Remo The Adventure Begins (8 page)

“We’ll double the gold payment if you can do it in a year,” said McCleary. Smith shot him a dirty look.

“In a year, you will have your first head on the wall. The payment will be delivered by your undersea ships?”

Smith cleared his throat. “Yes.” he said. He hated to waste money, and he knew McCleary knew it.

“Let me explain, we are a democracy, as I said. And our organization assists that democracy in working,” said Smith. “We are secret. Therefore we need the natural kill. We need Remo to know how to do that so at crucial times, no one will know it is even a death.”

“Of course,” said Chiun. “Assist democracy.” He had known it all along. Some future emperors were often hesitant about stating their goals, usually because their advancement involved the death of a parent.

An assassin had to know these things, be able to handle the delicate wording of them. A natural or accidental kill had made so many princes into kings. If Smith wanted, Chiun could even provide him, for modest extra cost, the most appropriate statements of grief he would most naturally make on hearing of the untimely death of the current emperor, in America called President.

“Yes,” said Smith. “You understand. McCleary, you see he understands.”

Chiun bowed. Smith nodded. McCleary wondered.

Smith got back to work immediately. The normal procedures to access certain government files were not working. It was that defense thing again. But now Smith was not only certain something was wrong, he was sure that it was wrong on purpose.

Private Anthony D’Amico pulled the trigger on the new AR-60 assault rifle, Grove Industries’ latest offering for the defense of America. The AR-60 could shoot more accurately, faster, and under more difficult conditions than any other personal weapon in the history of warfare. That’s what the specifications said. The specifications justified the fifteen-hundred-dollar price tag that went with each rifle. And the Army’s estimate of how much it cost to train, feed, and transport a footsoldier justified the additional cost per unit. It all made so much sense, the Army had already ordered enough to equip a full division.

No one could deny its feasibility for combat. The gun was a miracle of design. The AR-60 field test was then just a formality. And of course to have a field test, one had to have a field. So the training center at Fort Baxter, Virginia, was chosen. And footsoldiers were chosen, and on this bright autumn day the squad marched to an open field in front of a reviewing stand and then as if in combat crawled forward across the field. Again, as if in combat, enemies appeared a thousand yards ahead of them. But unlike enemies these were all made of reinforced cardboard. And unlike most enemies they all exploded as rounds of AR-60 slugs poured into them. All of them, except the one Private Anthony D’Amico aimed at.

It remained unscathed. The man on his right had to mow it down. D’Amico was wincing in pain, holding his rifle limply in front of him. The sergeant came running over.

“D’Amico. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“The housing is loose. Touch the barrel. It’s hot,” said Private D’Amico.

“Screw the housing,” snarled the sergeant under his breath. “Brass is on the reviewing stand. This is a show. Just shoot the damned thing. Don’t feel it up.”

“It jammed.”

“Unjam it.”

“It’s the Grove AR-60.”

“I know that. Just give it a bang, it will work. Now get moving. My squad is not going to foul up in front of brass, not Sergeant Johnson’s squad.”

Sergeant Johnson waved the squad forward. Few people on the reviewing stand had cause to notice what was going on between a sergeant and a private. Most of them had a master’s in business administration in addition to their military educations. What one sergeant said to one private had little effect on the columns of numbers that symbolized modern defense to them. If one wanted to concern himself about battles and sergeants and privates, he was in the wrong mode for advancement. Unit cost, not flags and victories, was the way to stars.

But one officer did notice. Major Rayner Fleming focused on the private even while other eyes in the stand were focused on her full bosom and stunning good looks. She was used to that. She could have been a model, but being looked at was not exactly her idea of a career. She was Army, Army since her father raised her on a military post, Army since she graduated from West Point. And to her what went on between sergeants and privates was very important. Those were the people you fought wars with.

“What happened there?” she asked, pointing to the private holding his rifle a little bit farther in front of him than the others.

“Nothing,” a colonel answered Major Fleming.

“I saw something. I think there may be a problem with that AR-60.”

“I am sure the sergeant has taken care of it, Major. Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she answered, knowing that the colonel was not staring at the day when he said that. “Both of them,” she added.

“What?” asked the colonel.

“Nothing,” answered Major Fleming. “They are going to rapid-fire now.”

The squad fell to prone position on the far side of a ditch, and with a loud roar sent screams of lead slugs crashing into wood and paper targets of soldiers.

This time D’Amico’s gun fired. It shot the housing back through his eye, throwing him with its force to the back of the ditch. D’Amico only remembered pulling the trigger and then watching the darkness of the universe close in around him.

In this last darkness, D’Amico thought he saw a single star, a very cold and small light in all eternity. And in communication far greater than words, it assured him that a force had been aroused that would avenge his death. But he didn’t care about that anymore. He knew, like so many men just about to pass over into death, that he was no longer part of his body and there was a beautiful quiet about him. No more guns. No more pain. And for all time it would be this way.

Sergeant Johnson was cursing in the muddy field. He was cursing the gun. He was cursing himself. He was cursing the Grove AR-60 construction.

“We took the best of the batches and still they fouled, sir,” he explained to the officers. But no explanation was necessary. The on-field explosion had triggered the distancing mechanism that had become second nature to the officers. Speaking in statistics and percentages, their backs to the field, they had all removed themselves from the problem, except for one. The woman. Major Rayner Fleming was now quiet, looking around the field. She picked up a piece of the barrel housing and saw the Grove label, and manufacturing number and plant number, on it.

She questioned the sergeant. She questioned the men.

“These were the best of the lot,” Sergeant Johnson kept repeating as medics arrived to collect the body. They checked the pulse, they checked the heart, but they knew he was dead. The brain was already leaking out through the eye.

“So there have been problems with the AR-60?”

“Fucking useless, sir,” said Sergeant Johnson. He was looking to the man he had just sent to his death. “Too many are just no good.”

“Why didn’t you report it?”

“We did, sir. I know for a fact the lieutenant and captain reported it.”

Major Fleming questioned the lieutenant and captain.

“I am Major Rayner Fleming, of Weapons Analysis.”

“Then why did you people, sir, okay this sort of demonstration, sir?” said the lieutenant.

“I am trying to find that out, lieutenant. Now let me see your report.”

The report was of course in the limited-access computer mode, on the base. Everything the sergeant had said could be verified there. Major Fleming, using her clearance numbers, followed the report to her headquarters a few miles north to Washington, in the five-sided building known as the Pentagon. Her access did not read out.

“Minor problem,” she said, taking the report numbers down with a pencil and paper. Funny, she thought. The last time I used paper and pencil was when I made out a grocery list.

She folded it in her pocket. She knew the Army. And she knew computers as well as any in the reviewing stand. She knew that when she got to her own terminal she would come at the report from the other end, and find out why exactly this unit at Baxter had been denied access to the overall weapons-performance chart.

But the next day, there was still that problem and an added one. An error in programming highly classified information on the major new missile defense system, HARP, had somehow resulted in data overlap. Reports on the lowly AR-60 that had killed the private the day before were now protected by the same computer classification that guarded the top-secret defense program. And she could not get access.

No one lower than a general could access HARP, and only a few of those.

Major Fleming smoothed her skirt just before she entered General Watson’s office. General Watson’s face was screwed in maximum concentration. He was taping the handle of his tennis racket.

General Watson had a suntanned face, immaculately combed white hair, and eyes of blue clarity seldom seen outside the Caribbean or a major gem. He was called the “old-style soldier”; that is, he believed in personal Washington contacts for advancement.

“Sir,” said Major Fleming. “Some problem with the weapons-control computer access, sir.”

“You know what I think of computers.”

“For numbers, sir, they have been known to be more effective than the abacus.”

“What’s that, a new weapon? Don’t flaunt your weapons knowledge at me, Major.”

“No sir, an abacus is a Chinese counting device of beads, strung on wires.”

“I don’t follow the new China technology,” said General Watson. He pressed the tape on the handle firmly against the butt. Good job, he thought.

“It’s three thousand years old,” said Major Fleming.

“No wonder it doesn’t work,” said General Watson.

Major Fleming hated these meetings. She once heard someone say that “to know General Watson was to have faith in America’s enemies, any enemies.”

“Sir, I am being denied access to important information I have a right to have. We lost a man yesterday because of the AR-60 malfunction, and I have every reason to believe its problems are intrinsic.”

“Then get rid of the intrinsic,” said General Watson. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

She did not bother to explain that “intrinsic” meant a basic flaw within the Grove AR-60 itself. She was not here to make up for what his tenth-grade English teacher failed to do.

“I need you to help me access through HARP. For some reason there is an invalid overlay.”

General Watson put down his tennis racket, mumbling something about war being hell. He personally supervised Fleming’s access through HARP, and waited impatiently while she punched up the AR-60 reports, and the key-weapons-flow chart. And what they indicated was a persistent pattern of weapons failure, due to materials inferiority. Someone was shortchanging the Army, and so obviously that even General Watson could see it.

“I think we have a negligence case against Grove Industries, sir,” said Major Fleming. And now General Watson showed where he had won his stars. He might never be too familiar with an order of battle, but he certainly knew where the important toes were.

“Negligence, Major. Do you know how many Grove plants there are? How many outside suppliers and contractors they employ? Any one of them could have been at fault. We could never prove negligence against Grove . . . even if we tried . . . believe me.”

“Have you ever tried?” said Major Fleming.

“You made your point, Major. I’ll see to it that it is included with the complete report I am making. Now if you will move away from the terminal, I will close access. We are in HARP now.”

She saw the screen flash green, and then the program backed out of America’s most sensitive new technology, the HARP.

“I would like to get field weapons out of that system so that I could get to it.”

“Good idea,” said General Watson, saluting. Then he turned and left, practicing his forehand through ordnance control, and marched right back to his office.

Major Fleming wrote out a report on the problems of AR-60 access, noting, with some emphasis, that all Grove AR-60 data as well as Grove HARP information was now protected by a computer system also devised by Grove Industries. Why, she wondered, did Grove seem to have its own special computer file, which obviously very few people could get at? In fact, if she were correct in her assumptions, just the people who should be getting into their files, could not.

6

R
emo, alone at last in the safe house used for training, was hatching his own plans. When he saw Chiun leave with McCleary, he eased out of the door. It was amazing how quickly he moved now, though he could not imagine trusting any of this in combat. It might all be oriental mental tricks. But this day, he had a plan he had been working on secretly for weeks. It was crucial that he not fail.

Once on the street, he joined moving crowds as though one of them, careful not to move too quickly, careful to appear just like anyone out for a little stroll. He did not want to give anything away. He paused, waiting to sense if Chiun were around. There was no sense of the man. The Master was gone. Remo crossed the street. As he neared the far side, he couldn’t stop himself. He broke into a run, almost tripping a group of young men. He dodged a patrolman lounging against a lamppost, almost knocking the man into the concrete sidewalk. Remo didn’t care. Let the guy try to collar him. He was too close. He could smell it. Up ahead something was broiling. It filled his nostrils, and his senses. He dashed through the crowds at the doorway, moved up to the front of the line despite angry stares, and blurted:

“Make it two quarter-pound burgers. Plenty of onions.”

Remo Williams had gotten to a hamburger.

Afterward he went into a druggist’s and asked a question that left the man confused.

“Do you have anything that can remove hamburger from the breath?”

Someone suggested whiskey. They were joking. Remo was not. It took him a large part of the afternoon to find something. He only hoped it worked. Certainly it tasted bitter enough to be effective.