It didn't look like much when it came into view. A high dome of mud maybe two stories tall. The windows were cut in strange, flowing shapes like bulging insectoid eyes. The only sound that could be heard was the weird, doleful drone of afflicted bees.
"I don't like how that sounds," Gordon Garret said from behind the wheel of the lead RV, which for purely tactical purposes was now bringing up the rear.
"We can't afford to lose our communications nerve center in case point takes a direct hit" was the way Commander Streep put it when they made the switch.
"That sound," said Commander Streep, fingering his lawful AR-15 sport rifle with its sniper scope and full clip of Black Talon bullets, "is the feared anti-American and anti-Christian devil bee. Our sworn enemy."
Garret shivered, his nervous foot hovering over the brake.
"Column, halt!" Streep called over his PA system hookup. The Freedom Convoy came to a jouncing and dusty stop.
"Dismount!"
From the pickups and sport-utility vehicles, the shock troops of the Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia poured out, locking and loading and racking their Remington shotguns, those that had them.
In the relative security of his command RV, their leader dialed the PA system to its highest setting and lifted his mike to his lips.
"Attention! This is Commander Mearl Streep! I call upon Dr. Helwig Wurmlinger to exit his awful abode to answer for his crimes against American agriculture."
The bee buzzing abruptly dropped. Silence fell.
Then an oval door opened, and out into the moonlight stepped a tall, gangling figure whose eyes were wobbly discs of moonlight.
"Are you Wurmlinger?"
"I am. Did you say you were Meryl Streep?"
"Mearl, dammit! Mearl Streep of the Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia."
"Then I have never heard of you, and you are on my property."
"We have come to make you answer for crimes against America and Iowa."
"What rubbish are you speaking? Step into the light where I can see you."
"So you can assassinate me with your devil bee? No. We are not such fools, Wurmlinger." A pause, then he went on. "Boys, get ready to torch that Frankenstein mud-hut!"
The Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia looked around helplessly.
"With what?" one asked. "We ain't brought any torches."
"Well, go into that devil hut and find some flammables."
No one moved. They were too afraid, and the humming. started anew. It was unhappy, like the drone of dying honeybees.
Then a bee did appear. It was big and fat and bobbed up and down in the moonlight, finally coming to a point at the window glass of the RV where Commander Streep was issuing his demands.
It went tick against the glass. This caught Streep's attention, and he turned around.
In the moonlight, the compound eyes regarded him with an alien malevolence. But that wasn't what made the hairs rise on the back of Streep's thick red neck.
It was the unmistakable death's-head on its fuzzy golden black back.
"Assassin bee! It's an assassin bee!" Streep screeched. "Turn smartly, men, and chop it down if you value your lives!"
As one, the Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia wheeled, weapons snapping up and ready to fire.
If they could only find a target.
Questing muzzles remained cold. No gun flashes painted the surrounding woods with their red, purifying flame, Streep saw.
"What are you waiting on, you idiots?" he roared.
"Where is it? Where is it?" his men were saying. Their weapons were tracking the trees, the moon, the RV and the ground. Everywhere but where the solitary devil bee hovered, patient and sinister.
That was when Streep fumbled a flashlight out of a cargo pocket of his cammies. He clicked it on. A light popped. He trained it on the bee and called out, "There is your target! Shoot to kill!"
The Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia did.
The night air was lit by zipping yellow tracer flashes. The percussive stutter of autofire and the accompanying din of the war cries of men more afraid than angry shook the tense air.
When the guns stopped, there was no sign of the bee or Dr. Helwig X. Wurmlinger.
"Did we get him? Did we get him?" a shaking voice asked.
Coming up from under a pile of cushions on the RV floor, Commander Mearl Streep wondered the very same thing.
He was fumbling for his flash when a new sound cut the disturbed evening.
It was a drone. High, metallic, it was nothing like the sad drone of the hived bees that had greeted them. It was angry, insistent and it filled the night like viciously sharp blades of sound.
The Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia stretched and craned their necks all around them. Fear warped their moonlit faces, their eyes bugged out and sweat oozed from exposed pores.
"Shoot at the sky! Shoot the sky!" Commander Streep called out. "It's a swarm of devil bees. They come for us!"
The Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia obeyed their commander with an alacrity that would have made a four-star general proud.
Except for one problem: they had neglected to reload their weapons.
Click-click-click went their weapons like so many cap guns firing. Or in this case, not firing.
Because, while their helplessness was dawning on them, the insistent buzz reached a crescendo and they began grabbing themselves at every exposed orifice. A few sneezed violently. But whatever had gotten up their noses wouldn't come back out. Some covered their ears with their palms, but just as quickly uncovered them when they realized the high buzzing was inside their ears already.
One militiaman stood with his head cocked to one side, slapping his right ear in hopes of dislodging whatever had gotten into his left auditory canal. He cried out with each self-inflicted jar of his skull.
From the relative safety of his command RV, Commander Mearl Streep watched in mounting horror. The cream of his militia was falling all around him, conquered by something they could neither see nor shoot at. All it was was a high noise that might have been the sound of the glassy falling moonlight under severe stress, if light could emit sounds.
One by one, the Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia began dropping.
At his post at the RV's wheel, Gordon Garret enjoyed a commanding view of the slaughter. "What's killing them? I can't see anything!"
By way of answer, Commander Mearl Streep retched uncontrollably.
When a man rolling on the ground in his death throes happened to turn his way, Commander Streep saw the thing that made him sorry he had ever elected to take on the dark forces of the federal government.
As he watched, the man's open, terrified eyes were disintegrating. Actually melting from sight like so much candle wax consumed by fire.
But there was no fire. And no sign of bees.
Mearl Streep was no fool. He knew a losing battle when he witnessed one.
"Retreat! Retreat! We're pulling back!" Streep said. "Get us the holy heck out of here!"
Hands shaking, Gordon Garret keyed the engine to life.
It was too late. Though every window was sealed, the vengeful buzz got him, too. Taking hold of his skull, he jerked out of his seat and began throwing himself around the RV's plush jungle-camouflage-motif interior.
The most awful thing about it was that something seemed to have gotten into his skull. Streep figured that from the way he deliberately banged his head into bulkheads and windows-even the microwave, which popped open.
Fumbling with the door, Garret stuck his head into the microwave oven and stabbed every button he could.
Nothing happened. The safety mechanism defeated his desperate attempt to microwave himself to death.
By the time Garret slid out, loose as a sack of cold manure, Commander Mearl Streep was cowering in back at the rear-exit door latch.
The drone was still in the air. The howling and threshing had all stopped.
Carefully,
Streep turned on his haunches and reached for the exit latch. He took hold of it. Only then did he face away from the RV's green, brown and black interior.
When he turned, his blood ran cold.
For on the other side of the glass, hovering on moon-blurred wings, was a death's-head bumblebee. Its compound eyes regarded him without understanding or mercy.
"Oh, God." Streep gulped, releasing the latch.
That's when the buzzing seemed to lift from Cordon Garret's dead body and work its way toward him.
Streep's widening eyes saw nothing. But he knew with a nerve-numbing certainty that something he couldn't see-only hear-was moving toward him, seeking his life.
In desperation, he yanked on the latch and tumbled out.
That was when the killer bumblebee jumped him. Something else attacked, too. Streep could feel things in his ears and his nose. They felt like living sounds crawling into his skull, seeking his brain to quench its dark, un-American appetites.
Commander Mearl Streep died screaming as his tongue and eyeballs melted in his very head with the speed of candle wax vaporizing. The sound of his screaming grew so loud it almost rivaled that of the thing hungrily devouring the contents of his head. But not quite.
When he collapsed into a sunken heap of camouflage green, the sound ascended to the cold moon and faded in the night.
After a while, the death's-head bumblebee sought the hollow of a nearby elm tree to pass the night.
It was dawn before Dr. Helwig X. Wurmlinger dared to step out of his eccentric home. He took one look at all the eyeless, immobile corpses and said, "Goodness gracious me."
Then he went out back to check on his sick bees.
Chapter 33
Remo and Chiun found the owner of the farm in his farmhouse.
It was a pretty good-size farmhouse. At least twelve rooms. The house was rambling, its clapboard skin painted white. The barn and grain silo behind it were as red as a hot brick, however.
Remo knocked on the door and received no reply. So he knocked again.
"I hear someone inside," he told Chiun.
"Do as you will. I will not cross the threshold of the house of corn." And Chiun walked off to survey the desolation that lay seemingly in all directions.
Remo tried the door. It wasn't locked and he stepped in.
Beyond the foyer, with its lace curtains and polished staircase leading upstairs, was a spacious livingroom area.
The owner of the house was seated in a big recliner with his eyes fixed on a working television. It was a big-screen TV, tuned to the Fox twenty-four-hour news channel.
The man had the weathered look of someone who toiled in the sun. His eyes were squinted up, and the backs of his hands were red and raw as a blister. He wore bib-style coveralls over a red plaid flannel shirt, and on an end table sat a baseball cap that said Seedtec.
Remo said, "Howdy," figuring that was probably how farmers talked.
The man continued to stare.
"I'm from the USDA," he said. "The name is Remo Croy."
The man in the chair hadn't blinked from the time Remo had entered. He was going on sixty seconds of staring at the TV screen without blinking. His face had a loose, slack quality.
"Hey, did you hear me? I said I'm from the USDA. We're looking into the situation here."
The man blinked once, slowly. His mouth barely moved, but a low, toneless question issued from him.
"What's that you say?"
"I'm from the USDA. I need to ask you some questions about what happened here."
The man had his arms flopped over the sides of his recliner. The arm opposite Remo's position came up casually with a repeating shotgun. It smacked solidly into his free hand, and the farmer began twisting out of his seat in a preattack posture.
"USDA bastards! You broke my back!"
Remo moved in. It was no contest. While the farmer was still twisting around to draw a bead, Remo yanked the double-barreled shotgun out of his grasp. It came easily.
Stepping back, Remo broke the action, ejected the fat red shells and, as the farmer came out of his seat bellowing, Remo casually made the twin barrels bend in opposite directions like a candelabra.
The farmer took in this example of raw power, blinked again and sat back in mute, sagging defeat.
"Do with me what you will," he said woodenly. "You already broke my heart."
"Hey, fella," Remo said gently, "I'm not here to hurt you. We're just looking into what happened out here."
"Don't fool with me. I know you Agriculture Department people are behind it. You and your genetic experiments, tampering with Mother Nature. Don't think because we're simple people out here we can be fooled. Not for a minute. We know it was your infernal bees that ran the corn down."
"Bees?"
"United States Department of Agriculture bees," the farmer snapped. "Bred to wreak havoc and make foul mischief. Which is what they done here."
"That's crazy! Who in their right mind would breed bees to ruin a corn crop?"
"The same ones who spent billions of dollars flying a man to the moon, where the soil won't yield and there's no air to breathe."
"That's a big leap in logic," Remo argued.
"I seen it all on the TV."
Remo looked at the screen. The station was coming up to its top-of-the-hour news segment. A purple-haired girl of about seventeen with jet black lipstick began reciting the headlines, pausing only to crack lime green bubblegum between items.
"New strain of voracious insects strikes at the heartland. Entire farms in Iowa have been leveled. Is there a connection to the mysterious assassin-bee deaths on both coasts that have authorities baffled? With us now is Fox star-reporter Tamara Terrill. Tammy, what's the latest?"
The familiar figure of Tammy Terrill appeared, clutching a microphone in her white-knuckled hands.
"Heather, official Washington is being stonily silent on this latest event in the looming insect crisis, but officials with the U.S. Department of Agriculture are issuing heated denials that they are behind the outbreak of vicious insects."
"How are these denials being met, Tammy?" the news reader asked.
"With skepticism. I myself have been investigating this threat for, oh, almost thirty-six hours now, and I don't believe a word of it. They're hiding something. Just like on 'X-Files.'"
The anchor nodded in agreement, adding, " 'X-Files' rules. And it's on Saturdays now."
"Cool," chirped Tammy.
In his recliner, the farmer was also nodding. "See? Proof positive."
"That's no proof!" exploded Remo. "It's just two media dips throwing wild speculation into the air to see where it will land."
"It landed," the farmer said miserably, "in my corn."
"Look, I'm serious about looking into this. Can you tell me why some farms were stripped clean and others untouched?"
"Any fool can plainly see the why in that!" the farmer exploded.
"Well, I'm a fool from New Jersey. Humor me."
The farmer got up. He was taller than Remo expected. He walked with a stoop to his porch. There didn't seem much fight left in him, so Remo followed him out.
Standing out in the fading sunlight, he waved a plaid arm as if to encompass all of Iowa.
"What you're looking at is the first crop of the new Super Yellow Dent corn. Fool geneticists said it would resist corn borers, worms, cockleburs, you name it. Nothing could touch it. Nothing could lay it low. I paid a third more for that seed as any corn I ever bought. The slickers who sold it to me said the only thing that could kill it was drought. Now look at it. Bugs buzzsawed through it like no one's business."
The man whipped a red handkerchief out of the back pocket of his overalls and wiped his eyes on both sides. There was no moisture there. Remo figured the farmer had already cried himself out.
"I'm sorry this happened to you," Remo said simply.
"I got took. That's all there is to it. I got took for all I had. Super Yellow Dent is supposed to giv
e off an odor that was poison to any pest known to prey on corn. Instead, it seemed to have drawn a worse pest than anyone ever heard of."
"Maybe it wasn't the corn."
The farmer expectorated noisily. "Oh, it was the corn, all right. And I can prove it. You can, too."
"How's that?"
"Take a survey of all the cornfields out this way. The ones that got hit grew Super Yellow. The ones that got off soot-free was ordinary corn. Golden Dent. Boone Country White. Champion White Pearl. Silver Mine. Early Huron. You name it. Everything except Super Yellow Dent, the savior of the corn farmer." The farmer spit a second time angrily.
The Master of Sinanju appeared at that point. He was carrying an ear of corn before him, carrying it by the corn silk, as if it were a distasteful yellow dropping.
The farmer straightened with a start of surprise. "Who in hell is that?"
"My colleague," said Remo.
"Looks more like a refugee from Chautauqua Week, you ask me my opinion."
"Behold, Remo," exclaimed Chiun, lifting his prize high.
"It's an ear of corn. So what?"
"See how it has been chewed on one side and not the other?"
Remo took the ear. It was chewed on one side. The other side showed rows of tiny kernels, each one indented as if nicked by a cold chisel.
"Looks like the stuff that survived had the moisture sucked out of it," Remo remarked.
"You idjit!" the farmer bellowed. "Don't you know corn? That's Dent corn. Them indentations are perfectly natural."
"I never saw corn like that," Remo said defensively.
"That's because Dent corn is purely cattle feed. You boil and bite that stuff, and it'll crack your teeth apart worse than Indian corn."
"Oh. What do you make of the fact the bugs ate only one side?"
"A freak of nature. That's what I make of it."
Chiun shook his head firmly. "Many ears show such signs."
The farmer took the ear from Remo, examined it with methodical interest, then stepped off his porch into the field.
He foraged about until he had picked up a double handful of corncobs. Every example had been stripped on one side and one alone.
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