Remo The Adventure Begins (22 page)

“And you thought he was your father?”

“I did.”

“Until you found out he had a contractual obligation to us instead of you.”

“Well, I think you, he, and the other guy are all . . ." said Remo. He couldn’t get the words out. He waited a few moments until the rage subsided. And then simply added:

“Enjoy yourself. I quit.”

“Wait a minute, laddie. Not now,” said McCleary.

“I could live with what you did to me at the beginning. I accepted that. But what the old man told me back there—what you arranged with him—I just don’t think the whole country is worth it. That’s what I think. That’s what’s bothering me. That’s what I have been thinking about.”

“This country is worth a lot, Remo. I don’t think you know enough of the world to know how blessed this country is.”

“You had a father and mother, laddie,” said Remo, imitating McCleary. “When you have parents, you have a piece of this country. When you don’t have a father you don’t have nothing. It’s your country, laddie. Not mine,” said Remo. “That’s what I’m feeling.”

The factory ended along the road, and of course, the shabby bars began again.

“You see those bars?” asked McCleary.

“How can I miss ’em? The whole state is loaded with them. What do they have? Some sort of zoning ordinance that prohibits the number of homes you can build without a cheap roadside bar to service them?”

“I probably could not walk out alive from most of those bars, because of the color of my skin. When I go to small towns I don’t know if I can find a place to sleep because of the color of my skin. And more times than not, the places I want to live, I can’t live . . .”

“Those bars?” said Remo, nodding to the side of the road.

“Any of them practically. I wouldn’t go in unless I was ready to shoot my way out.”

“Stop the car.”

“We have a schedule.”

“Stop the car,” said Remo. “You and I are going to have a beer.”

McCleary felt Remo’s foot work its way to the brake. He couldn’t kick the leg away.

“We’ll have a beer later,” said McCleary.

“Now,” said Remo.

“I don’t want a beer that much. When we’re . . . To hell with it.” Somehow Remo had gotten his feet and hands on the wheel and pedal in such a way that McCleary couldn’t pry them off. He wasn’t driving the car anymore.

McCleary pulled the car over to the first brightly lit sign as an alternative to coming to a halt in the middle of the road.

“We’ll get a couple of bottles to go,” said McCleary as they entered the din and darkness of a bar that smelled like an armpit gone sour. As McCleary had thought, there wasn’t a black face in the room. Someone pointed that out.

Another person announced loudly that the bar didn’t serve baboons. Even in the dim light McCleary could make out just what clientele this bar did serve—big persons. Some of them had their sleeves cut off to make room for very big biceps. One of them offered to show his girlfriend “what the insides of a nigger look like on a barroom floor.”

And then brotherhood came to this little roadside tavern on the West Virginia byway. Remo noticed the bar had spills on it. So he wiped them off. He wiped off every little puddle of beer and every last nutshell so that it was neat. He did this with the two largest men in the bar.

And since they were now dirty rags he tossed them through the front windows.

Everyone was so impressed with Remo’s tidiness that they came to admire his handiwork on the bar. A man with a hunting knife was the first to look. He was so impressed he left the imprint of his skull and face on the glossy surface, then collapsed on the floor.

The two largest men quivered in the little gravel space used for a parking lot. There wasn’t one person who interfered with the well-dressed black man’s drinking. In fact, several offered to buy him drinks but he refused.

“Do you feel better now?” said McCleary, checking his watch. They hadn’t lost much time, but they had lost time.

“Yeah,” said Remo. “Do you?”

“Do you think I take pleasure in watching you abuse poor ignorant people who don’t know any better?”

“Sure,” said Remo.

“I did, damn me. I did, laddie,” said McCleary, with a big laugh from the belly. “I loved it. I wish I could do something like that about your father problem.”

“To hell with it. I got work.”

“I could get to like you, laddie,” said McCleary. “But I won’t.”

And both of them understood that one might be called upon to kill the other in an emergency.

“You already do, asshole,” said Remo.

“You didn’t take a beer back there.”

“My system doesn’t use alcohol. There is no purpose to it.”

“You used to drink a lot.”

“I used to eat for taste too,” said Remo. And McCleary understood that as American as Remo appeared, there was something else going on in him that McCleary would never fathom.

The signs for Grove appeared as warnings: “Roads Ahead Impassable,” then “Private Property.” Only when they had reached the high wire gates did they see the signs marked with the skull and crossbones indicating danger.

They, like those in every vehicle on that dismal stretch of road, had been monitored for several miles back. They parked the car at a small lot near a guardhouse, showing proper identification.

They could have used those papers to get into the plant, but such was the sophistication of the HARP defenses that identification, unless verified personally by someone inside who knew them, would be invalid within an hour. And more important, according to what Smith could make out, the defenses of the HARP complex were such that it was harder to get out than to get in.

What they had to try to do was avoid the entire checking system, stay out of the Grove personnel-identification machine. The plan was simple. Cut their way in under a fence, commando style. Remo and McCleary walked back down the road, then suddenly dropped, lying there quiet in the frosty grass and chill night air, waiting to see if anyone noticed. And when no one had, McCleary eased a wire cutter up in front of him, and clipped. The wire hissed and sparked. It was electrified. McCleary grabbed it with his left hand. The left hand smoked and sputtered. But it did not release the wire.

“Did Chiun teach you that?” whispered Remo. “How do you do that? I can’t do that.”

“You lose your hand to an antipersonnel mine in Nam and you replace it with an artificial one.”

So McCleary had one hand. That explained his talk about leaving only one handprint wherever he went. McCleary said it tended to confuse people, but not as much as he liked. Now Remo understood.

Inside the fence, fifty yards of gravel and grass surrounded a four-story building. Pools of light from shaded overhead bulbs at regular intervals illuminated the red-brick masonry and ironwork. It was an old factory.

Service trucks and crates littered a side road leading to a modern administration building farther back. No words were exchanged as the pair split. McCleary would meet Remo back at the opening. He headed for the administration building. Remo headed for the factory. Remo became part of the night. McCleary had to try to keep quiet on the balls of his feet. McCleary’s nerves were taut. Remo’s were correct. To him, this was not life and death; this was proper and improper.

Remo entered through a wood-frame window. The paint was new. The wood was old. Now here was the prototype of the most sophisticated electronics in America’s arsenal, and it was housed in this old factory with wood-frame windows. Why?

It seemed odd to break into a place and not feel fear or anxiety. Remo noticed the change in himself but did not feel it. One did not use feelings for that at a time like this. It was dark. He sensed sounds throughout the building. He could almost hear Chiun expounding on the proper way to enter a castle. He just substituted factory. As for the target, he substituted the HARP prototype.

The factory was open inside, dark but for partial moonlight coming from skylights above. Catwalks surrounded the open space like a prison. The room smelled of old dust, and shoe polish and dogs. Probably watchdogs, thought Remo.

Remo heard the pads on the floor. He turned. Saw it. German shepherd. Teeth bared. Midair. At him.

And by him. Remo let it bite at air, and moved through the open space to the lower platform circling the inside of the factory. He took a skip-jump to the lower rail and lifted himself just as the dog got a mouthful of trouser. With that foot, he flicked it off with a turning toe into the neck. The blow landed solidly. Funny, thought Remo, the animals always do it right. And he remembered all that Chiun had said about animals, where they were right and man was wrong. Animals always believed in themselves.

Two more dogs padded well out into the center of the factory and joined the other. Remo thought he was safe from them for a moment until one leaped at a bar, and then the other joined him. It was a game of fetch. Grab the bar, and their weight lowered a ladder. Then they could fetch the man with their bare teeth.

They ran toward him. Remo leaped to the walkway above. And they ran upstairs to join him. As he moved higher, so did they until they all reached the roof. Remo was outside. It was five stories to the ground.

He thought about it. Mistake. A searing pain gripped his hand. A dog was on it, hanging on by its teeth. Another one got in behind him. And he was high on the roof. He slipped a hand under the jaws of the large dog and opened them, freeing his hand just as one of the others bowled into him, sending him to the edge, holding on to crumbling brick. He felt something below. There was a ledge. It was a window. He dropped to it. Little ugly screeching sounds came at his feet. Rats. He felt prickly clawing up his pants leg. Up his calf. At his knee. Still going. A rat in his pants. The dogs on the edge of the roof were about to jump down to get him, and Remo smashed in the window with his head and dove into the factory.

He landed correctly, letting the whole body dissipate the force of the landing and unzipping his fly to release the trapped intruder.

A large “Access Forbidden” sign hung over a doorway. Remo tested the door. It was good steel. As Chiun had said, the best iron gates always guard the king. And the king in this case was HARP. He pressured the handle into the lock and it snapped with the ease of a garter.

And then he was in the room. But he was not prepared for what he would see. Smith had drawn him a rough sketch of HARP in his office. But there it only looked like a cube.

This cube was eight feet on all sides, and hung from the ceiling. Each side was a burnished metal, and the moon played golden on its polish. It was beautiful. Remo thought of what had to be inside. All the knowledge of a technological age, the perfection of defense achievement. He heard a buzzing. It came from above the doorway. A motor. A small motor. It drove a thing with a round glass barrel. A camera. It stopped when it pointed at him. It could spot movement.

Remo remained still, but it was too late. The camera flashed a red light, and then the light moved across the floor and quickly up the wall. The camera was aiming. The light hit HARP. The red glowed ugly, chasing the warm colors of the reflection of the move. And then in a blast of white light, HARP exploded and alarms went off.

Remo had triggered a self-destruct mechanism.

McCleary had just backed out of the door of the administration building. Everything had gone more smoothly than he could have hoped. Smith, in his usual brilliance, had pinpointed exactly what McCleary should get, and exactly where it should be, and there it was. McCleary had it; he had taken it exactly as Smith said he might be able to get it, and Remo over at the HARP prototype had blown up the building. Sirens were wailing and searchlights crisscrossing the whole place, and guards and dogs and guns made the whole place an inside of hell.

Con McCleary at that moment felt he could kill Remo. Wrong. He wanted to kill Remo. He didn’t know if he could ever kill him again.

One thing could be said about the boy. He could move. While Con McCleary had to work at getting back to the meeting point by carefully ducking from crate to crate, following moving trucks, trying to pretend to be part of the guarding force, Remo just moved. He was waiting near the fence hole when McCleary got there exhausted.

“I think I blew it,” said Remo.

“Don’t worry. We got what we need, I think,” said McCleary.

“We also got our escape cut off,” said Remo. McCleary couldn’t see what he was talking about. And then the searchlights blanketed the hole they cut, lighting it as though it were the infield of the Astrodome at night, and McCleary saw the guards run through the hole at them.

“C’mon,” said McCleary. “Those bulldozers.”

Remo ran to the bulldozer, and then realized that McCleary was still puffing along after him. A dog had gotten to his artificial arm and McCleary left the arm with the dog. Without it, McCleary ran crippled. The best he could manage was a lumbering, puffing, listing lunge.

Remo had the dozer running by the time McCleary got there.

“You got black man’s feet,” said Remo in revenge of his high-school years when blacks had outrun him and outplayed him, when the joke was if a player couldn’t move fast, he had what was called the “white man’s disease.”

“Through the fence,” said McCleary. Remo worked the gears. McCleary helped him. The bulldozer rattled and chugged, its treads crushing the gravel and scrub, moving forward. Remo helped McCleary jump off. The dozer chugged on into the electrified fence, setting off an explosion of light that would make a rock star envious.

They ran through the fence, and McCleary almost caught up to Remo, even with his sloppy gait, when his body jerked at the sound of a rifle bullet. Someone had gotten him in the back. McCleary went forward, too fast, faster than his legs, and he landed on the gravel.

Remo spun on the spot and turned back for McCleary. Another shot chipped stone at his feet. He couldn’t sense the men firing in the confusion.

“Get out of here. Take this. Get it to home. Get it to home,” said McCleary. He was pushing a cardboard package about half as long as a carton of cigarettes and twice as wide. “Get this to home. Go. Move it.”