Terror Squad td-10

by Warren Murphy

  "Then how could inexperienced people smuggle a field weapon through a detection device, and learn the use of firearms in a day?" asked Remo. "How could they do such a thing?"

  Chiun smiled. "There seems to be a contradiction there, does there not?" he said.

  "There does," Remo said.

  "There is none," said Chiun, and he explained.

  "Once, a long time ago, the House of Sinanju was summoned by an emperor of China, a cunning man, a wealthy man, a man of great perception but no wisdom, of great military victories but no courage. He was, in brief, not Korean in his virtues.

  "The emperor requested the services of the House of Sinanju. This was not the emperor who failed to pay for services, but the great, great grandfather of that emperor who one day would commission a Master of Sinanju and not pay, thus depriving the babies of the village of Sinanju of food,"

  "Yes, yes, get on with it. I know the story about the emperor who didn't pay for the hit," said Remo.

  "It is an important part of any story dealing with China," Chiun said.

  "Little Father, I know that the village of Sinanju is very poor, and that it has no crops, and in order to get food for the children and the aged, you hired yourselves out as assassins, and anyone who doesn't pay is really murdering your babies."

  "It is a little thing to you. They are not your children."

  "That was over six hundred years ago."

  "A crime, unlike pain, does not diminish with tune."

  "Right," Remo said. "It was a horrible, undiminished crime, and no emperor of China should ever be trusted."

  "Correct. But this was his great, great grandfather," Chiun continued. "The emperor had a problem. He wished to wage a very special assault against a king beyond his borders. The palace of the king was on a high mountain. It could not be assaulted by soldiers without great loss. The emperor did not wish to lose many of his fine troops. But he had peasants, more than enough peasants, who in that year of crop failure would starve to death anyway. Could the world's most illustrious and magnificent assassins, the perfection of mankind, the ultimate of what mere mortals might possibly achieve, in brief, could the Master of Sinanju train peasants to assault this castle so that prime troops would not have to be lost?"

  "The Chinese emperor called your ancestors the perfection of mankind?" asked Remo incredulously.

  "That is the way the story was told to me," said Chiun.

  "But you said Chinese emperor is another word for liar."

  "Even a liar must tell the truth sometimes.

  "The emperor said the special assault must be conducted within the month as the king had planned to move a great treasure out of the palace on the mountain. The ancestor of Chiun thought hard and long. What makes a warrior and what makes a peasant? Is it the eyes? No. All men have eyes. Is it the muscles? No. All men have muscles that can be trained briefly. Then why should it take years to train a good soldier? The Master of Sinanju thought and thought.

  "Why was the House of Sinanju superior to all other assassins? What made Sinanju perfection among flaws? What made the House of Sinanju respected and revered throughout the world?"

  "The House of Sinanju is known by maybe ten people today, Little Father," Remo said.

  "This is the way the story was told to me," said Chiun.

  "Then one day, the Master saw a soldier push a peasant off a road. The soldier was slight of build. The peasant was large and strong. Yet the peasant did not strike back. And then the Master knew what he could do, in a very short time. What was different between the peasant and the soldier was the mind. That was the difference. Only the mind. The peasant surely could have slain the soldier but he could not see himself doing it. His mind did not have it.

  "So the Master had artists draw pictures of the palace and the mountain. And he gathered the peasants before him and he spoke to them as they looked at the pictures. And as they looked, he had artists draw in their likenesses scaling the mountain, one on another. And he had artists draw in their likenesses killing the king's soldiers. And he talked to them until he had them seeing in their mind that they could do this thing. And at the end they believed that not only could they do this thing, but already had done this thing. And he had them chant together the signals they would hear.

  "And so they marched from the emperor's lands to the land of the king who lived in the palace on the mountain. And every day on the march, they chanted the orders to themselves and saw themselves scale the mountain.

  "And when the day arrived, they approached the mountain with the assurance of soldiers and scaled the mountain and overcame the fortifications, losing some men, but not as many as might be expected. This was due to the planning of the Master of Sinanju,

  "But lo, inside the palace, they fell to their knees because after all, they were peasants and had never seen the inside of a palace. And they wandered around, frightened and confused, and were slaughtered by the mere household guard, for they had not seen themselves inside the palace. They only visualized themselves assaulting it

  "So," finished Chiun, "were they skilled or were they not?"

  "They were and they weren't."

  "Exactly."

  "Then these people are skilled and not skilled."

  "Exactly."

  "How can I tell that to Smith?" Remo asked. "He is already greatly disturbed,"

  "That will pass,"

  "How do you know, Little Father?"

  "I know. Did you not see him eyes or his fingers or the way he looks at the sky?"

  "Smitty never looked at the sky in his life. He never did anything but play with his computers. He's a man without a soul."

  Chain smiled. "Perhaps, but he is a man."

  "No," said Remo. "You're not telling me it's his time of life."

  "Indeed it is," Chiun said. "He suffers now because life is telling him it is the beginning of being over. It is almost over and he was never there. But this shall pass, because it is only a moment, and he shall return to the illusion that most men have: that they will never die. And under that illusion, he will return to normal."

  "A bitter heartless machine," said Remo.

  "Exactly," said Chiun. "There are worse emperors to work for."

  The sidewalk ended a few yards past the last frame house. Remo and Chiun walked along the side of the road, and if one watched them from behind, he would see that the American now walked with the gliding motion of the Oriental, their arms and shoulders moving as if they were twins.

  They turned off the road at a small dirt path that led through a stand of birch, and down a small hill. Both men moved effortlessly.

  "Tell me," asked Remo. "Whatever became of the assault on the palace?"

  "It had a good ending. The Master led a small party to the treasure room and guided them into retrieving it. They made their way down the mountain and returned to the emperor with the treasure.

  "And the peasants?"

  "They were killed."

  "How can you say it was a good ending?"

  "The emperor paid."

  "If it was just money, why didn't the Master just keep the king's treasure?"

  "Because we are not thieves," yelled Chiun.

  "You stole from the king!"

  With that, Chiun gushed forth a stream of Korean, a few words of which Remo recognized. Stupid. White man. Ingrate. Invincibly ignorant. Bird droppings, And one more, which Remo recognized from constant use. It was a saying of the House of Sinanju: "You can take mud from the river, but you cannot make of it a diamond. Be satisfied with a brick,'*

  A large clearing loomed ahead and Remo pressed forward until he suddenly realized he was walking alone. He turned around and Chiun stood twenty feet behind him, near a large rock. There was a small clearing around the rock as if a deer had settled there for the night and nothing grew again.

  Remo motioned with him head for Chiun to keep up with him, but Chiun did not move.

  "C'mon," Remo said. "The training site must be just up ahead. The girl s
aid it was at the bottom of the hill."

  Chiun raised a finger. "That clearing up ahead was not the place," he said. "This was the place."

  Remo trotted back to the rock and looked around. There was the rock, about twice the height of a man, the small muddy clearing that looked more like a widening of the path, and nothing else.

  "How do you know?" said Remo.

  Chiun pointed to a small flattened section of the rock at about his shoulder height. The section was smooth, about the size of a matchbook cover, and looked as if someone had chipped it away with another rock.

  "It is time," said Chiun, "to leave the service of this emperor. Come, I can find employment for you, too. We must leave. There is always work for assassins. Do not worry about your income."

  He touched his long fingernail to the flattened section of rock.

  "This tells anyone fortunate enough to know," he said, "that the time has come to seek another benefactor, to serve elsewhere. Leave America to its own devices."

  Remo felt his stomach knot, a breath surge up into his throat.

  "What the hell are you talking about? I'd never quit when I'm needed." But the Master of Sinanju had already turned, and was looking up toward the sky.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Henry Pfeiffer was rearranging the price marker on the leg of lamb in his butcher shop window on Ballard Street in Seneca Falls when a co-ed from Patton College entered and smilingly told him he was going to kill two people.

  "I beg your pardon," he said in an accent tinged with the gutturals of Bremerhaven, Germany, where he was born. "Who are you? What are you talking about?"

  "My name is Joan Hacker. I'm a senior at Patton College. And you're going to try to kill two men for the revolution. Only you may not be able to, but you're the best we can get right now."

  "Uh, sit down, sit down. Can I get you a glass of water?" Henry Pfeiffer wiped him beefy hands on him stained apron and guided the young girl to a chair.

  "It's really very simple," said Joan Hacker. "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. We've got to break eggs. I'm giving up a meaningful relationship, and I mean, meaningful. I may never get that much of a relationship again. But I'm doing it for the revolution."

  "Perhaps some Alka Seltzer? Or schnapps? And then we phone the hospital, ja?"

  "Nein," said Joan Hacker who knew a little bit of German. "We don't have time. They're a bit up the canal now, and you will have good cover before they reach the road, I got them there. I mean, I did most of the work. I would have told you earlier, but we didn't want to give you much time to think about it. We wanted to wait for them to get there. We're giving you cover. You ought to be grateful."

  "Little girl, you will go to the hospital if I phone?"

  "No, Captain Gruenwald. S.S. Captain Oskar Gruenwald. I will not go to the hospital. I will wait for you."

  Blood drained away from the heavy face, of the butcher on Ballard Street. He steadied himself on the clean glass case.

  "Little girl, do you know what you're talking about?"

  "Yes, I do, Captain. You looked marvellous in your S.S. uniform. That's all right. I don't mind that you were a Nazi. We're not against Nazis anymore, what with Israel and everything. Naziism was just another form of colonialism. America is worse."

  Oskar Gruenwald who had not been called Oskar Gruenwald since one wintery day in 1945 when he took the uniform from a dead Wehrmacht sergeant and surrendered to a British patrol outside Antwerp, locked the door of his shop so no one else could enter. Then he spoke to the young girl.

  "Miss. Let me explain."

  "We don't have time for explanations," said Joan Hacker. "And don't try anything funny. If anything happens to me, your wife and family will get it."

  "Miss," said Gruenwald, lowering his massive frame into a chair beside the girl. "You do not look like a cruel person. You have never killed anyone, have you?"

  "The revolution hasn't required me to do that yet, but don't think I'd cop out."

  "Miss, I have seen bodies stacked like mountains. Mothers with children, frozen together in ditches. I have walked on ground that oozed blood because of so many buried alive underneath. It is a horrible insane thing, this killing, and to think that you take it so lightly as a form of social medicine is beyond the anguished ken of all mankind. Please listen to me. You have discovered my secret So be it. But do not put blood on your hands. It is a terrible thing, this killing."

  "You're irrelevant," said Joan Hacker. "We not only have your secret identity which the West German government would be very interested ins but we know that your son and grandchildren are right now in Buenos Aires, and they would look very unattractive after a bomb went off in their living room. On the other hand, if you do this thing for the revolution, no one will be the wiser."

  "How can I get through to you? I will not kill again," said Gruenwald, knowing, even as he said it, that once again he had been cozened into murder. The first time, he did not know what he was doing. He was seventeen and his country had a leader who promised a new prosperity and pride. There were bands and marching and songs and Oskar went to war with the Waffen SS. Indeed, he did look good in him uniform. He was thin and blond and even of teeth. Before bis twentieth birthday, he was an old man and a murderer. Oskar ordered people to dig ditches and then filled the ditches with the diggers. Oskar burned churches with the parishioners still inside. And the strange thing happened to him that happens to almost every person who, face to face, commits mass murder. He stopped caring about him own life and started taking incredible chances. He rose to captain and then was assigned to a special assassination squad, this old young man. Years later, he realized that people who kill wantonly seek their own death as well, and this is mistakenly called courage. Years later, when he had managed to build a new life and could see the massive horror at a distance, he knew he would never harm another person again. It was very hard learning to forgive yourself, but if you worked with children and donated much time to those who needed your time, bit by bit you could become human again and learn to build and love and care. And those were precious things.

  Throughout the years, there was one reassurance. The insanity of the Second World War would never be repeated, the mass murder for the sake of extermination would never be again. And then, to his horror, Oskar Gruenwald saw the insanity beginning again, like a dormant disease that suddenly sprouts a new boil.

  People, many of them well-educated, forgot World War 2. Playing little mind games with themselves, they decided that a massive military bombing which killed a thousand people in ten days was worse than a war which killed more than fifty million people. And if it suited their purpose to support a charge of racism, then everyone forgot the hundred thousand Germans killed in one raid on Dresden, and said America would not have bombed a European country as it bombed Vietnam.

  It was as if the world's greatest holocaust was forgotten because it was a quarter of a century old, and now the new Nazis were on the march and they called their master race "the liberated" and their new world war was "the revolution." Their stupidity was enough to make grown men cry.

  "Little girl," said Oskar Gruenwald to the pert co-ed who had threatened the lives of his offspring. "You think you are doing good. You think you will make things better by killing. But I tell you from experience, the only thing you will do is kill. I too thought I was improving the world and all I did was kill."

  "But you didn't have consciousness raising," said Joan Hackett, sure of her enlightenment.

  "We did, but they were called rallies," said Oskar Gruenwald, now Henry Pfeiffer. "The minute you kill other than to save your own life, the minute you kill for some new social order, then you have nothing but insanity."

  "I can't reason with you," said Joan Hacker, very annoyed and fervently wishing some of her friends were here to help her argue. "Are you going to do what we want or are you going to be exposed and watch your offspring get offed?"

  "Offed is killed, is it not?" asked the aging Gr
uenwald.

  "Yes. Like in 'off the pigs,' " said Joan Hacker.

  Oskar Gruenwald lowered his head. him past was coming home again.

  "All right, Gauleiter," he said, referring to an old Nazi rank for political officers. "I will do as you say."

  "What's a Gauleiter?" asked Joan Hacker, and Oskar Gruenwald cried and laughed at the same time.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Remo was stunned. He was furious. He looked at the small piece of shaved rock and then back at Chiun. What angered him was Chiun's self-assured conviction that Remo should understand immediately why they must flee and Chiun's refusal to explain further.

  China turned slowly, as if reading Remo's thoughts, and said, "I am a teacher, not a nursemaid. You have eyes but you see not. You have a mind but you think not. You see the evidence and you stand there like a blubbering child, demanding to know why we must flee. And yet I tell you, you know."

  "And I tell you I don't know."

  "Hit the rock," said Chiun. "Take a piece off."

  Remo cracked down flat handed and sheared a chunk to the ground. Chiun nodded to the shaved section, its lines similar to the section which had so astounded him in the first place.

  "All right," said Chiun, as though granting Remo his most childish indulgence. "Now you know."

  "Now I don't know," said Remo.

  Chiun turned and walked down the path, muttering in Korean. Remo caught a few words, basically dealing with the inability of anyone to transform mud into diamonds. Remo followed Chiun.

  "I'm not leaving. That's it, little father."

  "Yes, I know. You love America. America has been so good to you. It taught you the secrets of Sinanju; it devoted its best years raising you to a level that no white man has every achieved before. A mere handful of all men in history were as skilful as you are and you love America, not the teacher who made you so. So be it. I am not hurt. I am enlightened."

  "It is not a question of loving either you or my country, little father. You both have my loyalty."

  "That is something one tells his concubine and wife, not the Master of Sinanju."

  Remo started to explain when Chiun's bony hand raised.