The Sky is Falling td-63

by Warren Murphy

  "I do believe your people would believe that you might be a superior weapon to that fluorocarbon beam that lets in the deadly rays of the sun. Which means you may be telling the truth."

  "You must know what America is like. Who would want your place when we have ours?"

  "Son, I have seen the workings of the minds of counts and commissars, so do not bring something so absurd to my table as the dish that governments act rationally. You have earned a degree of my trust."

  "Then put down your missiles," said Remo.

  "There is a problem with that. You are going to have to think now. We created those missiles because we were sure at that time that America was responsible for the device and that it was a weapon. Further tests conducted in your country, young man, appeared to confirm our original estimate. We had to create a missile you could not damage. Not to say that such a device could put out our missiles. But it would place them in a category of unreliability we could not accept. Are you following me?"

  "We showed we could knock out all your missiles so you had to build new ones."

  Zemyatin controlled an acknowledging nod. It did not shock him that the man looked so average. The most dangerous things in the world were the commonplace. The bodies around Moscow were proof enough. He did not have to see muscles.

  "These new missiles have two orders that can be delivered. Go and no-go. That is exactly why your intelligence agency correctly called them 'raw buttons.' "

  "So tell them no-go."

  "Without burdening you with details, the deployment system across a nation larger than yours was necessarily cumbersome. We do not have some electronic command that maneuvers the missiles in series of calculated changeable firings. If we say 'no-go' it would take weeks to get everyone organized again, to get the orders out again. In effect, in this missile age they would have to be put down forever."

  "I am not against that," said Remo.

  "We have a designated firing time, soon to be upon us. If you kill me there is no way to put down those missiles. If you torture me, you will get a wrong command that will tell them not to listen to the right command if it should come next."

  Remo noticed the electronics against the wall, the dishes yet to be cleared from the table, and the old bathrobe this man confidently wore while discussing the gravest matters of state. This was the one, he was sure, he was to look for. The one who made the deals.

  "In brief, young American, it is either war or no war, the rawest of raw buttons. To tell them to stand down means virtually abolishing the system. And for that, I must have more proof than your showing off. I am sorry."

  "So it is war."

  "Not necessarily, " said Zemyatin. "We have time. I will not tell you how much. But we do have time."

  "If there is a war, you are not going to survive it. And tell your friend over there not to bother with that blunderbuss he has stuck in his pants."

  "Another death, American?"

  "I don't keep score anymore," said Rerno. "If those missiles go, I will spend a lifetime in this mess you call a country evening things out. I want you to know that no chairman or commissar or king will live one night. I will make your country into desert, a body without a head, a dung heap among nations. I don't want conquest. To win Russia is to win nothing."

  "For you. But for me, it is everything."

  The bodyguard whom Remo knew wanted a chance with the gun suddenly turned to the electronics. Remo caught only vague words of the language, but he knew that something horrible had happened.

  "American," said Zemyatin, "I now believe your government has been telling the truth about that weapon. Unfortunately."

  Remo waited to hear what the Russian leader meant by 'unfortunately'."

  "Your government may be stupid, but it is not completely so. The beam has been directed toward your northern pole with the largest arc yet, on a continuous scan parameter."

  "Wonderful," said Remo. What was he talking about?

  "In brief, the ozone shield is being punctured continuously above the polar ice cap."

  Remo eyed the Russian suspiciously. So what? he thought.

  "Terrible," he said.

  "Yes," said Zemyatin. "Unless that machine is stopped, the entire polar ice cap will be turned to water. So large is the polar ice cap that the oceans will rise many, many feet. Low-lying areas of the earth will be flooded, and that means most of Europe and America. Civilization as we know it will be doomed."

  "That machine can really get you so many ways," said Remo. "What is the source?"

  "Your America. The beam has been on long enough now for us to get a fix on it. Your northeast corridor."

  "Good. If you can get a fix on it, we must know exactly. Anything in that electronic junk on the wall that can get an American phone number?"

  "Yes," said Zemyatin. And Remo gave Smith's secret number to the Russians for dialing.

  While the bodyguard was dialing, Zemyatin asked, "Are you part of the CIA?"

  "No. Internal, mostly."

  "Secret police?"

  "Not really. We don't want to control anything. We just want to keep the country from going under."

  "We all say that," said Zemyatin.

  "But we mean it," said Remo.

  "Of course," said the Great One of the Russian Revolution.

  Smith's voice came over the transatlantic line surprisingly clearly.

  "This line is being eavesdropped on, Remo," Smith said. There were gadgets in his office, Remo knew, that could tell that, but he had never heard Smith say that before.

  "I would be surprised if it weren't, Smitty. This is a KGB line."

  "Doesn't matter. We have located the beam. You will not believe what it is doing!"

  "Continuous parameter scan on the polar ice cap. Low-lying areas are going to be flooded," said Remo.

  "Right," said Smith, wondering if Remo had suddenly learned to deal with technology.

  "The source is located just outside of Boston on their high-tech Route 128."

  "Then you can put it off now, and we can show their leader. I found him. His name is Zemyatin, Alexei. He has a stupid bodyguard."

  "Can't do that. Not that simple. There are two of those beams. One of them, we've been told, is called the doughnut. In its center, perhaps two hundred square feet, everything will be all right. Outside of that center, in a ring two hundred miles wide, everything will be exposed to the unfiltered rays of the sun. Washington, New York. Everything. It will be a disaster of enormous proportions."

  "Ask him how he knows," said Zemyatin.

  ".How do you know?" asked Remo.

  "That is the key, Remo. She has told us about it. If the government takes one step toward her machines, the doughnut goes off. Remo, she knows you and she wants you. That woman you were with is behind all this."

  "Dr. Kathleen O'Donnell?" asked Zemyatin. Remo nodded. He didn't have to ask Smith.

  "She wants you. She will settle for no one else. I am glad you called."

  "You mean she would destroy a world just to get another date or something?" Remo asked.

  He saw Zemyatin signal his bodyguard. Another phone was produced. Zemyatin spoke hurriedly. He was getting that psychological profile he had ridiculed before. He presented the facts to the nervous KGB officer in charge of the British desk.

  The answer was horrifying.

  "That is precisely what she would do," came back the voice from the other end of the phone. "One death or a million deaths means nothing to her. She might even enjoy them."

  "Tell your commander, American, we are coming. You and me," said Zemyatin.

  On the way out of the apartment, Remo slipped the pistol from the bodyguard's belt and crumbled it in his hands.

  "It wouldn't have worked, sweetheart," he said to the old warrior clutching at space.

  He also warned Zemyatin to give the command to stand down the new raw-button missiles, because Remo did not trust planes.

  "I mean, what if something happens to you?"

&n
bsp; "I am sure that with your awesome protection, American, nothing will. When I see the beam destroyed, then I will tell them to stand down. Trust is too rich a meal for an old man who has supped on the chicanery of international politics. Not at my age. Not now."

  "I don't care. You want us all to go up in a nuclear cloud if you have a heart attack? Fine with me. I think all you Russians are crazy."

  Alexei Zemyatin shrugged. It was not his country that had allowed something like the fluorocarbon beam to be produced.

  Chapter 18

  It was said of those who fought closely with the Great One that they began to think like him. So, too, was it with General Ivanovich.

  Traditionally, the North Koreans had been dismissed as gloating barbarians, too ruthless and crude and incompetent to even consider using a joint exercise.

  This time, their intelligence chief, Sayak Cang, was not humored and dismissed; this time, General Ivanovich stepped in, for even as Zemyatin and the American monster were boarding the plane for the flight to America, Ivanovich knew he had taken charge. He was not seeking how to appear well no matter what happened. He was looking to make this dangerous world work in Russia's favor. That was the secret of Zemyatin's brilliance. And the Great One knew Ivanovich understood that now.

  That was why Zemyatin had told him about the American discovery of the device in their own territory and the Russian missiles ready to go like a timer on an American coffeepot; without an order, just a date. Even now Ivanovich could hear the Third World War clicking away with all the mindlessness of a mechanical clock. He did not panic. He thought. And when the North Korean boasted about finishing de Lyon himself, Ivanovich did not wait to get some superior to join him in this new bold move he was taking upon himself.

  He had remembered Cang from a visit to Moscow. The man's only weakness was cigarettes and a sense of inferiority which he hid well. There was no reason for North Korea to eliminate a Russian problem in Western Europe, but Ivanovich understood immediately the North Korean action. Instead of laughing at the North Koreans for doing something seemingly not in their direct self-interest, Ivanovich ordered a direct salutation sent to Kim II Sung with a request for advice from their genius in special action work abroad.

  What Ivanovich did, in effect, after all these years, was to have his country answer the North Korean's call. Sayak Cang was on a line immediately inside the Russian embassy, an access Ivanovich, too, had risked ordering. But now, thinking like Zemyatin, he understood that retribution at home did not matter, especially since the American monster had personally crippled the great government of the Soviet Socialist Republics.

  Ivanovich held an entire country in the palm of his hands as he talked to the once lowly Sayak Cang.

  "We stand in awe of you, and seek your protection," said Ivanovich. "You are the leader of the socialist world."

  "I have lived my life to hear those words," said Cang. His voice cracked. Was it the emotion? It sounded so much like fear.

  "We had failed so many times with our problem in Western Europe that we called it insurmountable. You solved it."

  "You see we are a great nation."

  "Great nations have burdens, Sayak Cang. We have sent one of our leaders with a monster of a man, a killer you could not fathom, to America to seize a weapon that will destroy the Eastern world," said Ivanovich, shrewdly playing on Russia's Asian connection.

  "We not only can fathom any American killer, we can crush him like a leaf," said Cang. Cang cleared his throat. He sounded nervous.

  "There is a man whom we must have killed," said Ivanovich. "We have failed. There is an object we must have. There is a great game America is playing against us, and we are losing."

  In an almost stuttering voice, Cang asked what the game was. Ivanovich gave him the location of the American device near their city of Boston in their northeast province of Massachusetts. The general also gave Cang a description of the American monster and the Russian whom he wished saved. What Russia wanted was the device taken, the American dead, and the Russian, his name Zemyatin, taken out of the country, safely if possible.

  "We can do that. We can do all of it."

  "But it must be done now. Your experts who have shown us the way must take off now. Immediately."

  "Perfect. I really don't have much time now either way," said Cang. "Give all the glory to Korea because I will not be here."

  "Are you all right?"

  "I must build the only door our greatest sun cannot pass through. The door is death. In that I will control him." Ivanovich did not explore that. He gave the North Korean intelligence chief his salutations, and then tried to reach the plane Zemyatin was on to let him know what he had done. There just might be that flaw in the American after all. For the way the French SDEC director was killed, according to reports from the Paris embassy, was virtually identical to the way the American monster killed.

  Fire was going to be fought with fire.

  Cang could not feel his arms or legs, or even the last breaths in his throat. Good, he thought. I am lucky. The timing is perfect.

  He ordered the Master of Sinanju to be informed of where he was. Cang had been hiding for days now, trying to figure out exactly what his country could do. He knew he was a dead man. He accepted that. But how could his country use his death? And then the Russian gave him the perfect way to use a life any reasonable man had to admit would be over soon.

  Chiun had figured out who had stolen the treasure of Sinanju and why.

  He had told Cang in their last meeting:

  "Pyongyanger, dog. The treasure will be restored to the House of Sinanju. And I will sit here to receive it. I do not carry burdens like a Pyongyang dog."

  Cang did not protest. He bowed and left, and went into immediate hiding, warning the President for Life to stay out of the country at all costs until this disastrous corner could be turned. He had not even asked Chiun how he had figured out who had stolen the treasure. Now he would know that, too. He was using the door even Chiun and all the Masters of Sinanju were defenseless against.

  When Chiun entered Cang's rock-deep office, Cang was lying on a mat with his head on a piilow and smiling inwardly because his lips were hard to move.

  "I am dying, Chiun."

  "I have not come to witness the disposal of garbage," said Chiun,

  "The poison I have taken robs me of almost all sensation. I cannot feel, therefore you cannot make me tell you where I put your treasure. I am about to pass through the only door that can withstand an assault by a Master of Sinanju: death, Chiun. Death." Cang's fading eyes saw that Chiun remained still. He did not talk. Good. He did not wish to waste time. Cang had ordered what he wanted to be written out in case the poison acted too quickly. It was all the descriptions the Russian had given him, including the location of the machine. Chiun was to bring the machine to Russia and then he would be told where the treasure was. And incidentally, there was a presumptuous American he was to kill, and a Russian he was to save.

  "I am to trust you now?"

  "Trust or not. Do the task or not. I am leaving you and you cannot follow through the door of death. No one here knows where the treasure is, and you can kill for a hundred years and never find it."

  Chiun read the note again. He knew where Boston was. He had spent so long in America, wasting the best years of his life in one country serving the insane emperor who refused to take the throne. He knew Boston. He knew whites. He was perhaps the foremost authority on whites in the world.

  "Tell me, O Great Master, how did you fathom I had stolen the treasure? Tell me that, and I will give you one piece now."

  "The Frenchman told the truth. He didn't know who had sent him the coins. This I know. And the great theft by the pope was impossible."

  "How did you know that?"

  "The popes have not shown any skill since the Borgias. To steal the treasure of Sinanju, maybe, only maybe, could have been done by a Borgia pope who sought conquest and land. But for the one decent period, the popes
have been as useless as their founder, caring not for the glory of gems, the power of land, but for fanatic and useless things like prayer and their Western cult manners of charity and love, and whatever other peculiarities are endemic to their kind."

  "You truly know whites, don't you?" said Cang.

  "They are not all the same. But Pyongyangers are. They are dogs without the virtues of courage and loyalty," said Chiun. "Where is this piece of treasure you are willing to return?"

  "Underneath me," said Cang.

  Chiun rolled him over with one foot and found a minor silver statue taken as tribute by a minor Master, Tak. Tak was always the Master Chiun used to forget when memorizing the cadences of the history of the Masters of Sinanju.

  Chiun ordered one of the flunkies to return the statue to the village of Sinanju and let the villagers place it on the steps of his house in tribute.

  Cang now faced the floor after having been rolled over. No one dared roll him back in the presence of the Master of Sinanju. But with his last breaths, Cang explained what Sinanju meant to Korea, and that all Koreans should now work together. He had not desired to touch such a treasure but he knew of no other way to induce service from a Master of Sinanju now working in the white lands. Cang's last words were of his admiration for Sinanju, and his love of Korea, and his plea that Koreans work together as the true brothers they always had been. Only in that way could the land they all loved be free of foreign domination. These were Cang's last words as he passed through the door even the Masters of Sinanju could not penetrate to harm him. He spoke them into the hard floor of his office. The floor heard the plea much better than the Master of Sinanju.

  Chiun had left for America after seeing which piece of the treasure had been returned for an answer to the question.

  It was Ivanovich's competence that led to the great battle of America's high-tech Route 128 just outside of Boston. He knew the last moment that Zemyatin could call off the missile attack. He found out the speed of the airliner headed toward Boston carrying the Korean detachment. He had only one element to control, and he did that to perfection.