Chained Reaction td-34

by Warren Murphy

  Up Route 13 they drove until they reached the outskirts of Exmore. There everyone abandoned the buses carrying bundles labeled Swarthmore State College. Inside these bundles were the shore-patrol uniforms and weapons.

  Bleech himself wore a pair of green Bermuda shorts, a white T-shirt reading "Swarthmore State," and a whistle around his neck. He was the coach if they were stopped.

  The cargo was left in the luggage compartments, the oxygen machine keeping the bound men alive.

  A mile up the dirt road, in a vast meadow, Bleech ordered everyone into the fields to sit and wait.

  If Bleech didn't have a wristwatch, he would have sworn that they had waited for a full half hour. But it was only ten minutes. The second hand moved so slowly, and he fully realized in the blazing summer sun how long a minute could be. Then, from over a hill with grass parched brown, came the rackety sound of helicopters. They were on time. They were blue and white and they were beautiful.

  And they were on time. He had done it.

  There was a message for him when the first chopper landed.

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  "Sir, fourteen triple perfect," said a pilot who did not know what the message meant. But Bleech knew.

  Fourteen meant the number of captives picked up from the buses. Triple perfect meant all three phases of the operation had gone without hitch: Bleech had gotten in and out of Norfolk without any trouble; the fourteen prisoners were exactly what was wanted; and everyone else was doing their job correctly, which meant that the prisoners were already moving toward their final destination.

  Bleech loaded his men into the helicopters. Trooper Drake was the last to board and he stumbled getting in.

  Back at the base camp, Drake would be accused of not staying with his unit and he would be put into the hot box, a prison that got intensely hot in the summer sun, and then Bleech would march the men for a three-day drill into the woods. Drake would be dead on return and Bleech would make a little speech about how Drake had tried to leave his unit and when a man did that, Bleech just forgot he ever existed. His only problem was whether or not it would be more effective to let the troopers discover Drake dead in the hot box or call them together for a parade, and then open the box calling Drake to walk out. It always carried more terror when your men thought you killed them carelessly, without reason. It gave every potential punishment the spicy threat of fatality.

  It was a good unit, Bleech realized. He was running out of men for punishment examples.

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  And now his stomach craved the rich brown points of a toasted English muffin.

  He had won his first battle. According to the calculations of the computer and, more importantly, according to his own, the first battle was going to be the toughest. From here on in, it would be easy.

  He had done his job and now those who worked the cargo would have to do theirs. But that should be done easily, too. It had been done before. It was only recently, perhaps within the last hundred years, that it had stopped being done in most civilized places.

  Lt. Colonel Wendell Bleech did not have the only computer hookup with extremely limited access. There was another, even more extensive in its probes and knowledge of American life, and the access was even more limited. Only one terminal in one spot in America could call out the information, and should anyone else burrow into the computer, the entire unit would self-destruct chemically, becoming a clogged mass of wires and transistors floating in powerful acid.

  This computer terminal was in an office in Eye, New York, of what appeared to the outside world as Folcroft Sanitarium. Minimally, it was a sanitarium, but its real purpose was to house the computer complex that was the heart of the secret organization CURE, which now no longer had an enforcement arm.

  And what Bleech's computer had told him to do was now being analyzed by the CURE computer and by Dr. Harold W. Smith, the head of the agency, sitting in the office overlooking Long Is-

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  land Sound and the ocean over which his ancestors had sailed from England to found a country intended to be based on law.

  The early reports were confusing. Either several men had been snatched or had joined a raid on a black section of Norfolk, Virginia. The full facts were not clear this morning because these were the first reports. Good intelligence, like good trees, took time to grow and each bit of information was the fertilizer that helped. So all Dr. Smith knew at 10:42 A.M. was that some men were missing. The computer said the men had certain commonalities, a phrase the brain used when it was looking for a reason for something.

  Smith stared at the commonalities, his lemony grim face with the thin, tight lips unmoving, but the mind behind that forehead thinking, yet not panicking, realizing something was moving at the nation's innards, and there was still no idea as to why.

  The commonalities of the missing men: they were all black, between twenty and twenty-three, and all had petty criminal records. All were unemployed and unemployable by federal standards.

  Smith took a pencil from his gray vest. He liked tight vests and gray suits, white shirts, and his green striped Dartmouth tie. He always wore cordovans because they lasted longest in his opinion.

  He started scribbling. The computers could do most things better than humans, except to really roll things around.

  The terminal now reported that the number of missing men was a positive fourteen. Looking

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  again at the list of common factors among the fourteen men, Smith realized that the people whose lives were affected most by the fourteen men were their relatives, and so he punched into his terminal a request for an early readout on the relatives.

  Perhaps one of them had arranged the removal of these fourteen men. Even as he asked the question, Smith knew it was probably wrong. Those who had the most to gain by the disappearance of those missing from Norfolk would be the least likely and least capable of arranging those disappearances.

  Only one relative's name came onto the computer, not because it was likely to have arranged the disappearance of the fourteen, but because of a contact with CURE at a previous point. The name was Gonzalez, R., but it was quickly preempted by more important information from the computer: Several witnesses saw subjects being grappled with, bound, and injected with some sort of tranquilizing subject. Those doing it wore Navy shore-patrol uniforms.

  Smith asked the computer for a whereabouts on Remo and Chiun. This was done by simply doing what a computer did best, looking through piles of information for something significant. The computer scanned its records, looking for reports of people doing what most people couldn't do. If there were reports from police or newspapers of a single man with bare hands effortlessly crippling many men with guns, that would be an indication. If there was a tale of somebody walking up the side of a building, that would be another. If there was a report of a white and an

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  Oriental involved in a disturbance, caused when someone accidentally touched the Oriental and was dismembered for it, that would have been a conclusive.

  This time, the computer gave Dr. Smith only one report. A man had jumped from an airplane without a parachute and lived.

  Smith's eyes widened in anticipation and then became their normal steel gray again. The man had indeed jumped from an airplane and lived. He had been injured and was now at Winstead Memorial Hospital, outside of Ramage, South Dakota. His condition was critical.

  So much for the whereabouts of Remo and Chiun. They were not at Ramage, South Dakota. It would have taken more than an airplane jump to put Remo in the hospital.

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  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Master of Sinanju had heard it and did not believe it. He would have asked again if he thought he could bear the answer. He asked again.

  "What have I done to you that you would commit so foul a deed on me ?"

  "Maybe it's not foul, Little Father," said Remo.

  "I cannot believe it," said Chiun.

  "Believe it," Remo said. "I will not kill again."
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  "Eeeeeeah," said Chiun and Remo's words withered his tired old ears. "The pain I can bear. But knowing that I have betrayed my ancestors by giving so much that will not come back to the House of Sinanju, this I cannot live with."

  "I'm not going to feel guilty," Remo said. "I have my life to live, too, and I wasn't born an assassin."

  "That need not be mentioned now," said Chiun. And then, in the darkness of his morning, a shaft of light appeared. "You have killed, Remo. By your act, you kill. You kill the House of Sinanju by what you do. Who will pass on what we know? Who will take the sun source of the martial arts and give its essence to another to keep it alive? Who, then, if not you ?"

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  "You," said Remo. "You found me. Find someone else."

  "There is no one else."

  "What about all those wonderful Koreans you always claim could master Sinanju, but in a moment of weakness you chose a white instead of a Korean ? Get one of them."

  "I am too old now."

  "You're not more than eighty-five."

  "I have given so much, there's nothing left."

  Remo watched the steaming pot on the boat's butane cooking stove. He was leaving for his new job after this lunch. The rice was steamed perfectly and the duck was a few moments from completion.

  He had reservations for a Delta flight out of West Palm Beach to New York City. What he did not mention was that he had reservations for two.

  "Do you want ginseng on your rice or not?"

  "Ginseng is for happy times. Ginseng is for hearts that have not been broken or betrayed," said Chiun.

  "No ginseng?"

  "A little," said Chiun. "To remind me of happy days which will be no more." He made sure with his eyes that he got the proper amount. Remo crumbled the root into the boiling pot.

  He saw Chiun's face raise a bit, concentrating on the ginseng. He added another pinch. The face lowered.

  "But I will not enjoy it," he added. During the meal, Chiun added how he was not enjoying anything. Yet he knew there were worse things in the world, he said. Much worse.

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  "Yeah, what?" asked Remo, chewing his rice to liquidity. Eating, properly pursued, was no more enjoyable at this stage of his development than a breathing exercise. It was, properly done, the tak-ing-in of nourishment. To enjoy it was to do it wrong. For that could lead to eating things for enjoyment instead of nourishment, and that could be fatal, especially to Americans who ate like that all the time.

  "You think more of your rice than what I think is a desecration," said Chiun.

  "That's right," said Remo.

  "Perfidy," Chiun said. "Eternal perfidy. I have one wish in life. And that is never for my eyes to settle upon the waste of Sinanju doing what it was not trained for."

  "Okay," said Remo.

  "I do not even want to know what you will do."

  "Good," said Remo. "It will be better for you that way."

  "You know," Chiun said, "not everyone appreciates assassins, no matter how great they are."

  "I know," Remo said and there was no mocking in his voice now.

  "They call us murderers and killers."

  "Well, they have a point. To a degree."

  "They don't understand what we do."

  "How could they?" Remo asked. He wondered if he needed duck. A young man normally had enough fat in a grain food not to need the duck. A bead of fat glistened on the whitish flesh of the boiled duckling. Remo decided no.

  "And in this country, your country, it is worse. You have amateur assassins working everywhere.

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  Anyone who owns a gun thinks he has a right to kill."

  "I know," Remo said.

  "But a good assassin, why, even the victims respect him. Because the victim has a better death than if old age attacked, for in old age one is tortured into the grave. One sees one's limbs stiffen and breathing go and eyesight wither and all manner of ills befall. But, when a person goes with the assistance of a great assassin, he lives one moment and all but painlessly does not the next. I would rather be assassinated than be in one of your car accidents," said Chiun.

  ""I'm going, Little Father," Remo said. "Are you coming?"

  "No," said Chiun. "This is too much to bear. Goodbye. I am old and poor. Perhaps you are right and this is the time to leave me."

  "You're not poor. You've got gold stashed all over in little packets. And besides, there never has been a time when an assassin can't find work."

  Remo packed everything he owned in a small blue canvas bag. An extra pair of chinos, three pairs of socks, four black T-shirts, and a toothbrush.

  He thought he would be interrupted by Chiun any moment but the interruption did not come. He zipped up the bag. Chiun worked on his duck, taking little pieces with his long fingernails and chewing them as Remo had chewed his rice, into liquid.

  "I'm going," said Remo.

  "I see," said Chiun. Remo knew Chiun had

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  giant steamer trunks that had to be labeled for shipments. He had not asked Remo to label them.

  "I'm going now," Remo said.

  "I see."

  Remo shrugged and let go a sigh. He had worked more than a decade as an assassin and he could not, if he wanted to at this moment, fill his bag with valuables. He was going to a new life. He was going to where he would have a home and a wife and a child. Maybe several children.

  Chiun had said children were like orchids, best appreciated when someone else had to do the labor of growing them. They had had this discussion before. Many years before. And many times since.

  Remo did not know if he was going to that home and family. He did not know if he really wanted it anymore but he did know he wanted to leave. And he did know he did not want to kill again for a long while, if ever. It was not a big new thing that came on him, rather something that had been coming for so long and so slowly it felt like an old friend whom he had suddenly decided to say hello to.

  Chiun did not get up.

  "I don't think 'thank you' would be enough," said Remo to the man who had given him that new life.

  "You never gave enough," said Chiun.

  "I gave enough to learn," said Remo.

  "Go," Chiun said. "A Master of Sinanju can do many things. He cannot do miracles. You have allowed yourself to turn into corruption and rot. The sun can make some things grow. It makes others spoil."

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  "Goodbye, Little Father. Do I have your blessings?"

  And there was silence from the Master of Sinanju, a silence so deep and so cold that Remo felt the shivers through his bones.

  "Well, goodbye," said Remo. And he did not cry. He did not disapprove of those who did; it was just not for him.

  Walking down the gangplank to the dock, Remo wanted to take one last look at the man who had given him Sinanju, forever making him someone else from that one-time policeman in that eastern city, who was framed by CURE, lured into its service, and then transformed by Chiun.

  He wanted to look but he did not. It was over.

  He made the dock, and the sunny day seemed more like a rude heat bothering him. One of the wealthy men from Delray, in blue blazer and yachting cap and a boat that he somehow managed to let everyone know was worth a cool million, which he never had time to run, greeted Remo with his greeting for everyone.

  "Hot enough for you, fella?" asked the man from the deck of his yacht and Remo leaped over the railing and slapped tears into his eyes.

  Then with his one blue canvas bag he went to the marina office and telephoned for a taxicab to take him to the airport. A secretary using the telephone to talk to a friend was intently describing her previous night, when she told someone triumphantly where to get off.

  Remo compressed the telephone into her lap.

  She looked horrified at the black shards that had, just moments ago, been a communications link to her friend. And now it was in her lap. The

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  man had crushed the phone as if it had been mad
e of compressed dry cereal.

  She didn't say anything. The man who was waiting for the taxi didn't say anything. Finally she asked if she could wipe the plastic pieces and metal parts from her lap.

  "What ?" asked the man.

  "Nothing," she said, sitting very quietly and very politely with a lap full of telephone.

  She glanced out the window at a small crowd gathering near a yacht, where one of the wealthier customers was holding the side of his face and gesturing wildly. And alongside that came a most peculiar sight. It was like a blue sheet being propelled by a frail wisp of a man with only a hint of a scraggly white beard, floating up around the dock. She didn't know how he could get around the mob that clustered around the customer holding his face, a mob that stretched from one side of the dock to the other.

  The frail little Oriental moving the diaphanous blue robes across the dock did not go around. And the secretary, not wanting to take her eyes off the maniac in her office nor let that incredibly big smile dissipate, because she did not want her steel desk shredded on her, forced herself not to blink. Because the old man in the blue robe didn't go around. He went through, in that strange shuffling gait, unbroken as if the mob didn't exist. And there was the commodore of the marina himself, rolling around on the dock, grabbing his groin in great pain.

  And then a horrible thought struck the mind of this secretary, this mind already overloaded with terror. The old man, the Oriental, was coming to

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  the office. He was berthed along with the lunatic who shredded telephones, and he might be even worse, because he moved through crowds as if they did not exist.

  And he was coming here. To the office.

  She tried to smile harder, but when your jaw is stretched like a two-sizes-too-small leotard, there is no harder to give. So she fainted.

  When Remo felt the presence of Chiun moving toward him, the deep brooding darkness torturing his soul suddenly blossomed into sunlight.

  "Little Father," said Remo, "you're coming with me. It's the happiest day of my life."

  "It is the saddest day of mine," said Chiun. "For I cannot allow the desecration you plan of my gifts and the gifts of the masters of thousands of years of Sinanju to go unwitnessed. I must bear the full pain of your evil."