Warren Murphy: Last War Dance

"Why must I?" asked Remo.

"Because I need it."

"Is that all I am to you? A sex object?"

"That's irrelevant. Rape me."

"No," said Remo.

"Filthy pig," she hissed. "I will never again waste my body on a man not worthy of the gift."

Remo heard her rustling around in the grass. Then he heard her voice. "Come on. Wake up. I need it again. Wake up there, you."

Remo felt like rooting the unconscious Jerry Lupin on. At least sex might keep her quiet—something that seemed beyond the reach of any other technique.

The roar from the church was deafening.

"We shall overcome some day…

Umgawagawa. Umgawagawa."

Remo hopped up the stairs and walked in through the open door.

The interior of the church looked like a Bowery corner on a Sunday morning. Some people slept sitting up; others slept lying down on the floor and on the pews. The altar trays and cloths had been swiped off onto the floor, and the altar was being used as a bar. It was stacked full of every imaginable type of liquor, and Dennis Petty was presiding as bartender while also leading the singing.

He saw Remo and waved. "Hey, sing with us," he called.

"We shall not be moved," he roared, waving a full tumbler of whiskey over his head, his words echoed by a dozen people, who were still able to move their lips for something other than swallowing.

"By the shores of Gitchee Goomee," yelled Remo.

"We shall overcome… some… day," roared Petty.

"By the old Moulmein Pagoda," yelled Remo.

"Those ain't the words," said Petty.

"Where'd you get the booze?" asked Remo in disgust.

Petty tapped his forehead with his right index finger. "We got friend, wise ass. Not just you with your Twinkies."

"Name one friend you've got," challenged Remo.

"Perkin Marlowe, that's who," said Petty.

"He sent you this booze?"

"Right. A whole truckful."

"Is he coming?" asked Remo. "I hope he's coming here. I just hope he's coming here. I want to see him. I hope he's coming."

"Who cares if he's coming?" yelled Petty. "We got the booze. And there's more coming tomorrow. We shall overcome… this day… and the next day… and the next day. And as long as the booze holds out."

This time there were only four or five voices accompanying his. Everyone else had collapsed. Remo looked around at the interior of the church. So much for well-laid plans. It would take a moving company to haul this load of human garbage up to the Apowa village on time.

He thought again of just dragging along Petty and Lynn Cosgrove. But Brandt wouldn't settle for them.

The decision was simple. Remo was going to have to find that .155 millimeter cannon.

Van Riker slept as Remo made his way through the night to the Apowa Village, but the general was not alone. Another figure was in Van Riker's room. A hulk of a man, sitting in a chair next to Van Riker's bed, smoking cigarette after cigarette, the butts pinched near the filter by all five fingers of his right hand. His left hand cradled a pistol on his lap. The man studied Van Riker's tanned face in the dim light of the night-light near the bathroom.

Van Riker's sleep had been troubled. He had been upset when Remo had told him that Valashnikov had arrived at Wounded Elk. But when Van Riker had gone to Chiun's room, neither Chiun or Valashnikov had been there.

The general had waited for hours, struggling to decide whether he should call Washington. But whom could he call? What could he say? No one in Washington knew of the Cassandra, and few had even heard of General Van Riker. Call the FBI? They would start a dossier on Van Riker as a crank. The CIA? They would make a careful note to discuss it at next month's briefing, five days after some clerk leaked it to Jack Anderson.

Finally Van Riker returned to his own room and fell asleep, but his sleep was restless, haunted by visions of a wave of Russian missiles launched at America on a preemptive first strike of war. And a half-dozen of those missiles were aimed at Wounded Elk, to destroy America's best single hope of keeping the world from war. Once Valashnikov was sure of the location of the Cassandra, it would be easy for the Russians. Valashnikov wouldn't even have to plant a homing device near the monument. All the Russians would need would be a geography book.

Van Riker's eyes flicked in sleep, moving back and forth as he saw the Montana hills exploding with nuclear color and America's great cities being leveled by Russian missiles.

And then he was awake. In his mind he had seen a red fireball of destruction rising over Baltimore. Now as he opened his eyes, he saw a faint red glow in his room. For a moment he was frightened, but then he realized that the red ball was only the head of a lit cigarette. Someone was sitting by his bed.

"Valashnikov?"

"Yes, General," come the heavily accented voice. "It is pleasure after all these years."

"How long has it been?"

"Ten years," said Valashnikov, stabbing his cigarette out in an ashtray. "Ten years wasted because the idiotic NKVD could not tell difference in translation between tan and Negro. Well, no matter… I am here now, and so are you. Is all that matters."

"I won't tell you anything," said Van Riker.

"You don't have to," said Valashnikov. "The fact you are here tells me all I need to know. If you are here, Cassandra is here. Mother Russia needs no other knowledge."

Van Riker sat up slowly in bed. Outside the window the blackness of night was growing lighter. Dawn would come soon.

"That's doesn't seem likely," he told Valashnikov. "If it were that simple, why did you come here?"

"Forgive me, General," Valashnikov said. "For a human reason—to gloat. You have cursed my life for ten years. You and that infernal device of yours. But now I have won. I came so you could know the feelings I have carried in me for ten years. The feelings of loser." He laughed. "I suppose it seems foolish to you, but I wanted you to know what you did to me."

"Are you going to kill me?" asked Van Riker.

Valashnikov laughed again, a hard, brittle laugh. "Kill you? Kill you? After all these years? No, General, I am going to let you… how do you Americans say it?… to stew in the juice?

"I'll move Cassandra and set it up elsewhere."

"It will take you months. You know and I know that months will be too late. It will be seen. You were able once to build it in secret because we not know it existed. No more do you have that luxury."

"I'll…" Van Riker said and then stopped because he could think of no other threat, nothing that might frighten Valashnikov.

Valashnikov stood up. "Good, General. At least you have not tried to lie to me again. You may go back to sleep now. You should sleep with the bliss of knowing you have doomed your nation."

He put his gun in his jacket pocket. "Sleep tight." he said. "Hahahahaha." As he left the room through the front door, the long peal of laughter hung in the air behind him.

Van Riker sat there in bed, thinking. Then he got up, turned on the light, and went to the telephone.

There was one person who could help. One person he could call.

Dr. Harold W. Smith, at the Folcroft Sanitarium.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The sun was minutes short of rising when Remo got to the Apowa village high on the hill overlooking the mob of reporters, marshals, and bogus Indians out on the Montana prairie.

Remo paused on the edge of the mesa and looked down. Below him, beside the road that led to the Apowa village, stood the church housing the Revolutionary Indian Party and the bronze and marble monument housing the Cassandra.

Remo turned and trotted toward the Apowa town.

It was pushing five thirty now, he knew, and he didn't have much time left to stop that .155 millimeter cannon from blowing up the monument and detonating the Cassandra.