Last War Dance td-17

by Warren Murphy

  "Company car?" asked Remo.

  "Yes," said Valashnikov eagerly. "Not only that. But apartment. Two bedrooms. Right near Moscow. Seventeen-inch television set. Your own radio. Charge account at Gumm's."

  He smiled suddenly, and just as suddenly the smile vanished. "I understand that is what your leaders call an offer you can't refuse."

  "Isn't he a nice man, Remo?" asked Chiun. "Don't you like him?"

  "He's sweet, Little Father, and so are you. I hope you'll be very happy together." He got up from the bed. "I'm going for a walk. The idea of my own seventeen inch television set has staggered me. I need air to clear my head."

  Remo walked outside, resolved to put the Russian out of his mind for a while. He had other problems. The Apowa tribesmen were ready to blow up the monument and the church with a .155 millimeter cannon unless Remo delivered the RIP gang. Now how was Remo going to get them all to the Big A?

  That was problem number one. And if Remo failed, Brandt would use his cannon and more than likely wipe out America by setting off the Cassandra.

  Against that the Russian problem paled into insignificance. He would let Chiun continue negotiating with Valashnikov for a pure gold offer to go to Russia. When push came to shove, Remo could end those negotiations in a flash. He had a special secret weapon that Chiun didn't know about.

  The idea of the Russians sending a recruiter all this distance to try to snatch up Chiun!

  And then Remo found he had another problem. Walking along the dirt road leading from the motel toward the press compound, he met Van Riker. The general was striding crisply along the street at a hundred twenty steps per minute. He saw Remo, smiled and asked, "Where's the Oriental?"

  "He's back in his room being propositioned by a Russian agent," said Remo airily.

  Van Riker looked surprised, not sure whether or not to believe Remo. Finally he said, "Oh? Who?"

  "Valash-something," said Remo.

  Van Riker's face turned pale under his tan. "Tell me. Did he say Valashnikov?"

  "Yeah, that's it."

  "Oh, my God," said Van Riker.

  "What's the problem?"

  "He was a Russian intelligence officer. His job was to find the Cassandra. When he failed, he was exiled. And now he's back. After all these years. And this time, he's found it."

  "I don't think so," said Remo. "I really think he just came to offer Chiun a job."

  "Maybe he's doing that, too. But he came here because of the Cassandra. He knows it's here."

  "So what?"

  "Then its whole value is gone," said Van Riker. "If its location is known, an enemy can knock it out on the first strike. And we've lost our destroy-in-death capability."

  "If he knew it was here, would he have come here?" asked Remo.

  "Hmmmm," Van Riker reflected. "You're right, you know. He suspects, but he's not sure."

  "All right," said Remo. "Then just play dumb. Leave him to me."

  He walked away from Van Riker, telling himself he would have to call Smith that afternoon for more instructions on how to deal with the Russian. Killing him might be simple, but it would infuriate Chiun, who would think Remo did it only to prevent Chiun's taking the Russian offer.

  Problems, problems, problems.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Smith, as usual, had been analytical. No, it would not do for Remo to kill Valashnikov because if the Russians did not now know the location of the Cassandra, Valashnikov's sudden death would be all the proof they needed that the missile was at Wounded Elk.

  There were, if Remo would but remember, two goals to his assignment. The first and most important was to make sure that the Cassandra was not detonated. Remo was still working on that one and should concentrate on it. Keeping the Russians from finding out Cassandra's location was only a secondary goal… a poor second.

  Smith had gone on in this fashion for nine minutes before Remo finally stopped him by hanging up. Remo had done what he had to do: alert Smith. He would leave the problem of Valashnikov to him now.

  Remo's own problem was getting the RIP contingent up to the village of Wounded Elk, and he felt pretty good about that. He had a plan. He whistled happily as he trotted along the dark road toward the RIP encampment in the Episcopal church. His plan would work. It would be a snap. The thinking man won every time.

  "Who goes there?"

  Oooops. If he didn't want to be noticed, he decided, he had better stop whistling.

  He froze. He was dressed in black, and his dark shape blended with the darkness. The guard, ten feet away, looked around carefully but saw nothing. He wheeled suspiciously around and looked behind him. Still he saw nothing. Suspicious to the last, he peered again into the darkness toward Remo, but finally he put down his rifle and resumed leaning on it.

  Remo moved off softly past the guard, continuing toward the church.

  It would be easy.

  The RIP people wanted booze. Remo would tell them he had found some. He would load them all into the back of the sacred buffalo TV van, which the TV crew had been afraid to demand back, and he would drive them all up to Brandt's store. And that would be that.

  Brilliant, Remo.

  Up ahead, the church glared with light, the only bright spot in a black night. Remo heard singing, the voices soft at first, then louder as he drew nearer.

  "Back your ass against the wall… Here I come…"

  They were singing dirty songs. And loud, Remo realized as he drew even nearer.

  "I know a girl who lives on the hill. What she won't do, her sister will. Sound off…"

  They were screaming now. Well, at least he wouldn't have to wake them. As Remo paused at the foot of the church steps, he heard a sound: "Psssst. White-eyes."

  He turned toward the hedges at the left side of the church steps.

  "Psssst. In here."

  He stepped forward and heard a rustling sound.

  "You're late."

  He looked down. Lying on the ground, her buckskin shirt up around her hips, was Lynn Cosgrove. But she wasn't alone. Lying beside her, apparently sleeping, was Jerry Lupin. He was naked.

  "Late for what? Cover yourself up. That's indecent."

  "You said you'd be here at three. It's five after. The human body is never indecent. It is glorious in all its rampant sexuality. Besides, I'm your slave. You have violated me and stolen my honor. I am yours to do with as you will. So do with me. Please! I've been waiting."

  "Waiting? With him?" asked Remo, pointing to Lupin.

  Lynn Cosgrove smiled. "I found out it's good with anybody. Anybody at all."

  "Good," said Remo. "Stick with him."

  "You promised," she screamed.

  "You know you can't trust a white man," Remo said.

  "You can't trust anyone over thirty," she said.

  "You can't trust a reactionary," he said.

  "You can't trust a man," she said. "A sexist, mind less pig. I'm not your object, you know. I'm a human being, with human feelings."

  "You could have fooled me," Remo said.

  "Are you going to rape me?"

  "No."

  "You must. You have to rape me."

  "Why must I?" asked Remo.

  "Because I need it."

  "Is that all I am to you? A sex object?"

  "That's irrelevant. Rape me."

  "No," said Remo.

  "Filthy pig," she hissed. "I will never again waste my body on a man not worthy of the gift."

  Remo heard her rustling around in the grass. Then he heard her voice. "Come on. Wake up. I need it again. Wake up there, you."

  Remo felt like rooting the unconscious Jerry Lupin on. At least sex might keep her quiet—something that seemed beyond the reach of any other technique.

  The roar from the church was deafening.

  "We shall overcome some day…

  Umgawagawa. Umgawagawa."

  Remo hopped up the stairs and walked in through the open door.

  The interior of the church looked like a Bowery
corner on a Sunday morning. Some people slept sitting up; others slept lying down on the floor and on the pews. The altar trays and cloths had been swiped off onto the floor, and the altar was being used as a bar. It was stacked full of every imaginable type of liquor, and Dennis Petty was presiding as bartender while also leading the singing.

  He saw Remo and waved. "Hey, sing with us," he called.

  "We shall not be moved," he roared, waving a full tumbler of whiskey over his head, his words echoed by a dozen people, who were still able to move their lips for something other than swallowing.

  "By the shores of Gitchee Goomee," yelled Remo.

  "We shall overcome… some… day," roared Petty.

  "By the old Moulmein Pagoda," yelled Remo.

  "Those ain't the words," said Petty.

  "Where'd you get the booze?" asked Remo in disgust.

  Petty tapped his forehead with his right index finger. "We got friend, wise ass. Not just you with your Twinkies."

  "Name one friend you've got," challenged Remo.

  "Perkin Marlowe, that's who," said Petty.

  "He sent you this booze?"

  "Right. A whole truckful."

  "Is he coming?" asked Remo. "I hope he's coming here. I just hope he's coming here. I want to see him. I hope he's coming."

  "Who cares if he's coming?" yelled Petty. "We got the booze. And there's more coming tomorrow. We shall overcome… this day… and the next day… and the next day. And as long as the booze holds out."

  This time there were only four or five voices accompanying his. Everyone else had collapsed. Remo looked around at the interior of the church. So much for well-laid plans. It would take a moving company to haul this load of human garbage up to the Apowa village on time.

  He thought again of just dragging along Petty and Lynn Cosgrove. But Brandt wouldn't settle for them.

  The decision was simple. Remo was going to have to find that .155 millimeter cannon.

  Van Riker slept as Remo made his way through the night to the Apowa Village, but the general was not alone. Another figure was in Van Riker's room. A hulk of a man, sitting in a chair next to Van Riker's bed, smoking cigarette after cigarette, the butts pinched near the filter by all five fingers of his right hand. His left hand cradled a pistol on his lap. The man studied Van Riker's tanned face in the dim light of the night-light near the bathroom.

  Van Riker's sleep had been troubled. He had been upset when Remo had told him that Valashnikov had arrived at Wounded Elk. But when Van Riker had gone to Chiun's room, neither Chiun or Valashnikov had been there.

  The general had waited for hours, struggling to decide whether he should call Washington. But whom could he call? What could he say? No one in Washington knew of the Cassandra, and few had even heard of General Van Riker. Call the FBI? They would start a dossier on Van Riker as a crank. The CIA? They would make a careful note to discuss it at next month's briefing, five days after some clerk leaked it to Jack Anderson.

  Finally Van Riker returned to his own room and fell asleep, but his sleep was restless, haunted by visions of a wave of Russian missiles launched at America on a preemptive first strike of war. And a half-dozen of those missiles were aimed at Wounded Elk, to destroy America's best single hope of keeping the world from war. Once Valashnikov was sure of the location of the Cassandra, it would be easy for the Russians. Valashnikov wouldn't even have to plant a homing device near the monument. All the Russians would need would be a geography book.

  Van Riker's eyes flicked in sleep, moving back and forth as he saw the Montana hills exploding with nuclear color and America's great cities being leveled by Russian missiles.

  And then he was awake. In his mind he had seen a red fireball of destruction rising over Baltimore. Now as he opened his eyes, he saw a faint red glow in his room. For a moment he was frightened, but then he realized that the red ball was only the head of a lit cigarette. Someone was sitting by his bed.

  "Valashnikov?"

  "Yes, General," come the heavily accented voice. "It is pleasure after all these years."

  "How long has it been?"

  "Ten years," said Valashnikov, stabbing his cigarette out in an ashtray. "Ten years wasted because the idiotic NKVD could not tell difference in translation between tan and Negro. Well, no matter… I am here now, and so are you. Is all that matters."

  "I won't tell you anything," said Van Riker.

  "You don't have to," said Valashnikov. "The fact you are here tells me all I need to know. If you are here, Cassandra is here. Mother Russia needs no other knowledge."

  Van Riker sat up slowly in bed. Outside the window the blackness of night was growing lighter. Dawn would come soon.

  "That's doesn't seem likely," he told Valashnikov. "If it were that simple, why did you come here?"

  "Forgive me, General," Valashnikov said. "For a human reason—to gloat. You have cursed my life for ten years. You and that infernal device of yours. But now I have won. I came so you could know the feelings I have carried in me for ten years. The feelings of loser." He laughed. "I suppose it seems foolish to you, but I wanted you to know what you did to me."

  "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 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 fin
d 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.