An Old Fashioned War
( The Destroyer - 68 )
Warren Murphy
Richard Sapir
Something strange was happening - and only Chuin knew what it was.
In America, the Indian tribes had united and were delivering crushing blows to the U.S. Army. In the Middle East, the Arabs had regained their martial mastery and were demolishing all who resisted them. In Mongolia, scattered tribesman had joined together for the first time since Genghis Khan to form a new Golden Horde poised to ravish all the earth.
Something strange was obviously happening all over the globe. Remo had no idea what it was, even as he desperately tried to fight it. Chiun knew but wasn't saying anything, as he got ready to cut a deal and split the world with the fiendish for behind it all. With Remo and Chiun divided, the whole world was wide open for conquest, and an ancient evil was spawning modern terror. Humanity's greatest enemy was now in the driver's seat - and its ultimate nightmare was coming true....
Destroyer 68: An Old Fashioned War
By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir
Chapter 1
He was going to die. If he stayed in Chicago one more day, he knew he would go to the top of one of the taller buildings and throw himself off; or maybe look into the barrel of the .45-caliber pistol his brother had brought home from Vietnam and test-fire it into his own forehead. He thought of trains, but trains might leave him only mangled. Trains weren't a sure thing. Trains were fickle as fate, and Bill Buffalo knew many poems about fate. He thought of fate as a person, a god, a muse, a force personified in cadences as strange to the English language as his native Ojupa language, now officially declared a dead tongue of historical interest alone. He was an Ojupa brave. He was born to hunt. To run. To dance around fires at night, and look into his own soul through the animals of the American plains.
The only animals in his tenement flat were mice, possibly rats, and of course roaches. And the only thing he wanted to dance about was death, his own.
With a slow deliberate motion, he put the clip of .45-caliber slugs into the automatic and looked down the barrel of the gun. What a last vision, he thought. A white man's tool.
"What are you doing in there?" called his landlady. She always called out when his door was shut.
"I'm going to blow my brains out," yelled Bill Buffalo.
"All right, but don't damage the wallpaper," she replied.
"I can't promise that," said Bill Buffalo.
"Why not?" asked the landlady, pushing open the door.
"Because I'll be dead. The dead don't clean up after themselves," said Bill Buffalo.
"Oh my-" said the landlady, seeing the young student sitting in his shorts at the edge of the brand-new bed, a large pistol pointed at his head, and his thumb about to pull the trigger. Immediately she understood the danger. If he missed, the slug would go directly into the new rose-patterned wallpaper behind him. It was from a remnants sale and there was no way she could replace it. Put a hole in the paper, and she would either have to cover it with some picture, or if that failed, buy entirely new paper for the wall and maybe the whole room.
"Don't shoot," she cried. "You've got so much to live for."
"What?" asked Bill Buffalo.
"Lots of things," she said. Her name was Tracto. Because of her bulk people called her Tractor, but never to her face.
"What?"
"Me," she said. She tried to smile at him lasciviously. When she first rented to him she had been afraid of rape. She would watch him walk down the hall, his beautifully muscled body clad in just a pair of shorts, and she would lock her door so that he couldn't walk in and take her forcibly. Then she stopped locking her door and then started leaving it ajar and going to sleep half-nude. And still her fears weren't realized. Now she told herself she could save the handsome young Indian with her body. If it was to save a life, it would not be a sin.
"What do you mean, you?" said Bill Buffalo.
"I would give my body to save your life," said Angela Tracto.
"I don't need body organs. I don't want body organs. I want to die."
"I meant sexually," said Angela Tracto, lowering her eyes.
She saw his thumb tighten on the trigger and his eyes go wide, waiting for the slug.
"And there are other things," she cried.
"What?"
"Don't you want to say good-bye to your friends back in Ojupa land?"
"There is no Ojupa land, only the reservation."
"But you do have friends."
"I have friends," said Bill Buffalo sadly. "I have Indian friends and I have white friends. And I have no friends. Do you know what you get for studying three years of nothing but classical Greek literature?"
"A degree?"
"You get crazy. I don't know whether I'm an Indian or a white man. Dammit, I think more like an ancient Greek than I do an Ojupa or an American white. I'm nothing, and the place for nothing is death."
"Something must have brought this on," said Angela Tracto. If she could get him to turn around, then maybe the bullet would hit a window. She had a renter's policy from a mail-order catalog. The windows were insured. The wallpaper was not. Also insured were doors, chandeliers, and moats that had to be redredged in case of siege. Wallpaper, floors, and fire damage were not. But that was all right. What could one expect for pennies a month? If the Phrygians ever raided South Chicago, Angela Tracto would be rich.
"My brother died. He got drunk and he drove a tractor into a ditch and it turned over on him. It crushed him. And I didn't go to the funeral."
"Well, there's nothing you can do for the dead. Do you want to turn around a bit?"
"It's not his death that made me sad. It's not that I did not go to the funeral that made me sad. What made me realize I was dead was when my father chanted the death dirge over the telephone, and do you know what I did?"
"You asked him if the call was collect?"
"I didn't know Ojupa from Greek or Latin. I didn't know it. I didn't know the words for 'mother' or 'father' or 'earth' or 'good-bye.' I had forgotten the words. And I answered my own father with a quote from Sophocles."
Bill Buffalo took a very deep breath and then shut his eyes because he had decided finally he did not want to see the bullet.
"You can learn to be Indian again. Don't pull the trigger. You can learn again."
"It's too late."
"How did you learn the first time?"
"The first time I didn't have all these other languages swimming around in my head. The first time I didn't dream in Greek or Latin. The first time all I knew was Ojupa."
"You can do it again. Lots have done it. I've had many young men who went to the big university and felt just the way you do, and when they returned to their home countries, everything was fine. Their problem was they were here. Like you. Just get up and face another direction and you'll feel better. Try it." Bill Buffalo looked at the big barrel. He was sure he wouldn't feel a thing, and that was what he was after: not feeling. On the other hand, why,not get up and see if he felt better?
He lowered the gun. Ms. Tracto must have been very happy at that because a big grin spread over her face. That was strange. He never thought she cared about anything but the rent or possibly getting him into her bedroom, the door of which always seemed to be open at night.
"There, see. Don't that feel better?"
"Feels pretty much like before," said Bill Buffalo.
"That's because you're not home. Go home. Go back to the reservation. You'll see."
"I don't belong there."
"That's how you feel now. Not how you'll feel when you're there. Trust me. I know."
It was a lie, of co
urse, but a successful wallpapersaving lie. What Angela Tracto didn't know was that she was sending back to Ojupa, Oklahoma, the man whose birth all mankind would regret and who might possibly bring about the end of the world.
If she had been told that a scourge as old as the first raising of one brother's hand against another was going to reappear, she would have said so long as it didn't reappear on her rose wallpaper that was all right with her. But then, she didn't know what the handsome young man with the strong cheekbones had studied. She didn't know the ancient texts and she didn't know how Greek would combine with Ojupa one night around a fire, when this young man, this walking H-bomb, returned to Oklahoma to be reunited with his people.
All she knew was that her rose wallpaper was safe. "I never thought you knew that much about human behavior," said Bill Buffalo, putting down the gun. "I never figured you for that."
By the next morning he was in Ojupa, Oklahoma, with the heat and the dust and the shanties with the television antennas and the bottles of whiskey and beer lying in open sewers, some of the bottles still attached to his relatives. In Ojupa it was absolutely clear again why he had left: no future. And for him not even much of a past.
"Hey, Bill fella, good to see you back, man," said Running Deere. Running Deere was named after a tractor because everyone knew a tractor was more reliable than any animal. Besides, real deer hadn't run around the Ojupa lands for decades now, but John Deere tractors almost always seemed to run.
"I've come home," said Bill Buffalo.
"How's life in the big city?" asked Running Deere, hoisting his balloon paunch over his too-tight Levi's. He wore a T-shirt proclaiming his love for Enid, Oklahoma.
"I want to get away from it. I want to get away from everything I learned there. I don't know who I am anymore. I'm going to visit my brother's grave. I'm going to sing the death chant. Would you come with me, Running Deere? Would you bring others who know the Ojupa tongue? Would you bring the medicine man?"
"You sure you don't want a beer first?"
"I don't want beer. I don't want whiskey. I don't want tractors. I want Ojupa ways. I don't even want these white man's clothes."
"Hey, if you don't want those cool jeans, I'll take them," said Running Deere.
"You can have everything. Just chant with me at my brother's grave and don't forget the medicine man and Little Elk, and my father. And never again call me Bill, but Big Buffalo," said Bill.
That night he put on clothes that felt right and natural, leaving his legs and arms free, not bound, and gave up his shirt and jeans and went with the friends of his childhood to his brother's grave, and there in the full Oklahoma moon he joined those of his blood in reverence for one of the tribe who had gone to join those who no longer lived in this world.
The night was cold and his skin prickled with goose bumps, but he didn't mind as he felt the old chants come back to him. Warm as his mother's milk, familiar as a hug, the words came from the back of his throat, dancing on his tongue, clicking at his teeth as though he had never forgotten them. All the Chicago boarding rooms and all the hours of study in the library were gone as he felt his feet join with the earth and himself become one with his people. It had worked. Ms. Tracto, the landlady, was right. He was home, and he would never leave again. The words poured out, about loss, about return, until, totally one with the Ojupa words themselves, he said: "Atque in perpetuum frater, ave atque valle."
And smiling he turned to his tribesmen, to see their faces blank and the medicine man, normally the last to show any emotion on his withered seventy-year-old-face, shocked. His tribesmen looked at each other in confusion.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"What language you speaking, Big Buffalo?"
"Ojupa. It was beautiful. I said to my brother, 'And so, brother, forever, hello and good-bye.' "
"That ain't Ojupa, never has been," said Running Deere.
The medicine man, in his feathers and sacred paint, shook his head.
"But the words came right from my soul," said Big Buffalo. "It's the most famous Ojupa saying. Hello and good-bye. It's from a poem about a young man who returns from abroad and finds his brother dead, and says, 'And so, brother, forever, hello and goodbye.' Ave atque valle."
Big Buffalo slapped his forehead and groaned. He had just recited a Latin poem from Catullus. The "abroad" he had referred to was the other end of the long-dead Roman Empire.
He fell to his knees before the medicine man. "Save me. Save me. Kill the foreign spirits in me. Rid me of the white man's curse. I don't want his education. I don't want his languages. I want to dream in my people's tongues."
But the medicine man shook his head.
"This I cannot do," he said sadly. "There is only one way to rid you of the curse, and it is the most ancient and dangerous ceremony of our heritage."
"I don't mind dying. I'm already dead," said Big Buffalo.
"It's not your death I fear," said the medicine man.
"Hey, give the guy what he wants," said Running Deere. He had always liked Big Buffalo and felt the medicine man too much a stickler for the old ways. Besides, there weren't that many old ways left, considering the television and booze and pickup trucks that had become the real life of the Ojupa tribe.
But the medicine man shook his head. They were on sacred ground, the small hill that held the remains of those who had passed on to the other world of the Ojupa. It had been made sacred by the buffalo horns and the fires of the dried mushrooms, and the grasses of the plains and the good spirits that had been called here by previous medicine men. There were crosses here too, because some Ojupa were Christians. But it was still sacred ground because the medicine men of the tribe had prepared it first. The war dead were here also, those who had fought against the white man's cavalry and those who, in later wars, for the white men against other white men. There were marines and soldiers here as well as braves.
"Hey, medicine man, why you shaking your head?" asked Little Elk. He was a construction worker in nearby Enid and he was big enough to stick the old man under an arm and carry him around like a parcel.
"Big Buffalo's problems are bad. There are tales of a man who has lost the soul of his people. This is not new. But the whole tribe must ask the spirits to visit if he is to be saved."
"Okay. You're always doin' that stuff with spirits and things."
"There are spirits and there are spirits. These are the spirits of blood and anger and pride and the great spirit of misjudgment."
"Misjudgment?" asked Little Elk. He laughed. He had never heard of that one and it didn't sound too frightening. Besides, they were running out of beer, and the cemetery on the hill gave him the willies. He didn't like any cemetery, especially at night. Big Buffalo, who had been the smartest kid at the reservation school, was crying on his knees, his hands up in the air, babbling that strange foreign language. Running Deere was looking at his watch because he knew the liquor store was closing soon in nearby Enid, and the others were slapping their arms because the Oklahoma night was getting very cold.
The stars looked brighter on a cold night, thought Little Elk. He hated stars. He hated anything having to do with the outdoors. He hated loud noises. Little Elk liked computers and air-conditioned rooms and people who never raised their voices. Running Deere was yelling at the medicine man and Big Buffalo was crying, and finally Little Elk said:
"Medicine man, do the prayers. Say the chants. C'mon. It's late. It's cold. Big Buffalo has always been a nice guy. One of the nicest. Give him a break. And give me a break too. And the rest of us."
"Yeah," said Running Deere.
And the others joined in too, so that the medicine man finally and wearily said, "I am old. I will not have to live with what happens, but you will, all of you."
"Hey, medicine man, nothing ever happens. If our medicine is so strong, what are we doing in a stinking patch of ground the white man left us? Just do it, make Big Buffalo happy, and let's get out of here and get a drink." Thus spoke Little Elk
, but he spoke for all of them.
The old man lowered himself to his knees, and stretched out his arms, palms upward, and began to chant, earth tones with the rhythm of the earth, sky tones with the rhythms of the universe sparkling above them on the little cemetery hill of Ojupa land. Big Buffalo joined the chant with his funny language. Running Deere felt an urge to build a fire, and Little Elk, who normally hated anything physical, scurried around gathering twigs for the fire. The medicine man lowered his head to the earth, and reaching into his waistband withdrew a handful of sacred mushrooms.
He dropped them into the fire, and the fire smoked and they gathered around the little blaze and breathed in the sacred smoke and exhaled the chants, the medicine man and the young braves in the Ojupa tongue and poor Big Buffalo in the crazy language.
The smoke grew and danced, and stretched its arms, and howled, a long, low howl deeper than a coyote and stronger than a bear. Iron banged against iron, and cries of the wounded filled the night air, even though they all knew no one around them had been hurt and no one was banging anything. Big Buffalo was laughing and Little Elk was screaming when they heard the first words.
Later each would recall that the words came in the language he was most comfortable with.
They would wonder what language Big Buffalo heard that night, but they would never know.
"You look like a bunch of regular guys with some brains and guts," came the voice from the fire. There was a man in the fire. He was laughing. Even in his suit, everyone could see he was well built. He looked like a man of men, with a clean smile, a strong jaw, and eyes that seemed to shine in the night.
He carried a briefcase. He didn't burn. The briefcase didn't burn, and the fire went out suddenly, as though doused by a passing rainstorm. But it wasn't raining.
"Hey, let's get a drink," he said. "Let's have some fun."
"Liquor store is closed," said Little Elk. "I knew we wouldn't make it."
"Closed. Fine young men like yourselves denied drink? Who closed it?" asked the man. He thumped his chest, inhaling the good night air.
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