Warren Murphy - Dr Quake

"I knew an Israeli agent once. Briefly."

"Different culture. Forget it."

Smith pulled into the driveway, and almost as if it were on signal, the people began to leave. "I guess they stopped here for a farewell drink," Smith said. 'The house is yours and so's the store. Both paid in full. It's getting late and I'm going to have to leave. Here comes Chiun."

Smith stopped in front of the house and the rented limousine pulled up behind them. The driver jumped out and opened the back door for a frail Oriental in flowing green robes. He helped the elderly man to the front steps. Chiun thanked him politely. He took Chiun's three trunks from the back of the limousine and lugged them to the sidewalk, along with Chiun's television equipment. The driver motioned that Chiun might, if he wished, sit on the trunks. He helped the elderly man to sit down.

Remo shook his head. Chiun was playing helpless again. Chiun often did this to get people to carry his luggage or haul things from place to place. He did not bother to inform those who did the hauling that he could twist them like soft candy if he felt like it. Nor did he inform them that he was the Master of Sinan-ju, before whom all men were merely targets in motion.

Once when a woman was carrying Chiun's shopping packages and had lost the key to her locked car, Chiun had pressured the metal handle open. He explained that it had really been unlocked. But it took the garage a week to get another lock to replace the one Chiun had mangled.

Now Chiun again was in the late afternoon sun of a California summer. He probably expected to be carried into the house.

Smith looked at his watch again and Remo removed his single valise from the back seat and hopped out of the car. As he turned, he saw that Chiun was no longer sitting on his trunks. He was in the driveway commiserating with a woman dressed all in black and he was bowing mournfully.

Remo looked up at the neat manicured lawn, and the people now leaving and wondered suddenly why people mourned death as if it were an accident befalling the unlucky, when every one of them would suffer the same inevitable fate.

And for these people, it could be soon, depending on how successful Remo was at his job. He saw seven dark birds take off from a popular tree in the distance, as though frightened by a cat. For all he knew that could be another low tremor. Birds could feel the tremors best.

How many earthquakes a year did California have? Little earth tremors. Little adjustments of the forces of the crust of the earth. Like bugs in a bottle that kids would cap, and maybe they'd remember to let in air. Maybe the little bugs would live.

They were all bugs in the bottle, only now the problem wasn't air. Someone was going to smash the bottle under foot. With all the human bugs in it.

CHAPTER NINE

The well built homes were not damaged that night. Only the chandeliers swayed slightly. Barefoot, Remo could not feel it on the stone floor of the living room. Neither did Chiun stir and he slept on a mat on the floor of his bedroom.

Out across the lawn a cat howled, Remo looked to the blue-black sky with its lost moon, feeling very alone and very helpless, frightened to a degree that he had never felt since his training with Chiun had begun.

So he closed his eyes, closed his mind and for a moment was silent. When he opened his eyes he was calm again. An over active mind is a dagger in one's own heart was an old saying from the Korean village of Sinanju whence the master came.

Other homes were not so safe that night. They were not strong, they were not solid, they boasted no plumbing or air conditioning or central heating.

They were the homes of the grape pickers, the people who came to San Aquino in the spring and summer to work the vineyards, then who left after the late season harvest. Aquino grapes were good grapes, vermouth grapes for America's leading vermouth.

So while the owners of the vineyards did not really feel the quake that night, the pickers did. For the tremor that could sway a chandelier could collapse a sheet metal wall or sever a two-by-four nailed to another two-by-four that was supposed to hold up a roof.

Three shacks came down in the San Aquino night like houses of cards.

Bare light bulbs flicked on in the standing shacks. People in nightgowns and underdrawers, some in slacks and nothing else fled from their shacks, shrieking.

Lung-choking dust rose from the collection of tin and wooden rubble.

Someone yelled in Spanish.

"Men. We need men. Help."

A fat, bloodied hand reached its way out from under a splintered beam and in Spanish, a weak voice called from the direction of the hand: "Please. Please."

"Here. Help me with this beam," yelled one man in slacks and bare feet. It was cool, but his body was soaked wet as he struggled to lift a beam off the fat, moving arm with the bloodied hand.

From one pile of sheet metal and wood and tarpaper came a baby's cry.

It cried as men peeled off strips of housing with their hands. It cried when the cranes and tractors arrived from the town of San Aquino. No one standing around the shacks could stop it or pick it up or comfort it, and the men working to untangle the pile felt helpless, afraid and angry at the building that did not yield fast enough and the child they could not find fast enough.

In the middle of the night, the crying stopped and when the dead baby's body was discovered in a little while later and laid onto a table-the grape pickers of San Aquino returned to their shacks in silence.

And they did not go to the fields the next day, although the sun was high and hot, and in the words of generations of migrants, it was "weather to work."

"Jeez," mumbled Sheriff Wade Wyatt. "Spooky wetback labour. Anything'!! spook 'em."

He had arrived on the scene in the morning, having discovered by telephone the previous night that no white men had been killed and having therefore returned to sleep.

"Won't go to the fields, huh?," asked Wyatt of the owner of the Gromucci ranch. "Shoot. You think it's the Commies stirring them up?"

"No," said Robert Gromucci, the owner. Gromucci leaned from the window of his pink Eldorado convertible and looked up to Sheriff Wyatt taking notes.

"Seven people were killed last night," Gromucci said.

"All greasers though-right?"

"All Mexican-Americans."

"Seven. The shacks went?"

"Your deputy has the report."

"Yeah, sure. I just wanted to get some of the details of the quake."

"The workers are restless today," Gromucci said.

"In the old days we knew how to handle that, Bob, but I can't do anything for you today. You know my hands are tied."

"I wasn't asking you to work them over, Wade. They're talking about this being the year of the big curse or something. The gods of the earth versus the gods of destruction. I don't know."

"I thought you people believed in that stuff too, Bob. No offense."

"We don't. You look unusually content this morning, Wade."

Which was true. Wade Wyatt had warned the San Aquino committee-Curpwell and Rueker and Boy-denhousen-that the quake would be coming. Reprisal for Feinstein's trip to Washington. Reprisal for Washington sending in McAndrew. Warning not to make any more trips or to welcome any more federal men.

"No, no more than usual, Bob," Wyatt said. "It's just that good old, uneducated hick, redneck Wade Wyatt isn't always wrong, you know, and sometimes he has a right to gloat."

"Seven people are dead, Wade."

"So, hire others. I'll see you, Bob. Take care. Regards to the missus," yelled Wyatt, trotting backwards as he talked.

He entered his star-studded Plymouth and wheeled the vehicle onto the dusty road out of the camp and to the highway which was coming alive with the morning San Aquino traffic.