The Sky is Falling td-63

by Warren Murphy

"The large groceryman?" said Remo.

  "Yes," said Kathy.

  Remo winked. "I hate this code pippyding."

  "A supermarket," he said loudly to the woman.

  The woman tapped her driver on the shoulder, indicating that he should leave.

  "He's looking for a large groceryman," yelled Kathy.

  "Right," said Remo.

  The woman stopped her chauffeur and handed Remo a small briefcase. Then she drove off. The briefcase had a simple clasp lock. Remo fumbled with it for a moment and then simply broke it off. Kathy noticed he only would have had to slip a bar free.

  Inside were two wallets with passports and a plastic camera. The passports had names but no pictures. There was also a metal device to make impressions, much like a corporate seal.

  Kathy recognized the camera. It had a picture of two smiling children on it, with the sun shining brightly behind them. It was called "Insta-Tot," the first instant camera a four-year-old could use. The directions were in pictures and the words were addressed to parents. They said what a thrill a child would get mastering this absolutely simple device. It was so easy to use that words were not even needed. Just follow the pictures. It suggested that the parents let their children figure it out themselves if they had already had preschool experience.

  "I don't know where the film goes," said Remo. "Why do they make things like this? Where does the film go?"

  "In the bunny's mouth," said Kathy. She pointed to the side of the camera where a smiling bunny's teeth surrounded a square opening. Then she pointed to the film. The film was an oblong square just the shape of the hole. On one end of it was a picture of a bright orange carrot. "The carrot goes into the bunny's mouth," said Kathy.

  "Why didn't they say so?" said Remo.

  Kathy pointed to the picture on the Insta-Tot package. There was a click.

  "You just photographed your foot," said Kathy.

  "Why don't they tell you these things?" said Remo.

  "I presume these pictures are for our passports."

  "Yeah. This will get us both into Hanoi."

  Kathy O'Donnell pointed the smiling Insta-Tot sun toward the real sun. Then she put the big blue eye on the camera to her eye. Then she pressed the bunny's nose.

  The picture came out in a minute, only somewhat blurred, good enough for a passport.

  "You have talent," said Remo. Then she put the camera in his hands, put his fingers on the bunny's nose, pointed the camera at her face, stepped back, and told him to snap. On the third frame he got her picture.

  He crumpled the camera in his hands and gave her the metal seal. She imprinted both pictures into the passport with the seal. Someone had gotten Remo the seal of the United States of America in the course of an hour. He had been instructed to destroy it. He did so quickly with his hands, as though polishing it. He made the seal into a solid block of metal which he threw with a clank to the street.

  "How did you do that?"

  Even more amazing was his answer. In terms of force and essence, the mystical concepts he explained, came very close to intricate atomic theory.

  On one hand, he could do things with his body that were awesome. On the other, he rattled off metaphysical explanations like nursery rhymes. Yet, he couldn't get through the directions for a four-year-old.

  She asked him about this.

  "I have some difficulty with mechanical things," Remo admitted. "But when they unnecessarily confuse you with directions, then things become impossible."

  "What is confusing about pressing the bunny's nose?"

  "Well, you see, you're scientific. You understand things like that," said Remo.

  "I also understood the carrot in the bunny's mouth," said Kathy.

  "Okay, you can be smartass about it, but you were employed for the project in Malder. and you do know what we are looking for. You would recognize it if we found it."

  "I think I would," said Kathy. She was not sure how they would be able to get out of that Communist capital, but just watching the power of this magnificent man would satisfy her forever, even if she were held in some prison camp. If worse ever came to worst and she was captured, she could trade off what she knew for her safety. Besides, men were men. She would work out something if she had to.

  But she did not think she would have to. She would more than likely see a trail of shattered bodies, each one a glorious thrill to her entire nervous system.

  She hoped there might even be a problem getting into the group on its way to Hanoi and that he would have to kill to get them out. Just a little killing to make the day bright, to make her feel womanly again.

  But the covers were perfect and unchallenged. They were part of the International Media Committee for Truth in Southeast Asia, Their first names were correct, which told Kathy that Remo had informed his superior about her already. It also told her that Remo had to have the highest priority possible with an agency that could get things done quickly.

  She thought about these things in the dim light of the Swiss airliner, totally satisfied by the miraculous hands of this wonderful man called Remo. Actually, Reemer seemed like most men to Kathy. But Remo was unlike all the rest.

  "I've never met a man like you," she said. "You're so different from other men."

  "No, I am not."

  "Who are you like?"

  "Someone else. Except he doesn't seem to function in the modern world. I don't know. Don't bring up that subject."

  "Is he your father?" asked Kathy.

  "Sort of."

  "I'd like to meet him."

  "Go to sleep," said Remo.

  Before landing in Hanoi, the International Media Committee for Truth in Southeast Asia had discussed the main draft of their conclusion to their investigation of the truth. It declared that Hanoi had been maligned, that its living standards and freedom should be copied by the rest of the world. It blamed the American media for distortion.

  The man reading the communique was an actor. He knew the news business as few did. He had played a newspaperman on Broadway and on television.

  "We just want to see the truth come out," he said.

  "What about the hundreds of thousands of people who are willing to die to get out of Vietnam now that it's liberated?" said Remo. There was no purpose in mentioning this. He wasn't going to change anything. It was just that these peopie were so sure that their intelligence was superior to the average American's. It had been grating to hear them discuss how provincial the Americans were, how distorted the American news was.

  "They're not Vietnamese. They're Chinese," said the spokesman, his craggy face had appeared on many TV commercials announcing his willingness to work for the betterment of mankind.

  "So?" said Remo.

  "Well, they weren't Vietnamese who were fleeing, but families who had once come from China," said the spokesman for the truth committee.

  "You mean they have to be racially pure to have rights?" asked Remo. He had heard this bandied about often in the States when it was obvious that Vietnam had become a bloody concentration camp. Otherwise, why would people flee?

  This man, whose every other sentence was about fighting fascism, was unwittingly spouting the fascist line. He could have been a Nazi and not known he wasn't a humanitarian. The last thing in the world of which he could conceive was his own stupidity. By the time the plane touched down in Hanoi it was resolved that the American media grossly distorted the progressive nature of the Hanoi regime.

  The news release for tomorrow was to be about the bombing of Vietnamese rice fields that destroyed the ground and created agricultural problems.

  The truth committee was still working on the draft denying Hanoi still held American prisoners, but they had to get that cleared first by the Vietnamese military.

  When they arrived in Hanoi there were reporters waiting for the leader of the group to read his statement. He tousled his hair and opened his shirt to look like a newsman. He read the statement with a sense of remorse that his own country's media were
distorting the nature of a people whose only desire was to live in peace.

  The committee had been scheduled to read a statement at the hotel about industrial progress, but they were late. The rickshas had broken down.

  The nice thing about communism for this actor was that if the towels were dirty you didn't have to wait for new ones or suffer insolence from the help, the maid was beaten right on the spot by a policeman.

  "How are we going to find the beam?" said Kathy. "It's obviously hidden."

  "If it is hidden, then someone has hidden it. Therefore, someone knows where it is."

  "How do you find that person?"

  "Well, if it is not a person but the government, and everything in these places is, you grab the highest government official and get him to tell you about anyone who might know about a new device."

  "What if he doesn't talk?"

  "They always do."

  "But if he honestly doesn't know."

  "Too bad for him."

  "I love it," said Kathy O'Donnell. "I love it. Start with that guy with the machine gun and the pith helmet."

  "I'll start where I want," said Remo.

  "Where are you going to start?"

  "I don't know," said Remo. The streets were bleak and plain; even the trees seemed to be stripped of bark. Apparently the people had eaten it. No wonder there wasn't any garbage on the streets of Hanoi. The lucky ones had already found it and made it their dinner.

  Soldiers were everywhere. Slogans were everywhere. Remo rcognized old Chinese formations of letters. Much of this land had belonged to China at one time. Chiun had talked of insidious rebellions against the Chinese emperors. What differentiated an insidious rebellion from other kinds was whether the emperor had paid a Master of Sinanju.

  Often just a few people were behind a rebellion. What they did was work on the grievances of the many and get the people to follow them. The new liberation movements of the world were 3,500 years old at least.

  Looking around the streets of Hanoi, Remo noticed that the only fat people he saw were of high officer rank. Everyone else was thin beyond belief.

  "Look at how thin the people are," Remo said.

  The leader of the truth committee heard this. He was standing in front of his hotel, stuffing a caramel bar into his face.

  "Capitalism doesn't encourage them to eat properly," he said. He dropped the wrapper. The doorman fell to his knees to lick it, but was kicked away by the manager of the hotel, who also had the rights to lick the crumbs off the Americans' shirts.

  The American actor was told what an intelligent man he was. He was told this often. He was also told how much smarter he was than the average American, who did not know the real truth about the world.

  "I owe it to my countrymen," the actor said, "to make them aware of the real world, not some comfortable beerswilling Formica version of it."

  "What is Formica?" asked a Communist minister.

  "It's a shiny material that you can spill things on, and it never stains and you wipe it off easily. Always looks new. No character," said the actor.

  "Could you get us some?" asked the minister. The actor laughed. They asked again. He was sure they couldn't want something as bourgeois as Formica.

  He asked to be taken to visit a typical Vietnamese family. Remo understood what the two officials were saying, but not word for word because he had only been taught the emperor's tongue. Rather, little snippets of phrases these officials never knew had come from old Chinese lords. The Chinese this committee so casually dismissed as having no rights in Vietnam had been in that country longer than the Normans had been in England.

  The words Remo recognized were, "Stall the fat fool until we get the family set up correctly."

  "Won't he be suspicious?"

  "If that fat pig can think he is intelligent by saying things that people write for him, then he will believe anything."

  "Yes, he does have the mind of a wooden puppet." The American actor put on his most concerned intelligent face for the photographers. He also asked to be taken to the scenes of brutal American bombings.

  "Americans have a right to know what their government has done in their name," he said.

  Remo let the group go off, even though some official was pushing him to follow. He was getting quiet within himself.

  Remo walked around Hanoi with Kathy and a guide all morning in what seemed like an aimless pattern. The guide, of course, was not a cultural "enhancement," as he was called, but a Vietnamese police officer.

  One building among many, not an especially large building, gave Remo the sense by the way the people walked by it that it was a building of authority.

  "You can't go in there," said the cultural enhancer.

  Kathy gave Remo a nod. Even she could understand his sign that the building was important.

  "How did you do that?" she asked.

  "I just did it. You keep looking, that's all."

  "Would you teach me?" she asked.

  "Teach me how to use that camera?" asked Remo.

  "You cannot go there. No, no, no," said the cultural enhancer.

  "Remo, you put the carrot film into the bunny's mouth. You point the camera at the person and then you press the bunny's nose."

  "I did that," said Remo. There was a tinge of hardness to his voice.

  "No camera allowed in liberated country," said the cultural enhancer. "No camera. No talking. You go back to group to get real story of truth of Vietnam. Real truth. Real peasants with real truth. Our truth the good truth. You see. Good truth. Yes."

  "I had trouble with the film," said Remo.

  "I don't see how," said Kathy.

  "Well, I did," said Remo.

  "You go. Now," said the cultural enhancer.

  Kathy shrugged and looked at the building. The man's real genius was going to show itself now. She sensed an uncontrollable excitement seize her, almost mesmerizing her, making her limbs weak, her body warm. She imagined all the people Remo was going to have to kill in a building like that, the one the guide had confirmed was a security place of the government.

  "That place is big enough to house the beam in any one of its many rooms," said Kathy.

  Remo moved toward the building. The cultural enhancer grabbed one of his arms, but his hands closed on air. Inside the building, a Russian with a microphone and a tape recorder commented dryly:

  "He is coming toward us. Mark that the subject might be initiating action."

  As he spoke another Russian was making notes. Halfway up the page was a comment that positive identifications had been made on the plane and reconfirmed at the airport. The female was Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell. The male was the American.

  "We're not ready yet," came a voice from behind him. The man with the tape recorder looked around with contempt. He was also afraid. The microphone was becoming significantly moist in his hands. He had ordered many people killed in his life, but now he was actually going to have to see the results of his orders.

  "It doesn't matter that you are not ready," said Colonel Ivan Ivanovich. Field Marshal Zemyatin had told him to allow no special requests from his execution team.

  Chapter 14

  Pytor Furtseva had been primed to kill for so many years that when he was told the target was advancing on him before he was ready, he didn't even mind. He would not have minded if he had to kill the target with his teeth right in the streets of Hanoi. He had practiced with his teeth on cows, and he had made his execution squad do the same.

  "Blood faces," they were later called, but rarely to their faces. At one training base in Byelorussia another officer had commented that the chef should throw away his carving knife and let the "blood faces" butcher the cows.

  Furtseva killed that officer with his teeth. He killed him in the mess hall where the officer had made that comment and, with the man's throat still in his mouth, he went to every table and stuck his face next to every officer at every place in the hall.

  No one peeped. No one left. Furtseva had
stood there in that hall waiting to be arrested, to be tried and then hung. He did not care. Eventually one of his fellow officers had the nerve to carefully get up and leave. Then the rest left and he spit out the throat onto the ground. Shortly thereafter armed soldiers filled the hall, surrounding him. He spat blood at them from the dead officer's throat.

  As Furtseva was escorted out of the mess hall, his execution squad cheered him. It was the proudest moment of his life. He was ready to die.

  The court-martial was held the next day and the execution was scheduled for the following week. The presiding officers were split. Some wanted hanging. The others said he had the right to be shot.

  It was unanimous, of course, that he would die.

  Pytor Furtseva stood for the verdict. His head was high. He felt a sense of relief, as though nothing mattered anymore. The shame and burden of being trained for something and never used was over. It would all end with a bullet or a rope.

  The chief officer at the court-martial read slowly, occasionally adjusting his glasses. The other officers sat with faces passive as sand.

  It took twenty minutes before Furtseva realized that he was not being sentenced to death.

  "It is the verdict of the defense forces of the Soviet Socialist Republics that you and your entire unit be punished collectively. You will march one hundred miles through the Siberian frost with only knives for protection. You will have minimum clothes. You will have no matches. No food. No water."

  "What?" Furtseva said. He could not believe the verdict. The army would never let a recalcitrant officer live. The most important thing in the army was getting along. To bite out the throat of a fellow officer for an insult was perhaps the most extreme example of not getting along.

  And then the strange punishment. Why should his unit be punished? He apologized to his men, the only apology he could ever remember making.

  They had asked him before he was assigned to the execution squad why he had never apologized to anyone.

  "To admit being wrong is to admit weakness. More than anything in the world, I fear weakness."

  That answer was scarcely out of his mouth when his Red Army file was stamped:

  "This man is never to be allowed near nuclear warheads or to undertake diplomatic missions."