Last War Dance, page 12
part #17 of The Destroyer Series
“Are you going to kill me?” asked Van Riker.
Valashnikov laughed again, a hard, brittle laugh. “Kill you? Kill you? After all these years? No. general, I am going to let you…how do you Americans say it? To stew in the juice?”
“I’ll move Cassandra and set it up elsewhere.”
“It will take you months. You know and I know that months will be too late. It will be seen. You were able once to build it in secret because we not know it existed. No more do you have that luxury.”
“I’ll…” Van Riker said and then stopped because he could think of no other threat, nothing that might frighten Valashnikov.
Valashnikov stood up. “Good, general. At least you have not tried to lie to me again. You may go back to sleep now. You should sleep with the bliss of knowing you have doomed your nation.”
He put his gun in his jacket pocket. “Sleep tight,” he said. “Hahahahaha.” As he left the room through the front door, the long peal of laughter hung in the air behind him.
Van Riker sat there in bed, thinking. Then he got up, turned on the light, and went to the telephone.
There was one person who could help. One person he could call.
Dr. Harold W. Smith, at the Folcroft Sanitarium.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE SUN WAS MINUTES SHORT of rising when Remo got to the Apowa village high on the hill overlooking the mob of reporters, marshals, and bogus Indians out on the Montana prairie.
Remo paused on the edge of the mesa and looked down. Below him, beside the road that led to the Apowa village, stood the church housing the Revolutionary Indian Party and the bronze and marble monument housing the Cassandra.
Remo turned and trotted toward the Apowa town.
It was pushing five thirty now, he knew, and he didn’t have much time left to stop that .155 millimeter cannon from blowing up the monument and detonating the Cassandra.
For a moment he allowed himself to consider what would happen if the Cassandra went off. He would die. So would Chiun. That thought shook him a little, since the idea of Chiun’s dying seemed unbelievable, as unbelievable as the idea of repealing the law of gravity or stopping some other force of nature.
But Cassandra’s power was beyond them to resist. Death. A strange thing. And Remo decided he didn’t like it. He wondered if that was the way all the people he had killed had felt. The next time he killed somebody, he would have to ask him what he was thinking about. That is, if there was a next time.
Brandt had thought he was smart, hiding the cannon. But Remo had thought the problem through, and the solution had come to him in a burst of inspiration. Why not hide the cannon out in the open? Where else but in the park? The park, with its collection of machine guns and artillery and the kids playing harmlessly around them. The park with its beautiful high-ground view of the church and the monument and the highway. All he had to do was go to the park and find a working .155 millimeter cannon.
That was all he had to do.
But it was too much. Remo went through the park carefully, checking each and every weapon. None of them was the potentially dangerous cannon. There were submachine guns that didn’t fire. Bazookas that wouldn’t fire. Mortars that couldn’t fire. Cannons that had never fired. But there was no working cannon that could level the church, destroy the monument, and detonate the Cassandra.
Only twelve minutes left, and Remo was lost. He didn’t even know where Brandt lived so he could get to his house in time to bleed the information on the cannon’s location from him. He was without ideas and without prospects.
The village around him was slowly starting to come alive. People were moving quietly along the streets.
Remo watched them. America on its way to work. God-fearing, hard-working America.
He watched God-fearing, hard-working America idly for a moment from his perch on the park bench, then he thought of something. Who went to work at five thirty a.m.? And these were all young men. Braves. And they all seemed to be going in the same direction.
It was no hope at all, but it was his only hope. Remo fell in with the small groups moving past the park, up toward the north. He walked fast, occasionally passing one of the groups but still able to follow the one just ahead.
Then he realized where they were going. The Big A supermarket.
Remo arrived there just a few minutes before six. Even though it was two hours before opening time, the interior of the store was already brightly lighted. Inside Remo could see Brandt. He was talking to a group of twenty young men, and more young men were arriving each minute, entering through the unlocked, pressure-operated front doors.
As the doors opened and closed, Remo could hear fragments of what Brandt was saying: “…supposed to be here…have to get rid of them ourselves…did you work out coordinates?”
The group which had now swelled to forty men, followed Brandt to one side of the store. As Remo watched, they fell onto the enormous display of toilet tissue, carrying the rolls away, first four-roll packages, then boxes, and then cartons, finally baring, under the protective mound of paper, the cannon. Remo understood why Brandt had gotten so upset when the women shoppers had hovered around the display. Sometime after the RIP had occupied the church, he had moved the cannon into the store from wherever its hiding place had been.
What a dumb place to store a cannon. So dumb, Remo almost hadn’t found it.
Now all he had to do was stop it from being fired, hopefully without hurting anybody. The Apowa were, after all, his kind of people, and Remo’s sympathies lay with putting a shell into the church.
Brandt now was supervising as the Indians wheeled the cannon out of a small chickenwire shed. The cannon was a big one. The top of its muzzle reached higher than a man’s head.
Figuring that there had to be a side door to wheel it out through, Remo trotted around the low cinder-block building and found the wide delivery doors at the back. He found something else, too—the main power lines for the building. Remo looked for a fuse box on the outside wall but could not find one. The twin power lines came from utility poles to a spot about twelve feet up on the wall. They were connected there to heavy porcelain insulated mountings and then went through holes in the masonry wall into the building.
Remo leaped up and grabbed one of the insulators with his left hand. This would be tricky. He didn’t understand electricity, so he took pains to figure it out carefully. If he just sliced one of the electric wires while he was touching the wall or the ground, he would be grounded and the jolt of electricity would pass through and probably kill him. Suppose he had worn his sneakers? Stupid, that wouldn’t matter, he decided. But he wished he had them. Anyway, he had to cut the wire without being grounded.
Remo dropped back to the blacktop of the loading area. He stood under the twin wires, then crouched and leaped straight up.
At the top of his leap, he windmilled his right hand around his body and over his head. The hand hit the heavy insulated cable and sliced through it, separating the wire into two parts.
Remo, still off the ground, felt nothing but a faint tingle on the side of his hand. He landed lightly and danced out of the way of the severed section of cable that writhed about the ground like an electric snake, sparking and spitting out its evil juice.
Remo poised himself, then leaped again and slammed his hand through the second wire. It too split and hit the ground with a splashing surge of electricity.
As soon as he landed, Remo was moving away from the spitting wires. He heard shouts from the supermarket.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“Somebody go look at that fuse box.”
He had to work fast now. He went back around the front of the store just as a faint hint of pink was beginning to lighten the eastern sky. The automatic doors in front of the market no longer worked, and Remo had to force them open. Then he was inside, in the darkness, moving among the Indians, who had stopped wheeling the cannon and were waiting for the lights to come back on.
He moved in close and felt the cold polished steel of the barrel over his head. He tested the metal with his fingers and gave it exploratory taps with the sides of his hands. There were always weak spots in a machine, and a cannon was a machine. Chiun said there was always a spot where vibrations would bring it apart. He worked faster now, hitting the heels of his hands against the metal. And then he found it—a place that did not vibrate under his hands with the same dull hum as the other spots on the barrel.
Remo wrapped his hand around that spot on the barrel. Then from below, he began to swing his hands up and over his head, smashing hand against steel. It was rhythm—the pounding, left hand after right hand, left hand after right hand. in precise time, almost like a metronome. It filled the supermarket with dull bongs.
“Who’s making that racket?” somebody nearby yelled.
“Cannon inspector,” Remo answered.
Somebody else chuckled.
Then suddenly Remo, satisfied the metal now was vibrating in time with the thuds of his hands, changed the rhythm into a staccato series of smashes. The barrel of the cannon seemed to groan in pain. Remo stopped and slowly began to move toward the front door.
From the back of the store he heard a voice. Brandt’s. “Damned wires come loose from the building somehow. I’ve got some lights here. Everybody get one.”
Men surged toward Brandt and took the battery-operated lights he held in his arms. Then they walked back toward the cannon, lights on and swinging in front of them, and illuminated the huge weapon.
“What the hell?” said someone.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” said Brandt.
The cannon stood there as it had before, but now its barrel, instead of pointing ceilingward in phallic pride, drooped impotently toward the floor of the store, like a shriveled stalk of celery.
Remo was already outside, trotting toward the road to get back to his other main problem—Valashnikov.
But he was not fast enough. The enraged Brandt had gone to the window to look outside, and in the early morning light, he saw Remo trotting away.
“Damn it,” he said. “Dirty, double-dealing, double-crosser.” He slammed his right fist into his left palm. “If you think we’re done, funny name, you’ve got another think coming.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
GENERAL VAN RIKER HAD been successful. This, Valashnikov realized when the telephone rang in his room at the motel. On the phone was the Russian ambassador’s chief aide for cultural affairs—which meant the top Red spy in America.
“Comrade Valashnikov, you are to leave immediately,” he said without preamble.
“Leave? But why?”
“Why? Why? Is there a change in the policy that you ask me why?”
“But I’ve found what I came to find. It’s here. It’s here. After ten years I’ve found it,” said Valashnikov.
“Yes. You may have. You may also have caused an international incident. You may endanger détente, and without détente, without friendship, without mutual understanding, how can we ever make the surprise attack? Valashnikov, you are a fool, and you are to leave immediately.”
Valashnikov breathed deeply. He was just too close to success to lose gracefully. “Would you mind telling me what I am supposed to have done?”
“Gladly,” said the chief aide for cultural affairs. “First, your assault on that little girl, that little Indian child—has exposed you to criminal charges and our nation to embarrassment.”
“But…”
“Do not but me. If you were just a pervert, that would be bad enough. But you are a fool. To think that you have offered Russian arms to the Indians at Wounded Elk! You have tampered with an internal American problem. You have involved us in an affairs we should not be involved in.”
“But, I never…”
“Do not deny it, Valashnikov. I have heard it myself, with my own ears, just moments ago. You are just lucky the mayor of Wounded Elk is a reasonable man. Mayor Van Riker will not press charges.”
“Van Riker. He’s a…”
“He is an elected official, Valashnikov. An elected official. And would an American mayor lie? You will leave immediately. You will return to Vladivostok and wait there until you hear from us.”
The phone clicked sharply in Valashnikov’s ear.
Imbeciles! Stupid, foolish imbeciles! They had been duped by Van Riker. Somehow he had gotten information on Valashnikov, and he had used that information to give the ring of truth to the rest of the story he had told the Russian Embassy. And the embassy had believed it.
Stupid. Well, they could be as stupid as they wished, but Valashnikov would not help them in their stupidity. For ten years he had been right and he had been punished for his beliefs and for KGB stupidity. And now that he was on the verge of success, of redemption, he would not be cheated out of it by a spy in Washington who believed a ridiculous, incredible story.
In Moscow they must learn that Valashnikov had been right. There was nothing else left in life for him. His life had been struggles and losses, but he had to balance the books this time. He had to prove he was right.
Leave now? Go back to Vladivostok and his clerk’s job? Not even if he had wished to, he knew he would never have reached Vladivostok. Anyone believed to be fool enough to tamper with American politics would be exiled—or shot.
Valashnikov put his pistol into a dresser drawer, donned his jacket, and walked out of his room. He would find a way to show Russia he was right.
· · ·
When Remo came back along the road from the Apowa village, he was not stopped by the federal marshals, who all seemed to be congregated around the large tent that was being used as press headquarters.
Remo strolled over in that direction and saw that the TV lights were on, cameras were humming, and the pen-and-pencil reporters were hastily scribbling notes. The center of all the attention was a face Remo recognized immediately. It had graced the covers of news magazines. It had been magnified forty times and seen on motion picture screens around the world. It was Perkin Marlowe. The actor wore blue jeans and a T-shirt, and his thinning, longish light brown hair was caught in a small ponytail.
“Genocidal America,” he said softly, his lips hardly moving.
“What’d he say?” one of the reporters yelled. “What’d he say?”
“Homicidal America,” said another reporter.
“Thanks,” said the first, happy he hadn’t missed anything.
Perkin Marlowe went on, answering questions in a voice so dull and diffused that it was difficult to understand. But the thrust was that America was an evil country and Americans were evil, dull, stupid people who did not have the good sense to support this obviously worthwhile cause of the honest, free, nature-loving red man.
That the same evil, dull, stupid American people had made Perkin Marlowe rich by attending his films he did not deem worthy of mention, and if any of the reporters thought of it, they did not mention it either, lest they seem to their peers to be establishment stooges.
“I am on my way to the RIP encampment,” Marlowe said. “There I will make my stand alongside my Indian brothers though we may fall under the onslaught of the government troops.”
“What troops?” called out Remo before slipping to a different spot in the crowd.
Marlowe looked confused. “Everybody knows there are troops hidden all around here.”
“That’s right,” squeaked Jerry Candler. “I had it in the Globe. Be quiet there in back.”
Marlowe continued, “Yes, we may fall under the onslaught, but we will fight bravely.”
“Forget the fight,” Remo called. “Did you remember to bring more booze? The last truckload’s all gone.”
Again he moved before anyone could spot him. Marlowe looked around, trying to find the speaker. Finally he said, “Gentlemen, I think that’s all. If I never see any of you again, keep up the good work. Fight the good fight.”
He turned quickly and as Candler led the audience in applause, walked rapidly from the press tent and across the grass prairie toward the church.
The newsmen followed him, lugging their equipment. The marshals moved along with the crowd, across the field toward the church.
And unseen on the main road, headed from the motel to the monument was Valashnikov.
Remo, who did not see him, went back to the motel. He found Chiun in lotus position on the floor, looking through the large front window.
Chiun quickly rose to his feet. “You have been gone so long. Did you like him? Isn’t he nice?”
“How much did he offer you?”
“Well, it wasn’t just me, Chiun said. He would want you, too. And he would pay you something, also.”
“How nice,” said Remo. “Chiun, I’m surprised at you.”
“I tried, Remo. I told him to be sure to pay you a lot; otherwise your feelings would be hurt.”
“Not that, Chiun. Trusting the Russians. You know how you don’t trust the Chinese? The Russians are worse.”
“I have never heard that of them,” said Chiun.
“No? Did you talk to him about television?”
Chiun raised an eyebrow. “Television? Why should I talk to him about television? I am not an anchor person. What is an anchor person, anyway?”
“An anchor person is a person who sinks a news show with heavy attempts at humor,” said Remo. “What I’m talking about is your daytime dramas. What are you going to watch instead of As the Planet Revolves?”
“Why instead of?” asked Chiun.
“Because Russia doesn’t have As the Planet Revolves,” said Remo.
“You lie,” said Chiun, his face whitening as the blood drained.
“No, Little Father, it is true. Russia does not have the soaps.”
“He told me they did.”
