Warren Murphy: Terror Squad

Remo felt the wind at the back of his neck and knew Chiun was readying his game. Remo managed to save a Volkswagen and a Buick but failed on a beige Cadillac Brougham whose driver waved back pleasantly with a smile. This robbed Chiun of his pleasure and Remo felt the wind cease on his neck. The window was up.

"Little Father," said Remo seriously, "I am worried. I am worried about Smith."

"It is a good thing to put one's mind to the wellbeing of an employer. But not to worry. To understand."

"I think Smith is losing bis balance and I don't know what to do about it,"

"The only thing you can do, my son. Your craft, taught to you as it was taught to me. Practice your calling."

"But... ."

"But this and but that. There is always a but to excuse a foolish move. You have one thing that you do better than any white man. You are not skilled in diplomacy or the civil service, nor can you lead hundreds of men. You are an assassin. Be satisfied with that. For if you fail in that, you fail in all things."

"I just wish I could do something, dammit."

"And I wish I could be a sparrow," said Chiun.

"Why a sparrow?"

"So I could fly from here and visit Brooklyn before the ends of my days."

"You never let up, do you, Chiun? Never. All right. I promise you, when this thing is over, we will visit Brooklyn and find the house where Barbra Streisand was born. Okay? Okay? Does that satisfy you?"

"We could turn around now," said Chiun, "and get it over with so you would not have anything on your mind."

"I give up," said Remo.

"Then we are turning around?"

"No," said Remo.

"You give up in the most peculiar of ways," said the Master of Sinanju, and, having been denied a promised pledge, said not another word until the car reached the outskirts of Seneca Falls in the middle of the night.

CHAPTER FIVE

Remo expected little difficulty in finding the training site, at or near Patton College.

A training site had certain requirements you couldn't fit in a one-room apartment. The Kalashnikov rifles the hijackers had used, for example. If you were going to fire them at something other than point blank range, you needed a minimum of fifty feet and an optimum minimum of one hundred feet. Ideally, a good range would be fifty yards.

You also had to fire it into something other than a blackboard.

For a terrorist, nerves were needed. The most common training was fire-going through it. Fires left scorches.

Obstacle courses and plane mock-ups were also useful. In short, if there was any training going on, Remo would find the place.

After recovering from his shock that Remo had failed to find out how the weapons were smuggled past the metal detector, Smith had warned him that the terrorists' training might be unlike any training that military minds were aware of.

"Then they'll leave traces unlike those from any other training. Relax, Smitty. They're dead meat. Okay?"

It was a small campus and Remo strolled it alone. Chiun claimed he was exhausted from the trip, but Remo knew if Chiun had thought there would be anything of interest on an American college campus, he could have stayed awake a week if he wished. It was no magic trick, just an ability to sleep in shorter periods more continuously, the use of odd seconds instead of hours.

Naturally Patton College had a Fayerweather Hall. Every campus seemed to have one. The administration building was little more than a shack but the main buildings rose brick and aluminium modem, forming squares around large green lawns.

Remo was sure training wouldn't be on the lawns but he strolled them anyway. Not a divot. A few of the co-eds eyed him and he smiled back, not an encouraging smile but a recognition of their interest. He would have liked to have gone to a college like this and when he had been a living person with an identity, a patrolman on the Newark Police Force, he had enrolled in an extension school at Rutgers. He couldn't afford to go to a school like this in the daytime. If he had, who knew, maybe he never would have been recruited by CURE and maybe he would have a wife and family by now.

He knew, however, that the attractiveness of a family existed only because he didn't have to endure one. Still, it would be nice to know that children would carry on the name. Hell, he didn't even have one, other than him first name, and being an orphan, he wasn't all that sure that either name-Remo or Williams-really belonged to him.

He wandered into the gym. A gym would be an ideal place. A man with a pot belly and a whistle stood on the side watching about fifty, mostly beefy athletes, go through set exercises. He was in him late forties and wore a baseball cap. He had to be a coach. No middle-aged man other than a coach would wear a baseball cap, unless, of course, he was an admiral, and Patton College was landlocked.

"Spring practice?" asked Remo.

"Yeah," grunted the coach. "Who're you?"

"Freelance writer doing a round-up on small colleges. Their use of gymnasiums and things like that"

"Hey, you," screamed the coach. "Move your fucking ass, you lazy cunt." He waved a clipboard at a young man who, Remo could tell instantly, was working incorrectly on a damaged knee.

"We like to use our gym," the coach said softly to Remo, "to build character. That's the whole philosophy of Patton athletics. Hey, you, Johnson. You do those pushups clean or it's back to the ghetto. You're not in Harlem, anymore."

The coach took a brief moment to deny there was any racial friction on the team and he wanted Remo to print that. "We've got good boys here. Good boys."

Was the gym used twenty-four hours a day?

The coach shook his head.

Was there a rifle team?

Nah.

Martial arts classes?

"Nahhh, that's faggy. Give a guy a shot in the head and that's it. You know, pow, in the head. With the fist. American. I don't go for that gook stuff. Don't print that, though. You can say we view the athletic field as a laboratory for building understanding. Hey, you, Ginsberg. You waiting for your mother to make that push-up? Let's get into it. Petrolli! Get the grease out of your ass. . . . Athletics, as you may know, constitutes an extension of the Greek philosophy of sound body and sound mind. It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game."

"Have a losing season last year?"

"Well, let me explain that. You see, we really didn't lose if you look at the statistics." Remo examined the walls as the coach went into a statistical explanation that would do justice to the wildest fantasies of a government economist. "So you see, on the whole, we've really had a winning season."

"Yeah," said Remo. "Say if you should see an old Oriental guy anywhere in long flowing robes, don't mention things like gook. Okay?"

"Hell, what do you take me for? I know how to handle gooks. There was one here last week. I talked to him just like everybody else."

"Mighty white of you. Was he Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese? What?"

"A gook."

"Well, now that you've got it down to a billion people."

"A gook's a gook."

"I hope you never find out the difference. I hate to clean up bodies."

The janitor, for twenty dollars, confirmed that there was no rifle range, no explosions, no fires, no karate classes. Radical movements? Some. Did they meet anyplace special? No.

The basements of the dormitories showed nothing, nor did the chemistry labs or the physics building, the Student Union, or even the banks of Cayuga Lake or the old barge canal which bordered two sides of the campus.

They had to train somewhere. You don't put people on airplanes with rifles without training, and you definitely don't sneak .50 calibre machine guns past metal detectors without planning. And if this group was, as Smith suspected, part of the new wave of terrorists, they definitely had to have large amounts of space to create terrorist squads and guerrilla armies. Not that that was done here in the halls of Patton, but if the training techniques were similar, there had to be plenty of useable space.