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Warren Murphy: Spoils Of War

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Spoils Of War: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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The entire U.S. army is being forced to wage war on its own people by a pontificating ten-preacher and the blonde Venus traveling as his wife. But, saints be praised, Remo and Chiun are of a different persuasion, and their unorthodox tactics leave many a zombie-eyed Christian soldier prostrate on the ground. Chaplains are dying left and right . . . an army base appears out of nowhere those answers to a higher authority than even the Pentagon. Agents of CURE postulate that a Mideast power may have created these apocalyptic events, but the facts are cloistered in secrecy. When Remo and Chiun look for answers, there's no room for sacred cows - and that's the gospel truth!

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"Contain your false if eager pridefulness, o brainless one. 'We' could have referred to any of two billion Oriental persons."

21

"It could have, but it didn't. Admit it, Chiun. You slipped."

The compliment put Remo in a good mood. He hummed as he gunned the Cadillac down the winding Texas road. The name of the tune he was humming was "Disco Lady." He could not recall where he had picked it up, but he remembered some of the words, and sang them:

Disco Lady

Won't you be my baby? Girl, you got me crazy Disco La—

"Halt!" Chiun thundered.

Remo skidded the car to a stop, causing it to swirl in an elaborate loop and careen off the road into a ditch of frozen mud.

"What is it?" Remo whispered, his eyes straining to pierce the darkness miles away.

"It is that revolting melody, with its equally repugnant message."

"Damn it, I drove off the road!" Remo yelled. He got out to look at the damage. "We'll have to Hit it out," he said. "It's too deep to push."

"We?" Chiun asked, his hands on his hips.

As Remo was hoisting the two-ton Cadillac back onto the road, the battered pickup truck with Smith at the wheel reappeared, coming from the other direction. The passenger door opened. "Get in," Smith said, his face looking more lemony than usual.

Smith drove silently to a small cabin off the main road and unlocked the door. When Remo and Chiun entered, he was taking off his galoshes. He lit

22

a candle, then removed his hat, coat, and wool scarf. Beneath them he was wearing the three-piece gray suit he had worn every day since Remo had first met him. Sitting at the candlelit kitchen table in the cabin, Smith looked exactly as if he were at his desk in Folcroft Sanitarium.

"A number of men are disappearing from military bases in different parts of the country," he said. Remo hopped up and sat on the unused wood-burning stove. "C'mon," he said. "They've been doing that since Vietnam. It's called desertion. Or it used to be. Now with this brand-new wacko volunteer army, it's probably one of the new career specialties. Join the army and run away." Chiun slapped his .arm. It stung. "Silence. Do not speak to our emperor thus," he hissed. "Oh, mighty Emperor Smith, do not punish the young fool too harshly, for he is yet, despite all my effort, a brainless thing. A simple thrashing with wet whips would suffice." He whispered in Korean to Remo, "You deserve to be beheaded, idiot. Let the lunatic emperor talk."

"Nobody gets beheaded in America," Remo said. "It's a good thought, though. Maybe that'd stop the army desertions. We could make a deal with Sweden and Canada. Give them a few bucks for every deserter's head they send back." He shook his head. "They probably wouldn't do it, though. Too bad. The French'd do it. The French'd do anything for a buck. Except work."

"We have reason to believe they're not deserting," Smith said. "In the first place, the missing soldiers aren't recruits. They're chaplains. And nobody knows how they're disappearing or why. According to the president's reports from the Pentagon, none

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of them took anything with them—no money, no snapshots from home, nothing to indicate that they left voluntarily."

From his vest pocket he extracted a neatly folded map of army bases around the country. Some of the bases were circled, with arrows leading from one to the next. "Fort Antwerth in central Iowa was the first camp to be affected. Then Fort Beson in southern Kansas, followed by Fort Tannehill in New Mexico." He traced the route of the disappearances with his finger. "Whatever's happening, it's moving southward. The next attack, if there is one, should either be at Fort Wheeler in Oklahoma or Fort Bor-goyne here in Texas, about a hundred miles due south. You're midway between the two points now. The plane that brought me in has orders to wait for you. You can get to either base in less than an hour."

Remo studied the map. "It could be a nut job," he said.

Smith looked at him drily, awaiting further explanation.

"Some psycho murderer on the outside who doesn't like army preachers," Remo said. "A sniper or something. Can't the army's M.P.'s look into it?"

Smith shook his head. "The reports at all three of the camps where the chaplains disappeared have been negative. Not a trace."

He was silent for a moment, as if deliberating whether or not to tell Remo the rest. After a moment he said, "There's more." He took a miniature tape recorder from his coat pocket.

"Strange things have begun to happen at these camps immediately following the disappearance of their chaplains," Smith said. "The commanders' re-

. 24

ports are virtually identical. First, the chaplains disappear. Then there's mass confusion among the enlisted men. For a day or so, the reports are frantic. The officers can't get the recruits to listen to them. Discipline is at zero. Offenders are placed under military arrest, but apparently just about every enlisted man on the base is an offender, and the guardhouses can't hold them all."

"So what do the C.O.'s do then?"

"Nothing. There's nothing they can do but wait for it to pass. At all three camps, the confusion disappeared totally within two or three days. That's been the pattern."

Smith fidgeted in his chair, uncomfortable with what he was saying. "Here's where the reports become really odd," he said quietly, his eyebrows raised. "If this weren't thoroughly documented from three unrelated bases, I'd have difficulty believing it," he waffled.

"Smitty, you have difficulty believing in gravity," Remo said. "Just tell me, and we'll work out the plausibility studies later."

Smith looked at Remo acidly. He took a deep breath. 'To a man, the commanders swear that a sweeping change comes over the recruits after the two-or three-day period of chaos. Discipline shoots to an incredible high. Every order is obeyed without question, even the slightest suggestions.

"At Fort Beson, a drill instructor told one of the recruits to go fly a kite. The private wandered off and came back tö the identical spot an hour later with a box kite made of newspaper and plywood. He started flying the thing in the middle of dress parade, and wouldn't stop without a direct order."

"That's doing it the army way," Remo said.

25

Smith's expression was without a trace of humor. "See if this strikes you as amusing," he said, pressing down the "play" button on the recorder.

As the tape began to wind, a man's voice rang tinnily out of the recorder. The man was obviously frightened out of his wits. His voice quavered as he tried to keep it under control. The man was talking wildly about zombies and a foreign plot to take over the U.S. Army, but the focus of the speech was the murder of the man's top aide, a Lieutenant Andrew Fitzroy King. The man on the tape insisted over and over that his aide had been stabbed to death in front of him while he was submitting a report about the weird goings-on at the base.

Smith shut off the recorder. "That was the base commander at Fort Tannehill," he said. "A two-star general. He sent this recording to the president by special courier. The president gave it to me this morning."

"I suppose Lieutenant King disappeared without a trace, too."

Smith closed his eyes and opened them again slowly. "There is no military record of Lieutenant Andrew Fitzroy King on file at the Pentagon," he said. "According to the army, he not only disappeared, he never existed. Of course, I have a few such Kings on file at Folcroft, but I can't determine which one he is, since no one on the base will acknowledge his existence."

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