The Sky is Falling td-63

by Warren Murphy

  That did not bother Furtseva. He had never met any officer assigned to nuclear weapons he had even mildly respected. They were uniformly phlegmatic, and none of them had ever had even a strange idea, much less a lust for life. Or death.

  Still, his actions in the mess hall undoubtedly would get some of his men killed on that hundred-mile starvation trek through the deadly Siberian chill. And it was not his unit's fault. It was his.

  So he called them together to explain the punishment. And then came the time for his apology.

  "And because it was my fault, I am now saying I am..."

  The word "sorry" did not come. He gave his pistol to a sergeant.

  "If you wish to shoot me, go ahead."

  The sergeant stepped back and saluted. The entire unit snapped to attention and saluted. Then they applauded.

  "Better to die with you as blood faces, sir, than to live like clerks in the Red Army," said the sergeant. They all had similar psychological profiles. There was something about them Pytor Furtseva liked. At that moment, the liking had turned to love.

  Almost half the men died on the hundred-mile trek. They hunted with knives, they burned whatever they could for warmth, they made clothes from elk hides and from the canvas they found. They even stumbled on a stray police unit that was lost. The unit never turned up again, although somehow they had left their clothes with the blood faces.

  When the hundred-mile trek was over, Furtseva's blood faces were the strongest unit man for man in the entire Red Army. Any one of them would have died for him. Every one of them thought they were the best killers in the world and were dying to try out their skills, ready to pick fights with ten times their number.

  But also as part of the punishment they were sent to a base far away from all the other Red Army units. The sentence was indefinite. The blood faces took it proudly.

  The only hard part of their punishment was that they did not get a chance for combat. Not even during the delicious invasion of Afghanistan. All over the world assassinations had become a tool of governments, and Furtseva's unit remained on their lonely base.

  Their leader was told that was part of strategy. Telling him this was one of those smooth-faced officers who probably thought a knife was for opening presents and a gun to hold out in a parade.

  The strategy was that the Soviet Union would use its satellites for assassinations. This would leave Mother Russia free of terrorism charges and the leaders of the Communist world free of taint. They would use the Bulgarians and other East Europeans for the dirty work: Who cared what taint stuck to a Bulgarian when Russia could remain a socialist beacon of morality?

  His unit would only be used as a last resort. It was then that Furtseva heard the rumor that the man behind that strategy was an old field marshal from revolutionary days. The old man-he'd heard the phrase "Great One" used-had been the one responsible for his strange punishment.

  If the commander of the blood faces had been told the Great One's reasoning he would not have understood. He was not supposed to understand. It was all part of a very logical scheme that had brought Furtseva to Hanoi to kill a lone American while a KGB staff officer looked on.

  When news of Furtseva's revolting act in the mess hall reached Alexei Zemyatin, he inquired rather casually what the army officers intended to do with the man.

  He did not use the word "man." The word he used was Russian for "crazy animal."

  "Get rid of him, of course," Zemyatin was told.

  "Has any of you thought this through?" Zemyatin had asked.

  "You can't keep a crazy animal in the army," Zemyatin was told.

  "This man is an executioner, yes? His unit was trained like commandos with all the knives and garrotes and things they use," said Zemyatin. The accent on "things" showed the old man's dictate.

  "Yes."

  "Then who else would we want for this sort of work but a crazy animal? Who are you going to train for this?"

  "We thought someone who would make a better soldier."

  "You mean one who would cause no trouble. Who would work well with others."

  "Of course. What else would you want of a soldier? He must get along with others, because if he doesn't, you don't have an army. You have a mob."

  "Soldiers parade, and soldiers surrender, and soldiers sometimes will not even fire their rifles. I know soldiers. This man Furtseva is a disgusting killer, and sometimes we need just that. So let us not only remove him from the army, but make him an even greater hero to those lunatics in his command."

  And so it was then that the "punishment" of the hundred-mile death march through Siberia was determined. The hardships molded the crew into an even tighter unit.

  When the commander of the blood faces heard his unit was finally going to be used, his only regret was that it was against one person. He wanted hundreds. He wanted to be outnumbered by ten to one. His unit could tear the throats out of animals with their teeth. They could fell squirrels with knives, and shoot out the eyes of birds with pistols. "Give us combat," Furtseva had said.

  "You will have plenty," he was told by the smoothfaced KGB colonel with the rosebud lips.

  He was given only one man.

  And not only was that man not going to give him a chase, but he was coming to him. Just one man on those pathetically bare Vietnamese streets of this northern city, Hanoi.

  Even worse, the commander of the blood faces had to explain several methods of killing, and promise to use them all. The officer, Colonel Ivan Ivanovich, was also having this entire execution photographed, convincing the commander that the people who ran Mother Russia were lunatics. On one hand they refused to use him because they wanted satellites to take the blame; on the other hand they were taking movie pictures of him, recording him, and making notes.

  There were to be three men with knives, followed by an assault with pistols, backed up by snipers on the roof, grenade throwers, and then a three-man team. The KGB colonel had written this down.

  "Do you really think any single human being is going to escape my knife fighters?" Furtseva had asked. He had been hoping for perhaps a little war with the Vietnamese, and that way they could fight their way out of Hanoi.

  Colonel Ivanovich knew the commander was thinking that absurd thought or something like it. That was what made him so nervous. He did not know if Furtseva would frighten the American, but the commander of the blood faces certainly terrified him.

  "He is advancing on us. We won't even have a chase," said Furtseva.

  "Subject seizing the initiative," Colonel lvanovich said into his microphone. His words were written down for backup.

  The knife fighters went out first.

  Rerno saw them coming. They were healthy and moved well on their feet.

  "Oh no! They're attacking us," screamed Kathy. She had thought Remo would do the attacking. Suddenly she felt very alone and frightened in this strange Communist capital. And the man she had entrusted to provide magnificent killings had suddenly gone mad. He was whistling. Remo liked to whistle occasionally while working. Not familiar tunes, but the rhythms of his body to make everything more harmonious. One of the problems with three people was that they had difficulty moving in unison. So when he caught the first knifer's wrist, he had to make a little adjustment to swing him around like a throwhammer. The stroke was good, accelerating as he brought the first man's feet into the second man's eyes, and then around again to catch the third in the stomach. Precisely in the middle.

  The first knifer was good for the following screen of pistol wielders, except that his feet tended to wear out from impact. Remo was through the second screen, and up the walls toward the snipers, before Kathy had a chance to scream in delight. The snipers were duly surprised when their scopes showed the faces too close up, and then showed nothing because eyes whose accompanying brains had been turned to jelly tended not to focus all that well.

  Colonel Ivanovich had caught most of it with his microphone. Every crushing death blow had sounded like an explosion b
efore Furtseva's last line had a chance to throw grenades. The commander was running upstairs toward the action while Ivanovich was ordering the cameraman to pack, and everyone else to get out of there immediately.

  The commander stopped his grenade throwers from finishing the man because he wanted him to himself. He lunged at the thin American, showing his teeth.

  Remo saw the man drive toward him with his mouth open. The man obviously wanted to help, and Remo let him. He offered his throat momentarily, let the man pass, and then caught the back of the man's neck with his chin, driving a neck vertebra out through the man's mouth.

  The man had obviously been trying to bite his throat. Chiun had told him that there would be a time when someone would be that foolish.

  Remo never understood why anyone would expose himself like that. Chiun had explained that usually people that stupid were white. The man had been white. Remo made sure the grenades did not go off by implanting them through the mouths of the throwers into the cushions of the upper intestines. Then he went on through the building, looking for anyone who knew something about the fluorocarbon beam.

  Outside, Kathleen O'Donnell was giddy. "I love you, Remo," she cried. "I love you."

  Ivan Ivanovich ran past the laughing woman with his cameramen and note-taker. He thought for a moment that he should seize her, but he was sure from the horrible force of the noise coming from inside the building that he would not be able to get out of Hanoi alive if he laid a hand on her.

  And he was going to get out of Hanoi alive. He paused only to make sure of the damage done by the lone American. The entire blood-face team had been dispatched like so much old cabbage. And according to Hanoi security, the American had gone on a killing spree and was still killing as of the phone call from the airport.

  Colonel Ivanovich had caused a grave international incident, strained relations between two close allies, and, by his failure to stop the American, had launched a plague upon a capital city. Even now every policeman was looking for the killer, afraid to find him. What had the colonel done?

  By the time Ivanovich and his photographers and notetakers reached Moscow, a formal message of complaint and the mounting damages had reached the halls of the Kremlin.

  Alexei Zemyatin heard them all, and said when he received the trembling Colonel Ivanovich.

  "Good. At least something has finally gone as planned."

  Chapter 15

  The man had used another human being like a whip. Everyone saw it.

  "He used him like a whip," said someone in the darkness.

  "No," said someone else.

  "Slow it down. You'll see. He used him like a whip. I swear."

  The picture stopped on the screen, and whirred back. "Who is it? Who is that man? Was this trick photography?"

  The picture started again. A single man advancing into three. The three had knives. The single man had no weapon.

  The pictures themselves seemed extraordinarily smooth. Everyone in the audience had seen pictures like that. If a top athlete were going to perform internationally, the coaches were allowed to use one very valuable half-hour of that film. It was for shooting at ten times the number of frames per second of ordinary motion pictures. While it couldn't stop a bullet, it could catch the bullet's blur going across a screen.

  "Do I have to watch again?" A voice in the darkness.

  "Either all watch this or we watch our cities being destroyed, our farms becoming barren, and a slaughter that none of us who live benefiting from socialism will survive." An older voice in the dark projection room.

  "It is so bloody." The first voice.

  "Why not soldiers? Why do we have to see these pictures? Don't we have commandos? Judo experts?" There was silence before the film was run again. The room had a certain pressure to it, as though the very air had been squeezed in. It was not easy to breathe. It smelled of fresh linoleum and old cigarettes. There were no windows, and none of the men were even sure what part of Moscow they were in, much less which building. They had been told that no one and nothing other than they were needed. They had been taken from all over the socialist bloc and brought here to watch these films.

  They were all surprised, therefore, when they were given secret information.

  "No military man, no KGB expert, has been able to identify what we see here. None."

  "When were these pictures shot?"

  "Two days ago."

  "Are you sure they are real? You know they might have gotten some Western wrestlers or gymnasts and faked all this. You know that Western technology can do wonders."

  "It was photographed in Hanoi. And I was right next to the photographer. I saw it all with my own eyes."

  "I am sorry, sir."

  "No. Nothing to he sorry for. You are here because we don't know what this is. Nobody else who has seen these pictures can explain it. Ask any questions you wish."

  "I can only speak for myself, but I have never killed anyone. I am an athletic coach, a gymnast. I recognize other leaders of our socialist sports world here. Running coaches. Weight-lifting coaches. Swimming coaches. What are we doing here? Why us? is the question I now ask."

  "Because no one else has figured out what we are looking at. It is not tai kwan do, or judo, or ninja, or karate, or any of the hand-fighting techniques we are familiar with. We don't know. You know the human body. Tell us what you see."

  "I see what I have never seen before."

  "Look again." The picture began to roll once more and the long man took the knife wielder and, grabbing a wrist, used him like a whip, the feet being the snapping points. It could have been a ballet, the man moved with such grace, if the deaths were not so stunningly real and final.

  Once the coaches knew that they were not responsible for understanding the moves, they could see small things they recognized.

  "Look at the balance," said the gymnastics coach. "Beautiful. You can teach that and teach that and maybe one in a thousand learns it. But never like that."

  "The concentration," noted the weight-lifting coach. "Timing," said the instructor who had broken the West's dominance of the pole vault.

  Someone asked if it were a machine. The answer was no. Machines had that kind of force, but never the calculating ability to make judgments.

  "He looks as though he is hardly moving. Beautiful. Beautiful." This from a skating coach. "You know that he has got the magnificent ability to know where everything is at all times."

  Now the mood had been reversed. Admiration replaced horror. Some of the coaches had to restrain themselves from applauding.

  Then one of them noticed something peculiar. "Look at the mouth."

  "Right. Look at the mouth."

  "It's puckered."

  "It might be the breathing. There might be some special method of breathing that unlocks this all."

  "Do the sound. Can you get a high resolution for the sound?"

  "We already have," said the man beside the projection machine, and turned on the lights. He was the KGB general with the smooth face and rosebuds lips. The new general's pips glistened on his shoulders.

  "Gentlemen," said General Ivan Ivanovich, sporting a new medal for combat. "The puckered lips were whistling. The tune was created by Walt Disney, an American cartoon company. It was for their cartoon picture Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The tune was a happy little melody called 'Whistle While You Work.' "

  There was a deathly silence in the room as every man was reminded that they had been watching someone so very casually kill fifteen men. But one of the coaches was not deterred by the carnage. He asked for a copy of the film to use as a teaching instrument for his athletes. He did not even get an answer from the general. Another coach provided it.

  "There is no one in the world we know of who could learn what we saw today."

  Even better than swearing the coaches to secrecy, something that relied on their characters, young General Ivanovich had them shipped to a lush countryside dacha to wait for a few days or weeks or months, bu
t hopefully not years. In brief, he imprisoned them.

  Then he faced Zemyatin. The old man lived alone in a little Moscow apartment one could not tell was for the privileged. He had become almost friendly with the young bureaucrat who had tasted his first experience of combat. And if the young bureaucrat could forget his fear, he was even growing to like the Great One, who would just as soon have a high officer shot as light a cigarette.

  When he returned from Hanoi with a tale of how the blood faces, the best killers Russia had been saving, were slaughtered like sheep, Ivanovich had been given those general's pips he had longed for. He had been told that his mission was a success, and for the first time he realized the freedom this old man offered. He was not looking to blame people. He was not looking to claim credit or escape disaster. He was looking to protect Russia.

  And Ivanovich had done just that. The mission was twofold. And entirely different from the disaster in London. In London they had merely lost men. But here, they had learned something, according to the dictum of the old field marshal. You assumed the enemy was perfect until he showed you otherwise.

  If the blood faces had eliminated the American agent, all well and good. But if they failed, then Ivanovich's mission with the film and the recorders was to let the man show them how they might kill him.

  But even with the field marshal's praises for Ivanovich, the young general felt a bit apprehensive as he rang the doorbell. They had not yet, despite all the films and analysis, found the man's weakness.

  A man roughly Zemyatin's age answered the door. He had a big pistol stuck in his floppy trousers. He had not shaved, and smelled of old vodka.

  "He's having supper," said the man. Despite his age, General Ivanovich was sure that the pistol would be used more accurately and more often than any glistening automatic in a shined holster on the belt of a smart young officer.

  "Who is it?" came the voice from inside.

  "The boychik with the cutesy lips."

  "Tell General Ivanovich to come in."

  "You're eating supper," said the old man.

  "Set another place."