An Old Fashioned War td-68 Read online

  "It's a liquor store. State runs it. Sells liquor by the bottle. It's closed," said Little Elk.

  "Which state?"

  "Oklahoma. You're in Oklahoma, mister. I didn't get your name," said Running Deere.

  "Whatever you want to call me, friend. I'm here for you. I'm going to make you rich, respected, and famous. I'm going to make you feel like real men. I'm going to make it so that when they sing songs around your campfires a thousand years from today they will remember your names with awe. That's who I am."

  "And you call yourself?"

  "Liquor store. Are you going to let Oklahoma tell you when you can drink and when you can't? Slaves live like that. Are you slaves?"

  "It's closed, mister," said Little Elk. "We missed it."

  "Whose locks? Who has a right to lock you out on land that should be your own? Free men, real men, own their land. What are you?"

  "Who are you?" asked Running Deere.

  "The man who's going to get you some fine drink, the sort of liquor you deserve whenever you want it. Not when Oklahoma tells you."

  "I don't know," said Running Deere.

  "A big man like yourself? What are you afraid of?" They didn't know his name, but they knew he made sense. This muscular stranger who had appeared out of the fire had an answer for everything. No one noticed, as they marched off the little hill of the cemetery, that the medicine man was not with them. His head was still pressed to the ground, and he was crying, crying that the wrong spirit had been unleashed. Nor did they notice Big Buffalo in a trance, saying nothing, his eyes wide, mumbling only the funny tongue he had learned at the white man's school in Chicago.

  At the edge of the cemetery the man turned and threw a snappy salute at the graves.

  "I like war dead," he said. "Lets you know men lived here. Real men. The Ojupa are great among peoples. Never let anyone tell you otherwise. You hear?"

  They still didn't know his name when they drove into Enid in a pickup truck. The liquor store was locked and barred, and the streets were empty. "Never getting in," said Little Elk.

  "I could tell you how to get in there, but a smart guy like you, Little Elk, can figure it out," said the stranger, giving Little Elk a manly slap on the back. "It's an adventure. Let's go for it."

  The man's corporate gray suit never seemed to wrinkle and his tie was as neat as he when he stepped out of the smoke of the campfire back at the Ojupa cemetery. The braves felt a sense of excitement about this man, more than anything they had ever felt in sports, more than in the biggest football game.

  "What have you got to lose?" he asked. "You want me to lead? I'll lead." He jumped out of the truck, but not before Running Deere, who now seemed faster than ever, cut him off and headed for the front door. Little Elk figured the rear would be easier, and with a car jack he pried open the bars at the rear of the store. Alarms went off but Running Deere and the stranger were too fast. They were in the store and out with a case of whiskey apiece before any police could arrive, and the pickup truck sped out of Enid with everyone singing old Ojupa war songs. By morning, everyone but the stranger had a hangover, and they could see sheriff's cars crisscrossing the reservation looking for them.

  "How did they find out it was us?" asked Little Elk.

  "I told them," said the stranger happily. He looked even healthier in the daylight, with bright eyes, a peppy disposition, and a can-do attitude. Running Deere wanted to throttle the man. But Big Buffalo, who had found them and who was still mouthing that funny language, reverted to English to tell them not to bother, that it wouldn't do any good.

  "I'll tell you the good it'll do, Bill. It'll make me feel good when I go off to jail," said Running Deere.

  "And me too," said Little Elk. And so did the others. But the stranger only grinned at the threats.

  "Shoot me. Go ahead. Shoot me," he said. "If there is anyone here who loves the Ojupa more than I, let him blow my brains out now. Go ahead."

  "You call bringing the sheriff's office down on us an act of love?" asked Little Elk.

  "I couldn't have given you a greater gift. Because after today, you will never skulk around a sheriff again. You will never fear when you see his blue bubble coming after you on a highway, or hear his siren. You are meant to walk on this Ojupa land as lords of it, not frightened little boys. Are you men or boys? As for me, give me liberty or give me death."

  The stranger snapped open his case and there inside were five brand-new mini-machine guns, smaller than the famed Israeli Uzi, hardly larger than pistols.

  "The question is, do you guys want to live forever? Or are you going to stand up once for manhood? Are you going to honor those dead in your cemetery, or are you going to go on living like half Indians, half whites, all nothing? As for me, death doesn't frighten me nearly as much as slavery, nearly as much as seeing my women look down on me, nearly as much as living each dusty, dreary day like some little gopher who has to hide at the sound of a footstep. I cannot promise you victory this day, good Ojupa braves, but I can promise you honor. And that is all any of us have in the end."

  There wasn't a shaking hand in the band as they reached for the submachine guns. And it was known throughout the reservation and indeed on other reservations and across the country what happened that day. A handful of Ojupa braves annihilated an entire sheriff's posse, and when the state troopers were sent in, they took them on too. They flew the banner of the Ojupa, and Running Deere said it best for all of them:

  "Maybe we won't win this day, and maybe we won't live this day, but the world will sure as hell know we were here."

  The state troopers had automatic weapons too, and even an armored car. They outnumbered the small band and had all been trained to a fine edge. But there was a spirit now in the Ojupa. Little Elk didn't mind discomfort and Running Deere no longer waddled but moved swiftly.

  They fought through the morning and into the afternoon and laughed at requests to surrender, scoffed at warnings that their cause was hopeless, and by nightfall other young men had joined them.

  In a brilliant night attack devised by Little Elk and led by Running Deere, the now larger band outflanked the state troopers and forced them to surrender, taking all their weapons.

  "We'll let you live so that you may tell others that you have met the real Ojupa," said Running Deere. He no longer wore blue jeans or a shirt that professed love for Enid, Oklahoma, but a uniform made of real deerskin. A knife was stuck in his belt.

  "When we come back we will fill the sky with so many helicopters we'll block out the damned sun," said a state trooper, angry that they should yield to an outlaw band.

  "Then we will fight in the shade," said Running Deere.

  His words and the deeds of the Ojupa spread to other reservations. By the time the reinforced state troopers returned, they were met by a little army composed of frustrated, downtrodden braves, and this time the army outnumbered the troopers.

  And Little Elk, warned about helicopters, had prepared defenses against the slow-moving targets with the many guns. The state troopers fought bravely that day, but the Ojupa were braver and shrewder.

  Many died, but as the stranger said, "The tree of liberty is watered with the blood of patriots."

  They buried their dead, even as warnings that the Oklahoma National Guard were about to close in came to the little cemetery on the hill.

  One of the dead was Big Buffalo, or Bill Buffalo as he was known for a while. He was buried with full honors, even though it didn't seem as though he died in battle. There were powder burns at his right temple and a gun was found in his right hand. One of the braves remembered his last words.

  Big Bill Buffalo had kept repeating: "Tu cogno, tu cogno."

  No one knew what it meant, until later, when it was all over, one of Buffalo's teachers from Chicago came down to pay last respects to one of his finest students ever.

  "Who was he talking to?" asked the teacher.

  "Wasn't talking to anyone. He was looking at our friend who came out of the
campfire, and just kept saying those funny words. He said them and then put the gun to his head. And bang. Pulled the trigger," said the witness.

  "His words are Latin. And they mean 'I know you. You I know.'"

  "Well, shoot," said one of the other braves, listening in. "That's good. 'Cause no one else here knows him."

  With the leadership of the stranger and their own good fighting skills and courage, the Ojupa that day registered the first Indian victory against federal troops since the Battle of Little Big Horn. But by now other tribes were ready to join, because this time the word was in the air:

  "This time we can win."

  In Washington the news was grim. An entire National Guard division, one of the best in the country with the most modern equipment, had been soundly defeated in Oklahoma. Not only that, but the Indian band was growing daily as it marched northward. It had to be stopped.

  The problem was that it would be Americans fighting Americans.

  "If we win, we still lose," said the President. "We've got to find a way to stop this without a war," said the Secretary of the Interior.

  "If you could increase our budget," began the Secretary of Defense.

  "What on earth is left for you to buy?" snapped the President, astonished that the Defense Department still wanted to spend more money even though every month it went through the gross national product of most of the rest of the world.

  "We could form an exploratory purchase committee to look for new technology."

  "We have enough technology. We need a quiet victory without a battle," said the President.

  "Impossible. Those things don't exist," said the Secretary of the Interior.

  "We could buy one," said the Secretary of Defense.

  "From whom?" asked the President. He was known to the public as an amiable person, not concerned with details. But every cabinet member knew he had a firm, sharp grasp of facts, and while he never became angry in front of television cameras, he certainly could show anger in these meetings.

  There was silence among the cabinet.

  "Thank you, gentlemen. That's all I want to know," he said, dismissing them. Then he went to the bedroom in the White House and, at the proper time, took a red telephone out of a bureau drawer. He did not have to dial. As soon as he picked up the phone it would ring. This time he did not hear the reassuring voice saying that everything would be taken care of, that there was no wall that posed an obstacle or killer elite that was a threat. This time, reaching out for America's most powerful and most secret enforcing arm, he got a wrong number.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and there was no reason he couldn't handle a simple telephone connection as well as the next guy. It was just a matter of putting one connector into another. That it had to be done by getting past guard dogs, and over one of the most modern defense perimeters in the world, did not matter. It was still a simple connection.

  "You plug the red socket into the red receptacle. We've colored it red so you won't forget," Harold W. Smith had told him.

  There had been a problem on the direct-access line from the White House and Smith feared that the President might not be able to get through without being compromised by some new electronic device on sale to the public. There was so much electronics out there, private eavesdropping, that it had become a problem for the organization to keep its secret phone calls secret. The very office of the presidency could be ruined if ever it was discovered an organization so contrary to the laws of the country was being used to protect those very same laws. There would be disaster if others than the small group that comprised it should ever know of its existence.

  Therefore more secure phone access was called for.

  As Harold W. Smith, the lemon-faced head of the organization, explained it, Remo should imagine sound waves as two giant pillows encapsulating the world. America's eavesdropping and Russia's. Where they met created an absolutely perfect interference pattern. If the organization could establish its sending base inside that area by the simple plugging of one cord into a monitoring station there, then the President could use his red phone without fear of anyone listening in.

  The problem was that the monitoring station was in Cuba, right smack in its most heavily fortified area, just outside the American base at Guantanamo. There the Cuban special forces practiced approaching the American defenses and then retreating. To penetrate the monitoring station to repair the phone lines in the overlap area would be like swimming through a tide of oncoming humans, the best-trained humans in Cuba.

  "Let me get this straight," Remo had said. "The red plug into the red socket."

  Smith nodded. They were on a small patrol boat just off the coast of Florida. They would meet, if everything went well, in Puerto Rico after the assignment. Even though it was sweltering, Smith still wore his gray three-piece suit.

  "And the blue wire into the blue connector. We know the Russian connector is blue. They always coat their connectors in that sort of installation with blue. It's a special noncorrosive metal. Everything tends to corrode in the Caribbean. The Russians have placed their station over an old American monitoring station. Don't worry about the electronics. It will work. Just get into the station with the equipment. And then get out without them knowing you were ever there. That's the problem. We're piggybacking this thing. They've got to think everything is running normally. Can you do it?"

  "Red into red," said Remo.

  "Getting in and out without being seen, through a wave of their special forces?"

  "And blue into blue," said Remo. He looked at the blue wire. Nothing special, no longer than nine inches, with a tiny electrode attached. And the red plug seemed just like a simple outlet plug. He held both of them in one hand.

  "Through a wave of their special forces without them knowing you were ever there," repeated Smith.

  "Red into red. Blue into blue. Should be easy," Remo had said.

  "If they know you've been there, the whole thing is blown," said Smith.

  "I'll put the red one in first," said Remo.

  And he kept that in mind as he waited for dusk to slip into a little gully just beneath a marine machine gun nest at the outer rim of the Guantanamo naval base. He could have told the marines a friend was going to move through their lines, but their help would probably only serve to alert the other side.

  It wasn't full dark as his soft steps became softer, not pressing on the earth but becoming a friend with the ground underneath, feeling the rhythms of the humid Caribbean air, the silence of the ground, the moisture on his skin, and the rich smell of the green jungle growth all around him.

  He wasn't a man sneaking past some marines, he was part of the environment they worked in. He was the air they felt, the ground they walked on, the sounds of the jungle, part of it all. And being part, they didn't see him. One sergeant thought he had seen a shadow pass, but shadows, especially at dusk, were everywhere. What they did hear was the rustle beyond of another Cuban special-forces battalion starting their advance.

  They would come close, as though attacking, so close they could make out faces even with little light, and then at the last minute they would retreat.

  This evening the jungle hummed as fifteen hundred Cubans moved as silently as they could toward the American perimeter. They moved forward and they moved back, and through them moved a man who blended into the jungle more completely than any of the animals living there. And they finished their exercise never knowing that the man had simply walked by them.

  Remo found the monitoring station as he was told he would, where he was told he would, and he easily located the guards through their movements. He was quiet within himself, the sort of quiet that does not listen for sounds but allows the body not to strain, thus doing more than not making sounds, becoming the silence that makes all other sound, no matter how small, clear. Through the noise he knew where the guards were, how quickly they walked, or, if they sat, by their breathing how awake they were. And he simply moved where they weren't.<
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  And he found the right room, and he found the red socket. And everything would have gone perfectly, except there was a red wire near the red socket. And Smith had not told him about the red wire.

  "Don't panic," he told himself. He plugged the red socket into the red plug. His lean body and sharp features seemed to blend into the darkness even of the machines of the installation. Only his thick wrists seemed to stand out, poking from a dark body-tight shirt set above dark gray slacks. He wore loafers because he never liked shoes tight to his feet. They interrupted the sensitivity of his soles.

  The red plug looked fine. He heard one of the guards move down a nearby corridor. He was approaching the room. Blue wire. Remo looked for the blue wire in the machine Smith had described. He found it. Blue wire to blue wire. He attached the blue wire.

  Done. He had done it. But why was everything sparking? And why was he hearing some woman in Omaha speaking to the President of the United States? At least it sounded like the President.

  "Smith? Is that you?"

  "I'm sorry, this is Marion Kilston. I'm from the Omaha Neighbors Bureau. I'm offering today a new introductory neighbor-acquaintance kit."

  "Not Smith?"

  "We don't have a Smith, although you would think we would, it's such a common name, don't you think? Who is this? You sound just like the President."

  The line went dead. Remo pulled out the red plug and saw the brass prongs were twisted. Apparently they didn't fit into the socket. He looked again. It wasn't a socket. It was red, but it wasn't a socket. It had Russian writing on it. It looked like a socket. It was sort of round. But it wasn't a socket.

  The problem was that when you used the human body to its cosmic correctness you unleashed the awesome powers of the mind through the universe. Speed and power became something else again. They became knowledge. That was what all training was about, for the body and the mind to know. Unfortunately, when one had difficulty with electrical gadgets, or for that matter any gadgets from toasters to garlic presses, this power left one with plugs that looked like brass taffy. If killing a Russian who had put that sign on the monitor that looked very much like a socket would have helped, Remo would have been fine, he thought. Two Russians or ten would have been fine. Unfortunately, there were no Russians about, and doing harm wouldn't have done much good in the first place. And then Remo noticed two dark vertical slits in a small reddish piece of plastic at the top of the machine. The socket!