Chained Reaction td-34

by Warren Murphy

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  CHAPTER TEN

  "Fourteen college buses, spaced at five-minute intervals, have been seen riding along Route 675 toward Pennsylvania," Smith said, as he hung up the telephone.

  "So what?" said Remo. "They're going to a baseball game."

  "They're from Marywether College, Allenby School, Bartlett University, Southern Jersey State, Northern School of the Atlantic, and Saint Olaf's."

  "All right," said Remo. "A cricket game. So what?"

  "So there are no colleges by those names in the United States," Smith said.

  "Can we get a fix on where they're going?" Ruby asked.

  "It's in the works. They'll be monitored," Smith said.

  "Time to move out," Ruby said. "Be back tomorrow, Mama. Iffen you get hungry, you send somebody out from downstairs to get you something. We going for Lucius."

  "I be all right, chile," said Mrs. Gonzalez, swaying back and forth in her rocking chair. She looked at Smith and shook her head no, trying to

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  catch his eye, still believing that he was the one with the power to decide whether or not to bring back Lucius and trying to convince him not to.

  Driving out of Norfolk, Chiun fiddled with the CB radio.

  "How do you like retirement?" Smith asked Remo.

  "A lot better than I liked working for you," Remo said.

  "Have you given a thought to what you'll live on?" Smith asked. "You know that you just can't keep charging things to me anymore."

  "Don't you worry about me," Remo said. "I'm going to be a television star. And when those residuals come pouring in, I'm going to live like a king forever."

  "You retired," Ruby said to Remo. "You don't look like the retiring type."

  "I quit," said Remo. "Too many bodies without names, too much death."

  "Remo," said Smith sharply. Remo met his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Smith glanced toward Ruby.

  "Don't worry about it, Smitty. She knows more about the organization than you could guess. If you didn't find us, she wanted us to find you."

  "You're remarkably well-informed," Smith said to Ruby.

  "I keep my ears open," Ruby said.

  "Which is hard when you have ears like Brussels sprouts," Chiun said.

  A squawking came over the radio and Chiun said hello.

  "What's the handle, good buddy?" a voice asked.

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  "I tell you as I tell the others. People do not have handles."

  "What do you call yourself?"

  "What do I call myself or what do others call me?"

  "What can I call you ?" the voice asked. The accent was dry Oklahoma and Remo marveled that no matter where you heard a CB-er talk, they all sounded as if they lived in a tarpaper shack on the outskirts of Tulsa.

  "I call myself modest, kind, humble, and generous," Chiun said. "Others call me glorious, enlightened, wonder of the ages, and worshipful master."

  "Quite a handle. Suppose I just call you modest?"

  "Just call me Master, as befits my character. Did I ever tell you, medium tolerable buddy, that I used to work for a secret government agency?"

  Smith groaned and pushed his head against the corner of the seat.

  Lt. Colonel Wendell Bleech was in the first of the fourteen buses spread out along the highway. He sat behind the driver, a headset over his ears, monitoring any calls that might be coming to him from home base.

  The fifty men on his bus were dressed in jeans and T-shirts, and Bleech had relaxed discipline enough so that they were allowed to talk to each other. But not too loud.

  His top lieutenant slid into the seat next to Bleech.

  "Finally getting this show on the road," he said, in as much a question as a statement.

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  "Yessir," Bleech said. "Men ready?"

  "You know that better than I do, Colonel. They're as ready as we can make them."

  Bleech nodded and looked out the window at the countryside rolling by.

  "We didn't do a thing that they couldn't do in the regular army," he said. "If they wanted to."

  The lieutenant grunted agreement.

  "Twenty years I watched," Bleech said. "The army going downhill. Salaries going up. Morale down. Turning it into a country club. Civil rights for dog soldiers. All volunteers so treat 'em with kid gloves. And all the while I was thinking, give me this army for six months I could turn 'em around, shape 'em up, and make a real army out of them. Like Patton had. Like Custer had."

  The lieutenant nodded. "Like Pershing," he offered.

  Bleech shook his head. "Well, not exactly like Pershing. You know where he got that Blackjack nickname from?"

  "No."

  "He used to run a black outfit in the army. They called him Nigger Jack at first. No, scratch Pershing. But they never gave me the chance and then they all got their little asses in an uproar 'cause some civilians got shot in Nam, and here I was, all I wanted to do was make the army good, and I was getting thrown out on my ear."

  "Soft," the lieutenant said. "Everybody's soft today."

  "Then I got this chance, and these are the best troops I ever saw. Best conditioned, the best trained, the best disciplined. I'd march them into hell."

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  "And they'd follow you, sure enough," the lieutenant said.

  Bleech turned and smiled at his lieutenant and clapped a friendly hand on his shoulder. "Someday," he said, "when this country gets itself all straightened out, they're going to strike medals for us. But until then we got to get our reward just from the doing."

  His earphones crackled and he raised a hand toward the lieutenant for silence. He swung the small mike down from its anchor on top of the earphones.

  "White Fox One here," he said. "Go ahead."

  He listened intently for almost a minute, then said briskly, "Got it. Good work."

  He snapped the microphone back up atop the headset and the lieutenant looked at him quizzically.

  "Trouble?" he asked.

  "We had visitors at the camp."

  "Yeah?"

  "They didn't learn anything there, but they must have gotten something somewhere else. They've been seen coming from Norfolk, following us along this road."

  "Following us?"

  "Looks that way."

  "Who are they?" the lieutenant asked.

  "Don't know. Three men and a woman,"

  "What do we do?"

  A small smile spread slowly across Bleech's face. It made him look like a Halloween pumpkin.

  "We'll give them a welcome."

  For over two hours, Chiun had been trying to

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  convince everybody on the CB's forty channels that they should be silent for exactly seventy-five minutes so that he could recite one of the shorter works of Ung poetry. No one had paid any attention to his demands for silence and as Remo, following a report Smith had received from a roadside phone call, turned onto a dirt road near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Chiun was yelling threats and insults into the CB in Korean.

  Hidden in the hills bordering the road a half mile away, three soldiers saw the white Continental kick up a puff of dust as it came off the pavement into the narrow road.

  "He always like this when he travels?" Ruby asked Remo, jerking her thumb toward Chiun.

  "Only when we're going someplace he doesn't want to go."

  "What's he saying now?" Ruby asked. Smith sat up nervously. Whenever Chiun spoke Korean, Smith worried that he was giving away the last few secrets that remained to the United States Government.

  Remo cocked an ear. "He is telling that moderately acceptable buddy that the only difference between him and cow droppings is that cow droppings can be burned in a fire."

  Another voice squawked and Chiun squawked back. "And he's telling that one," Remo translated, "that he should drink sheep dip."

  Remo bumped along the pocked dirt road in the soft-sprung Continental while the screeching continued from the back seat and Ruby covered her ears with her
hands to muffle the noise.

  Suddenly, Chiun was silent. Ruby turned in her seat to see what had stopped the noise in the car,

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  but as she turned, Chiun dove past her, across the front seat and grabbed the steering wheel from Remo with his left hand.

  He gave a sharp yank and the car swerved to the right, almost at a ninety-degree angle, moving off the narrow roadway and toward a tree. At the last split instant before it hit the tree, Chiun forced the wheel back in the other direction.

  Remo looked at Chiun, his mouth open to question him, when there were two explosive thumps, in close succession, in the roadway behind them. The car was hit with flying rocks and dirt and clouds of dust and acrid smoke swirled up on the road.

  "Mortars," Remo yelled. He tromped down heavily on the gas pedal, took the wheel back, and sped down the road.

  Chiun nodded, as if satisfied, and slid back to his seat. Smith was looking through the rear window, as the dust cleared, at the two holes in the roadway, each the size of a beer barrel.

  Remo began to let the car slow down.

  "Do not reduce speed yet," said Chiun. "There is another to come."

  "How you know that?" asked Ruby.

  "Because good things always come in threes," Chiun hissed. As Ruby watched, he seemed to narrow the focus of his eyes, as if staring at a point only inches in front of his nose, then he looked up and said sharply, "Steer left, Remo. Left."

  Remo swerved the car sharply to the left and slammed the gas pedal down into passing gear. The car's nose lifted and it careened down the road. There was an explosion behind them that

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  lifted the right side of the car up off its wheels for a moment, but Remo easily pulled the car back under control.

  Chiun opened the rear window on his side and listened intently for a few seconds.

  "That is all," he said. Without a pause, he picked up the CB microphone again and resumed screaming into it in high-pitched Korean.

  "How'd he do that?" Ruby asked.

  "He heard them," Remo said.

  "I didn't hear them," said Ruby.

  "That's 'cause you've got ears like Brussels sprouts."

  "How could he hear them when he was yelling all the time into that radio ?" Ruby asked.

  "Why not?" said Remo. "He knows what he's yelling into the radio; he doesn't have to listen to that. So he was listening to everything else and he heard the mortars."

  "Just like that?"

  "Just like that," Remo said, knowing it would never satisfy her. The art of Sinanju was simple and people wanted complexity. There was no complexity in telling the simple truth-that Sinanju taught a person to use his body the way it should be used.

  "If you're so smart, how come you didn't hear them?" asked Ruby.

  "Chiun hears better than I do," Remo said.

  "Silence," thundered Chiun from the rear. "Since I hear so well, do you realize what an affront to me is your constant yammering. Be still, the two of you. I am preparing to deliver my Ung poetry."

  "Sorry, Little Father," Remo said. "Have to

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  wait a while." He rolled the car off the road and into a small stand of trees. "This is the end of the line." He looked around to Smith.

  "Their mortar men will be reporting back that they missed us, so they'll be waiting. We'll have to go on foot. Smitty, you and Euby take the car and go back."

  "Bull," said Euby.

  "She has a good heart, this one," Chiun said. "She will make brave sons."

  "Cut it out, Chiun," said Remo. "You'll just slow us down, Smitty. We passed a gas station back on the left about a mile. You go back there and wait for us. We'll be back as soon as we get a fix on this thing."

  Smith thought a moment, then nodded. "All right. I can make use of that telephone there, too," he said.

  Remo and Chiun slipped from the car and Ruby drove away. As soon as she got onto the road, she glanced up into her rear-view mirror. Remo and Chiun were gone, nowhere to be seen.

  Ruby kicked up dust coming around a curve, narrowly missing one of the mortar craters, before a long straight run that led back to the main road. As she came around the curve, she jammed on the brakes. Parked across the road was an olive-drab army-type truck, but with no military markings.

  Four men with automatic weapons jumped toward the front of the car as Ruby braked, and pressed the barrels of their weapons against the glass. Ruby threw the Continental in reverse and looked up quickly into the rear-view mirror. Three more men were standing behind the car,

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  their weapons pressed against the glass, aimed at her head and Smith's.

  "Better stop," Smith said.

  "Sheeit," said Ruby.

  A man wearing sergeant's stripes on his khakis hopped lightly down from the cab of the truck.

  "All right, both of you, get out of there." He elaborately opened the rear door for Smith. "Out," he said.

  Then he opened the front passenger's door, leaned in and smiled at Ruby. His teeth were yellowed with tobacco stains and his accent was deep, deep Alabama South.

  "You too, nigger," he said.

  "Well, if it ain't the Koo Koo Klucks," said Ruby.

  At the top of a small hill, Remo looked around and recognized where he was. Stretching out before him were the rolling hills of southern Pennsylvania, dotted with monuments, statues, and small buildings.

  "This is Gettysburg," Remo said wonderingly. "There's Cemetery Ridge. And there's Gulps Hill."

  "What is this Gettysburg?" asked Chiun.

  "It was a battlefield," Remo said.

  "In a war?"

  "Yes."

  "What war?"

  "The Civil War."

  "That was the war over slavery," Chiun said.

  Remo nodded. "And now we're looking for another army that's trying to keep slavery alive."

  "We will not find it on top of this hill," Chiun said.

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  Below the heel, in a small clearing, Remo found three small dents in the ground left by the triangular base of the field mortar.

  "One of them was here, Chiun," he said.

  Chiun nodded. "They expected us," he said.

  "Why?"

  "Because this lowland spot commands no view of the road. There were three shells fired at us. One of them must have been able to sight our vehicle and by radio told the others when to fire. But they were already targeted on a roadway they could not see. They expected us."

  Chiun pointed through the trees. "And they went this way."

  "Then let's go join the army," Remo said.

  In the clearing behind one of the small hills outside Gettysburg, a military field camp had been set up. The clearing was bordered by military trucks and the buses that had brought the men from their South Carolina base. Parked in a corner of the field was Ruby Gonzalez's white Continental.

  Only one tent had been erected, a fifteen-foot square standup wall tent that served as Colonel Bleech's command post and sleeping quarters, while he waited further orders.

  Natty and round in dress gabardines, his riding trousers Moused neatly inside his highly polished boots, Bleech slapped his riding crop against his right thigh as he looked at Smith and Ruby. They were guarded by the sergeant with the yellow teeth and three soldiers carrying automatic weapons.

  Behind them, sitting on the ground watching,

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  were five-hundred young troopers, the main body of Bleech's army. They had been hastily turned out when Ruby and Smith were brought in, and as they marched in to sit on the ground in neat rows, Ruby glanced at them. Crackers, she thought. Deep South, shit-kicking crackers without a brain in their little racist heads.

  Bleech, conscious of the need to make a good impression on his men, marched briskly back and forth in front of Ruby and Smith. Ruby yawned and covered her mouth with the back of her hand.

  "All right," Bleech growled. "Who are you?" His voice carried loudly over the clearing and hung in the
air. The troops sat hushed, watching the scene.

  "We from the town hall," said Ruby. "We come to look at your parade permit."

  Bleech fixed her with narrow eyes. "We'll see how long your sense of humor lasts," he said. "And you?" He turned to Smith.

  "I have nothing to say to you," said Smith.

  Bleech nodded, then spoke over Ruby's and Smith's heads to his troops.

  "Men, look well. Know the face of the enemy. These are spies." He paused to let it sink in. "Traitors and spies. And in wartime, and this is wartime because everything we cherish as Americans is being warred upon by people like this, in wartime there is only one penalty for spies and traitors." He stopped again and let his eyes roam from one end of the clearing to the other. "Death," he intoned.

  "You gonna show us your parade permit or not?" asked Ruby.

  "We'll see if you have so much of a sense of hu-

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  mor in front of a firing squad," Bleech said. "But first you're going to tell us who you are."

  "Don't hold your breath, honkey," said Ruby.

  "We will see." Bleech nodded to the sergeant who moved up close behind Ruby then slammed his hands against her shoulder blades, shoving her forward. She stumbled toward Bleech who turned his lead-tipped riding crop forward. Its weighted butt end buried itself deep into Ruby's stomach. She let her breath out with a heavy oomph and fell to the ground in the dust.

  Bleech laughed. Smith growled, a growl of simple animal anger, and lunged forward at the colonel. Bleech raised the riding crop over his head and swung its weighted end at Smith's skull. But as it whooshed toward him, Smith ducked. The crop passed over his head and Smith came up with a hard New England fist into Bleech's fleshy nose. The colonel grabbed at his nose with his free hand. The four soldiers guarding Ruby and Smith jumped forward and bore Smith to the ground with their weight. One zealous private slammed the butt of his rifle down into Smith's right shoulder.

  Ignoring the pain, Smith looked up from the ground at Bleech, holding his bloody nose, and recognized in him all the little tinpot tyrants and bullies he had hated all his life. "Brave when you hit women," he sneered.

  Bleech took his hand away from his face. A river of blood ran down from his nose to his fleshy lips.

  "Restrain that man. He will get his. After the pickaninny."