Warren Murphy: Shooting Schedule

"How does it end?" Chiun asked as he leafed through it.

"Don't ask me. I didn't get that far. There was too much to do, what with all those Jap extras not speaking English or knowing how to die on cue."

"I never got a script," Sheryl said. Her face was pale, but the color was slowly returning. She kept her eyes averted from the flickering TV screen.

Chiun read in silence. His parchment features lost their animation. Only his eyes moved as they skimmed the pages.

He looked up with grave features when he was finished. "I understand now," he said, clapping the script shut. "We cannot wait. We must go into the city. Now.. "

"What is it?" Bill Roam demanded. "I will explain on the way."

"I'm coming too," Sheryl said.

"No offense, Sheryl," Bill Roam rumbled, "but no squaws this time out. This is men's work."

"I've got just as much right to fight those bastards as you do," Sheryl shouted. "It's my city, Sunny Joe. Not yours. You're a damn reservation Indian. And Chiun isn't even American. But those are my family and friends they're butchering. I have to do my part."

Bill Roam looked to Chiun. "The little lady has a powerful point, I guess."

"Then come," Chiun said. "We must act swiftly."

The Christmas-morning sun broke over the eastern seaboard like a slow radiant kiss. As the planet revolved, the twilight zone between day and night crossed the continental United States like a shadow in retreat.

The last place to see the sun rise was California. And at Castle Air Force Base, the word came down the Air Force chain of command to cart-start the B-52 bomber chosen to carry out Operation Hellhole.

Captain Wayne Rogers, USAF, received his orders in a sealed envelope. Face ashen, he turned to his copilot. "Well, this looks like it."

The big B-52 bomber rolled out of its revetment and onto the flight line. Rogers eased the throttle forward, and the big lumbering bird surged ahead, gathering airspeed for takeoff.

They rolled past a line of K-135 aerial tankers. They would not be needed for midair refueling. Not on this mission. Even though he hadn't opened his sealed orders, Captain Rogers knew his target.

The bomber lifted off and swung in a 180-degree right turn. Not toward the Pacific and some foreign target, but inland. Into the continental United States. When he had leveled the ship off at cruising altitude, Captain Rogers nodded to his copilot. The other man tore the envelope open.

"It's Yuma," he croaked.

"Holy Christ!" Captain Wayne Rogers said.

He tried to concentrate on his instruments. The hundreds of red and green lights were like a high-tech Christmas tree. From time to time they blurred and he wondered if his sight was going. Then he realized he had been crying unawares.

"Merry Christmas, Yuma," he muttered bitterly. "Wait'll you see what Santa's bringing you this year."

Chapter 21

Bartholomew Bronzini watched the sun rise on the final day of his life.

The red light came in through the ornate bars of his cell in the main cellblock at Yuma Territorial Prison. It transformed the now-completed scaffolding into a smoldering silhouette. The cameras had long ago been put in place; they were using a three-camera setup.

"Like they were filming a cheap sitcom," he spat. Bronzini had not slept all night. Who could sleep when he was worth an estimated one billion dollars, had a face that hung in millions of dorms and dens, and was about to be hanged by the neck for the crime of agreeing to star in a Japanese movie?

Besides, all night long, sounds of fighting had come from the city. Bronzini wondered if the Rangers had landed. But he saw no parachute drop, heard no planes overhead. Maybe the citizens had found their balls.

Hope had begun to rise in his heart, hope of rescue, but as the night wore on, it was dashed time and again as the fighting died down, began anew, and nothing happened at the Yuma Territorial Prison except that his guards continued fussing with the camera setup. They rushed back and forth nervously, which Bronzini attributed to being up all night without sleep.

With the dawn, Bartholomew Bronzini, America's number-one screen superstar, knew exactly how prisoners felt on death row.

He decided they wouldn't take him without a fight. Bronzini withdrew from the door and hunkered on one side of the cell. His fist compressed into bloodless mallets of bone. He waited.

The sounds of commotion stabbed at his heart. He set himself. Sounds of running, yelling, and frantic activity swept through the prison-turned-museum. APC motors started up. A tank growled to life, and its tracks clanked on asphalt.

"Ready when you are, you sake guzzlers," Bronzini growled under his breath. "You're going to need more than a tank to get me up on that stage."

To his surprise, the sounds faded in the distance. An eerie silence fell over the Yuma Territorial Prison. It was broken only by the distant percussive stutter of automatic-weapons fire and intermittent explosions.

Bronzini came up out of his crouch. In the courtyard, cameras stood unattended. His guards were gone. Bronzini wasted no time. He attacked the cell door. The wrought iron was held in place by two horizontal crosspieces attached to hinges. Since the former hellhole of Arizona had been turned into a tourist attraction, the cell doors had been maintained with an eye toward appearance, not practicality. Bronzini knelt beside one crosspiece and tried to force it. The screws were embedded in three-foot-thick stone walls. He felt some give, but not much. The top crosspiece felt solid.

Bronzini looked around the cell. There were only a bed and a plain wooden dresser for furniture, but in the center of the stone floor a fat steel restraining ring was bolted to a metal plate. Bronzini went to this. He squatted over it, taking a position not much different from one he used to lift heavy weights.

Bronzini began pulling slowly, then with greater force. The veins in his reddening neck bulged. He groaned: The ring refused to budge, but he was Bartholomew Bronzini, the man with the greatest muscles in Hollywood. He grunted and groaned with the strain. Sweat soaked the hack of his black leather combat suit.

Bronzini's animal-like groans grew into a crescendo, and were joined by another groan-the inhuman cry of metal stressed-to the breaking point.

The plate gave: Bronzini fell on his ass. But he had the ring. He jumped up and attacked the door with it. It took very little time. One hinge cracked. Another one came free. The door hung by the padlock. Bronzini shoved it aside impatiently.

He stepped out into the stone courtyard and made his way past the rows of open-air cells until he came to the parking lot. He moved cautiously, although he expected to encounter no opposition.

There was a pickup parked in front of the museum gift shop. Bronzini got in and hot-wired the engine and soon had the pickup squealing up Prison Hill Road.

Bronzini drove recklessly, not exactly sure where he was going or what he was going to do once he got there. The roads were deserted, but as he pulled into the city, there were people standing in their yards, looking anxious and confused. Bronzini pulled up to one of them.

"Yo! What's going down?" he barked.

"The Japanese have pulled back into town," an older man said excitedly. "There's heavy fighting, but no one knows who they're mixing it up with."

"Rangers?"

"Your guess is as good as anyone's. We're all wondering what to do."

"Why don't you fight? It's your city."

"With what?" the man demanded. "They took all our guns."

"So? This is Arizona. The wild west. Take 'em back."

The man peered closer. "Say, now, aren't you that actor fella? Bronzini."

"I'm not exactly proud of it right now, but yeah."

"Didn't recognize you without your headband."