The Whisper of the Axe

by Richard Condon

  The food wasn’t bad. They couldn’t recognize a lot of it, but it was better than just army food. Cal kept up a lively patter throughput the meal. There was a small American flag at the center of the table. At other tables, each with up to ten men and one or two Chinese officers, there were other small identifying flags. A lot of the world was represented: black men from Central Africa being trained to go into Rhodesia and South Africa; Arabs learning how to demolish Israel; Irish learning how to kill the Irish; stolid groups of Japanese, Dutch, Czechs, Italians, French and Pakistanis. One table at the far side of the room was long and rectangular. Its diners seemed to be a cross-section of all nationalities in the room.

  Major Wong identified them as Upperclassmen who were about to move out to advanced studies at the Guerrilla War College in the north.

  “How come no women?” Reyes said. “Women are always a big part of the people where I come from.”

  “There is a women’s camp. It’s just like this one.”

  “If we gone work with them, I don’t see why we don’t learn with them,” Dolly Fingus said.

  “We tried it,” Major Wong said, “but it made too much trouble. It creates too many personality mysteries. A very bright Italian guy got killed and two guys had nervous breakdowns from all the screwing. So we had to reorganize.”

  “Are they near here?” Dawes asked mildly.

  “I really have no idea where they are,” Major Wong responded. “But you’ll meet them in the fourth year at the War College.”

  “Who do they screw on Sunday afternoons between four and six?” Buckley asked. “Male non-coms from your Western Army?”

  “Oh, I imagine some of them get the occasional officer,” Major Wong said.

  On their first morning at Camp Cody they were awakened by batmen at 5 A.M. After a hearty breakfast they were moved out through the Weapons Area into the vast off-limits site, into the Psychological De-Briefing Area. They were separated. Each man was taken into a separate building, each building approximately ninety yards from the next. The buildings themselves seemed to be tiny two-room arrangements, but the rooms were only for interviewing and early sedation. After that they were dropped sixty feet into the ground by elevators to a large common hospital area that had six cubicles on each side and two projection rooms at each end: four in all. By the tune the men reached the lower level they had fallen into an ambulatory hypnotic state from the chemicals that had been contained in their breakfasts. The men were put into separate silent cubicles where two technicians to each cubicle stripped them down and strapped them firmly to steel stretchers, which were capable of lying horizontal, standing vertical, or achieving any angle in between, with the patient either right side up or upside down. The stretcher could be whirled centrifugally by an electric motor or could be turned end over end.

  Feeding tubes leading to bottles containing Chinese-developed preparations (some perfected over centuries, some in recent years), which opened the doors of consciousness and led the interrogators to the truth locked inside the minds of each of the men, shadow-thin layer upon shadow-thin layer, were inserted into nostrils, into veins at wrist, thigh, and ankle so that the saturation of the unlocking mechanisms could begin.

  The American recruits seemed to be sleeping. The technicians checked their body temperatures, breathing rates, blood pressure and REMs constantly on the monitor dials. The saturation process took forty-one hours, tended by two twelve-hour teams for each patient. The interrogation began. Each man was taken through his childhood, his adolescence, into his young manhood. Routine areas were investigated and painstakingly checked off: political background, governmental connections, sabotage experience, espionage backgrounds; skills, loyalties, resentments, hostilities, ability to love and accept self; ability to welcome authority to find solution, teamwork capabilities; sexual drives, sexual malarrangements, sexual relationships with Areas 1 and 2 and 3 (life background; group background; emotional responses).

  The processes of interrogation required ten weeks of twenty-hour days with chemical stimulation and sedation. The interrogators were, in every case, women.

  The terminal process was the re-educative process. This took four weeks, was enormously painful, both physically and emotionally—continuously, unendingly painful because it required that negative lessons be laid down which, if the subject deliberately chose to transgress the necessities of those lessons, caused extraordinary, instant electrical pain to be induced into the central nervous system. Some men took longer than others. Those totally anti-authoritarian must have felt, before the end, that they had been fractured everywhere by sledgehammer and taken the burns of corrosive acids into hundreds of knife wounds throughout their body. A man like Dawes, however, accustomed to discipline, went through the negative lesson period with minimum intensity of suffering. Lurky Anderson remained in that twilight zone of agony for three days longer than the others.

  When the negative lessons had been mastered and each man was ready to welcome authority as he would welcome love and attention, the positive lessons, to be a fixed part of their characters forever, were firmly addressed. These fixed characteristics were largely identical: The men existed to serve their Leader, an unknown face and form somewhere in the United States, whom they would never meet but would always obey. They were in China to be taught how they could develop as soldiers of the revolution, as great and model leaders themselves who would accept the responsibility for taking hundreds of thousands of Americans into battle. They had ascended to the highest level. They adored Authority, Discipline, Service and The Team. They were as one intricate, self-involved body, which helped itself to triumph over social and political wrongs. They would willingly labor to learn how best to kill millions of the enemy so that the revolution would overcome the status quo and American glory would once again rise up to the heavens like a great and shining light, even if it were necessary for all of them to die to bring it there—if their Leader wanted it there.

  When it was over, when they came out the other side of the mysteries and found themselves seated in the small reception room of the little building of the Psychological De-Briefing Area where they had first entered, none of them remembered anything that had happened, what they had suffered, or how much time had passed. They all looked worn and thin and each man had deep restraint marks on his arms and legs. When the entire group had reassembled, they met in a small, wooden building known as the American University. It was a classroom with blackboards all around and swivel seats at small desks for thirty.

  Major Wong arrived eleven minutes after they had seated themselves. They had been sitting quietly waiting for him.

  “Good morning,” he said. They did not answer.

  “You must answer—Good morning, Cal,” he said gently.

  “Good morning, Cal,” they said in unison.

  “I am happy to see you all together again and pleased to read your outstanding reports from the de-briefing. We begin. You are at Camp Cody because you are revolutionary specialists at war who will become supremely skilled at guerrilla war. As Chairman Mao wrote in December 1936 in the uncompleted study called Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War: ‘War, this monster of mutual slaughter among men, will be finally eliminated by the progress of human society and in the not-too-distant future, too. But there is only one way to eliminate it and that is to oppose war with war, to oppose counter-revolutionary war with revolutionary war, and to oppose counter-revolutionary class war with revolutionary class war. History knows only two kinds of war—just and unjust. We support just wars and oppose unjust wars. All counter-revolutionary wars are unjust, all revolutionary wars are just. Mankind’s era of wars will be brought to an end by our own efforts and, beyond doubt, the war we wage is part of the final battle.’

  “But also beyond doubt,” Major Wong continued earnestly, “the war we face will be part of the biggest and most ruthless of wars. The biggest and most ruthless of unjust counter-revolutionary wars is hanging over us, and the vast ma
jority of mankind will be ravaged unless we raise the banner of a just war. When human society advances to the point where classes and states can be eliminated and private possessions are abandoned, there will be no more wars, counter-revolutionary or revolutionary, just or unjust; that will be the era of perpetual peace for mankind. Each country, especially a large country, has its own characteristics; therefore the laws of war for each country also have their own characteristics. Those applying to one cannot be mechanically transferred to another.

  “In the great Chinese revolutionary struggle, because of the nature of our country, Chairman Mao chose not to drive to seize the big cities. You come from the American industrial society. In the coming revolutionary struggle which you will wage, the immediate goals will be changed. You will fight inside the cities, ignoring the vast countryside. By bringing ruin in their name to the people of the cities you will cause them to overthrow the counter-revolutionary forces, demanding to be allowed to live their lives—which will of course never be the same again.

  “In the next three years at Camp Cody we will experience together how this will be accomplished—this chain of limited urban wars—within all vital parts of the American nation. But allow me to tell you how Chairman Mao expressed protracted, limited war: ‘Enemy advances, we retreat; enemy halts, we harass; enemy tires, we attack; enemy retreats, we pursue.’ It is all waiting for us to study—for whether guerrilla warfare is fought in the mountains, in a pasture land, or in the mazes of a great modern city—it still uses the same strategy: Guerrilla war is the finest possible way to fight this kind of war.

  “We will carry with us one golden rule: ‘The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.’”

  The men, now six, minus Teel, who had left for the nuke school, were taught the basic applications, in actual practice and in theory, of what Agatha Teel was then, at home, working to provide for them: The Plan, the great weapon they would use when the Thirty Cities’ War began with a trained army of 700,000 men and women, white and black, students, preachers, junkies and dropouts, loosely 25,000 in each of the cities (depending on its size), drilled, organized, equipped guerrilla troops to fight a conventional opponent, the government forces, trapped in a maze. Their army would be equipped with modern weapons, from nuclear devices to light automatic rifles and small arms and including artillery, bombs, grenades, dynamite, gelignite, bacterial weapons, fire extermination systems, propaganda and poison gas. Munitions, weapons, food, and medical supply dumps and depots would be dispersed and concealed as caches; secured hideouts, hospitals, money cut-outs, plus a habitually bribed opposition within the government would be available to every commander on Army Corps, Divisional, Brigade, Regimental and Company levels. Battle plans for each individual city were currently being developed by seasoned professionals of international guerrilla war which would, during the first seven months, give an 8 to 1 advantage in any revolutionary struggle, fitting to the nature of big city warfare, of surprise. No quarter would be asked or given and, for the first time better-than-adequate financing over an indefinite period would be available, more than enough financing to exhaust establishment forces, to reduce the American population by ten to twenty million people, until a new world could be entered and all lives (remaining) fulfilled.

  Each night the Americans at Camp Cody fell into an exhausted sleep from the exertions of their studies, which highlighted:

  Mountain climbing (for later translation into ascent of the exteriors of high buildings and chimneys);

  Metropolitan fire equipment operation and instant disablement;

  Advanced karate and aikido (Tomiko);

  Familiarization with layout and superficial techniques of television and radio station operation and their semi-permanent/permanent destruction;

  Speaking, reading, and writing knowledge of the second languages of the regions of their country: Spanish, Yiddish, German and the New York dialects;

  Certified qualification in Gr-1, the favored assassination technique;

  Proficiency in the major studies of American city street universities: astrology, pot cultivation, I-Ching, the Druid religion, palmistry; Ouija, group sex, women’s liberation, etc.;

  Water main destruction, river bridge demolition, underground transportation paralysis, stadium, theater and church firing during performance for maximum loss of audience; efficient mass child murder; the uses of throwing acids by power hoses, etc.;

  Proficiency with small arms, grenades, own-made bombs and devices, flame-throwers, ropes, clubs/sticks, and knives;

  Techniques of bribery, coercion and corruption; spread of venereal disease, spoliation of children;

  Memorization of dry and wet sewerage systems for cross-city passage of troops, couriers and assassination teams;

  Wreckage of elevator systems, electrical generators, water supply systems, food distribution, garbage disposal;

  Forgery: counterfeiting money, ID cards, automobile licenses, passports, evidence, military credentials, credit cards, general evidence;

  Advanced arson;

  Destruction of crowds: the American leader was determined that no crowds should be allowed to form whether civilians or government troops, and to discourage this at its source all congregations of people whether shopping, walking, marching, rioting, or worshipping at church carried DESTRUCT signals;

  Inducing dependency on the occult; promotion of auguries, omens, and reliance on their infallibility;

  Education in the basic requirement: execution, out-of-hand and on-the-spot, of anyone in uniform: Boy Scouts, nurses, policemen, priests, park employees, soldiers, nuns, athletes, etc., so that people could not judge to whom they could turn for assistance;

  Random Death Planning: people must return home to find pets slaughtered; baby carriages shoved into street traffic; high floor falls for crowded elevators especially in the first three weeks of warfare; car bombings in crowded areas; heavy accent on random slaughter with greatest display of blood and dismemberment;

  Emphasis on follow-up action in all conquered and unconquered suburbs;

  Detailed attention to principles of propaganda; improvement in rumor spreading, causing rumors during first three years of warfare of a profoundly optimistic nature, constantly giving “inside information” of early future dates when the war would be over to cause hope to vanish systematically as those dates retreated;

  Overall objective: inability of 85 percent of the citizenry to dare to leave their homes.

  “Even though you have been expertly indoctrinated at your de-briefings,” Major Wong said, “I have noted from some of your expressions that you find these tactics difficult to accept even though all of you have lived lives of crime and violence. However, that is how you feel now. You will accept these tactics in time as you gain calm understanding, just as the American people watched death on television each night at dinnertime throughout much of the Vietnam war, accepting it, finally, as they became so bored with the war it had to be taken off the air for lack of a sponsor.

  “Let me ask you this: is it a wholly different thing to you, when a formal war is declared by old men in a capital city, a war which implements instant nuclear strikes and megadeaths, laying cities or villages—because sizes in terms of human death don’t really matter—to waste without any offer to capitulate?”

  The female non-coms turned out to be a sensational bunch of kids. Everyone had a marvelous time except Kranak. Kranak would not fuck a Chink.

  22

  February 1971

  Mr. Palladino completed the arrangements with President Duvalier in two more meetings. Each was satisfied that he had made an extraordinary deal. When Mr. Palladino returned to New York, he passed the word to Senator Karp to set a meeting with Bart Simms on the Staten Island ferry because Mr. Palladino had given his people the problem of how to bug the Staten Island ferry and they had solved it. But Bart refused to meet on the ferry. They met at the shallow end of the swimming pool at the St. George Hote
l in Brooklyn Heights.

  “I can’t even swim!” Mr. Palladino protested to Senator Karp.

  “No swimming, J.D.,” Karp said. “You just stand in the shallow water and talk.”

  “I don’t spend on four-hundred-dollar English hand-tailored suits so I can stand around in a pair of trunks and look like a slob,” Mr. Palladino argued. But the biggest money of his life was involved so he agreed to the meeting.

  They settled several matters: first, Mr. Palladino was to put a down payment of two million dollars into escrow with Herbert Ryan Willmott as fiscal agent for Delmarva Popular, a trust account; that Bart was to leave “within ten days” for Asia to make the arrangements for the purchase and transport of ten tons of raw opium for delivery to Fort Axelrod, a former establishment on the south coast of Haiti; and that the actual deal for the price of the opium would be made by Mr. Palladino personally, with the Kuomintang representative, at Mr. Palladino’s office in New York while Bart waited in Hong Kong for the deal to be closed.

  Those were the essential matters. Bart had already applied for medical leave from his work as Assistant Curator at Spider and had given the agency to understand that he was about to resign because of the pain in his leg. The news was accepted with a great deal of regret and considerable sympathy, and a collection was taken up to present him with a quartz clock.

  A significant part of the arrangements, quite invisible to Bart, lay in Mr. Palladino’s intention of putting a lock on Bart during this first trip. He had finally figured out how to equalize Bart’s knowledge of the Sesteros and Abramo. Bart was going to forget he had ever heard about the Sesteros or Abramo.

  “My God, you are certainly a lot fatter in trunks than you look when you are dressed. I’d like to get the name of your tailor,” Bart said as Mr. Palladino came up the ladder out of the swimming pool.