Angry White Mailmen td-104 Page 3

  Remo hurriedly followed.

  As the Master of Sinanju stepped off the plane, the Japanese stewardesses in their traditional geisha-style kimonos blocked Remo's way.

  "You are not staying, gaijin?" one asked.

  "Osaka is my destination," Remo pointed out.

  "We are coming back to Osaka. You may stay with us. Fly back to America, then come back. We will make it very pleasant for you, gaijin. "

  And they all smiled their geisha smiles.

  "Thanks," said Remo. "But my friend will make it very unpleasant for me if I don't get off in Osaka." The Japanese stewardesses all made pouty faces and one asked, "You know of Japanese hara-kiri custom?"

  "If you're trying to blackmail me into staying by threatening to commit suicide," Remo said, "it's been tried."

  "It has?"

  "Many times."

  "Did the girls open their bellies for you?"

  "I never stick around long enough to find out," said Remo, brushing past.

  Remo found Chiun waiting near the baggage chute. There was no luggage. They were only staying a day. Normally the Master of Sinanju took some portion of his fourteen steamer trunks along but in this case he decided against risking even one to what he darkly referred to as "Japanese atrocities."

  "Let's find a pay phone," said Remo.

  "You did not stay to watch?"

  "The stewardesses commit hara-kiri? No. Too messy."

  "It is the one Japanese custom of which I approve," Chiun said loudly in English. "If only more Japanese would slit their bellies in shame of being born of these islands."

  "Look," hissed Remo, "can we just be on our way?"

  "Yes," said Chiun even more loudly. "Let us be on our way. Let us enter Occupied Japan with all its sinister intrigues."

  "Japan isn't occupied anymore, Little Father."

  "It is occupied by Japanese. Better it were occupied by Koreans, who would improve it. But that is not to be in my lifetime, I fear."

  Remo noticed they were being followed by a white gloved security detail so he pretended not to be with the Master of Sinanju. He found a pay phone and dialed the USA country code, then leaned on the 1 button.

  "We're here," Remo told Smith when the lemony voice came over the line.

  "Go to the Sunburst Hotel on Sakai-Suji Avenue," Smith said.

  "No time. Chiun's already stirred up the natives. We've got to be in and out quick."

  "I have not yet determined a plan of attack for you," Smith hissed.

  "We can go in and kill everyone," Remo suggested.

  "Technicians and salary men are not worth our time. Go to Nishitsu Osaka. Make sure the Nishitsu executives understand we have discovered their plot to destroy our rail system and have traced it back to them."

  "How?"

  "You will find a way. Just be subtle. You are delivering a message."

  Rejoining Chiun, Remo related the conversation, then added, "Guess we're just going to have to march in and kick butt."

  "Too subtle," Chiun said, stroking his wispy beard. "You call that subtle?"

  "I have a more appropriate idea. One that will impress even thick Japanese skulls."

  "You lead and I'll follow."

  Remo did. First to the Osaka customs counter, where Chiun was asked if he had anything to declare. The question and the Master of Sinanju's vituperative answer were in Japanese, and Remo didn't understand any of it. But the way the customs officials' ears turned red and their facial expressions flattened out suggested that Chiun had declared them all illegitimate sons of Japanese snow monkeys.

  The security police who were hovering in the background now rushed forward.

  More heated exchanges transpired.

  Chiun flung hot words and brandished his jade nail protector in official faces. Someone decided it was undeclared contraband and attempted to seize it.

  Instead, he seized his own crotch. Others seized other sensitive portions of their anatomies and Remo had to rush in to rescue the Japanese constabulary from the Master of Sinanju's wickedly flashing nails.

  He accomplished this by sending them spinning into a nearby men's room and with his hand cold-soldering the door shut after the last one tumbled in.

  After that Remo followed the Master of Sinanju to a waiting taxi.

  "Why did you not come to my aid sooner?" Chiun sniffed. "You know I am nearly toothless in my present condition."

  "I was pretending I wasn't with you, okay?"

  "I do not blame you," Chiun said, voice suddenly dejected. "I have allowed myself to be shamed in your eyes. And in the eyes of my ancestors. I wear a horn of jade where my Killing Nail should be."

  "That's not it, Little Father. I just didn't want to be made."

  Chiun's eyebrows lifted. "But it's all right that I am made?"

  "Look, you couldn't be more obvious if you carried a flag. I like to blend in."

  "I would like to blend the Japanese shogun who stole my honor," Chiun said fiercely.

  "Just keep a low profile and you'll get your wish," Remo cautioned.

  Chiun gave the driver instructions and Remo spent the ride looking out the rear window in case they were being pursued.

  "You know they'll be looking for us when we try to fly out of Osaka," Remo undertoned.

  "I will be looking for them, too," sniffed Chiun. "They who dared covet the nail protector of Gi."

  "A previous Master broke a nail?"

  "Gi had weak cuticles and protected his Killing Nails when he was not dispatching enemies of the Khan with them."

  "Which Khan?"

  "Kublai."

  "Gi worked for the Khan who oppressed Korea?"

  "Gi offered his services to the Korean emperor, whose offer was far less than that of the Khan."

  "Doesn't sound like much of a Master."

  "He was a wonderful historian and so we revere him."

  "You revere him," said Remo, "The only thing I revere is finishing this freaking assignment."

  "Oh? Are Japanese bothering you?"

  "They're starting to," Remo growled. Chiun only smiled thinly.

  FROM THE OSAKA AIRPORT the red taxicab conveyed them to a train yard where old diesel locomotives sat rusting and peeling.

  While the cab waited, Chiun went among these and inspected them carefully, knocking on noses and sides until he was satisfied.

  The Master of Sinanju haggled with the yardmaster in Japanese. Then they reclaimed their cab. "What was that all about?" asked Remo.

  "You will see."

  Next Remo found himself in an airfield where helicopters buzzed overhead. Again there was haggling. Then Chiun called out, "Come, Remo we are going for a short ride."

  Soon a giant helicopter sky crane was lifting off with Remo and Chiun in the cabin.

  Night had fallen. Chiun guided the pilot with quick gestures. Before long they were over the train yard. A cable was lowered at Chiun's direction and the locomotive was secured by a ground crew.

  "Why are we stealing a locomotive?" Remo wanted to know.

  "We are not. I have purchased it at a fair price,"

  "Yeah? What are you going to do with a locomotive? It won't exactly fit into the overhead bins on the flight home."

  Chiun examined his nails. "I will think of something."

  Twenty minutes later they were approaching a great industrial complex of white buildings under blue-white floodlights. Remo looked down. He saw a tiny helicopter on a roof helipad. The helipad was in the shape of the three-moons symbol of the Nishi samurai clan, now Nishitsu Industrial Electrical Corporation.

  If they stayed on course, the ponderous weight of the diesel locomotive would soon overfly the helipad, Remo saw.

  "You're not thinking what I think you're thinking," Remo said.

  "We have been asked to deliver an unmistakable message."

  "Does he know that?" Remo asked, indicating the earphoned pilot in the control bucket.

  "Not as yet."

  "So all we have to do is pre
ssure him to hit the cable release at the right moment?"

  "No, he will never do that because he would fall into great difficulties. I will persuade him to tarry here a moment or two. Having accomplished the difficult part of the assignment, the rest will be up to you."

  Remo shrugged. "Fair enough." And opening the side door, he stepped out into a wheel strut. His actions were so quick and fluid that the pilot, occupied with his flying, didn't notice.

  Remo was gone almost five minutes. The skycrane started to pitch and sway. Then with an adroit parting of cable, the helicopter suddenly rose higher, freed of its tremendous burden.

  The locomotive actually whistled as it fell. Its monstrous moon shadow lay over the helipad, and kept shrinking. It struck with a great booming like a peal of thunder. The chopper actually shivered.

  The pilot started to caterwaul the most ungodly curses as Remo climbed back in. He hadn't noticed Remo was gone.

  "What took you so long?" asked Chiun.

  "Cable that thick takes time to snap," said Remo, looking at his greasy hands.

  Chiun made a face. "If you have correct fingernails, your hands would now be clean."

  Remo frowned.

  "I thought you were off this fingernail kick?"

  "I have agreed that you may wear your nails as you wish. That does not mean I am forbidden from describing other options."

  In the control bucket, the sweaty-faced pilot swung his ship around to inspect the damage.

  It wasn't complete, but there was a big hole where the main Nishitsu roof had been. Gone were the helipad and its helicopter. Smoke and flames were boiling up. Amazingly, almost no one reacted on the ground. Since it was evening, loss of life would be minimal.

  And the Master of Sinanju leaned forward and took hold of the pilot's very red neck.

  The pilot decided this was the airspace he most didn't want to loiter in. The skycrane went rattling away like a huge frightened pelican.

  "Think they'll get the message?" asked Remo.

  Chiun shrugged. "Who is to say? They are Japanese and therefore thick of head and slow of wit."

  Chapter 5

  Dr. Harold W Smith had been plucked out of the CIA data-analysis section to run the supersecret government agency called CURE for more than one reason. There were many excellent analysts in those early days of the CIA when Univac computers the size of an entire room were constantly keypunching data to be processed and analyzed.

  It was said of Smith in those Cold War days that he was worth two Univacs. The raw intelligence that passed before his gray eyes prior to being fed to the big systems often never reached the keypunch stage. Smith had only to glance over it, correlate it with other data cataloged in his gray brain and inform a superior of his conclusions.

  "The Soviets are about to crush the Hungarian revolution," Smith would warn.

  "What makes you say that?"

  And Harold Smith would reel off a list of seemingly routine troop and armor movements, canceled vacations, recalled ambassadors, increased food imports and other outwardly unrelated data in support of his conclusion. And he would be right.

  At first he was dismissed out of hand.

  "Leave the correlating to the computers, Harold."

  But Smith was stubborn. And not blind. He kept offering his analyses, and they were on the money 99.7 percent of the time.

  As punishment, Smith was exiled to a windowless office of his own. To his superior's intense exasperation, he continued predicting world events and continued memoing his superiors. And he was invariably, infuriatingly, stubbornly correct.

  Finally they had no choice but to promote him to senior analyst. From then on, the agency pretended Harold Smith was just another Univac. In fact, he outperformed the Univacs, which were only brute computers whose keypunched ticker tape had to be decoded by higher-level analysts. Uncorrelated data in, correlated data out.

  With Smith, they skipped two of the three steps. And saved on electricity.

  Smith called the revolution in Cuba correctly. He proved conclusively on paper that the so-called missile gap was just Soviet propaganda perpetuated by Pentagon scare mongers. And by the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the CIA was only too glad to see him take early retirement. A man that unrelentingly single-minded could be a royal pain in the ass.

  Harold Smith did not retire. He instead went on to head an organization that CIA never dreamed existed. It was called CURE. The premise of the President of the US. who had created it and installed Smith as its director was staggeringly simple. The American experiment was in collapse. The Constitution lay in shreds. It was not possible to maintain order and defend the nation from the rain of threats from all quarters-and remain within the rigid limitations of the law.

  CURE would operate outside constitutional and legal mandates. Smith's task-one as staggering as those faced by the early Founding Fathers-was to beat back the modern-day Huns and Visigoths who were chipping away at America's freedoms by any means possible.

  Three decades later, Harold Smith was still at it, operating from the same cracked leather chair in the same Spartan office in the same cover institution. Folcroft Sanitarium, ostensibly a warehouse for the chronically ill and mentally impaired. Smith ran both organizations with a firm, unsentimental hand. Older, grayer, yet still recognizable as the supercompetent bureaucrat the CIA had nicknamed the Gray Ghost.

  The only thing that had changed in those years was Smith's computer setup. Initially it was an oak desk that concealed a terminal that rose from his desktop like a crystal ball and connected to the hidden bank of mainframes in the basement, dubbed the Folcroft Four by Smith.

  The Folcroft Four still hummed behind a blank concrete wall, backed up by optical WORM-drive servers and other new innovations in data storage and retrieval. But Smith's desk had been replaced by a modern desk with a black glass top. Buried under the tinted glass was a fixed monitor. Smith hated change, but this new desk was much more secure than the old.

  From his chair, he stared down into the black glass. The amber letters on the screen floated as if in some dark liquid medium.

  There was no keyboard in the usual sense. When Smith brought his hands close to the desktop nearest him, the thin white letters of a standard alphanumeric keyboard arrangement glowed. But there were no keys in the physical sense. It was a touch-sensitive capacity keyboard, that darkened the second Smith withdrew his hands.

  Smith was scanning the vast daily stream of data that his mainframes pulled off the Net and wire-service links, collating the bulletins, discarding the trivia and saving in files those items he believed would be useful for future operations.

  It was after noon. Two hours past midnight in Japan. There was no news out of Osaka. Smith had had misgivings about sending Remo and Chiun to deal with Nishitsu before he had fully identified the situation. But sometimes keeping his only employees happy was his only survivable option.

  At 12:33 his system beeped, and a red light popped up on one corner of his screen. Smith brushed a flat hot-key, and an AP bulletin appeared. It was brief, indicating it was only a first, sketchy report moving on the wire.

  Oklahoma City, OK-Courtroom Shooting (AP) An unidentified gunman burst into the court of Judge Calvin Rathburn at 11:15, Oklahoma time, opening fire. Initial reports indicate more than two dozen persons wounded or killed. The gunman fled. Eyewitnesses have so far provided no description of the assailant. The attack took place in the new Wiley Post Federal Building, which replaced the old Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, destroyed by a truck bomb more than a year ago previously in the worst case of domestic terrorism in US. history.

  Frowning, Smith began tapping his keyless keys and dumped the report into a growing file he called Militia Threats. This was supposition on his part. But it seemed a solid one.

  Not ten minutes later, the first report of the explosion at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street in midtown Manhattan bubbled up. One glance at it, and Smith immediately consigned i
t to another file labeled Terrorist Threats.

  Nothing about either event suggested a link to the other. Smith invariably thought in links and patterns. But no pattern or link was apparent. In fact, it never occurred to Smith to connect the two, even as closely spaced in time as they were.

  Smith had gone on to his work, knowing his ever-vigilant system would alert him to significant followups when, approaching 1:00 p.m., the bulletins began peppering him like thrown darts.

  New York, New York-Mystery Explosions (AP) A string of as yet unidentified explosions occurred today at approximately 12:27 in Manhattan's West Side. Initial reports indicate a series of seven detonations, all in a multiblock area surrounding the Manhattan's General Post Office. Damage and casualty reports are unavailable at this hour. No link to the earlier explosion at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street has been established.

  The anonymous AP wire copywriter, bound by the rules of journalism, could do no more than suggesting a link. But not Harold Smith.

  Eight explosions at a minimum, all in the relatively confined sector of midtown Manhattan.

  Something was up. Something big. With a sharp pang, Smith regretted having sent Remo and Chiun out of the country. But done was done.

  In their absence, Harold Smith would look into the situation. There would be time enough to bring Remo and Chiun into this when a target was established.

  After all, they were assassins, not investigators. Smith made excuses to his secretary and left his office with a shiny leather briefcase that contained his telephone-computer links to the Folcroft Four. It was a new system, one he had built to replace the old one, which had been destroyed recently. This would be a good opportunity to field-test it.

  SMITH TOOK the Henry Hudson Parkway into Manhattan, noticing that the trees on either side of the parkway were being choked by wild catbrier and hops. He frowned. Someone should do something about it. Smith hated untidiness in any form. Even in nature. If he had his way, trees would grow in orderly ranks and flowers would sprout only where they were wanted.

  His briefcase lay open on the seat beside him, and the computer system was up and running.