"When we come back we will fill the sky with so many helicopters we'll block out the damned sun," said a state trooper, angry that they should yield to an outlaw band.
"Then we will fight in the shade," said Running Deere.
His words and the deeds of the Ojupa spread to other reservations. By the time the reinforced state troopers returned, they were met by a little army composed of frustrated, downtrodden braves, and this time the army outnumbered the troopers.
And Little Elk, warned about helicopters, had prepared defenses against the slow-moving targets with the many guns. The state troopers fought bravely that day, but the Ojupa were braver and shrewder.
Many died, but as the stranger said, "The tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots."
They buried their dead, even as warnings that the Oklahoma National Guard were about to close in came to the little cemetery on the hill.
One of the dead was Big Buffalo, or Bill Buffalo as he was known for a while. He was buried with full honors, even though it didn't seem as though he died in battle. There were powder burns at his right temple and a gun was found in his right hand. One of the braves remembered his last words.
Big Bill Buffalo had kept repeating: "Tu cogno, tu cogno."
No one knew what it meant, until later, when it was all over, one of Buffalo's teachers from Chicago came down to pay last respects to one of his finest students ever.
"Who was he talking to?" asked the teacher.
"Wasn't talking to anyone. He was looking at our friend who came out of the campfire, and just kept saying those funny words. He said them and then put the gun to his head. And bang. Pulled the trigger," said the witness.
"His words are Latin. And they mean 'I know you. You I know.'"
"Well, shoot," said one of the other braves, listening in. "That's good. 'Cause no one else here knows him."
With the leadership of the stranger and their own good fighting skills and courage, the Ojupa that day registered the first Indian victory against federal troops since the Battle of Little Big Horn. But by now other tribes were ready to join, because this time the word was in the air:
"This time we can win."
In Washington the news was grim. An entire National Guard division, one of the best in the country with the most modern equipment, had been soundly defeated in Oklahoma. Not only that, but the Indian band was growing daily as it marched northward. It had to be stopped.
The problem was that it would be Americans fighting Americans.
"If we win, we still lose," said the President. "We've got to find a way to stop this without a war," said the Secretary of the Interior.
"If you could increase our budget," began the Secretary of Defense.
"What on earth is left for you to buy?" snapped the President, astonished that the Defense Department still wanted to spend more money even though every month it went through the gross national product of most of the rest of the world.
"We could form an exploratory purchase committee to look for new technology."
"We have enough technology. We need a quiet victory without a battle," said the President.
"Impossible. Those things don't exist," said the Secretary of the Interior.
"We could buy one," said the Secretary of Defense.
"From whom?" asked the President. He was known to the public as an amiable person, not concerned with details. But every cabinet member knew he had a firm, sharp grasp of facts, and while he never became angry in front of television cameras, he certainly could show anger in these meetings.
There was silence among the cabinet.
"Thank you, gentlemen. That's all I want to know," he said, dismissing them. Then he went to the bedroom in the White House and, at the proper time, took a red telephone out of a bureau drawer. He did not have to dial. As soon as he picked up the phone it would ring. This time he did not hear the reassuring voice saying that everything would be taken care of, that there was no wall that posed an obstacle or killer elite that was a threat. This time, reaching out for America's most powerful and most secret enforcing arm, he got a wrong number.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and there was no reason he couldn't handle a simple telephone connection as well as the next guy. It was just a matter of putting one connector into another. That it had to be done by getting past guard dogs, and over one of the most modern defense perimeters in the world, did not matter. It was still a simple connection.
"You plug the red socket into the red receptacle. We've colored it red so you won't forget," Harold W. Smith had told him.
There had been a problem on the direct-access line from the White House and Smith feared that the President might not be able to get through without being compromised by some new electronic device on sale to the public. There was so much electronics out there, private eavesdropping, that it had become a problem for the organization to keep its secret phone calls secret. The very office of the presidency could be ruined if ever it was discovered an organization so contrary to the laws of the country was being used to protect those very same laws. There would be disaster if others than the small group that comprised it should ever know of its existence.
Therefore more secure phone access was called for.
As Harold W. Smith, the lemon-faced head of the organization, explained it, Remo should imagine sound waves as two giant pillows encapsulating the world. America's eavesdropping and Russia's. Where they met created an absolutely perfect interference pattern. If the organization could establish its sending base inside that area by the simple plugging of one cord into a monitoring station there, then the President could use his red phone without fear of anyone listening in.
The problem was that the monitoring station was in Cuba, right smack in its most heavily fortified area, just outside the American base at Guantanamo. There the Cuban special forces practiced approaching the American defenses and then retreating. To penetrate the monitoring station to repair the phone lines in the overlap area would be like swimming through a tide of oncoming humans, the best-trained humans in Cuba.
"Let me get this straight," Remo had said. "The red plug into the red socket."
Smith nodded. They were on a small patrol boat just off the coast of Florida. They would meet, if everything went well, in Puerto Rico after the assignment. Even though it was sweltering, Smith still wore his gray three-piece suit.
"And the blue wire into the blue connector. We know the Russian connector is blue. They always coat their connectors in that sort of installation with blue. It's a special noncorrosive metal. Everything tends to corrode in the Caribbean. The Russians have placed their station over an old American monitoring station. Don't worry about the electronics. It will work. Just get into the station with the equipment. And then get out without them knowing you were ever there. That's the problem. We're piggybacking this thing. They've got to think everything is running normally. Can you do it?"
"Red into red," said Remo.
"Getting in and out without being seen, through a wave of their special forces?"
"And blue into blue," said Remo. He looked at the blue wire. Nothing special, no longer than nine inches, with a tiny electrode attached. And the red plug seemed just like a simple outlet plug. He held both of them in one hand.
"Through a wave of their special forces without them knowing you were ever there," repeated Smith.
"Red into red. Blue into blue. Should be easy," Remo had said.
"If they know you've been there, the whole thing is blown," said Smith.
"I'll put the red one in first," said Remo.
And he kept that in mind as he waited for dusk to slip into a little gully just beneath a marine machine gun nest at the outer rim of the Guantanamo naval base. He could have told the marines a friend was going to move through their lines, but their help would probably only serve to alert the other side.
Читать дальше