Warren Murphy - Ground Zero

"Be careful!" Sky Bluel shouted. "Don't break it! You'll ruin everything!"

The chauffeur came to the rescue. He leapt to the other man's side and lent a supporting hand.

"Okay, I got it," the beefy man said, gingerly lugging the device to the open trunk of the waiting limousine.

"Looks like it's now or never," Taggert muttered, pulling a rayon stocking over his head.

When the neutron bomb almost slipped from the beefy guy's hands, Barry Kranish made his move. Dripping mud, he plunged from the car carrying a railroad spike by its pointed end. He lifted it high.

Then a car suddenly screeched out of traffic and lunged up on the wide sidewalk, heading right for the chauffeur.

"Stop!" the chauffeur bleated.

The car didn't stop.

Before he knew what had hit him, the car grille picked up the chauffeur and carried him right into the unyielding hotel facade. He bounced off and his upper body landed on the hood, broken legs pinned between the bumper and the building.

Sky Bluel screamed. She called to the beefy stagehand from the studio.

"Don't just stand there, do something!"

No answer. She tore her eyes away from the body and looked back.

The beefy guy lay sprawled on the sidewalk, his head spurting red fluid like a spasmodic squirt gun.

"God, this is worse than Kent State!" she moaned.

Another man had the neutron bomb, Sky saw to her mounting horror. Holding one end up by both hands, he was dragging the board along the sidewalk. There was mud everywhere.

"Stop! That's my bomb. What are you doing with my bomb?"

"Get a generation," the man called back, spitting brown droplets.

Desperate, Sky Bluel looked around for help. A man in a rumpled suit stepped from the car that had pinned the chauffeur. He looked like some kind of plainclothes cop, so Sky swallowed her pride and said, "See that man? That's my property he's stealing."

"Too bad," the man said in a cold voice. He was balling a handkerchief up in one hand. The other held a clear bottle, which he unscrewed with the flick of a strong thumb.

Looking fierce, the man capped the bottle with the cloth and upended it. It reminded Sky of old movies where the bad guy would chloroform an intended victim. They were pre-sixties movies and the women always acted helpless and screamed. It was too regressive for words, so Sky had always changed the channel at those parts. Consequently, she had no idea how to react now.

She decided to run. Too late.

The man caught her by the braided rawhide thong around her neck. The handkerchief jammed into her mouth and nose and the smell was like a really bad trip. Although the colors were interesting.

Sky Bluel fought the mounting odor that filled her lungs. She clutched at the strong hand. It might as well have been stone. Struggling, she snapped the rawhide thong, but by then it was too late. Far too late.

Sky was unconscious before the man gathered her up in his arms and threw her into the passenger seat of his car. He slid behind the wheel. The car backed up, hurling the dead chauffeur to the sidewalk, where he sustained several posthumous contusions, and vanished in traffic.

It went north. The car being driven by Barry Kranish went west. When the police arrived several minutes later, the overlapping descriptions of the fleeing cars they got from passersby tied them up a solid hour while they sorted it all out.

By the time they realized they were dealing with two separate assailants driving two different cars, the trail had gotten too cold to pick up.

When Don Cooder received the news from the pair of stone-faced police officers that not only had he no neutron bomb to stun the nation on tonight's Twenty-four Hours, but also his featured guest, Sky Bluel, had been abducted, he did not flinch.

He told the two police officers who had come to question him, "Could you excuse me for a moment, please?" and went into his office.

Twenty minutes later, the impatient police barged in.

They found Don Cooder hiding under his desk, a shell-shocked expression on his face, repeating something unintelligible over and over in a thick voice. He was unintelligible because he had his thumb in his mouth.

"What's that he's saying?" one cop asked the other.

"Sounds like 'What's the frequency, Kenneth?' "

"Sounds like we came to the wrong place," Remo whispered to Chiun as he absorbed the police account of the double abduction.

"There are more wrong places than this," Chiun said coldly.

They had been at the studio more than an hour. After slipping into the building and ascertaining that Sky Bluel was not there, they had decided to wait in the concealment of a darkened morningshow set.

The arrival of the police and the commotion that followed-particularly the anguished cries of a program director when he realized he had neither star, nor guest, nor material for the evening broadcast of Twenty-four Hours-made them realize something had gone wrong.

"What is the meaning of 'What is the frequency, Kenneth?' " Chiun asked as they exited the studio unseen.

"One of the two early-warning signs of an impending nervous breakdown," Remo explained.

"And what is the other?"

"Finding yourself dead last in the ratings."

They went immediately to the Penta entrance, which was only then being cordoned off with yellow police-barrier tape.

There they mingled with the crowd, picking up snatches of overheard exchanges between newly arrived detectives and witnesses. A detective was dropping a rawhide cord into a clear evidence bag.

"Sounds like they got Sky and the bomb," Remo muttered.

"Who are 'they'?" Chiun asked darkly.

"Damned if I know," Remo spat. "Maybe Cooder set this up. Anything is possible with that guy."

"This is obviously the handiwork of the same perpetrators as before," Chiun said, regarding the sprawled bodies. Both were draped by sheets, except that the head of one had been uncovered by a medical examiner for the benefit of a morgue photographer.

"How?" Remo said. "The Dirt Firsters all bit the dirt-so to speak. Except that screwball lawyer, Kranish. And this isn't his style. It must have been someone else. Terrorists who saw the news promo, or the Dirt Firsters' military connection."

"Behold that dead man, Remo," Chiun intoned, indicating the body with the exposed face. "Does he not remind you of someone?"

Remo looked. "No"

"Look closer. At his forehead."

Remo did. He saw a faint line circling the man's brow.

"Hey! Just like the dead guy we found in Missouri. See, Chiun? That proves it. He was a Dirt Firster. He musta lost his headband when he got run over."

"Then whose cap is that?" Chiun asked pointedly.

Remo followed Chiun's pointing finger. He saw the plain brown cap lying crushed on the sidewalk.

"Is that a military cap?" he asked.

"I do not think so. There is no insignia."

"I gotta check this out," Remo said, stepping over the police-barrier tape.

None of the detectives noticed him as he picked up the cap and stepped up to the corpse. The morgue photographer had gone over to the other body.

"Excuse me, pal," Remo told the corpse politely, whipping the sheet away. His eyes blinked at the sight of a chauffeur's brown livery. "Chauffeur?" he muttered blankly. To be sure, he lifted the man's inert head and tried out the cap. It was a perfect fit.

"Damn," Remo muttered, standing up. "A freaking chauffeur."

That got him noticed by the police.

"Hey! Who the hell are you?" the plainclothes detective with the evidence bag demanded.

"FBI," Remo said, offering a card from his wallet.

"This card says you're an EPA investigator," the detective said belligerently, "and I say you're under arrest."

"You got me," Remo said, offering his thick wrists.