The Seventh Stone td-62

by Warren Murphy

Father was on the phone shortly thereafter and Reggie had to explain that he had reasons for what he did and the family had grown quite sloppy over the centuries and that finally the family would return to its full glory with the Koreans gone.

  "Father," he concluded. "We just don't have time for you."

  "Are they gone yet, the Koreans?"

  "You don't even know who they are," said Reggie to the silly old man.

  "Have you killed them?"

  "We will," Reggie said.

  (History of Sinanju from the gracious pen of Chiun, for those to come, that the House of Sinanju shall in its glory prosper and survive.)

  "And through the years, Chiun would accept no obstacle, even though the pupil was not from precisely what was considered the old borders of the village. As has been mentioned in the histories, these borders changed often. Sometimes those who lived west of the mill were considered Sinanju. Sometimes not. Who was to say where the borders in one age began and where in another they left off? As has been mentioned in previous histories by Chiun, there might be those who would question, not without some foundation, whether Chiun's pupil was indeed born within the formal boundaries of the village. There are always those who will quibble.

  "Nevertheless, through the years, Remo showed that Chiun could raise him to that level which could not be denied. He was Sinanju, even if he had been born as far away as the south village. Nay, even Peking or Tokyo, which he was not.

  "During the time of rest, Chiun took Remo to an island in the new world Chiun had discovered. (See: Discovery of America, Emperor Who Would Not Serve.)

  "And it came to pass that a total stranger came into Chiun and mentioning that Remo had been gone many days now bordering on weeks, said, 'Where has your son gone?'

  " 'Son,' answered Chiun. 'Why do you say that?'

  " 'Because,' said this simple but wise stranger, 'there is something about him that is so much your son. Or even your brother.'

  "Here, from the lips of a third person, was proof that Remo, the pupil, was definitely of Sinanju even if he had been born, in the eyes of some, far west of the old mill."

  "Yes, Mr. President," said Smith into the special device that would allow his voice to be scrambled. Only a telephone in the White House could unscramble it.

  "He has been there for a week, sir," Smith said.

  "Then why hasn't he stopped it?" the President said.

  "I don't know, sir."

  "Should I leave Washington?"

  "I don't know."

  "Well, dammit, Smith, what do you know? You run the organization that's supposed to know everything. What do you know?"

  "He's on it, sir. And I don't know his methods. Only one other person does."

  "The old Oriental? I like him. Use him too."

  "I am afraid, sir, that according to the protocols under which I operate, you cannot order me to do things. You can only suggest or order me to disband. This was to protect the country from my organization in case a President should try to misuse it."

  "I don't see how trying to save twenty million people from dying a horrible death is misusing your organization."

  Smith knew that the death threats and that crazed Indonesian newsman trying to kill him with a sword had gotten to the President. He was not about to tell this distraught leader that the Oriental whom the President liked so much because he was old too had become difficult because Smith was using Remo when Remo should have been resting.

  Smith was only glad that Remo demonstrated that even while he was at less than peak, he was still far beyond anything else in the field he might come up against.

  So Smith assured the President that the Oriental was not needed.

  "I will call you again only if it is absolutely necessary, sir. I don't think for the sake of our ongoing cover, we should be talking this much," Smith said.

  "All right," said the President.

  But before the day was out, Smith was phoning him. He had seen projected weather reports about a change in the jet stream and the President was going to have to leave Washington. The whole east coast would be in danger too.

  Chapter Six

  It was Indian country but the danger wasn't the Indians. They were the victims. The rolling hills where antelope and buffalo had grazed until the introduction of the rifle and cash for their skins, actually covered in their scenic beauty a bureaucratic foul-up so dangerous that every department had kept passing it to another department since the First World War.

  Underneath grass, far beneath where gophers made their underground villages, were four square miles of nerve gas, the first containers put there in case Kaiser Bill didn't learn his lesson and America needed to use gas warfare in the trenches of France. But at the end of the Great War, later to be given number one, gas warfare was outlawed.

  Like all the other countries with standing armies, America kept the gas just in case anyone else would violate the treaty. And then World War II broke out and new, more virulent gas was manufactured in case anyone broke the treaty in that war.

  And then the cold war started and one never knew what Russia might do, so more new gas was manufactured.

  And there was never a war in which America used gas, nor did any other country, no matter how base its philosophy, until in the Middle East an Arab country based on the principles of "compassion and justice" used it against a fellow Islamic country, based on "justice and compassion."

  Like all the other civilized countries who had never used their gas in war, America had been making it since Woodrow Wilson and the Sopwith Camel airplane and had an awful lot of deadly gas. Acres of it. Miles of it.

  In the early 1900s, they started stockpiling it with a friendly tribe of Indians in the Pakeeta reservation. The deal was one bottle of whiskey for one can of gas. The can would be buried underground and the Pakeeta would never even have to see it, much less smell it. The Pakeeta had the word of the United States government, a sacred promise from its leader and people. The gas was safe.

  Since the Pakeeta chief had already sampled an awful lot of the whiskey the government would give just to store the gas on the Pakeeta reservation just south of Billings, Montana, he took the sacred word of the white man.

  International relations being what they were, the entire Pakeeta tribe was able to stay drunk right up until the 1960s, when a new militancy overtook them. They were not going to store the white man's filthy weapons of death for his filthy body-destroying whiskey. They were touching their old roots again and demanded clear water and rich grazing lands and the pure sky of the great spirits. It was not the days of trusting, simple Indians anymore. The U.S. government could keep its whiskey. The Pakeeta wanted their dignity. They wanted cash.

  They got the cash and they bought cocaine and whiskey, although the old-timers still liked the old government-issue whiskey better.

  They continued to get chemicals in iron drums. One whiff of the sort of deadly gas that had been created could kill a man. A spoonful of the liquid allowed to mist in the air could wipe out a town. A quart would do a state, and the Pakeeta were sitting on four square miles of the drums and the original drums were rusting. Steel did that when buried in water-laden ground.

  The steel had been doing that since Kaiser Bill and his Huns. The Department of the Army said it wasn't its problem; the Army had gotten rid of the gas. The Bureau of Indian Affairs wasn't responsible because that was a problem of the land itself and the BIA dealt only with the Indians; it had no jurisdiction under the ground. They kicked it over to the Department of the Interior, which launched an investigation and blamed the Army.

  The drums rusted. Everyone knew they were dangerous. The government formed a high-level committee to investigate and make immediate recommendations. It was 1920 and there was enough gas underground at that time to wipe out Montana. By the time the committee was forming its final subcommittee to finalize its final recommendations, there was enough gas stored under the Pakeeta reservation to wipe out the United States and half the fish in the At
lantic, depending on how strong the winds were. It could also take out part of Canada and if there was a southward flow, settle Central America's problems for a good two centuries.

  And then someone, as a little gift, sent a piece of one rusted drum to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Interior and to the committee that was still investigating sixty-four years later.

  In three mailrooms, every person was killed when the metal touched air coming out of its plastic package. In the fourth mailroom, a vent carried the scent to the second floor, where thirty-two people were left staring dumbly into space, their nervous systems wrecked forever.

  The most frightening thing, however, was not the bodies but the note.

  "Please check the metal. You will find that it was manufactured by the Rusco Steelworks of Gary, Indiana, in 1917, precisely for the Army. And that for one purpose: to store gas. We tried cleaning off the metal by immersion in chemicals but as you probably know by now, even the most severe chemical scrubbing cannot clean this stuff. We had to remove the metal to get the explosives into the drums. Quite a chore, considering everything had to be sealed airtight when we did it. But we're good at placing bombs. Ask the President."

  Even before the bodies were cleaned out of the mailrooms, the second notes arrived, this time sent to the secretaries of the heads of the departments, which showed that the sender knew there would be no one left in the mailrooms to distribute the letters.

  This letter was a puzzle. There was a maze that someone had to get through in order to get into the stored drums to dismantle the bomb before it exploded. There was also a schematic of the bomb and Army engineers expressed admiration for it. It could take off approximately fifteen acres of earth. Given proper jet-stream activity, it could blow enough poison gas into the air to destroy the Midwest.

  Two men tried to follow the map that came with the note and were lost. So was a third. It seemed that not only did the Army Rangers have to tiptoe through cans of rusting nerve gas, loaded down with breathing apparatus and suits to keep their skin safe from air contact, but that there were people hiding in those underground areas who knew their way around and who knew how to kill.

  And the bomb was going to go off.

  Armies were useless. In the underground mazes of drums, ten thousand men were no better than one. In fact, the second note had warned that if more than two men were sent to disarm the bomb, it would be exploded.

  One or two special men were needed and after the best of the Rangers were used up on the first day, the President had ordered the Army to step aside. He was going to use other means.

  Remo arrived in Billings, Montana, on one of its rare muggy days with a little envelope containing the notes. It was the envelope Smith had given him back at Dulles Airport when the island-bound plane had been diverted back to takeoff. Find the bomb, disarm it and get it out from those rotting drums of poison gas.

  "And, Remo," Smith had said, "watch yourself. All right?"

  "You want me to do another steering wheel, Smitty?" asked Remo, and then he was off to Billings.

  The Pakeeta reservation didn't have teepees but neat houses with pickup trucks, some laundry hanging on the lines of those houses without dryers, and large discount stores. No one was selling blankets and Remo didn't see a feather in anyone's hair. He was asked thirteen times what he was doing there and showed identification from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

  He found the entrance to the gas-storage area, two plain steel doors set into a hill that looked like a bunker. Two guards at the entrance checked his papers.

  "Some Army guys go in yesterday, they don't come out on their feet," said one of the guards.

  "I'm not Army," Remo said.

  "They plenty tough."

  "It's not toughness that counts," Remo said with a little smile. "It's sweetness."

  "Hey, where's your flashlight?"

  "Don't need one."

  "You want to leave your money with me?" the guard asked.

  "Why?"

  "You ain't coming out again and I can use it," the guard said.

  "I'm coming out," Remo said.

  Inside, he let the darkness fill him. The normal response of a person to dark was anxiety, which strained the nervous system. Fear made the dark darker. In dim light, Remo could adjust his eyes so that he could see normally. But in total darkness, he did a different kind of seeing. It wasn't normal vision with colors and outlines; it was more of a knowing.

  The drums were stacked neatly, stretched out in square formations. Remo stayed still and heard a small scurrying sound, probably a hundred yards away. Good, he thought. No gas is escaping because the mice are alive. Of course, some of this gas manufactured in the fifties could attack through the skin. There was World War I and II gas, Korean gas, cold-war gas, Vietnam gas. Better dying through chemistry.

  There was moisture here under the earth and there was a certain heaviness in the darkness. Remo tasted the air as he breathed. It was rich as it always was underground.

  He moved between the drums according to the map and got lost. The map was useless. But the areas of drums did have borders and they were not that vast, so Remo began cutting the place up in squares, examining each square with eyes and hands, feeling for anything that might be a bomb, anything to indicate that he had reached that drum with sections sawn out, the sections that had killed the people in the government mailrooms.

  It was slow. He stayed there two days. Four times the doors opened showing painfully white light, and voices called out asking Remo if he was all right.

  "Yeah, I'm okay. Shut the door."

  The Bureau of Indian Affairs said he didn't have to be there. "It's Army responsibility."

  "Shut the door," Remo said. He had once been a soldier himself, long ago before his training, and he thought of the dependence on tools that most men had. Man first used a club, then a sharpened stone, and now he was using lasers from space. And every tool man used made him use his own abilities less, so that now most of his senses and muscles were as useless as his appendix. Using what you had: that was the secret of Sinanju.

  He found where the Rangers had died. He could feel in the earth where heels had dug in, that desperate strong throb of muscles fighting for life, suddenly having to be used when they had never been used before.

  And then suddenly the air was delicate again, not heavy. Another passageway had been opened. Remo was still. He heard them breathing; he heard their fingers work their way along barrels, fingers that were sure of where they were going.

  They knew this place underground, for people did not move that quickly in the dark without having been there before. Then they stopped. They were waiting for him, waiting for him to make a sound.

  In the dark, the Rangers had been at an awesome disadvantage against these men who knew their way. Remo heard them whisper.

  "I don't hear him."

  "Shhhhh."

  "He still here?"

  "Here? How's he gonna get out?"

  "So why don't he make no sound?"

  "Maybe he's sleeping."

  And so, very clearly, Remo said: "Not sleeping, sweetheart. Come and get me."

  He heard them move along the ground. They were quieter than most men. Indians probably. Indians could move well, even though most of them were too heavy. Remo moved himself with their rhythms so that they could not possibly hear him. He moved behind one and ever so gently pushed the third rib up into the aorta. Hearts did not pump efficiently with bone jamming into them. Remo put down the first one with smooth quiet in that dark chamber.

  Then he followed the other. The other stopped every few steps and listened for his victim. Remo stopped with him.

  Finally, Remo whispered, "Guess who?" The Indian stalking in the dark suddenly screamed and tried to run for the exit. But he was caught by the neck and pressed into the ground.

  "Hi. I am the great white spirit, come to break your skull," said Remo. "But I will make you a promise. Tell me who
paid you, tell me who told you to do these things and I will let you live forever in a land where the water flows free and the skies are pure."

  "Hey, man, we just needed the dough. Coke costs. We don't know who is behind it. We just got told there would be Army people coming in and we should kill them and then there would be a guy here and we should get him if we could."

  "Who told you?"

  "Crazy guy. Said that we would get paid ten grand to kill you and a hundred grand to describe exactly how we did it."

  "What did he look like?" Remo asked.

  "I don't know. We got an overnight delivery of cash with a phone number. We kind of advertise as guides to this place. Well, we had this phone conversation and he told us the Rangers or somebody was going to come and told us to be ready for them, and hell, when you get seventy-five hundred through Easy Express in the mail, you do tend to give a man service."

  "You must remember more," Remo said.

  "That's it. You know, we're Indian guides to the public. We don't ask too many questions. We usually get paid in tens and twenties and if we're lucky we can sell a frigging blanket. This man was talking big money."

  "Okay. Thank you for your help. I think you've spoken truly," Remo said.

  "Let me go then. I told you everything."

  "No, I'm going to kill you," Remo said. "This is Indian country and it's a white tradition not to keep our word."

  "But you said your word would be good as long as the water flowed."

  "Yup," said Remo, severing nerves in the brain with a sharp painless pinch. "That's an old standby. We've used that a lot."

  Remo continued his search for the bomb and finally found what he was looking for in the fourteenth quadrant. But it wasn't a bomb. His hands found a smooth plastic coating covering several barrels. It was a sticky substance, thick as a baseball glove, and that was good because no air could escape from that. In fact, any puncture in a barrel would be sealed by this covering. The people knew what they were doing. He found the barrels with the missing sections. The covering just flowed around the sections, keeping the liquefied gas secure inside. In fact, these barrels were not the most dangerous, as Smith had warned him. They were the safest, because they would not leak poison by accident.