The Color of Fear td-99 Read online

  "You should talk," said Remo.

  Chiun snorted and went on. "Even when wars between emperors are not over treasure, but something insignificant, treasure is still at the heart of all such conflicts. For each emperor requires treasure to sustain war. Soldiers must be fed and weapons secured. No one works for free. Even in a war."

  "Gotcha. "

  "But a civil war is another matter."

  "I don't think this is a civil war, Little Father. It's probably just a Memorial Day misunderstanding gone ballistic."

  "We will see. For if treasure lurks behind these events, this war will not be what it appears to be."

  Remo was looking at the potbellied Union soldier across the aisle. His squashed-down blue service cap grazed the overhead air-conditioning blower. "That uniform doesn't look French to me."

  "It is French. I will prove it." Chiun lifted his voice. "Kind sir, what is the name of your cap?"

  "It's a keppie."

  Chiun allowed himself a self-satisfied smile. "See, Reno? Kepi is a French word. It means cap. You white Americans have created nothing new, but have stolen your ideas from all other lands. Your way of government comes from the Greeks, your dream of empire is very Roman. There is hardly a nation on earth you have not looted of ideas, only to call them American."

  "What did we take from the Koreans?" asked Remo, genuinely curious.

  "The best years of my life," said the Master of Sinanju, lapsing into injured silence while he monitored the wing on his side of the plane for signs that it was about to tear loose.

  Except for the stewardess bringing refreshments and an offer to carry Remo's child, the rest of the flight was peaceful.

  Chapter 3

  By all rights the Second Civil War should have been snuffed out on the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike before the embers of misunderstanding could ignite a national conflagration.

  The governor of Virginia had ordered in the National Guard. The unit that had responded rolled out of Fort Lee, whose grounds abutted Petersburg National Battlefield. They had been on Memorial Weekend maneuvers. No precious response time would have been lost. Their orders were to quell a disturbance the local police could not handle. Armed with modern M-16 rifles, tanks and other implements of twentieth-century warfare, they were easily equal to the task of suppressing a group of weekend warriors equipped with muzzle-loading black-powder muskets.

  Except for the unfortunate fact that the National Guard unit mobilized was descended from the legendary Stonewall Brigade. When Captain Royal Wooten Page called his unit to halt, he was prepared for a scene of civil disobedience, if not riot.

  Instead, he came upon a scene that stirred his deep pride in his home state and Dixie.

  For there by the side of the road stood encamped a regiment of Confederate infantry, standing guard over a field of captured and bedraggled bluecoats. Their motorcycle steeds lay stacked in a sorry pile.

  "Well, Ah swan," he said, thinking of great-great-grand-uncle Beauregard E. Page, who had fought at both the First and Second Manassas. "Rest a spell, men," he said in his native drawl, "whilst Ah investigate further."

  Approaching the encampment, Captain Page dropped his gun belt and came forward with upraised hands.

  A voice called, "Halt! Friend or foe?"

  "Ah am and always will be a friend of the uniform you wear, suh, seeing as how Ah am proud to carry forward into the coming century the proud banner of the Stonewall Brigade; What unit do Ah have the honor of approaching?"

  "We be the Sixth Virginia Foot. Recreational."

  "Then you would know Colonel Rip Hazard"

  "Ah would. Ah had the sad duty of burying his noble husk this very morning."

  "Colonel Hazard is dead?"

  "Gunned down by treacherous blueclads."

  "Ah served alongside Colonel Hazard in this very unit."

  "And Ah served under him in this proud regiment."

  Captain Page was allowed to approach. He shook hands with a rangy individual who wore Confederate gray and muttonchop whiskers.

  "These the Yanks dastards in question?" Page inquired.

  "Nope. We annihilated them early on. These be reinforcements. The First Massachusetts."

  "Ah hear they can't shoot."

  "Never heard tell of a New Englander that could." After they had shared a moment of grim laughter, Captain Page asked, "What are you planning on doing with these skulking New England bluebellies?"

  "That hasn't been decided. But they're our prisoners."

  Page frowned tightly. "Mah orders are to put down this unfortunate uprising."

  "That's a right troubling notion, Ah'd say."

  "To you and me both, suh."

  "Especially what with the true enemy so nigh and all," the Confederate soldier said, looking north to Petersburg with grim mien.

  Captain Page gave this dilemma some thought. "What time are them infernal carpetbaggers due?"

  "High noon."

  "What say we gather up these Yanks and repair to the Crater to await developments?" he asked carefully.

  "Will your men follow you?"

  "Will yours?" countered Page.

  "They be Virginians, as are yours."

  "Then let us be about our marching, suh. "

  Captain Page returned to his waiting tank column and explained the situation. "These fine soldiers were clearly provoked into defending themselves and their honor," he related. "Moreover, they were ambushed while asleep, taking their last rest before meeting the siege army that you all know-if you read your morning paper or watch the TV-is due to descend upon Old Dominion like so many greedy locusts.

  "The place where they were cut down is known to one and all, Ah am sure. It is the spot where the malevolent moles under the command of Colonel Henry Pleasants-an ill-named rogue if ever one was spawned-dug the cowardly tunnel under the finest soldiers of the Confederacy and set a powder keg to light. The resulting blast reverberates to this day, for Ah know personally that some of you men had kinfolk maimed or lost in that unholy blast."

  A hateful murmur raced through the unit.

  "That awful hour was the darkest of the Siege of Petersburg," Captain Page continued, "and even though the doughty forces of Major General William Mahone repelled the Federal advance that followed, it shall never be forgotten. And now a new siege is about to be laid on that fair and shining city. Ah cannot but assume that the Union devils who wrought this modern calumny were inspired in their villainy, if not in league with, the very foe whose name you all know and which Ah will not sully the pure Virginia air by repeating. To that end, Ah am prepared to pledge this unit in common cause with our grayback brethren."

  Utter silence attended this statement.

  "Of course, Ah cannot demand that you boys follow me into this new cause. So Ah will give you the opportunity to consider this weighty matter."

  When they were done, Captain Page said, "Ah aim to stand by mah fellow Virginians until this matter is understood and the true culprits brought to book. What say you, men?"

  There were no objections.

  The Union captives, bound and hangdog, were loaded aboard the National Guard trucks and tanks, to which Confederate soldiers clung, waving their service caps and beaming in victory.

  "On to the Crater!" shouted Captain Page.

  A yipping rebel war whoop drowned out the firing of the engines, and what history would later call the Unified Confederate Disunion Alliance rolled south down the section of Interstate 95 called the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike entirely unopposed.

  When word of this revolt reached the governor of Virginia, he knew exactly what to do. He called the President of the United States.

  After he was fully briefed, the President of the United States knew exactly what to do, too. He thanked the governor of Virginia and buzzed his wife, the First Lady.

  "There's trouble brewing in Virginia," he said when the First Lady entered.

  "I heard. Can't you federalize the Virginia National Guard or something?
This is ridiculous."

  "I do that, and I'll be lynched the next time I go home to Little Rock." The President was going through his desk drawers. "You seen that T-shirt of mine? The one that says Smith College?"

  "Why do you have to go running to that Smith person every time there's a crisis?"

  "How many times do I have tell you," the President said testily, "that subject is off limits."

  The First Lady glared at the President. "What will you trade for that T-shirt?"

  "The golden opportunity to serve out your term as First Lady," the President said glumly. "Because if this nation is facing a new Civil War, we'll both be run out of this office by the Fourth of July."

  The First Lady snapped out of her glare as if stung by a hornet. "I'll leak it to the press that you're going for a jog," she said hastily. "That way the cameras will be sure to televise the shirt."

  The door to the Oval Office shut behind her as the President stood up to look out the latticed window that faced the South Lawn. It was the same view his predecessors going back to Abraham Lincoln-the most tormented Chief Executive in US. history-had enjoyed. Not even the imperfect, object-distorting glass had changed.

  But the burden on the man who held the office had. Lincoln had had a young nation to hold together. That was burden enough in the nineteenth century. Here in the twentieth, more often than not the President had a fractious family of nations to watch over, as well as domestic concerns.

  But in over one hundred years the essential mission had not changed. Hold the union together. For Lincoln it had been a matter of the North and the South. How simple that seemed today. For while modern America might be unified, it was still fractured along a thousand invisible fault lines. The great Democratic experiment was imperiled by forces that had insinuated themselves into its very cultural and political fabric.

  Thirty years before, a great President-destined to be martyred as was Lincoln-had come to a terrible realization. America was doomed. Its laws and leaders were no longer sufficient to hold it together. A tide of lawlessness was sweeping the land. The institutions of government could not hold it in check because the threats all came from within.

  Crooked courts and judges and lawyers had all but shredded the Constitution. It was no longer the shield it was intended to be. It was in truth a hindrance to the survival of the greatest nation in human history. Something had to be done. Something drastic.

  The long-dead President had considered martial law, repealing the Constitution and sacrificing his own Presidency on the same granite altar of national salvation that had cost Lincoln his life a century before.

  Instead, he chose another option.

  In secret he created CURE. It was an organization headed by one handpicked man. The letters were no bureaucratic acronym. CURE was simply a harsh remedy for an ailing nation. Bitter medicine, true. But if it worked, the union might endure to the turn of the century and perhaps beyond.

  Officially CURE did not even exist. To admit to the existence of CURE was to admit America didn't work. Its mandate was to right the ship of state by extraconstitutional means. Domestic spying. Wiretapping. Even framing of criminals outside the law who could not be gotten within it. No option was too extreme. The utter survival of the nation had been at stake.

  Over time the mission expanded even as the nation's ills worsened. In time assassination was sanctioned as a means of last resort. Nothing seemed to be enough. But like a keel CURE kept the ship of state from being swamped by domestic storm. The general public never dreamed it existed. Congress never suspected. Successive Presidents came and went, each sworn never to reveal the secret-except to the man who followed him. Each was shown the red hot-line telephone-kept in the Lincoln Bedroom-that connected with the faceless man who headed CURE.

  A man named Smith. The same man handpicked so long ago.

  As the President gazed out past the magnolia tree planted by old Andrew Jackson and maimed by a suicidal pilot only months before, toward the cold finger of the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial beyond it, he bitterly cursed the still unexplained accident that had severed the hot line to Smith, wherever he was. It had been a hell of a lot easier to just pick up that phone than to put on a Smith College T-shirt and go jogging for the cameras in the hope that Harold Smith would be watching his TV and get the message.

  But knowing Dr. Harold W Smith, the man already had his people on this ruckus in Virginia.

  The President just hoped the bodies wouldn't make too high a pile this time. Last time had been a bitch.

  Chapter 4

  At Richmond's Byrd International Airport a minor skirmish broke out when Flight 334 from Boston landed and one Franklyn Lowell Fisk deplaned in Union blue.

  As it happened, a civil engineer named Orel Ready simultaneously deplaned from a flight from Atlanta, wearing Confederate gray.

  They encountered one another at the baggage carousel.

  Ready took one look at Fisk and Fisk at him, and pungent characterizations were exchanged with the riddling vehemence of canister fire. A small but intrigued crowd gathered.

  It might have blown over except for the regrettable fact that their baggage arrived just then. In the heat of the moment Ready pulled his cavalry saber from his Tourister luggage, and Fisk extracted his fully functioning Third Model Dragoon commemorative pistol with its walnut grips and 24-karat gold trigger guard and back strap from an overnight bag.

  They glared at one another for an eternity of dislike.

  "Bushwackin' Johnny Reb!" Fisk snarled.

  "Back stabbin' blackguard!" Ready retorted.

  History never recorded the name of the instigator of the Byrd International Airport Skirmish. Some witnesses swore that Ready lunged at his opposite while others averred that Fisk let fly with a .44-caliber Minie ball in a cloud of black powder smoke before the sword point could begin to move toward his heart.

  Either way steel flashed and lead flew-but neither man flinched at the specter of incoming death.

  Which was just as well, because they were in no immediate danger.

  NO ONE NOTICED the wispy little Asian man in black bustle out of the fringes of the gathering crowd. He stood at least three heads shorter than most, and all eyes were fixed on the two combatants. Or on their weapons, rather.

  In the blink of an eye something broke the lunging saber in midstroke. During that eye blink-caused by the discharging of the mail-order replica Dragoon-a force no one saw and both antagonists felt deflected the Minie ball from the dark gray breast of Orel Ready.

  With a metallic clang, the ball caromed off something and buried itself into a khaki knapsack that just happened to come sliding down the baggage chute.

  When the echoing report stopped and eyes flew open, Frank Fisk stood with Orel Ready's saber seemingly buried in his unprotected stomach while the Dragoon muzzle lay smoking over Ready's heart.

  Fisk and Ready each sized up his situation at the same time.

  "Dear Lord, Ah am undone," Ready howled.

  "You have run me through, you rebellious Johnny," Fisk moaned.

  Then both men promptly fainted dead away. Ready still held on to his saber, which-when it came away from Fisk's chest-was shown to have been sheered off to a blunt end like a broken butterknife. There was no smoking hole over Ready's heart, either. Nor any exit wound. No blood, either.

  The crowd gathered closer to inspect the honored fallen of the Byrd International Airport Skirmish. An insurance agent from Savannah was the one who found the broken saber tip lying under the men, and held it up so the round dent in the fine-tempered steel could be seen by one and all.

  "Day-am!" he said. "'Pears to me the ball broke the tip off this frog-sticker and saved both their lives."

  WALKING AWAY from the altercation, Remo said to the Master of Sinanju, "Nice move, Little Father. You avoided a major battle back there."

  "You could have helped," sniffed Chiun.

  "I'm on strike."

  "Does this mean that you a
re a union sympathizer?"

  "I'm an Ex-Marine. That means I'm in sympathy with nobody who puts on a uniform they haven't earned. Why do you ask?"

  "Union sympathizers are always going on strike in this mad nation."

  "This isn't that kind of union," said Remo.

  "What kind is it?" asked Chiun.

  Noticing fistfights breaking out all over the airport, Remo grumbled, "A weak one if you ask me."

  "All republics are destined to collapse from within."

  As they passed knots of belligerents, Chiun took the opportunity to drift up to some of the more hotheaded and surreptitiously inserted a long fingernail into the fray.

  The nail flicked in and out so swiftly that when those stung by it finished yelping and examining themselves for puncture wounds, they never connected the insult with a tiny little man in black who glided past, a serene and unconcerned expression on his wrinkled countenance.

  Very quickly the airport was evacuated and bee catchers were called in to deal with what airport officials insisted were "a swahm of teeny-tiny killer bees."

  But no infestation of bees was ever found.

  Thus ended the Skirmish of Byrd International Airport, about which songs would one day be sung.

  THE AIRPORT car-rental agent looked Remo and Chiun over with a critical eye. "North or South?" he asked.

  "North," said Chiun.

  "That's not the north he means," Remo told Chiun.

  "What north do you mean?" demanded the rental agent in a suspicious tone.

  "He thinks you mean North Korea," said Remo.

  "That where he hails from?"

  "Yes," said Chiun. "I am hailed in North Korea."

  "One north is as bad as another, carpetbaggers," the agent snapped. "Ah ain't renting you no car." He pronounced it "cah."

  "That your last word on the subject?" inquired Remo in a cool voice.

  "Cross mah heart and hope to die humming 'Dixie.'"

  As it turned out, these were the last words the stubborn rental agent ever spoke. For the rest of his life, he hummed. Doctors could find no explanation for his voice-box paralysis. Many articles were written, and medical texts were revised to include the condition, but no similar case ever again surfaced.