The Color of Fear td-99

by Warren Murphy

  It was very strange. When Remo slowed, Page's legs slowed, too. When Remo topped a rise, Page's legs knew exactly what to do even though all during the hike to the Crater, Captain Page was firmly informing his brain that he did not want to go near the damn Crater.

  Page felt exactly like a docile puppet. He wondered if it had something to do with the way Remo manipulated his spine during the walk, tapping vertebrae to hurry him up and squeezing when he wanted Page to slow down.

  When they reached the Crater, the Confederates had gotten themselves organized. Seeing Captain Page a prisoner, they leveled their muskets. Others went to work with their ramrods.

  "Anyone who wants to walk around for the next month with a ramrod shoved up his backside," Remo said casually, "has my permission to fire."

  There were three takers. They let go and then used their hands to bat away the thick black-powder smoke to see how badly their target had been hit.

  When the smoke thinned, there was no sign of the skinny man with the thick wrists and dead-looking eyes.

  Reflexively they reached for their belted ramrods. And encountered emptiness.

  "Oof! Oof! Oof!" the three said several seconds apart. Then a firm hand guided their hands to the missing ramrods.

  They found that the missing implements were stubbornly stuck in something and, when they turned around to look, they saw that they were somehow stuck in the seats of their Confederate gray trousers.

  The trio formed a daisy chain and tried to help one another out of their rectal predicaments.

  After that, the Confederate troops decided it was high time for a long coffee break and set to boiling chicory in their battered tin field cups over open fires. One man surreptitiously began coaxing his camp coffee along with a Zippo lighter.

  Meanwhile, Remo guided Captain Page to the lip of the Crater.

  The object had landed off center, gouging a raw brown wound in the grassy gash before it had rolled down to the deepest part of the Crater. Most of the lenses had shattered, leaving dull yellow glass shards lying about.

  And next to the object a Union reenactor sat sobbing uncontrollably.

  "Looks like we got a casualty here," said Remo, starting into the Crater. Captain Page obligingly followed. Or at least his feet obliged. His face scowled in a very ungentlemanly manner.

  "These Yanks are a sorry lot," mumbled Page when they reached the man.

  "What do you expect?" said Remo. "It's not like they're professional soldiers."

  Remo tapped the Union soldier's dusty boot with a toe. "Lose your musket?" he asked solicitously.

  The man looked up, face warped and dust smeared. "It was awful."

  "What was?"

  "The color of the thing," the Union soldier sobbed.

  "Let me guess, it was sunflower-colored. The worst, ugliest, most hideous yellow you ever saw. Right?"

  "Yellow? It was blue. A searing, crushing, soulflattening blue. I just want to die."

  "You said blue?"

  "Yes."

  "Not yellow?"

  "No."

  "You sure about that?"

  "I know my colors," the man spat.

  Remo let that go. "The blue make you afraid?"

  "No, it made me depressed. I feel like the world's come to an end. First we get captured by the people who we come south to succor, then they drop some kind of depression bomb smack on us."

  "The other guys ran away."

  "I wish I could. I don't even feel equal to standing up."

  "Let me give you a hand, soldier," said Remo, offering a thick wristed hand.

  The Union soldier simply sat there dejectedly, his head hanging so low his chin was buried in his chest. His shoulders looked like a wire coat hanger that had been bent down at each wing.

  "This is a very unhappy man," said Chiun.

  "This is a guy who doesn't know his yellows from his blues," said Remo.

  "I have never seen a more unhappy man."

  "I'll give you that," said Remo.

  "He is a disgrace to his uniform," declared Captain Royal Wooten Page.

  Remo gave Page a scornful look. He was now wearing a plumed Confederate officer's bicorne hat that looked as if it had been taken off a dead French admiral circa 1853. "You should talk."

  "Ah am a proud son of the South, suh"

  "Who deserted his unit to join a bunch of weekend warriors playing at war."

  "This is a right serious matter," Captain Page said stiffly. "The state treasury has been looted, the governor co-opted and the legislature is about to sell out the land of their fathers for mere gold."

  "Gold is not mere," sniffed Chiun. "It is gold. Therefore, it is perfection."

  "These guys probably have some excuses," Remo went on. "They're probably all 4-F's. But you're a real soldier. What got into you?"

  "Virginia."

  "Huh?"

  "Virginia is in mah blood. Ah make no bones about it, suh. Ah would die for the soil that nurtured me." And throwing his head back, Captain Page burst into mournful song:

  Take me back to the place where Ah first saw the light, To mah sweet sunny South, take me home. O'er the graves of mah loved ones Ah long for to weep, Oh, why was Ah tempted to roam?

  Remo reached around for the back of the captain's neck, intending to deaden the man's speech centers when from somewhere inside the broken stainless-steel bomb, a siren began wailing.

  "What the hell is that?" he said.

  "The bomb is about to explode," Chiun said. "Quickly, Remo, we must escape."

  "Bombs don't make sounds like fire engines."

  Chiun got behind Remo and began pushing urgently. "Hurry, clod-footed one."

  Remo scooped up Captain Page and the Union soldier, one under each arm, and started out of the Crater. The siren sound swelled and grew in pitch like an angry ghost following them.

  When it was screaming at its most urgent, and the entire battlefield was thumping with Confederate soldiers running from the Crater, the explosion occurred.

  This explosion wasn't yellow. Or even blue. It was on the order of a thoom. Not a big, earthshaking thoom, but a substantial thoom nonetheless. A pillar of blackish smoke crawled out of the Crater, seeking the climbing sun.

  After that the Crater hissed like grease in a giant frying pan.

  "Hold up, Little Father," said Remo as the hissing reached his ears. He stopped.

  Chiun hesitated. "The smoke may be dangerous, Remo."

  "Maybe. But I still don't think that was a bomb."

  They stood and watched the black smoke coil and twist up from the great Crater to be picked apart by an intermittent southwesterly breeze.

  When nothing else happened for five more minutes, Remo walked back to the Crater rim.

  "Mind setting us down, suh?" a voice requested.

  Remo looked down and saw that he was still carrying the depressed Union soldier and a docile Captain Page under his arms.

  "Sorry. Forgot," Remo apologized, dropping the men to the ground.

  They hung back at a careful remove while Remo looked down into the Crater.

  At the bottom the stainless-steel sphere was a puddle of hot, smoking slag. It bubbled and spread, scorching the grass as it lost its round shape and became flat.

  "Guess we won't ever know what it was now," Remo said unhappily.

  "I do not mind," said Chiun, "just so long as we do not ever encounter its like again."

  ". . . JUST SO LONG as we do not ever encounter its like again."

  At a mobile command-post van a man removed his earphones and snapped a console switch. "Moise reporting. "

  "Go ahead, Moose."

  "According to the field mikes, we hued them good and proper. Opposition forces have abandoned the battlefield."

  "That's our read from above. We just sent out the slag command."

  "They're talking about it right now. The technology remains secure."

  "Roger. Continue monitoring. We may need additional field support come H-hour."
/>
  "Standing by. Moise out."

  The man in the mobile command post cut his mike and returned the earphones to his head. "I hate being called fucking Moose," he muttered to himself.

  Chapter 7

  On the ground overlooking the smoking pit history had dubbed the Crater, Remo searched the sky with his eyes. The black helicopter that had dropped the weird device that was now so much superheated steel slag was gone. It was not among the clustering choppers that hung off in the western sky, well out of musket range.

  Captain Page turned to Remo and said, "Earlier, suh, you spoke of surrender terms."

  "That's right," said Remo.

  "Well, Ah am prepared to offer them."

  "Offer? You're going to surrender to us."

  Captain Page jutted out his cleft chin with pride. "Never. Ah would sooner die."

  Remo flexed his fingers to limber up. "That can be arranged."

  Page took a step backward. "Ah will ask you to keep your cotton-picking hands to yourself, if you do not mind."

  "No problem," said Remo, folding his lean arms.

  Captain Royal Wooten Page relaxed visibly.

  "Now you are being reasona-aayaaah!"

  Captain Page fancied himself a singer of sorts. Mostly of the soap-and-shower variety. Old-timey tunes were his stock-in-trade. "Lorena." "Rebel Soldier." "Barbara Allen." "Shenandoah." He could manage middle C, especially if the water turned suddenly cold. For the first time in his life, he hit top C. And while he was, technically, singing, lyrics had nothing to do with his impressive performance.

  The pain seemed to shoot through his entire body, paralyzing it with shock. It was remarkable pain, far beyond even that time on maneuvers when a halftrack had run over the toe of his combat boot. Once, he had experienced something like it. He had been a teenager and gotten some candy cane stuck between two teeth one Christmas morning. For want of a toothpick or dental floss, he had taken some tinsel off the tree and used it to saw the offending particle out from between two back molars.

  The pain had been electric and excruciating.

  Later he figured out that the aluminum tinsel rubbing between the amalgam molar fillings had generated some kind of primitive electric current. At the time the pain could only be called exquisite.

  This pain was anything but exquisite. It was as if his nervous system had been hooked up to a car battery and the juice pumped straight in.

  Captain Page dearly wanted to run away, but the pain rooted him. He did manage to jerk his head around because he had the idea the pain was coming from his left. It was, he plainly saw.

  The old Oriental gentleman in the black kimono with the red artillery piping had hold of his earlobe. That was all. Just the earlobe. Captain Page wasn't aware of any particular sensitivity in his earlobes. From time to time, in the hot weather, he might develop a pimple in the fleshiest part, but that was it.

  The old man was squeezing the lobe between two quite wicked fingernails. Yet they seemed so fragile in their elegantly curved length. Now they were stern, hot needles bringing proud Captain Royal Wooten Page to his quivering knees.

  "Now, about that surrender," said Remo.

  "Would you prefer total surrender, or would abject surrender suffice?" Captain Page moaned.

  "Whatever wraps up this idiocy quickest."

  "This idiocy, suh, will never be wrapped up so long as Virginia is threatened from without."

  "Who's threatening it?"

  "Ah told you. The evil forces of Uncle Sam."

  The terrible fingernails withdrew.

  "Did you hear, Remo? It is Uncle Sam who is behind this."

  "Hold your horses," said Remo. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Page, spell it out for me."

  "Surely you know of the assault upon our sovereign state of Old Dominion," Page said, getting to his feet.

  "I know two groups of idiots are fighting the Civil War all over again."

  "It was the Yanks who started it, as Ah have it. Ah was not actually present at the Second Battle of the Crater, you understand."

  "I understand exactly nothing."

  "The Sixth Virginia Foot had camped out on these very grounds to stand against the would-be plunderers of ole Virginia, Colonel Rip Hazard commanding. He fell when the advance guard of Union troops swooped down upon them in their sleep. It was a slaughter, suh. The Sixth Virginia were not prepared for true combat. Their muskets were tramped down with powder and wadding only. No balls."

  "No brains, either," said Remo.

  "Ah take violent exception to that."

  "Feel free," invited Remo.

  "The valiant survivors lay in ambush when the Forty-fourth Rhode Island came along and paid them in their own coin. When the First Massachusetts followed, they were overwhelmed without loss to the Confederate side, Ah am pleased to report."

  "Let me guess, no balls, either."

  "You have that right." Captain Page frowned. "Ah must admit that portion of the tale has me flummoxed."

  "How so?"

  "Colonel Hazard had requested the assistance of the Forty-fourth Rhode Island Weekend Artillery and the First Massachusetts Interpretive Cavalry in the coming unpleasantness, and it was his impression that he was betrayed by one or the other. Yet both Northern regiments, when subsequently engaged, were firing paper and powder. They were woefully unprepared for battle."

  "Wait a minute. Back up. What coming unpleasantness?"

  "Why, the Siege of Petersburg National Battlefield, of course."

  "Who's laying siege to this patch of grass?"

  "Why, the dreaded Sam Beasley Company, of course. Don't you read the newspapers?"

  "Bingo," said Remo.

  "The carpetbaggers subverted our state government, extracted millions of taxpayer dollars for road and highway improvements and had the unmitigated gall to think they could erect a so-called Civil War theme park on Virginia soil, despoiling land that has only recently shrugged off the terrible wounds of the late unpleasantness."

  "What late unpleasantness?" asked Remo.

  "The War between the States, naturally."

  "I wouldn't exactly call the Civil War late," Remo said dryly.

  "You are obviously no Virginian, suh. These wounds lie deep, and the scars still fester."

  Remo looked around. "I can see that."

  "They will never build on this hallowed ground. They failed at the Third Manassas, and they will surely fail here."

  "Third Manassas?"

  "They desired to build in the vicinity of Manassas National Battlefield Park, but the good people of Manassas chased them away. Their alternative site is just a stone's throw from here. But before God Almighty, we wall run them off also or ourselves lie buried in the Crater."

  "Third Manassas wasn't a battle, but a public-relations victory, is that it?"

  "It is a victory nonetheless." Page thumped his chest once. "Ah only wish Ah had participated personally instead of succumbing to inglorious defeat at your wicked Yankee hands."

  "Forget it. We have a beef with Uncle Sam Beasley, too."

  "If only he had lived," Page said, wet-eyed. "The kindly old gentleman would never have allowed this vile travesty to be carried out in his name."

  "And Colonel Sanders was a friend to chickens," said Remo.

  "Suh?"

  "Never mind. I want to talk to someone who was at the first ambush."

  "My pleasure." Page called over to the men in gray drinking bitter chicory coffee with even more-bitter expressions. "Fetch Mr. Huckabee over here."

  "Huckabee has been confined to quarters for dropping character by virtue of being out of period," a sergeant hollered back.

  "What was the nature of his offense?"

  "Zippoing his coffee, the lazy shirk."

  "These men take their soldierly duties quite serious," Captain Page confided to Remo. Remo rolled his eyes.

  "Sergeant, you survived the dastardly attack on your fine regiment. This man would appreciate an opportunity to treat with yo
u."

  "He won't hurt me, will he?"

  "What kind of soldier talk is that?" Captain Page said angrily.

  "I'm recreational, sir."

  "I only hurt people who keep me waiting," Remo said loudly.

  The sergeant cleared thirty yards of clipped grass in jig time.

  "Sergeant Dinwiddie reporting as threatened," he said, saluting Remo smartly.

  "Here now, you don't salute a civilian," Captain Page said.

  "Beggin' your pardon, Captain, but I have been witness to this individual's manhandling skills, and have no wish to enjoy his wrath."

  Captain Page rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. "Carry on, then."

  Remo addressed the sergeant. "You get a clear look at the unit that attacked you last night?"

  "Before God, I did."

  "They wore Union blue?"

  "They did."

  "What color piping?"

  "It was light blue."

  "Not artillery red?"

  "No."

  "Not cavalry yellow?"

  "Light blue, as I have said."

  Remo turned to Captain Page.

  "Light blue piping is infantry, right?"

  "It is indeed," Captain Page said slowly. "Ah declare, Ah was unaware of a Union infantry reenactment regiment on maneuvers in these parts."

  Sergeant Dinwiddie spoke up. "There was none, Cap'n. Just the Forty-fourth Rhode Island Weekend Artillery and the First Mass. Interpretive."

  "Great," growled Remo. "You were set up and you fell for it."

  "It was dark, sir," the sergeant said apologetically. "And we lost our beloved Colonel Hazard in the first engagement. He would have set us straight had he lived. I am plumb sure of it."

  Remo said to Captain Page, "I asked for a phone a while back. You have one?"

  "No, suh. Ah ordered the field phones destroyed."

  "Why?"

  "So headquarters would not recall us before the press conference. Or worse yet, federalize us under the command of Washington and set us against our fellow Virginians." Captain Page visibly shuddered at the thought.

  "The Beasley people are coming here?"

  "At high noon." Captain Page sank to one knee. "Suh, Ah beg of you. Let me and mah brave boys stand against the Yank devils."