Warren Murphy: Angry White Mailmen

After that Remo followed the Master of Sinanju to a waiting taxi.

"Why did you not come to my aid sooner?" Chiun sniffed. "You know I am nearly toothless in my present condition."

"I was pretending I wasn't with you, okay?"

"I do not blame you," Chiun said, voice suddenly dejected. "I have allowed myself to be shamed in your eyes. And in the eyes of my ancestors. I wear a horn of jade where my Killing Nail should be."

"That's not it, Little Father. I just didn't want to be made."

Chiun's eyebrows lifted. "But it's all right that I am made?"

"Look, you couldn't be more obvious if you carried a flag. I like to blend in."

"I would like to blend the Japanese shogun who stole my honor," Chiun said fiercely.

"Just keep a low profile and you'll get your wish," Remo cautioned.

Chiun gave the driver instructions and Remo spent the ride looking out the rear window in case they were being pursued.

"You know they'll be looking for us when we try to fly out of Osaka," Remo undertoned.

"I will be looking for them, too," sniffed Chiun. "They who dared covet the nail protector of Gi."

"A previous Master broke a nail?"

"Gi had weak cuticles and protected his Killing Nails when he was not dispatching enemies of the Khan with them."

"Which Khan?"

"Kublai."

"Gi worked for the Khan who oppressed Korea?"

"Gi offered his services to the Korean emperor, whose offer was far less than that of the Khan."

"Doesn't sound like much of a Master."

"He was a wonderful historian and so we revere him."

"You revere him," said Remo, "The only thing I revere is finishing this freaking assignment."

"Oh? Are Japanese bothering you?"

"They're starting to," Remo growled. Chiun only smiled thinly.

FROM THE OSAKA AIRPORT the red taxicab conveyed them to a train yard where old diesel locomotives sat rusting and peeling.

While the cab waited, Chiun went among these and inspected them carefully, knocking on noses and sides until he was satisfied.

The Master of Sinanju haggled with the yardmaster in Japanese. Then they reclaimed their cab. "What was that all about?" asked Remo.

"You will see."

Next Remo found himself in an airfield where helicopters buzzed overhead. Again there was haggling. Then Chiun called out, "Come, Remo we are going for a short ride."

Soon a giant helicopter sky crane was lifting off with Remo and Chiun in the cabin.

Night had fallen. Chiun guided the pilot with quick gestures. Before long they were over the train yard. A cable was lowered at Chiun's direction and the locomotive was secured by a ground crew.

"Why are we stealing a locomotive?" Remo wanted to know.

"We are not. I have purchased it at a fair price,"

"Yeah? What are you going to do with a locomotive? It won't exactly fit into the overhead bins on the flight home."

Chiun examined his nails. "I will think of something."

Twenty minutes later they were approaching a great industrial complex of white buildings under blue-white floodlights. Remo looked down. He saw a tiny helicopter on a roof helipad. The helipad was in the shape of the three-moons symbol of the Nishi samurai clan, now Nishitsu Industrial Electrical Corporation.

If they stayed on course, the ponderous weight of the diesel locomotive would soon overfly the helipad, Remo saw.

"You're not thinking what I think you're thinking," Remo said.

"We have been asked to deliver an unmistakable message."

"Does he know that?" Remo asked, indicating the earphoned pilot in the control bucket.

"Not as yet."

"So all we have to do is pressure him to hit the cable release at the right moment?"

"No, he will never do that because he would fall into great difficulties. I will persuade him to tarry here a moment or two. Having accomplished the difficult part of the assignment, the rest will be up to you."

Remo shrugged. "Fair enough." And opening the side door, he stepped out into a wheel strut. His actions were so quick and fluid that the pilot, occupied with his flying, didn't notice.

Remo was gone almost five minutes. The skycrane started to pitch and sway. Then with an adroit parting of cable, the helicopter suddenly rose higher, freed of its tremendous burden.

The locomotive actually whistled as it fell. Its monstrous moon shadow lay over the helipad, and kept shrinking. It struck with a great booming like a peal of thunder. The chopper actually shivered.

The pilot started to caterwaul the most ungodly curses as Remo climbed back in. He hadn't noticed Remo was gone.

"What took you so long?" asked Chiun.

"Cable that thick takes time to snap," said Remo, looking at his greasy hands.

Chiun made a face. "If you have correct fingernails, your hands would now be clean."

Remo frowned.

"I thought you were off this fingernail kick?"

"I have agreed that you may wear your nails as you wish. That does not mean I am forbidden from describing other options."

In the control bucket, the sweaty-faced pilot swung his ship around to inspect the damage.

It wasn't complete, but there was a big hole where the main Nishitsu roof had been. Gone were the helipad and its helicopter. Smoke and flames were boiling up. Amazingly, almost no one reacted on the ground. Since it was evening, loss of life would be minimal.

And the Master of Sinanju leaned forward and took hold of the pilot's very red neck.

The pilot decided this was the airspace he most didn't want to loiter in. The skycrane went rattling away like a huge frightened pelican.

"Think they'll get the message?" asked Remo.

Chiun shrugged. "Who is to say? They are Japanese and therefore thick of head and slow of wit."

Chapter 5

Dr. Harold W Smith had been plucked out of the CIA data-analysis section to run the supersecret government agency called CURE for more than one reason. There were many excellent analysts in those early days of the CIA when Univac computers the size of an entire room were constantly keypunching data to be processed and analyzed.

It was said of Smith in those Cold War days that he was worth two Univacs. The raw intelligence that passed before his gray eyes prior to being fed to the big systems often never reached the keypunch stage. Smith had only to glance over it, correlate it with other data cataloged in his gray brain and inform a superior of his conclusions.

"The Soviets are about to crush the Hungarian revolution," Smith would warn.

"What makes you say that?"

And Harold Smith would reel off a list of seemingly routine troop and armor movements, canceled vacations, recalled ambassadors, increased food imports and other outwardly unrelated data in support of his conclusion. And he would be right.

At first he was dismissed out of hand.

"Leave the correlating to the computers, Harold."

But Smith was stubborn. And not blind. He kept offering his analyses, and they were on the money 99.7 percent of the time.

As punishment, Smith was exiled to a windowless office of his own. To his superior's intense exasperation, he continued predicting world events and continued memoing his superiors. And he was invariably, infuriatingly, stubbornly correct.

Finally they had no choice but to promote him to senior analyst. From then on, the agency pretended Harold Smith was just another Univac. In fact, he outperformed the Univacs, which were only brute computers whose keypunched ticker tape had to be decoded by higher-level analysts. Uncorrelated data in, correlated data out.

With Smith, they skipped two of the three steps. And saved on electricity.

Smith called the revolution in Cuba correctly. He proved conclusively on paper that the so-called missile gap was just Soviet propaganda perpetuated by Pentagon scare mongers. And by the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the CIA was only too glad to see him take early retirement. A man that unrelentingly single-minded could be a royal pain in the ass.