Warren Murphy - Last War Dance

"Do you want to live?"

"Damned right, but not in a ditch."

"Ah well," sighed Chiun. He would have to make it simple for the great American scientist general. Chiun tried to think of some parable that would make it clearer. Something simple. Something that a child would understand.

Van Riker scrambled out of the sewer ditch, spitting and heaving.

"Once upon a time," said Chiun, "there was a delicate lotus whose beauty was known far and wide."

"Don't give me that Papasan routine. Why did you kick me in the ditch?"

Ah well, the courteous man tries many roads to understanding, thought Chiun. So he explained in a different way.

"If we were to drive to the church and monument, we would be stopped because all cars are stopped."

Van Riker nodded.

"You see the floating morning cannot sustain that which…"

"No, no, I got you the first time. Why the ditch?"

"Your suit acts like a beacon in the night."

"Why didn't you just tell me to change suits instead of kicking me into the ditch?"

"I did."

"But you didn't tell me why."

"One is not always sure a thimble will hold a lake. Better that you know what, then later perhaps you can deal with why."

"All right, all right, all right."

They walked along the road, and when they were three hundred yards from the marshals' lights, Chiun signaled his charge down into the ditch at the left and then up the other side. They walked through crunching gravel for a while, and then Chiun signaled for Van Riker to halt.

"I'm okay. I can go on," said Van Riker.

"No, you can't. You are breathing wrong. Rest."

This time Van Riker did not argue. He waited. Then his eyes drifted upward, and he saw the night sky and the stars and was awed by the universe and his own smallness in it. Even the Cassandra would not be a speck on one of those stars out there.

"Magnificent," he said, mostly to himself. "How can one give thanks for such awesome magnificence?"

"You're welcome," said Chiun, somewhat surprised because he had not shown this strange fellow much, nor did he think this fellow would understand if he did see something impressive.

"The head of your organization said back in that hangar in Raleigh that you are the finest assassin in the world," said Van Riker, passing time until he got the signal to move again.

"Smith is not the head of my organization. I am the head of my organization, and I consider what he says silliness."

"How's that?"

"If he is not the finest assassin or even the second finest, how would he know? What do I know of your Cassandra if I am not of the wisdom of your house of science? What do I know?"

"I see," said Van Riker. "That's the effectiveness of the Cassandra, you know. That we are dealing with people who understand what we have. If they didn't understand, then we wouldn't have a weapon."

Chiun placed a hand on Van Riker's chest. The breathing was good, but he was not ready to move, not for what Chiun wanted him to do.

"It is a bad weapon," said Chiun. "Of weapons I know, and the greatest is the mind. But this Cassandra is bad. If I had been advising the emperor, you never would have made this bad thing."

"We don't have emperors—we have presidents."

"An emperor is a president is a czar is a bishop is a king. If you call the man who rules you a lotus petal, still your lotus petal is an emperor, and your emperor made a mistake. That is a bad weapon."

"Why?" asked Van Riker, intrigued by the reasoning of the strange Oriental, who was supposed to have such awesome killing powers.

"The weapon is a threat. Correct? It is," Chiun went on, not waiting for a reply. "But the weapon is also a danger to your country. Otherwise you would not be here with me. You have created a weapon which has no direction. You might as well have created a tornado. No. A good weapon points only at the enemy."

"But the Cassandra had to be a superpowerful weapon to be an effective deterrent."

"Wrong. Your weapon had to be powerful in only one place, but you made it powerful in two, and that is why it is bad weapon," said Chiun, pointing toward the lights of the monument. "There the weapon is in the wrong place… where it can hurt your own kingdom."

Chiun pointed to his own head. "Here, in the mind of your enemy, is the rightful place for your weapon. That is where it belongs—in his fear—because that is the only place it can really work. If it works at all."

"But we had to construct one, give enough accurate details to let them know we had one. How do you make them believe you have something you don't?"

"I am not in the habit of working out petty details for military failures," said Chiun. Then, feeling Van Riker's heart again, he added, "You are ready. Come."

They moved through the darkness across the plains, with Chiun leading Van Riker between gopher holes. When they came to a dark section, just before the lights at the ring of marshals' posts, Chiun told Van Riker not to move. To wait. To think about his breathing and the stars. But no matter what happened not to move.

Then Van Riker saw something he could hardly comprehend. The ancient figure in the dark kimono was before him, giving him instructions, and then he was not before him but part of the darkness. The lights at one federal marshal's outpost dimmed, and then another dimmed, but there was no sound, not even of a man being struck or of a man moving after being struck. There was the light, and then there was not the light. And while trying to see where Chiun was, he felt a tap on his back.

"Move," he heard the master of Sinanju say, and Van Riker walked straight ahead. As he passed the marshals' outposts, he saw that the men appeared to be sleeping.

"You didn't kill them, did you?"

"Look again."

Van Riker turned his head back toward the ring of marshals, and he saw the lights were now back on, and the marshals still stood with their backs to him and the Oriental, their guns cradled in their arms, their hips jutting out in relaxed slouch. They tossed pleasantries at each other—all as if they had been waiting there, bored and uninterrupted, for hours.

"How did you do that?"

"A mere nothing," said Chiun. "In our village children can do it."

"But how did you do it?"

"How did you build the Cassandra?"

"I couldn't explain just like that."

And Chiun smiled, and he saw the man understood. When they were close to the monument, Chiun insisted they wait. Even as the sky lightened, threatening morning sun, they waited in the open plain and no one seemed to spot them.

"Remo is back now," Chiun said. "We will go. Just walk with me."

"How do you know that?" asked Van Riker. "Then again, why should I doubt that you know it?"

A television news truck turned toward the spire of the church up ahead. A pack of men and women surrounded it and began unloading.

Van Riker saw Remo leap from the cab. There was a special silent grace in the man's movements, almost a reduction of all effort to a simple gliding motion that seemed familiar to Van Riker. Where had he seen it? In the Oriental, of course.

Remo saw Chiun and Van Riker inside the marshal's lines, and he started toward them. Just then a RIP guard with shotgun and six-shooter staggered to his feet, clinking hollowly as he walked across the aluminum beer cans sprinkled outside his sandbagged trench. "Halt there, you shits," he said to Chiun and Van Riker.

"Good morning," said Remo to the guard, who turned around into two fingers that shattered his nose. He went flew backward, horizontal at first. He saw the dark blue morning sky of Montana, then he saw the brown dirt prairie, and then he didn't see very much of anything at all.

"Very subtle," said Chiun, chiding. "You, Remo, are of a race of litterers. Beer cans, bodies. Litter."