"Put a hold on all incoming calls, Candelaria," Costa snapped. "Notify the switchboard that I am not to be disturbed for any reason for the next two hours. Lock the door. I'm ready to dictate."
She returned to her desk to make the necessary calls. But the first one was to an outside number. The phone was lifted at the other end, but no one answered. "Time," she said, and broke the connection. Then she took care of the other matters and returned to her employer.
For an hour she took dictation. Then Costa grew hungry, as he generally did when in the throes of creativity. "Fetch me a candy bar," he said. "Quickly." It was not that his hunger was that urgent, it was that he wanted the surge of food energy to guarantee the continued high output of his brain, so that he could birth the brilliant report at one sitting. Every minute's delay threatened to dull the fine cutting edge.
Candelaria unlocked the door, went into her office and thence to the hall with money from the petty change box. A man stepped silently forward to meet her. He handed her a wooden box. She accepted it with hardly a pause and carried it on down to the candy machine, feeling a slight vibration within it. Perhaps it was merely her nervousness.
The man stood waiting for the elevator down to the ground floor. Modern as this building was, it still suffered delays. The indicator showed the elevator was stationary on the second floor; something was holding it up. After a moment the man moved to the stairwell and started down. Thirty stories was a long way, but he preferred not to wait.
Candelaria carried box and Hershey bar into her office. She brought both all the way into the executive's office. She handed him the candy, went back to the door, set down the box and opened it.
"Candelaria!" Costa said, irritated. "What are you doing?"
"It will only take a minute," she said, drawing out a plastic bag filled with something that quivered and hummed.
"I'm in the middle of dictation!" he protested.
"Dictate to this," she said, flinging the bag toward him. It burst open, releasing a dark cloud that buzzed angrily. She stepped quickly out the door, slammed it shut, and locked it.
"What on earth—" Costa exclaimed, furious at this unexpected insolence. That girl had just lost her livelihood! Then he saw the cloud and recognized it. "Bees?"
Years before, an enterprising beekeeper had imported small honeybees from Africa, in order to crossbreed them with local strains and develop superior honey producers. The African bees made half again as much honey as American bees. But they were also ten times as fierce. The individual sting of a bee was no worse than average, but these Africans were much more eager to sting. Where a person might blunder into a nest and receive two or three stings ordinarily, he would receive twenty or thirty from an African swarm in the same time, and when he ran, they would follow for as much as a mile.
In 1957 some of these killer bees were accidentally let loose near the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Since then they had spread relentlessly, killing or mating with local queen bees. Their vitality and aggressiveness gave them a competitive edge against the natives. Every year they increased the radius of their territory another hundred miles or so, until they covered all South America.
The North Americans were viewing the approaching invasion of their continent with growing alarm, unable to do much about it. As with the stinging fire-ants, that flourished despite all the efforts of modern technology, the bees progressed.
All this flashed through the executive's mind in an instant, for he well knew the history and nature of the bees. It would take perhaps 500 stings to be lethal to a man—but this confined swarm could deliver that. There was no other living target in the room. He hurdled the bag and charged for the door—and found it locked. Fernando Mirabal could have bashed it down with his mighty shoulder; he was a fantastic brute of a man. But not Costa; he was soft and paunchy from years of desk work.
Now the bees were on him, striking like miniature dive-bombers. Sting! Sting! Sting! Faster than he could perceive, let alone avoid, they scored on his bare arms and face and neck. He shut his eyes, but they stung through his eyelids. He screamed—and they stung his lips and tongue. They were all over him, in his clothing, crawling up inside the legs of his pants, through the sleeves to his armpits, from his shirt collar down his back, stinging everywhere. Maddened by the continuing pain, he picked up his heavy swivel chair with hysterical strength and smashed it through the picture window. Now there was an escape! He flung himself out through the jagged gap and sailed through the air, knowing that relief was at hand at last.
Costa's descent was more efficient than that of the ninja who had brought the bees. By the time the ninja reached the ground floor, a guard was there. The building was already being sealed off, with all occupants suspect. "Stop!" the guard cried, aiming his handgun.
The ninja walked quickly up to him. His lips parted lightly, revealing a small wooden tube. From this tiny blowgun emerged a poison-tipped needle, Fukumi-Bari , a special ninja dart. It pierced the guard's right eyeball, carrying its serum directly into his brain, and the man fell dead.
The ninja departed the building and the city swiftly, mission accomplished. If Candelaria were lucky, she too would escape to find sanctuary at the Black Castle; but even if she failed, she had the satisfaction of avenging her situation.
The dwarf-ninja stood only three and a half feet tall, but size was no indication of his prowess. He was, after all, one of the original Japanese minions of Fu Antos.
He moved down the river in his miniature canoe, paddling swiftly and silently until he spied the night lights of the town. This was where the oil company troops were garrisoned. The town itself had a population of about 5,000, and was the nearest substantial settlement to the ninja camp: useful for minor supplies and contacts. So normally the ninjas had left it alone. Now it had become a liability, to an extent. The capitalist forces were moving in, and it was necessary to blunt their encroachment by selective pruning, as at Brasilia.
The dwarf beached his boat silently and tied it within the high foliage of a tall overhanging tree: the last place a soldier would think to look. In addition he left a band of poison on the handle of its paddle, just in case a stranger did discover it and try to use it. Stealing ninja equipment was hazardous business.
Now he slunk around the backs of the buildings, seeking the army unit's temporary barracks. A battalion of troops had arrived in the past week, some five hundred men under the command of Major Albuquerque Lima.
The major was not the run-of-the-mill army man. He was Nordic, of German lineage, his parents having settled in Brazil and changed their name after World War II. His father had been a career officer in the German military machine, one of the thoroughly professional soldiers that had made the Wehrmacht the finest fighting force in the world despite Nazi interference. He was tough, fair, and tactically brilliant, prevented from rising to higher rank solely by the conspiring jealousy of his less-qualified colleagues. He had made a specialty of jungle warfare and felt quite capable of handling a band of renegade Indians and any outside collaborators who were stirring them up.
Fu Antos concurred with that assessment. Major Lima was dangerous, and would become more dangerous as his successes in the field forced his unwilling superiors to yield him increasing authority. Without him, his battalion was merely another unit, its guiding genius gone.
The town, like many in the central Brazilian wilderness, was fairly new. It was near the river but not on it; instead it perched on a small rise of the ground, built there because of the periodic river floods. There were no paved streets; yellow dirt roads and crude wooden houses served the people adequately. Few people lived in central Brazil from preference; could they but afford it, virtually all would inhabit the pleasure city of Rio.
The normal police post was small, about fifty men augmented in times of crisis by volunteers. However, the local police had been wiped out in the prior excursion upstream, and the army camp had been constructed on the outskirts of town.
It was pat
rolled by armed guards, of course, but passing through this perimeter was child's play to the ninja dwarf. He skirted the main barracks, going instead to the Letrina. This was a simple wooden housing constructed over a big hole in the ground. The army was efficient about such things; no fooling with expensive and water-wasteful flush toilet facilities. When the hole was filled, dirt would be shoveled over the refuse and the shit-house moved to a new pit.
There were two sections: one for officers, the other for men. The dwarf observed the privy for some time, waiting until it was empty, then entered the men's room. Here there was a board-seat with four holes. A thin partition separated this from the officers' facility.
He donned his tekaki, metal claws fastened to both hands and feet, enabling him to climb vertical surfaces. He arranged a rope and little screw-in hooks about his body for ready access, and fastened his specialized weapons on his back. Then he mounted the seat nearest to the officers' partition, put his hands down on either side, lifted up his feet, and swung them back and down into the hole. He let his body drop silently, performing an acrobatic feat that would have been impossible for a larger or flabbier man.
The pit was deep, but even in a few days a battalion of five hundred men can generate a lot of fecal matter. There was only four feet clearance between the seat-board and the semi-liquid mass of substance below. Since the seats were raised two and a half feet above ground level, the pit was getting full, and the structure would have to be moved in a few more days. The stench was intense.
The ninja clung to the wooden ceiling by means of his tekaki, moving like a human fly toward the officers' section. One mishold and he would fall, suffering a fate a good deal worse than cleanliness. The partition extended down part way, terminating at ground level, eighteen inches above the smelly stew. The dwarf descended this, then froze as two enlisted men entered their section. He watched, clinging to the wall as their meaty posteriors plunked down on the seats and disgorged their contents.
The troopers, their rounds expended, departed. The ninja resumed his journey. He brought his head down beneath the partition, so that he could see up into the officers' twin-holed evacuation center. All was clear. He passed one arm through and jabbed his claws into the wood, then followed with the other arm. Like a snake, he completed the contortion, his forepart ascending the wall while his hindpart descended on the far side. Somehow he performed the maneuver noiselessly and faultlessly, never touching the refuse below.
Now he mounted to the seat-board. There were fewer officers than men, so that the twin seats represented much more adequate accommodations than the four. But officers always had the best of it; that was what they were paid for, even though their refuse stank as bad as that of the common herd.
The ninja emplaced himself between the two holes, which were more widely spaced as though to accommodate broader beams. He hooked on firmly with both feet and one hand, then used the free hand to bring up one of his screw-hooks. Carefully, laboriously, he drove this into the wood. Silence was more important than speed. Then he screwed in a second hook, and strung his musubinawa, a special rope fashioned from woman's hair, between them. At last he rested his back within the loop of this fine, light, strong rope, and let go with his other hand. He unlimbered his small, sharp, barbed spear and held it in his right hand. Now at last he was ready for business.
This procedure had taken well over an hour, and it was now two in the morning. He had a prospective wait of several hours. No normal man could have stood it, suspended uncomfortably above a pit full of shit—but this was a ninja. In perfect silence he waited. The atmosphere infused his being and caused him an imperative need to defecate—and, ironically, he was in no position to do so.
Reveille sounded just before dawn, and the army camp came abruptly to life. The troops piled into the men's section, dropping an irregular avalanche of manure into the four mouths of the privy and letting loose an exuberant fusillage of wind. In minutes the level of odor rose appreciably, slopping under the partition in slow waves to displace the lesser offerings of the officers. As though to combat this intrusion, an officer came to make his own discharge. Now came the ticklish part. The dwarf had placed himself so that he could cover either hole, since he could not anticipate which one his prey might use. But there were a number of officers, and only one—Major Lima—was his assignment. There would be no second chance; he had to be sure he scored on the major, not a lesser man.
He had to look. The posterior that covered the right hole gave no clues as to the rank of its owner. From this vantage, all men were equal. Well, not precisely equal; General Napoleon of France had spent so long wrestling with an evacuation complicated by piles that he had been unable to commence the battle of Waterloo advantageously. More of history was written in the outhouse than all the texts cared to admit. At any rate, the ninja had a problem. Had he been able to study photographs of the major's rear, he could have identified it now, but there was little light, and no such pictures had been available. Too bad that anal divination was not a contemporary practice, like palmistry or forehead divination. So he had to risk a peek through the left-hand hole.
He did this cautiously, not poking his head through but angling his body so that he could glance slantwise through it and up at the officer's insignia of rank. To do this he had to slide his legs almost directly under the occupied hole—and they were quickly soaked by the flowing urine. He paid no attention. His gaze traveled up the sleeve, up the arm to the shoulder as he twisted about in his sling, to command a view of the insignia of rank on the collar.
At last he saw it: a simple single star of a second lieutenant. Not his man. He swung smoothly back to his hiding place between the holes as the stream abated and the man stood up, not offering any solids to the pot this time.
A few minutes later a second officer entered. This one took the left seat, and the dwarf swung the other way to spy his rank. There it was: the three five-pointed stars, one with golden sunbursts between the points. The major!
Now the dwarf hefted his spear, braced himself, and aimed it at the anus opening like a black flower. Gas blasted out from that orifice, like the firing of a blank—and the point of the barbed spear thrust directly into that fart and up into the intestine, driven by all the convulsed power of trained ninja muscles. The major lurched up, but the shaft followed, and as gravity brought the torso down again the tip pierced the beating heart and killed him. The man slumped on the seat, his career over. The dwarf snapped off the protruding shaft of the spear, leaving no visible cause of death, not even flowing blood, then proceeded to make his getaway, mission accomplished.
He clung to the seat-board with his claws, unhooked the support cord, unscrewed the hooks, and let go. He dropped straight into the septic pool below. As he slowly sank into the brown slush, he placed a hollow reed in his mouth. Then he moved his arms and legs to draw himself down under the surface. Soon only the tip of the reed projected above, as the thick lumpy stew closed in. It was several minutes before another officer entered the privy. Then there was a commotion, audible to the dwarf despite the insulation of substance. He was sure the leaderless troops would not suspect the cause of the major's demise—not until the surgical post-mortem was performed. By that time it would be night again, and the ninja would silently emerge from his camouflage and make his way to the river.
Quite possibly the soldiers would never catch on to the precise mechanism of the assassination.
Ass-ass-in. Under his mask of shit, the dwarf smiled briefly, for he knew the term for his act in many languages. An ass had received a spear in the ass.
But he had reckoned without knowing the cadre of officers and noncoms the major had assembled. In minutes these superior men had deduced the nature and timing of the event. Preferring not to wait on the tedious and uncertain process of formal justice, they took direct and immediate action. A sergeant made a charge out of three blocks of eight-pound military TNT, equivalent to over fifty pounds of commercial dynamite. He cut off a five-seco
nd length of fuse, dropped the mass through the privy-hole like a huge turd, and ran outside.
There followed a spectacularly ugly and smelly scene. The explosion blew the privy apart, followed by a rain of wood, dirt, urine, feces, and fragments of the dwarf ninja.
Fu Antos learned of this vengeance very quickly. It made him angry, for the dwarf had been one of the most valuable of his agents. It also suggested that this army battalion was more formidable than anticipated, for the cadre had reacted with very nearly the insight and decision of a ninja. Simple elimination of its commander would not suffice; the entire unit had to be destroyed.
But the battalion was now fully alert. Soldiers patrolled the perimeter of the entire town, challenging all strangers, and troops occupied many of the houses. The town was now under martial law. The dwarf's canoe had been found and burned; machine-gun nests now overlooked the river. There was no way to infiltrate this area without the risk of substantial losses, and the ninjas could not afford further casualties.
Fu Antos chose a subtler approach. He waited until the major's corpse had been put aboard a police craft with its honor guard for transport to civilization, then sent another ninja to swim the river. All eyes were dutifully on the funeral craft, making it easy; but the ninja stroked well beneath the muddy surface anyway, breathing through a tube to the air. The projecting part was concealed by a small tangle of floating debris. There were many such items in the river, so even the soldiers whose eyes strayed were not suspicious.
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