Warren Murphy: Chained Reaction

Chiun nodded. "She is courageous, that one. She will give me a very good son. Through you, of course," he added quickly.

"Forget it," said Remo. He stopped talking as the enraged Bleech pulled his lead riding crop back in his right hand to smash into Ruby's temple. As he extended it behind him, Remo's hand flashed out of the doorway opening of the tent and yanked the crop from Bleech's hand.

The colonel let go of Ruby and spun toward the tent. Remo stepped out into the bright sunshine.

"Hi, guys," he said.

He waved lightly to the five-hundred troops sit-

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ting on the ground. They buzzed among themselves, unable to keep still any longer.

"What's this all about?"

"Who's this guy?"

"Bleech'll do a number on him."

"He can't be all there, coming here like this."

Bleech stared at Remo, then reached for the automatic bolstered at his side. Remo's hand moved again, and Bleech heard the rip of leather as his holster was neatly excised from his belt and went flying twenty feet away.

"That any way to say hello ?" asked Remo.

The sergeant and three soldiers behind Smith had their guns out now. The sergeant had an ugly .45 aimed at Remo's belly; the three privates had their automatic rifles aimed at Remo.

"That's enough," the sergeant said.

Ruby looked around at Remo imploringly. Remo winked.

He turned to the four soldiers. "You're next," he said.

The sergeant extended his gun arm, taking dead aim on Remo's belt buckle.

And then, like the earth ripping open during an earthquake, there was a loud high screeching. The soldiers turned their eyes toward the sound. A small yellow hand with long fingernails protruded through the wall of Bleech's tent. Like a knife, it slashed down toward the ground, and then through the ripped and fluttering canvas came Chiun, Master of Sinanju.

The sergeant wheeled with his gun, but Chiun's yellow robes swirled around him as he moved from the tent. The sergeant's finger squeezed on the gun, but before it fired, Chiun's hand covered

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the gun. The sergeant could feel the trigger guard being squeezed up behind his index finger, stopping the trigger from being depressed. He felt the crunching of bones, as the tiny yellow hand squeezed, and realized that his bones were being mashed, melted into the automatic as the pressure of Chiun's hand welded the cold steel into his warm living flesh. And there was the pain. The sergeant gave an ear-piercing scream and fell in a crumpled heap, the automatic stuck in his hand as if it had been nailed to it.

The three soldiers alongside him were barefaced, pimply boys. They watched in terror as the sergeant fell.

They looked at Chiun.

"Fire, you bastards," yelled Bleech.

"Up yours," said one of the soldiers. He dropped his weapon and ran. The other two looked confused.

"I said fire," Bleech hollered.

The two men made the last mistakes of their young lives. They lowered their rifles to their waists, wheeled toward Chiun, and squeezed the . triggers. The automatic weapons fired a loud rat-tat-tat that tore through the canvas of the tent. Then they fired no more, as their rifles went through their bellies and out their backs, not even slowing down at the spinal column.

They went down, slowly, like jello molds melting away under a heat lamp.

Next to them, the sergeant lay blubbering, trying to disentangle the steel of his automatic from the flesh of his hand.

Bleech looked at the carnage, turned, and tried to run. But Remo slipped his hand into the back

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of the colonel's Sam Browne belt and held him tight. Bleech's legs moved to run, but he made no progress and, to the five-hundred soldiers, he looked like a cartoon character trying to run over an ice patch and expending heavy labor to no result.

They laughed.

Bleech heard them. Laughing. At a soldier, a career man, a man who had stood for his country when the commies and the pinkos and the lefties and the radicals were trying to destroy it.

"Don't laugh," he screamed.

They laughed harder with that sure young man's sense of knowing when the gang has a new leader.

"All right," Remo said. "Playtime's over. Who runs this operation?"

Bleech gathered his breath as Remo pulled him close by his belt. "Men," he shouted. "You'll see now how a soldier dies when he must." To Remo he said "You'll find out nothing from me."

But nothing in Bleech's experience or training had prepared him for this pain. Remo pinched his left ear lobe between his thumb and index finger and squeezed.

"Who's the leader?" Remo said again.

"Baisley DePauw," Bleech said instantly. And Remo released his ear and the pain gave way to shame that he had cracked so quickly, talked so easily, and his soldiers were laughing aloud now at him, and the shame and anger filled Colonel Bleech's head like a hot red liquid and he scrambled across the ground, found his holster, and pulled out the automatic weapon from it. As he turned to fire, Ruby dove toward the ground,

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came up with an automatic rifle and squeezed one round neatly into Colonel Bleech's forehead.

He dropped like wet dirty socks.

The troops stopped laughing.

Ruby walked over and nudged Bleech with her toe. Like a cotton packed medicine ball, he rolled over smoothly, dead.

Ruby looked at Remo. "I been wanting to hit that sucker since we got here."

Remo looked at the seated soldiers who just stared at him, frightened, confused, not knowing what to do.

He pointed to Colonel Bleech. "That's it, boys. Your master race. Now get on your buses and go home. This army's been discharged."

The sunlight glinted off the hard planes of Remo's face and the shadows made his deepset dark eyes look like pools of death.

"Go home," he repeated.

None of the soldiers moved; none stirred. It had all happened too fast and they had trouble digesting it.

Remo picked up Bleech's heavy Sam Browne belt, two and a half inches of thick grain leather. He held it in his two hands then, without seeming effort, pulled his hands apart, slowly, almost casually.

As the soldiers watched, the leather ripped apart, the two halves trailing dry stringy strands.

"Go home," Remo said again. "Now!"

One recruit stood at the end of the first row.

"Men. Ah think we better haul ass out of heah."

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It turned into a rout, the young soldiers struggling to see who would be first on the bus.

Remo nudged the groaning sergeant with his toe.

"And take your garbage with you," he called.

He looked at Smith, who was holding his right shoulder.

"What's wrong with your arm, Smitty?" he asked.

"Nothing. I fell," Smith said.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

"Look at this, Remo."

A complimentary copy of the Southern Pennsylvania Dispatch had been left in the motel room Smith had rented for access to a telephone. Smith had the paper open on the bed, opened to a double-page advertisement over the center fold.

He pointed at the pages and Remo looked at them.

AT LAST,

WE KNOW THE CAUSE

OP AMERICA'S PROBLEMS.

"So do I," said Remo. "Americans."

"Read it," Smith said.

Remo read the copy on the left-hand page. It was brief and direct.

America's blacks, it said, suffered from longstanding problems: high unemployment, poor educational facilities, narrow job opportunities, absorption in a culture that did not recognize their rich cultural heritage.

America's whites, the advertisement said, suffered from a growing inability to walk the streets of their towns and cities safely and a growing

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sense that the government in Washington was no longer interested.

"Hear, hear," said Remo.

"Bead it," said Smith.

Whites felt that the products of their labor and their work was being drained from them in higher taxes, higher prices, and more government programs from which they could see no benefit.