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  Chained Reaction

  ( The Destroyer - 34 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Black is not only beautiful, it's Ruby Gonzalez . . . the wild CIA lady with a sure cure for what ails Remo and Chiun. Remo Williams just can't seem to forget he was once a Newark cop. But when you're the Destroyer you do need a little humility. Yellow, the worth of gold, the texture of parchment, the color of the sun source itself . . . and, in the inscrutable, insuperable, Chiun, a veritable galaxy of wisdom and power. And fun at a riot. It will be all over when Southern idiots with whips and chains, and Northern madmen with money attempt to reduce business costs by raising slavery to new levels of efficiency. The Destroyer, with a little help from his two friends, proves that billions of dollars and armies of thugs just aren't enough. Then bucks and Ruby will do . . .

  DESTROYER #34 CHAINED REACTION Copyright (c) 1978 by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

  An Apology to the Readers

  "From time to time there has appeared an American post office box in the front of these books. Many people, appreciating the glory and wisdom of Sinanju, wrote to that address hoping to be enlightened. Many of those letters were unanswered because Sapir and Murphy were in charge of my answers. Those letters will remain unanswered because of the sloth of Sapir and Murphy, now rich men because of my greatness. I, Master of the House of Sinanju, apologize for the cheap white help."

  By his august hand this 177th day of the Year of Dread Wind, 4,875, we are:

  -Chiun

  "I was answering the letters when Sapir said he didn't like the way I was doing it and would take it over. Since then, your letters have been unanswered."

  -W. B. Murphy

  "Murphy has known me almost twenty years. Anyone who has known me that long had to know I wouldn't answer the letters.

  But that's typical of Murphy-a victim of hope surmounting awesome evidence. All I said to him was that he was doing a lousy job and that I could do better. In any case, most of the letters were for Ghiun. I am hiring a new bookkeeper. If I can find the letters, I may answer them. But since it is only a moral and spiritual obligation, don't get your hopes up. I think I forgot to keep up payments on the post office box. However, I did keep them up for many years, but not one of you thought to write me and say 'good job.' "

  -R. Sapir

  CHAINED REACTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  Walker Teasdale III knew he was going to die, knew he had less than a week to live, and knew it made no sense to plan on anything, even his next meal.

  He fell into a steady gloom with a vacant stare that no one in Bravo Company could break or even enter.

  "Walker, do you know what you're doin', boy? You're gonna get this whole outfit bad marks. That's what you're gonna do, boy," threatened another recruit in the bunk next to his.

  Walker was nineteen years old, with sandy hair, a bony build, and a face waiting for manhood to line it with years. His light blue eyes, like empty Caribbean pools, stared nowhere. He rested his chin on his M-16 and answered the intruder from his vision of gloom.

  "Ah don' care what happens to the outfit. Ah don' care what happens to anybody. Ah don' care anymore. Ah'm gonna die and that's that."

  "How you know you're gonna die, boy?" asked the other recruit, who always seemed to know more than Walker. He was from the big city, Charleston.

  Walker had been to Charleston, South Carolina,

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  only twice, once to sell a funny rock he had found to a university feller who was supposed to pay a good price for such things. It was a real good price too, $15.35, and Walker trudged nineteen miles each way to get that price. The second time he had been to Charleston had been to enlist in this special unit that paid for everything and gave you everything.

  The other recruits knew Walker was "real country" because he liked the food. Walker thought chipped beef on toast was a treat for months until the other recruits teased him out of it. But he still went back for seconds and ate the leftover portions. He just didn't smack his lips as much anymore. That was all.

  Walker cried at Gene Autry movies when the other recruits booed because the show was in black and white.

  Walker prayed before he went to bed.

  Walker did his calisthenics even when the drill sergeant's white stick wasn't there to prod.

  Walker carried the packs of others on forced thirty-mile hikes.

  Walker turned himself in for falling asleep on duty.

  Walker cried when "Dixie" was played. When the national anthem was played. When Geritol commercials came on television, because it was "so nice to see people in love at such an old age." The old age, for Walker, was thirty-four.

  So they laughed at him because he was country. But no one laughed at the rifle range. Walker became the unit sniper in the first two weeks. While other recruits from Chicago and Santa Fe were being told to put the little needle

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  at the front of the barrel between the little V at the back of the barrel and sight the whole thing just under the target, Walker was drilling bull's-eyes. A Walker Teasdale target looked as if someone had taken a rock and pressed out the center.

  Walker said there was no secret.

  "You jes' put 'er in there real easy, is all."

  "But how?" he was asked.

  "You jes' do it," Walker replied and he was never able to teach the other recruits how to put out a buzzard's eye, as he called the center of the target.

  Everyone teased Walker.

  When he asked why the basic training of this outfit was almost two full years, he was told it was that way because he held everyone back.

  When he asked where "the nigras" were, they told Walker that a big bear in the hills ate them all up and then everyone rolled on the barracks floor in laughter.

  But that question did get some people thinking. Where were the blacks ?

  "They ain't smart enough to get into this outfit," said the recruit from Chicago.

  "There are some smart niggers," said the recruit from Sante Fe. "They got to have a few. This is the army, isn't it?"

  And then the recruits started remembering the strange requirements and questions when they enlisted. Half the questions seemed to be about blacks and how the recruits felt about them.

  One said he thought he hadn't stood a chance of getting into the outfit when he answered, "The only good one is a dead one. A dead nigger won't

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  mug you, won't welfare off you, won't mess up your neighborhood. Only thing niggers ever do good in the world is fertilize. And if they had any choice about that, they wouldn't do that either."

  "You said that?" asked Walker Teasdale, unbelieving.

  "Yessir," said the other recruit.

  "Gollee," Walker Teasdale had said. "Ah thought it was against the law not to like nigras."

  "Ah hate 'em," said the other recruit.

  "Seems a waste of time to hate anybody," said Walker.

  "Not niggers. Any time you spend hating them is time well spent."

  "Well, ah don't hate nobody," said Walker. "There's good and bad in all kinds."

  "Ceppin' niggers is mostly bad," laughed the other recruit, and training became so hard, with the constant repetition of tiring drills, that the strangeness of the unit became less a topic of discussion than survival in the following few days.

  There were drills like silence. Five men would be told a secret by the commanding officer and then sent out into the field. This secret would not be mentioned again until two weeks later when the five were brought before the commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Wendell Bleech, a rotund, pink-faced ball of a man with a harsh crew cut and extra large epaulettes on his shoulders
, which let the cloth of his military blouse hang fuller over his suet-bloated body.

  Colonel Bleech liked to talk about mean and lean. Colonel Bleech liked toasted English muffins with peach jam and sweet butter.

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  Colonel Bleech also liked to punish in front of the assembled unit. He went beyond enlightened rehabilitation. He broke noses and arms and legs and threatened each time, "the next time I get rough."

  Colonel Bleech had a riding crop with lead balls laced into the flattened pommel. Colonel Bleech pointed to two of the recruits.

  "The secrets I told you are no longer secrets. They have come back to me. I swore you to secrecy. Do you know the most important thing in a man's makeup and character is his word? You have violated your word. You have raped your word. You have desecrated your word. Now what do you two have to say for it?"

  They said they were sorry.

  "Now, see, men, I have a problem," said Bleech. He liked high riding boots and balloon riding pants. He looked like a tan pumpkin. Anyone who hadn't seen him kick prostrate recruits in the groin would think he was downright cherubic. He slapped his crop against his shiny riding boots.

  "I have a real serious problem, men, because I would like to believe you. I would like to believe you are sorry. I am a believing man. But I have discovered that you are liars. That you give your word and it is meaningless. Is that correct?"

  "Yessir," answered the two recruits, at stiff attention, their eyes sneaking glances at the flicking crop, snapping every so often against the hard leather boots.

  "Being unable to take your word that you will be sorry, I must make sure."

  The crop snapped against a nose. The young

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  man covered the bloody streak across his face with his hands. He gasped. His eyes teared.

  Little drops of blood came down his nasal passage to the rear of his throat. He tasted it, hot and choking.

  "Now I know you're sorry," said Bleech. "I know you are truly and deeply sorry. That's how I have to do things when I can't take a man's word."

  And with that, he snapped a knee into the groin of the second recruit and that boy went over in two, his face coming very close to the ground very quickly. He opened his mouth to scream a silent scream. And Bleech stepped on the back of his head, pushing his face into the ground, then ground the polished heel of the polished boot into the boy's jaw, where a sickening crack happened and the boot sank two inches into the face and the jaw was broken.

  "That's for talkers, boys. But this is nothing compared to what will happen if you talk outside. There is no greater sin in this man's world than talking outside the unit."

  Colonel Bleech stomped a polished foot in the South Carolina dust. It was a hot dry summer in these hills of the training camp, where no paved roads led and the only entrance the recruits knew about was by helicopter.

  Lordy, did they know helicopters. They knew loading and unloading the way most people knew how to swallow. They knew how to carry people, both willing and reluctant. They had more techniques for dragging someone by lip or ear or even chain than they could count.

  Only one person never questioned an order of

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  the peculiarity of the training. And that was the big raw-boned boy from near Pieraffle, South Carolina, twenty-seven miles south of Charleston, the boy who liked Gene Autry movies, chipped beef on toast, who never got tired, and who spoke kindly about Lt. Colonel Wendell Bleech, even behind his back.

  So when Walker Teasdale fell into despondency, his chin resting on the barrel of his rifle, his eyes looking into that great nowhere where people see no tomorrow, the other recruits took special notice.

  "How do you know you're going to get killed, Walker?" they asked.

  "I know. I know how, too," he said. "They're gonna shoot me for disciplinary reasons. I know it. They're gonna take me out to that piney hill and they're gonna make me dig my grave and then they're gonna put a bullet in my head."

  "Who's they, Walker?"

  "Colonel Bleech and the drill sergeants."

  "You ? They think you're perfect."

  "They won't tomorrow."

  "Nobody knows what's going to happen tomorrow, Walker."

  "I do," said Walker, firm in gaze and voice, a steady sureness in his manner, as when he talked about putting bullets into targets.

  He asked for a glass of water and young men who ordinarily wouldn't wait on anyone unless ordered by a superior jumped to find a glass. There were no glasses in the barracks, so someone drank the last bit of smuggled moonshine in a mason jar, washed it out with water, and filled it.

  Walker put his gun on his rack and, with a slow

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  wisdom that had replaced his boyish innocence, looked at the water, then drank it all.

  "This is my last sustenance, fellas. Ah've seen the buzzards in my dreams and they called my name. Ah take no more food or drink."

  The other recruits thought this was pretty much craziness, since no one had seen a buzzard around these parts since coming to camp more than ten months ago, all of them thinking1 that basic training should have been a two-month affair and finding out, in an address by Colonel Bleech, that two months wasn't enough to teach a man to tie his shoes right, let alone become a soldier, a real soldier.

  When Bleeeh said "soldier," his voice lowered, his spine stiffened, and a deep pride came to his entire bearing. His lead-weighted riding crop would always tap at his polished boots on that word.

  On the morning that Walker Teasdale said he would die, the recruits were awakened as usual with drill sergeants screaming in their ears, for their usual semiclothed morning run, wearing just boots, shorts, and rifles with full packs of ammunition.

  Long ago, they had stopped commenting on how none of them had ever heard of basic training like this, with a five-mile run every morning and at triple time. One of the recruits who had a brother in the Airborne once tried to chant as he ran and had to run punishment miles because this unit never made noise when it ran, when it fought, and when it marched.

  "There'll be plenty of noise on the great day," Colonel Bleech had promised, but everyone was

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  afraid to ask what that great day was, although they had heard a lieutenant mention it, too, but the lieutenant admitted he didn't know what that great day was. All he knew was that he owned two homes, an Alfa Romeo sports car, and sent his two daughters to private schools-all on a lieutenant's pay.

  The pay was good, but tired, frightened young men do not think of money when they want only rest. And they don't think of money when they are thinking only of dying.

  Walker Teasdale did his five-mile run with the unit that morning and passed up his favorite chipped beef on toast, even though the other recruits kept passing him heaping portions of it.

  They packed for a two-day marching into what was called Watts City, a specially constructed battle site in which the unit maneuvered through alleys and simulated taverns and empty lots. Whoever built Watts City, someone said, must have cheated on the contract because the whole thing looked like a slum.

  As they double-timed through piney woods, their bodies now hardened and moving easily without complaint of lung or muscle, dark birds circled and pivoted in the delicate blue sky.

  "Buzzards," whispered someone and everyone looked to Walker and then the birds. Only one trooper that day refused to look up. He knew the birds would be there. He had dreamed them. He had seen them in his sleep as he had seen this piney hill. And he knew his time was coming.

  They marched as the sun made their uniforms sweat-wet clinging clothes. The pine needles, soft beneath their feet, had at one time made bloody

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  blisters, but now these blisters were callouses. The recruits hardly noticed the tax levied on their bodies by the march.

  Most thought they were on another mock raid on Watts City, but at the outskirts of the reconstructed slum they turned away and double-timed down into a leafy valley with a small brown mudw
ater stream, and there Walker Teasdale saw the little hill above him that he had seen in his dream.

  And if he had not been staring at that hill, he might not have seen the brown boot stick out from behind a tree. Other recruits rested, but Walker stared at the hill. He knew he would have all the rest he would ever need, soon and forever.

  The other recruits took their smoking break by the muddy stream. And then a bugle seemed to come out of the sky and they all looked up but saw nothing. Only Walker saw the slender object in the hand of Colonel Bleech atop the small piney hill.

  It sounded like the voice of God coming from all the trees, but Walker knew the small object must be a microphone and the voice was Colonel Bleech's and was coming from hidden speakers in the trees.

  "The greatest violation that can ever occur has occurred," came the voice from the hills and sky and even the stream. It was around them and in them.

  But only innocent Walker knew what the voice was.

  "Treason. Rank and utter treason has occurred and the party is over. I tried to be understanding

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  with you. Reasonable with you. Moderate with you. And what do I get in return ? Treason."

  "That's Bleech, isn't it?" whispered one recruit.

  "Shhhh. Maybe he can hear," said another.

  "Where is he anyway ?"

  "Shhhh. You wanna make it worse?"

  "Treason," came the colonel's voice. "Pay attention while you hear the insidious ingratitude of one of you. No more kid gloves. No more kindergarten wrist-slapping. Treason calls for death and one of you will die today for this infamy. If only I had exercised discipline before," said Bleech to his unit, most of whose members had scars from his "little reminders" as he liked to call the punches and kicks and crop whips, "I wouldn't have to exercise this ultimate discipline now. You can blame me, men. If I had been firm before, one of you wouldn't have to die now."

  The recruits all looked to Walker Teasdale who was still standing up, leaning on his rifle.

  Atop the hill, Colonel Bleech took a toasted English muffin from his orderly, who had crawled with it so as not to be seen by the recruits down in the little valley across the muddy stream. The colonel thought it would have been highly unmili-tary, when staging a punishment, to be seen receiving a toasted English muffin with sweet butter and jam. So he ordered the young aide to crawl to him.