Warren Murphy: Spoils Of War

The senator's whole right arm trembled, but he wrote down the information.

"Now, for the grand finale, let the CIA in on your plans to control the United States with your zombie deserter army. And don't forget to mention that you engineered the massacres at those four army bases to get your recruits. That ought to wow 'em out in Langley."

Nooner wrote until the final period was placed near the bottom of the page.

Remo released him. "Is that all?" the senator asked.

"Put down that you swear the above to be true and verifiable, then sign your name. I saw that in a movie once. It made everything legal or something."

"All right." He signed his name with a flourish. "What are you going to do to me?"

Remo folded the paper and placed it in an envelope. "Got a stamp?"

The senator pointed at a desk. Remo placed the stamp on the envelope, addressed and sealed it, and put it in his pocket. 'Til mail it, just to be sure," he said with a wink. "To answer your question, I don't know. I was planning to kill you, you know, but you've been so cooperative and everything. Besides,

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sending you to jail for three hundred years or so might be more interesting. If you're dead, nobody will care much whether you were guilty or not."

The two men sat staring at each other for what seemed to both of them like a long time. "Tell you what I'm going to do," Remo said, slapping his thigh. "You call the director of the CIA at home right now and tell hún everything in the letter, and I won't kill you."

"How do I know I can trust you to keep your word?" the senator asked.

Remo smiled. "You don't. Now you know how your constituents feel."

Wearily the senator picked up the telephone and dialed. He greeted the sleepy voice at the other end of the line with a monotonal rendition of the contents of his letter.

"Whaaat?" the CIA director said, yawning. "What kind of crap is this?"

'Tell him that if he doesn't send a team to pick you up within five minutes, you're going to blow up his house," Remo whispered.

Nooner gave him a disgusted look and parroted the words back into the phone.

"Well, okay, Ozzie, if that's the way you feel about it. I'll get a car over there right away. You just hang loose, okay? Okay?"

"Sure," Nooner said, and hung up. "Satisfied?" Remo nodded. "And just in case you think you can get away with saying you were forced to lie under duress, the president is personally going to order an investigation of you in the morning. You've left tracks, Senator, and this letter points to the trail. Bye bye."

He waved and placed one leg outside the window.

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"I'll hunt you down," the senator threatened. "You'll be exposed for the crackpot you are. I'll be cleared in a minute."

Remo slapped his forehead. "Oh yeah. There's one thing I forgot to tell you. Just slipped my mind, I guess."

"Whaf s that?"

"I don't exist," Remo said, and slithered down the face of the building minutes before the CIA car arrived.

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Sixteen

It was high noon on the parade grounds at Fort Va-dassar. Chiun grumbled and complained all the way up the barbed-wire fence.

"Is Emperor Smith never satisfied?"

"We just have this one last little job to do, Little Father, and we're done with the assignment." Remo paused at the top of the fence to get an overview of the base. "After this mess, I'd say we were entitled to a couple of weeks of R and R in the sun. The tropics, maybe. Jamaica, or Martinique—"

"Or Sinanju," Chiun said dreamily. "The sun shines nicely in Sinanju."

Remo cleared his throat. "Maybe Smitty'11 put us on another case."

"What else remains to be done here? We have eliminated the false priestlet. We have eliminated the red-haired woman. We have eliminated the senator. What is left?"

"We have to eliminate this army," Remo said grimly, watching Fort Vadassar's 100,000 recruits in drill formation. "They deserted in herds after the press conference."

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"But you said the newspapers would retract their statements today."

"That's not going to stop these zombies," Remo said. "They've been brainwashed. Anybody who tries to disband this army is asking for war."

He looked out over the parade grounds. The number of soldiers had swelled to fill the base, and all their faces bore the blank, burned-out stamp of Randy Noonefs control. Each platoon on the grounds was at least 8,000 men strong and led by top Quad officers, their telltale sabers dangling from their belts.

Remo shook his head as the officers shouted their commands. Each of the thousands of men in each platoon obeyed in perfect robot precision.

"Tahiti. If we get through this, we deserve no less than Tahiti."

"Sinanju," Chiun insisted.

"We'll talk about it later." Remo let go of the barbed wire and dropped to the ground. "Let's start in the officers' mess. If s lunchtime."

The officers' dining room hardly qualified as a mess hall. Silken draperies adorned the walls, and ornate filigreed brass outlined both entrances. Candles lit the room, their flickering light seemingly in rhythm with the droning ancient music in the background. The hearty laughter of men rang out over the babble of Quati spoken at the tables. On a small stage, a rotund woman in harem costume gyrated seductively. Other women similarly clad made the rounds of the tables, offering drinks and honeyed desserts.

Spotting Remo and Chiun in the doorway, two of the officers rose and asked them to state their business. Remo stuck a finger through one man's left

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temple. "That's my business," he said. Chiun dispatched the other officer with a swift kick to the crotch, causing the man's legs to part near his navel.

In an instant, the place was in an uproar. The woman hid, screaming shrilly. The men rushed toward Remo and Chiun, their sabers bared.

One by one they fell, their swords flailing wildly in the air. Remo and Chiun worked a double inside line attack, systematically knocking down the crowd of officers as though they were dominoes. When they had completed the inside line near the far entrance, they doubled back in an outside line, obliterating the rest.

"Your elbow was bent," Chiun snapped.

"Save it, Little Father. We've got too much work to do."

"It is important. Without a straight arm, it is possible to maim without killing. That is both cruel to your target and dangerous to you."

Remo was abashed. "I'll remember next time, Chiun," he said. "There's no time to check the bodies now. We've got to get to the parade grounds before someone shows up here."

"Very, very dangerous," Chiun said, visibly angry. They left through the back entrance.

Beneath the rubble of broken bodies, a hand moved slightly. It pushed to remove the weight of five men piled on top of it, but could not. The hand snaked slowly between the bodies as the owner of the hand gasped and panted for breath. Then the hand shot out past the topmost corpse, a little flag signaling the life Remo's faulty elbow had spared.

The man pulled and writhed his way past the grisly load bearing down on him. He was in great

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pain. Nearly all his ribs were broken. Occasionally his lungs would fill up, and he coughed and spat blood. He was dying.

Still, he wrestled with the remains of his fellow officers, trying not to look at their bizarre positions and blank stares.

For the first time in his life, he missed Quat.

An eternity beneath the bodies. Then air. The man passed out for seconds at a time. But between the blackouts, he crawled.

He crawled to the door and scratched at it like a dog until it opened from his feeble efforts. He crawled outside, where he could still see the small outlines of the two strange men, the American and the old Oriental, who had come from nowhere to kill the Quati at Fort Vadassar. They were heading for the parade grounds. They wanted the rest of the officers. They were professional killers, of that he was sure. But the younger one had been sloppy with him. He had made a mistake, a tiny mistake, a fraction of an inch, but enough to spare the officer's life for a few minutes. He would use those minutes now to see that the assassins paid for their mistake.