked for off course. But nowadays he wasn't sure what that was anymore. He went to sleep next to a thirtyish blond who, sensing his magnetism, kept running her tongue over her lips as though rehearsing a lipstick ad.

  In New York City, Remo's cab let him off at a very expensive hotel on Park Avenue, whose elegant windows now reflected the dawn. About thirty policemen crowded the lobby. Someone, it seemed, had thrown three conventioneers thirty stories down an elevator shaft with the force of an aircraft catapult. Remo took a working elevator to the thirtieth floor and entered a major suite.

  "I didn't do it," came a high squeaky voice.

  "What?" said Remo.

  "Nothing," said the voice. "They did it to themselves." Inside the living room, draped in a golden kimono trimmed in black, his frail body seated toward the rising sun, wisps of hair placid against the yellow parchment of his skin, sat Chiun, Master of Sinanju. Innocent.

  "How did they do it to themselves?" demanded Remo. He noticed a small bowl of brown rice sitting unfinished on the living-room table.

  "Brutality always begets its own end."

  "Little Father," said Remo, "three men were hurled thirty stories down an open elevator shaft. How could they possibly have done it to themselves?"

  "Brutality can do that sort of thing to itself," insisted Chiun. "But you would not understand."

  What Remo did not understand was that absolute and perfect peace made any intrusion a brutal act. Like a scorpion on a lily pad. Like a dagger in a mother's breast. Like volcanic lava burning a helpless village. That was brutality.

  The mother's breast, helpless village, and benign lily pad were, of course, Chiun, Master of Sinanju, at breakfast. The scorpion, dagger, and volcanic lava were the three exalted members of the International Brotherhood of Raccoons, who had walked down the hall singing "Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall."

  As Chiun had expected, Remo again stood up for other whites, explaining away their hideous brutality as "some guys high on beer singing a drinking song," something that in his perverted mind did not call for an immediate return to gentle silence.

  "I mean, they couldn't very well throw themselves down a thirty-story shaft with the force of a machine, could they, Little Father? Just for singing a drinking song? Listen, we'll stay out of the cities from now on, if you want peace."

  "Why should I be denied a city because of others' brutality?" answered Chiun. He was the Master of Sinanju, latest in a line of the greatest assassins in history. They had served kings and governments before the Roman Empire was a muddy village on the Tiber. And they had always worked best in cities.

  "Should we surrender the centers of civilization to the animals of the world because you blindly side white with white all the time?"

  "I think they were black, Little Father."

  "Same thing. Americans. I give the best years of my life to training a lowly white and at the first sign of conflict, the very first incident, whose side does this white take? Whose side?"

  "You killed three men because they sang a song," said Remo.

  "Their side," said Chiun, satisfied that once again he had been abused by an ingrate. His long fingernails poked out of his elegant kimono to make the telling point. "Their side," he repeated.

  "You couldn't have just let them walk down the damned hallway."

  "And brutalize others who might be transcending with the rising sun during breakfast?"

  "Only Sinanju transcends with the rising sun. I sincerely doubt that plumbers from Chillicothe, Ohio, or account executives from Madison Avenue transcend with the rising sun."

  Chiun turned away. He was about to stop talking to Remo, but Remo had gone to prepare the rice for breakfast, and would not be aware of the slight. So Chiun said:

  "I will forgive you this because you believe you are white."

  "I am white, Little Father," said Remo.

  "No. You couldn't be. I have come to the conclusion that it is not an accident you have become Sinanju."

  "I am not going to start writing in one of your scrolls that my mother was Korean but I didn't know it until you gave me Sinanju."

  "I didn't ask that," said Chiun.

  "I know you have been struggling with how to explain that the only one to master the sun source of all the martial arts, Sinanju, is not Korean, not even Oriental, but white. Pale, blank, blatant white."

  "I have not written the histories lately because I did not wish to admit the ingratitude of a white, and how they all stick together even when they owe everything they are to someone kind and decent and mild who thoughtlessly gave the best years of his life to an ingrate."

  "It's because I won't write that I'm not white," said Remo. In his training he had read the histories, and knew the long line of assassins the way British schoolboys learned of the ancestry of their kings and queens.

  "You said you were raised in an orphanage. Which orphan knows his mother, much less his father? You could have had a Korean father."

  "Not when I look in the mirror," said Remo.

  "There are diseases that afflict the eyes and make them mysteriously round," said Chiun.

  "White," said Remo. "And I know you don't want to leave that in the history of Sinanju. When I take over the scrolls, the first thing I do will be to say how happy I am as the first white to be given Sinanju."

  "Then I will live forever," said Chiun. "No matter how afflicted this old body is, I will struggle to breathe."

  "You're in your prime. You told me that everything really comes together at eighty."

  "I had to because you would worry."

 
"I never worry about you, Little Father."

  Chiun was interrupted from collecting that insult and depositing it in his bank of injustices by a knock on the door, which Remo answered. Three uniformed policemen and a plainclothes detective stood in the doorway. Other patrolmen and detectives were at other doors, Remo noticed. The police informed Remo that they had reason to believe that three visitors to the city, three conventioneers, had been brutally murdered. Something had hurled them down from the thirtieth floor. They were sure it was from the thirtieth floor because the elevator doors on this floor had been ripped open and the cage jammed half a floor up to make room for the falling men. The problem was that they could find no trace of the machine that did it. Did the occupants of this suite hear any kind of machine this morning?

  Remo shook his head. But from behind him, Chiun spoke up clearly and, for him, quite loudly:

  "How could we hear machinery with all that racket this morning?" he demanded.

  The police wanted to know what racket.

  "The bawdy screaming yells of drunken brutals," said Chiun.

  "He's an old man," Remo said quickly. He added a little smile to show the police they should be tolerant of him.

  "I am not old," said Chiun. "I am not even ninety by correct counting."

  In Korean, Remo told him that in America, and the rest of the West for that matter, no one used the old Wan Chu calendar, which was so inaccurate it lost two months in a year.

  And in Korean, Chiun answered that one used a calendar for grace and truth, not for mere hoarding of time. Like Westerners so obsessed with each precise day that they think they have lost something if one day disappeared in a week.

  The police, confronted with the spectacle of two men speaking in a strange language, looked to each other in confusion.

  "Perhaps that loud noise was the machine that killed those men?" asked the detective.

  "No," said Remo. "It was people. He didn't hear any machines."