Mark Townsend - White captive

"One grand, as we agreed before," he answered matter-of-factly. "Straight from Havana."

"Is it real?" Duke asked skeptically, and then added, "Lemme see it."

The negro lifted the briefcase off the floor and reached in to pull out a large stack of twenty dollar bills.

"Care to count them?"

"Naw, man, just wanna make sure they's real," Duke answered and peeled one from the stack where they had been placed on the table.

He looked it over carefully, studying every detail by raising it to the light and looking intently through it. After several minutes, he turned his head to the waiting visitor and nodded his approval.

"Looks okay," he said. "We been stuck with some phony stuff for some o' the other jobs we done for ya."

"You spent it, didn't you, like it was real," the other negro said impatiently.

"Yeah, yeah, man, it was good stuff, but for the risks me and my boys takes, it oughta be right stuff. We don't charge much, ya know."

"I'll tank to the man about it in the future," he was answered curtly, and the negro turned back to the map.

Susan watched him carefully. In spite of her concern over her own precarious position, her curiosity had been aroused by the trend of the strange conversation. Most of the people she knew were of the opinion that the negro ghetto flare-ups that had occurred throughout the country were a spontaneous kind of thing that had been brought on by accidental incidences, and were not the result of some master plan controlled by any central organized group. Now, she was not so certain, and concentrated on the well-dressed negro's words as he began to speak.

"This is where we start it," he said with a grim tone to his voice. She could see that he was pointing to a side street that ran adjacent to the main artery through the Chicago ghetto.

"They'll never expect it here. They'll be looking for it on the main drag where they've got all the fuzz concentrated. We could never get a crowd gathered otherwise. They'd have it broken up in two minutes after all the lessons they learned last summer."

"W-W-Where ya g-gonna git a c-c-crowd," Stitch stuttered, a puzzled expression on his face.

"That's what you four and the others of your group get the thousand for," the speaker answered with a smile. "You see this point on the map," he continued, pointing to the center of a block. "This is where two of you will get picked up by the cops for being drunk and breaking a window in the cleaning shop that's located here. When they arrive to arrest you, you'll start a fight so they'll have to call a patrol wagon and bring in others. This will isolate them from the main group on the next street so they can't organize into any kind of wedge formation to break anything up before we can get started."

"Man, that ain't gonna git no crowd," Shorty, who had been sitting silent, interrupted. "We gotta hundred beefs goin' all the time down there."

"Next step," the negro continued as though anticipating this objection, "is a molotov cocktail through the window of this supermarket just down the street. They've got a stock of cleaning fluid and other inflammable material stored right next to the window where it goes through. It'll go up like a Roman candle. This, of course, brings in the fire department."

He paused for a moment with a self-assured smile on his face, and looked around the table.

"Does everyone see now the beginning of a crowd?"

"Ya crazy, man, ya talking about a hunderd years for anybody what gits caught," Duke spoke with alarm. "We cain't do that, for no money."

"You'll have help," their visitor said with quiet confidence. "Once this stage is reached, they won't have time to worry about arresting two drunken brawlers and an arsonist. You see these buildings?" he asked, marking five of them on an enlarged map.

"These are better sniper positions than all the trees in the jungle of Viet Nam. We've marked out twenty vacant rooms that we can pick off the honky police and firemen from, and have another forty for alternate positions that each man moves to after his primary position is discovered. We've twenty-five of the best trained guerrilla fighters you can find anywhere already familiarizing themselves with the area and their escape routes. When one building is overrun, we'll get out through the sewers. If one knows those underground routes well, there's no one in the world who can catch them unless that person knows them too, and so far, the honkies haven't caught on to the fact that we aren't just another mob. They haven't planned for the way we're going to do it this time."

"Where'd ya git these guerrilla fighters ya talkin' so big about," Duke interjected, a forced skepticism in his voice. He didn't mind the planning and brainwork of something like this being in other hands if the money were good enough, but violence had always been his business, and he sensed a sudden tinge of jealous concern flicker through his mind with the realization that even this was being taken from him. "I got guys that kin take care o' honky cops."

"You got guys that can use a shive or zip gun," the smooth self-assured negro said contemptuously. "That did the job last summer, but it won't do it this time. We can't leave it in the hands of amateurs."

"Man," Duke half shouted at him and leaped to his feet. "I kin take on all twenty five of them cats o' yours anyday and don't ya try and tell me I cain't."

Unruffled by the sudden outburst, the negro out lining the plan stepped back from the table and put his hands in his pockets. He stood still for a moment not saying a word as Duke leered at him with clenched fists across the width of the table.

"Say it, man, say I cain't, lemme hear ya say it," the enraged Duke shouted again.

His antagonist turned back to him and spoke without raising his voice. "Can you fire an M-16 rifle, Duke?"

There was a long silence and Susan could see the blood rising in Duke's face as he suddenly sensed a defeat that he was unprepared for.

"Naw, man," he finally sputtered, his voice lowering a degree in bitter retreat. "But what's that got to do with it?"

"Just this," he was answered in a calm even tone. "The honky National Guardsmen down on the street know how and they've got them. They could cut down your boys with their knives and zip guns in a matter of minutes. You wouldn't stand a chance. The men we've got there now have learned to use their equipment well, taught by the honky army itself in Viet Nam. And, we've just brought them back from six additional months in Cuba where they've had the best guerrilla training in the world. And, another thing, they've got M-16's too, and can use them ten times better than the young green honkies in the guard."

Duke stood for a moment, his composure and command completely gone, and then sat slowly back down in the chair. He had no answer for that argument and knew the others knew it too. They had seen the city last summer when the guard had moved in with their tanks and machine guns and automatic weapons, and nothing he could say now would matter one bit. His own men would know he was wrong and that the smooth-talking educated son-of-bitch with the black horned-rimmed glasses was right. A puny thin bastard that he could twist into nothing with his little finger, and here he was humiliating and degrading him before the others like he was dirt. And, there was nothing he could do about it; nothing in his background had prepared him for arguing against this new confident breed that were slowly taking over the world he had known and controlled by brute cunning all his life.

Susan felt the impact of the heavy silence that followed the one-sided and unequal exchange, and suddenly within herself, in spite of all she had gone through at the hands of the four brutal negroes, found her heart going out to them and all their kind. For some reason, she remembered with clarity at this particular moment a favorite statement of Mr. Herman, her anthropology teacher in school, about how funny the first two legged clumsy creatures to walk upon the earth must have looked to the monkeys swinging gracefully through the trees. She had always pictured them following the earth-bound creatures through the jungles, taunting them with their excited chatter and throwing objects down on them from above, safe and secure in their haven above the ground until one day, eons later, they suddenly found themselves caged and gaped at as objects of jest by those very creatures they had tormented with such impunity at an earlier time.