Terror Squad td-10

by Warren Murphy

  "I just wish I could do something, dammit."

  "And I wish I could be a sparrow," said Chiun.

  "Why a sparrow?"

  "So I could fly from here and visit Brooklyn before the ends of my days."

  "You never let up, do you, Chiun? Never. All right. I promise you, when this thing is over, we will visit Brooklyn and find the house where Barbra Streisand was born. Okay? Okay? Does that satisfy you?"

  "We could turn around now," said Chiun, "and get it over with so you would not have anything on your mind."

  "I give up," said Remo.

  "Then we are turning around?"

  "No," said Remo.

  "You give up in the most peculiar of ways," said the Master of Sinanju, and, having been denied a promised pledge, said not another word until the car reached the outskirts of Seneca Falls in the middle of the night.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Remo expected little difficulty in finding the training site, at or near Patton College.

  A training site had certain requirements you couldn't fit in a one-room apartment. The Kalashnikov rifles the hijackers had used, for example. If you were going to fire them at something other than point blank range, you needed a minimum of fifty feet and an optimum minimum of one hundred feet. Ideally, a good range would be fifty yards.

  You also had to fire it into something other than a blackboard.

  For a terrorist, nerves were needed. The most common training was fire-going through it. Fires left scorches.

  Obstacle courses and plane mock-ups were also useful. In short, if there was any training going on, Remo would find the place.

  After recovering from his shock that Remo had failed to find out how the weapons were smuggled past the metal detector, Smith had warned him that the terrorists' training might be unlike any training that military minds were aware of.

  "Then they'll leave traces unlike those from any other training. Relax, Smitty. They're dead meat. Okay?"

  It was a small campus and Remo strolled it alone. Chiun claimed he was exhausted from the trip, but Remo knew if Chiun had thought there would be anything of interest on an American college campus, he could have stayed awake a week if he wished. It was no magic trick, just an ability to sleep in shorter periods more continuously, the use of odd seconds instead of hours.

  Naturally Patton College had a Fayerweather Hall. Every campus seemed to have one. The administration building was little more than a shack but the main buildings rose brick and aluminium modem, forming squares around large green lawns.

  Remo was sure training wouldn't be on the lawns but he strolled them anyway. Not a divot. A few of the co-eds eyed him and he smiled back, not an encouraging smile but a recognition of their interest. He would have liked to have gone to a college like this and when he had been a living person with an identity, a patrolman on the Newark Police Force, he had enrolled in an extension school at Rutgers. He couldn't afford to go to a school like this in the daytime. If he had, who knew, maybe he never would have been recruited by CURE and maybe he would have a wife and family by now.

  He knew, however, that the attractiveness of a family existed only because he didn't have to endure one. Still, it would be nice to know that children would carry on the name. Hell, he didn't even have one, other than him first name, and being an orphan, he wasn't all that sure that either name-Remo or Williams-really belonged to him.

  He wandered into the gym. A gym would be an ideal place. A man with a pot belly and a whistle stood on the side watching about fifty, mostly beefy athletes, go through set exercises. He was in him late forties and wore a baseball cap. He had to be a coach. No middle-aged man other than a coach would wear a baseball cap, unless, of course, he was an admiral, and Patton College was landlocked.

  "Spring practice?" asked Remo.

  "Yeah," grunted the coach. "Who're you?"

  "Freelance writer doing a round-up on small colleges. Their use of gymnasiums and things like that"

  "Hey, you," screamed the coach. "Move your fucking ass, you lazy cunt." He waved a clipboard at a young man who, Remo could tell instantly, was working incorrectly on a damaged knee.

  "We like to use our gym," the coach said softly to Remo, "to build character. That's the whole philosophy of Patton athletics. Hey, you, Johnson. You do those pushups clean or it's back to the ghetto. You're not in Harlem, anymore."

  The coach took a brief moment to deny there was any racial friction on the team and he wanted Remo to print that. "We've got good boys here. Good boys."

  Was the gym used twenty-four hours a day?

  The coach shook his head.

  Was there a rifle team?

  Nah.

  Martial arts classes?

  "Nahhh, that's faggy. Give a guy a shot in the head and that's it. You know, pow, in the head. With the fist. American. I don't go for that gook stuff. Don't print that, though. You can say we view the athletic field as a laboratory for building understanding. Hey, you, Ginsberg. You waiting for your mother to make that push-up? Let's get into it. Petrolli! Get the grease out of your ass. . . . Athletics, as you may know, constitutes an extension of the Greek philosophy of sound body and sound mind. It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game."

  "Have a losing season last year?"

  "Well, let me explain that. You see, we really didn't lose if you look at the statistics." Remo examined the walls as the coach went into a statistical explanation that would do justice to the wildest fantasies of a government economist. "So you see, on the whole, we've really had a winning season."

  "Yeah," said Remo. "Say if you should see an old Oriental guy anywhere in long flowing robes, don't mention things like gook. Okay?"

  "Hell, what do you take me for? I know how to handle gooks. There was one here last week. I talked to him just like everybody else."

  "Mighty white of you. Was he Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese? What?"

  "A gook."

  "Well, now that you've got it down to a billion people."

  "A gook's a gook."

  "I hope you never find out the difference. I hate to clean up bodies."

  The janitor, for twenty dollars, confirmed that there was no rifle range, no explosions, no fires, no karate classes. Radical movements? Some. Did they meet anyplace special? No.

  The basements of the dormitories showed nothing, nor did the chemistry labs or the physics building, the Student Union, or even the banks of Cayuga Lake or the old barge canal which bordered two sides of the campus.

  They had to train somewhere. You don't put people on airplanes with rifles without training, and you definitely don't sneak .50 calibre machine guns past metal detectors without planning. And if this group was, as Smith suspected, part of the new wave of terrorists, they definitely had to have large amounts of space to create terrorist squads and guerrilla armies. Not that that was done here in the halls of Patton, but if the training techniques were similar, there had to be plenty of useable space.

  Remo wandered back into the Student Union, glancing at the menu in the cafeteria. Enough starch content to stiffen the living. He took a glass of water and sat down in a booth near some students who, like many youngsters and older lunatics, had solutions to problems of the world. Invariably these solutions required levels of mass morality that would shame a saint. These levels of morality, to be immediately adopted by mankind, were usually introduced by words such as "merely" or "just," such as "If only the police would just stop looking at brick throwers as enemies," or, "If everyone would merely stop thinking of their own self-interest," and, "Blacks just have to get together and think as one."

  Remo sipped the water. The youngsters in the next booth had narrowed the solutions to man's problems down to one. "Merely have everyone think of himself as part of one world family." The methods for achieving this world salvation somehow included, as its initial action, emptying garbage cans at Fayerweather Hall.

  Remo closed his eyes for a moment. Had he been wrong about Patton College?
Had the three skyjackers lied? He thought back to the plane, and tried to rebuild the scene in his mind. Seventy persons, terrified hostages. Four skyjackers, all with weapons. In his mind, he looked around the plane's cabin. Nothing. Rows of seats. An old wheelchair propped against the wall in the back. Stewardesses looking tired and tweety. But he should have found out how they got the weapons' aboard. And he should have found out why the plane had gone on to L.A. Sure, Smith wanted Remo to deliver the money. But the hijackers had control of that. If they had told the pilot, land here or get your brains blown out, he would have landed. Why had they agreed to L.A.? It was almost as if it had been part of their plan. But why? He should have asked. He should have asked a lot of things. But he was sure of one thing. They had not lied about Patton College. Fear was the greatest truth serum of them all. So where the hell was the training site? Remo let his mind wander and as he did, universal peace seemed easier. Maybe he could start it by throwing an egg at the dean of women or something. Then he felt the vibrations of someone sitting down.

  "Bastards. The bastards," said a young girl.

  Remo opened his eyes. A pert-faced girl surrounded by a strong shag cut of blonde hair was sitting across the table. She was crying.

  "The bastards."

  "What's the matter?"

  "The bastards. They won't let me get a word in edgewise."

  "That's too bad," said Remo without enthusiasm.

  "They never let me say anything. Especially when I have something good. Robert and Carol and Theodore always do all the talking and I never get a chance. I had something very good. Excellent. But no one would let me say it. They just didn't ask if I had something and they could see, if they looked close, that I had something to say."

  "Oh" said Remo.

  "Yes," said the girl, taking a paper napkin from a metal holder on the table between her and Remo. "I had a wonderful plan. All you have to do for a revolution is to kill the millionaires and the policemen. Without policemen, there'd be no police brutality. Without millionaires, there'd be no capitalism."

  "Uh, who's going to do all this killing?"

  "The people," said the girl.

  "I see. Anyone in particular?"

  "You know, the people," said the girl, as if everyone knew who the people were. "Blacks and poor."

  "Just in America?"

  "No. The Third World throughout."

  "I see. And what will you be doing?"

  "I'll help lead it, but I'll step aside for Third World leadership. I'll be the catalyst to help bring it about."

  "What if they don't let you get a word in edgewise?"

  "Oh, no. Third World people are nice. They're not like Robert or Carol or Theodore."

  "You think a Zulu chief is going to let you outline his future for him?"

  "The tribal chiefs of Africa are only a remnant of neo-colonial exploitation and we'll have to remove them too."

  "I see. What, if anything, do you learn here at Patton?"

  "History and political science. But it's really irrelevant I just cram for the exams to get an establishment piece of paper that says I'm legally allowed to teach. I mean, the paper won't make me any better a teacher. But you know the establishment."

  Remo toyed with the water glass.

  "You're probably very proud of the hijackers ... the revolutionaries who were killed recently."

  "Are you part of it?" asked the girl, her button brown eyes widening in excitement.

  Remo winked.

  "Gee, I didn't think anybody hardly knew they came from here. I mean, they weren't students. You're not a cop, are you?"

  "Do I look like a cop?" said former Patrolman Remo Williams.

  "Gee, I don't know, man, you could be. I mean, your hair isn't long or anything."

  Remo suddenly became very interested in the girl as a person. He asked her name. It was Joan. Joan Hacker, but Remo said that was the wrong name. She was starlight. She was truly starlight. Joan thought that was corny. Remo touched her arm and smiled. She thought Remo had a nice smile, but he could still be a cop. He smiled and listened. Starlight's father was a chemical engineer. He was a male chauvinist pig oppressor who revoked her American Express card and went pigging around, begging for approval and gratitude, just because he footed the bill for this bourgeois irrelevant institution. Starlight's mother was an un-liberated woman who refused to be liberated no matter how hard Starlight tried.

  Starlight's roommate was a nosy, aloof bitch who did nothing but paint her body to be attractive to male chauvinist pigs. Starlight's professors, except for her sociology teacher, were backward bourgeois nincompoops. Her sociology teacher had given her an A because of her term paper on how to conduct a successful revolution. Starlight's greatest ambition was to fight for the Viet Cong but since her father had revoked her American Express card, she couldn't afford the airfare.

  Starlight was for all oppressed people and against oppressors. Starlight's bust was a 38-D. Did Remo know that Starlight had taken the pill since she was sixteen?

  Starlight was outlining what America and the world really needed, later that afternoon in her dormitory room, when Remo gave her what she needed. Three times.

  Remo pressed her young nude body to his and waited for an expression of gratitude. Instead, he felt her hand run to reactivate the pleasure maker. She wanted more. She got more. Two more.

  "You really know how to get things started," said Starlight.

  "Started?" said Remo.

  "You're going to stop?" asked Starlight.

  "No," said Remo and by nightfall, Starlight finally believed he was not a policeman. She lay cuddled in him arms, kissing him shoulder.

  "I believe in the revolution," Remo whispered in her ear.

  "Do you? Do you really?"

  "Yes," said Remo. "I think the heroes who died in the airplane to free oppressed people are Patton's greatest contribution to civilization."

  "They really weren't matriculated," said Joan Hacker. "One took night school courses and the others weren't students."

  "Go on," said Remo, in amazement "You didn't know them?"

  "I did, too. I supplied the coffee and food. I paid for the lunch."

  "The lunch?"

  "Sure. It came out of my allowance but I considered it an honour. I suffered for the revolution."

  "They had only one lunch?"

  "How many lunches can you eat in one day?"

  Remo sat up in bed. "They trained somewhere else and spent one day here, right?"

  Joan Hacker shook her head and reached up for Remo to return his body to hers.

  "Answer my question first," said Remo.

  "No. They teamed in the afternoon, after lunch, and they left that night. Me and a bunch of other students who are liberated served the food and sort of stood guard. We didn't hear what was going on but it was very exciting. And then we heard what they had done."

  "Where did you stand guard?"

  "By the barge canal. None of us even saw the instructor. We didn't know what they were going to do. But yesterday when all those people came asking questions, we knew it had been traced back here. What's the matter? I felt your shoulders tighten."

  "Nothing," said Remo. "Nothing. I'm just overcome by the revolutionary ardor you show."

  Remo was overcome all right. By a gnawing suspicion about Smith.

  "These people asking questions. Were they police? FBI?"

  Joan Hacker shook her head. "Funny kind of people. None of them said they were police. Are you all right?"

  "Sure, sure," said Remo. Well, they were CURE people, elements from the vast network who didn't know who they really worked for. Smith hadn't been able to wait. He couldn't wait for the two days it would take Remo to drive cross country. Remo remembered China's admonition, not to worry about Smith, but to continue plying him trade. He also remembered that Chiun had answers to things that stumped western minds. He would ask the Master of Sinanju how a person could be trained in just one afternoon. He would take him to the spot ne
ar the river that Joan Hacker had described, and ask Chiun, what had gone on here? And Remo would be shocked by the answer.

  "You sure you're all right?" Joan asked again. "Maybe you'd like a little snort?" She pointed to a little metal canister on her end table.

  "No," Remo said. "But don't let me stop you. Go ahead and enjoy yourself."

  "Thanks," she said. "I will. After all this, I think a little coke would be groovy."

  CHAPTER SIX

  Chiun did not wish to leave the hotel at night. The northern cold of the Finger Lakes district of New York was too much for a Korean. Thus he stated.

  "Sinanju goes to twenty below zero during the winter. You told me that yourself," Remo complained. "And this is spring."

  "Ah, but in Sinanju, it is a clean cold."

  "I don't understand," said Remo, understanding all too well. The payments for not visiting the birthplace of Barbra Streisand were coming due.

  "Your ignorance is not my burden," said Chiun and would say no more. A typical response, thought Remo.

  At dawn, Remo asked Chiun if he had anything against dirty mornings. Or did the Master of Sinanju need a clean morning to go with him clean cold before he would leave the hotel?

  Chiun refused to descend to pretty bickering and tendentiousness. It was enough that he was going to examine the spot along the canal.

  The morning sun over dew-fresh grass was refreshing, so they walked.

  "Little Father," said Remo as they crossed an iron bridge over the canal, "I am confused."

  "The beginning of knowledge."

  "Everything I know about our skills tells me it takes time."

  "Much time," said Chiun.

  "Is it possible to achieve minimum skills in a day?"

  Chiun shook his head. A gentle breeze caught his wispy beard.

  "No," he said. "It is not possible."

  The bridge blended into a sidewalk, and they moved underneath a row of green budding trees with small houses set on oversized lots on both sides of the street. The fragments of front lawns were muddy. It had rained during the night