Ground Zero td-84 Page 5

  "The unnuking of America!" Sky Bluel cried. "What happened in La Plomo happened because barbarians got hold of the bankrupt and outlawed technology of poison gas. It is too late for the children of La Plomo. But it is not too late for the rest of us."

  "Could you explain unnuking?" the notorious anchorman asked.

  "I'll do better than that. I'll demonstrate it."

  Sky Bluel stepped back to the low, rounded shape behind her. A white tarpaulin smothered it like a huge Gypsy crystal ball under a cloth.

  Unhooking the guy wires that kept the tarp from being blown away, she clambered behind the shape, reached down, and like a parlor magician pulling a tablecloth out from under a place setting, whipped the tarp off.

  The videocams surged closer. Still photographers snapped pictures. The lights reflected off a large silver sphere whose stainless-steel surface was a mosaic of circular indentations. It rested on a thick rough-cut wooden board studded with electronic assemblies.

  The crowd "oohed" and "aahed" as they recorded the strange object for their news directors.

  This went on for two full minutes, until someone thought to ask a question.

  "It makes a great visual, Professor Bluel. But exactly what is it?"

  "It's a neutron bomb," Sky Bluel said matter-of-factly.

  This statement took possibly twenty seconds to sink in. Twenty long seconds while the videocams whirred and the still flashbulbs popped spasmodically.

  Remo sensed the prereaction shift in the mood of the crowd before they themselves were aware of it.

  "Come on, Little Father," Remo hissed. Getting no answer, he looked to his left. Chiun had already stationed himself well away from the crowd. He regarded Remo with a "What are you waiting for?" twinkle.

  Remo stepped out of the way just in time to avoid the stampede.

  "Neutron bomb! She's got a live neutron bomb!"

  The crowd broke in every direction.

  "I do not recall her saying it was live," Chiun remarked to Remo as they watched the crowd scatter.

  "She didn't," Remo said.

  The Master of Sinanju lifted an inquisitive eyebrow.

  "They're reporters," Remo explained.

  "Ah," murmured the Master of Sinanju, understanding.

  * * *

  Up on her pickup flatbed, Sky Bluel stood proudly before her neutron bomb. Her attractive face fell as her audience fled.

  "Wait a minute," she complained. "I'm not through rapping yet."

  "Oh, yes, you are," a surprise voice in her ear said.

  Sky turned. Behind her, somehow, was a tall man in a white T-shirt with dark deepset eyes that made her go blank.

  "Wow!" she said. Then, recovering, "Who . . . who are you? I mean, what's your bag, man?"

  "I ask the questions. You answer them. Is this thing really live?"

  "Sorta."

  "Straight answers."

  "The shaped charges are real, but there's no isotope in the core. That means it can explode, but it can't achieve critical mass and release hard radiation."

  The man in the T-shirt was examining the device critically. "Where the hell did you get it?" he asked.

  "I built it."

  "You built a neutron bomb?" Remo Williams asked incredulously. "You!"

  "That's the whole point," Sky said defensively. "If I can jury-rig one, so can any terrorist."

  "We'll argue about it later. How do you disarm this thing?"

  "Just pull out the charges by the handles."

  Remo looked over the steel ball. Each oversize dimple-it reminded him of a big tennis ballcupped a handle. Remo counted roughly thirty handles. Each handle bore a simple keyhole.

  He looked over to Sky. "Just pull. Is that it?"

  "Yeah, like opening drawers." She shook a tiny silver key that hung on a braided chain from her neck. "I didn't bother locking them."

  "Sounds too simple."

  "That," said Sky Bluel impatiently, "is my point exactly. "

  Remo called down to Chiun, who had drawn close. He was looking up at them with the cocked head of an inquisitive puppy dog.

  "Better get back, Little Father," Remo suggested. "Just in case. I'm dealing with dangerous stuff here."

  "I was dealing with dangerous stuff before you were born," the Master of Sinanju snapped. But he retreated to a reasonably safe distance anyway.

  "You go with him," Remo snapped to Sky Bluel.

  "Don't be ridiculous. I know more about this than you."

  Remo took Sky by the wrist, spun her like a square-dance partner doing a do-si-do, and propelled her off the truck with an ungentle shoe in the behind.

  Momentum carried Sky Bluel running to Chiun's side.

  Remo grabbed the top handle and lifted it straight up. He exposed a long wire-frame cone with a blunt end. A white claylike substance bulged through the wire-frame mesh. The chemical scent of plastique tickled Remo's nostrils. Carefully he set the blunt cone off to one side. The second cone came out more easily. Gaining confidence, Remo went through the rest.

  When he was finished, all that was left of the neutron bomb was a skeletal sphere of stainless-steel rings with a grayish metal basketball suspended at its core by struts.

  "See? I told you," Sky Bluel called over to him. "Harmless."

  But Remo wasn't listening to Sky Bluel. His attention was focused beyond her on the dark figures slinking up to the Army trucks. They had formed a human chain under the noses of the Army-who were preoccupied with firing up a stubborn compressor-passing canisters of decontamination solution two from man to man like a turn-of-the-century fire brigade.

  "Damn," Remo growled. "If it isn't one thing, it's another!"

  Chapter 5

  Fabrique Foirade grinned as the DS-2 canister was thrust into his broken-nailed hands. He took the sloshing canister and twisted his bony hips. Momentum carried the heavy container to the next and last man in line.

  The container left his hands. Chortling, he pivoted back to receive the next one.

  Because Fabrique Foirade, treasurer of Dirt First!!, wore his hair over his face like an unkempt Pekingese, his field of vision was not what it should have been. This forced him to work by feel.

  So it was by feel that he knew something had broken the chain he had so carefully set up to liberate the dangerous DS-2 solution from the pig ecocide Army. He accepted the next container, and as he horsed it around, it came back at him, almost knocking him off his feet.

  "Oof! What's this?" he asked, dumbfounded.

  "New game plan," an unfamiliar voice hissed. "We're returning the empty cans so the Army won't know they're gone."

  "The pig Army, you mean," Fabrique said reflexively.

  "Right, right," the other said vaguely.

  Behind his matted curtain of hair, Fabrique Foirade blinked. His eyelashes caught painfully in his hair. He shook the can. It made a heavy sloshing noise.

  "This ain't empty," he said.

  "I replaced it with pond water. Now, pass it on."

  "Hey, who're you, giving me orders? I'm in charge."

  "Okay," the other said reasonably. "Let the Army catch us."

  "You gotta point there. Okay, keep working."

  The cans came back from the truck, and just as quickly, they returned to it. Fabrique, grinning wolfishly and exposing green-stained teeth, chortled with pleasure. He hadn't had this much fun since they burned down the sawmill in Oregon, throwing over two thousand lumberjacks out of work but saving the last habitat of the freckled mudwhacking goldfish, the only pond creature known to masturbate while free-swimming, and therefore of inestimable value to an ecosystem increasingly threatened by undeserving humankind.

  "I think this is the last one," whispered the man ahead of him in line after he passed along a can that Fabrique could barely heft because his arms had grown unbelievably tired.

  "I think this is the last one," he told the man in charge of replacing the DS-2 with pond water.

  "Good," he said. "Give me a second while I d
ump it out."

  "Hey, I just had a thought."

  "Treat it kindly, it's in a strange place," the voice offered.

  "What's that, man?"

  "Here's the can back," the voice said, suddenly chipper.

  Groaning, Fabrique Foirade took the can and passed it back.

  "Okay, done," he said, panting. "What are you putting the bad stuff in?"

  "Back in the truck, where it belongs, of course," the voice said reasonably.

  This time the voice struck Fabrique as very strange. For one thing, he hardly coughed at all. No one who belonged to Dirt First!! did not cough. It was impossible. Like being clean.

  Fabrique reached up to his curtained-off face and pulled the fall of tangled hair apart. It sounded like cheesecloth ripping. Finally, he uncovered his eyes.

  The man standing behind him definitely did not belong to Dirt First!! he saw. For one thing, you could see the natural color of his skin. His face was well-scrubbed. His bare arms were lean, but muscular. His eyes, however, looked weird. Amused, they had a kind of deathly look in them. Like a grinning skull. The guy was sure grinning. He looked like he brushed his teeth at least once a week. Maybe more.

  "You, you're the reactionary who-"

  The grin squeezed down to a mean, menacing grimace.

  "The only reason I don't break every bone in your body," the grinning reactionary warned, "is that to do so I'd have to touch you."

  "You afraid of a little honest dirt?" Fabrique sneered.

  "No, I'm afraid my hands would stick to your skin forever. It's a terrifying thought."

  "Look, man. We're doing the world a favor here."

  "You wanna do the world a real favor? Take a bath."

  "You don't understand."

  "And I don't want to. Pull your troglodytes out of here. How'd you sneak back, anyway?"

  "There's more than one road into La Plomo, dude."

  "Then you have your choice of exits. Scram."

  "You'll be sorry."

  "Maybe. But I'll be clean and sorry."

  The clean dude stood back, folding his arms. Fabrique Foirade huddled with his followers. After the last of them had received the bad news with a sulky "Bummer!" he led them away from the cluster of Army trucks.

  "We should've spiked him, man," a voice complained.

  Remo Williams watched them go. He licked his index finger and lifted it into the wind. When the dry side gave him an accurate downwind fix, Remo hurried upwind.

  His course took him beyond the Army trucks and into the area where microwave TV vans and press cars were parked haphazardly. Remo stopped, noticed no sign of the media anywhere, and drifted around to the opposite side of the cars.

  There the media were hunkered down, trembling and wide-eyed.

  "You can come out now," Remo sang.

  "What's happening?" someone asked. It was the CNN newswoman. Remo detected a strong smell of urine coming from her general vicinity.

  "Nothing," he told her nonchalantly. "The bomb was a dud."

  Evidently this possibility had not occurred to any of them, because they took turns saying, "Oh!" in surprised voices.

  The press got themselves together. Combs came out. Lipstick and mascara were freshened. The air became sweetly sick with the scent of dozens of brands of ozone-depleting hair sprays. The CNN newswoman disappeared into a microwave van to change underwear.

  One network anchor-famous for doing stand-up reports on the war in Afghanistan from the safety of the Pakistani side of the border-was heard to complain that he shouldn't have to spray his own hair.

  "How can I be expected to watchdog the environment if I have to fix my hair every five minutes?" he complained bitterly.

  The percussive machine-gun sound of the compressors firing up made the air around them shake. The anchor dropped to his stomach, crying, "Incoming!" The others scrambled to follow suit.

  "What was that? What was that?" they cried, wild-eyed.

  "You're reporters," Remo said, heading back to the Army trucks. "You figure it out."

  Under the direction of Captain Holden, the Army was hooking up spray devices to the compressors. Wearing mouth filters, Army privates poured DS-2 into glass-bottle reservoirs. Then, dragging them through an opening they had clipped in the barbed wire over the high-pitched objections of the National Guard commander, they began the decontamination procedure.

  With the compressors stuttering like jackhammers, they surrounded the house, a neat white clapboard dwelling with an attached garage.

  Captain Holden lifted his hands. "Ready," he shouted.

  The spray guns snapped up on six khaki shoulders.

  "Aim!"

  The spray guns' nozzles dropped into line.

  "Fire!"

  "Why do they say 'Fire' when they are cleaning that house?" Chiun wanted to know. Remo hadn't heard the Master of Sinanju steal up behind him. Chiun was the only human being on earth stealthy enough to accomplish that feat.

  "Search me," Remo muttered. "Where's Moonbeam, the Mad Bomber?"

  "I do not understand why you call her that."

  "And I don't understand why you think she's so wonderful," Remo snapped back.

  "She cares about the children. No doubt she is kind to her parents as well," Chiun added darkly. "Unlike some."

  "Are you saying I-"

  Their incipient argument was lost in the gush of DS-2 as it hissed and splashed against the side of the house. The solution was dark blue, not much different from liquid household detergent. In fact, after splashing off the house, it left a sudsy residue on the ground.

  The house quickly turned light blue. Then dark blue. Then, it seemed to Remo, it began to brown.

  "Must be powerful stuff," Remo muttered.

  The smell forced them back, so they were never quite sure what happened after that.

  Someone yelled, "Fire!" It sounded like Captain Holden's voice. And it was agitated.

  "We are firing, Captain," a soldier protested.

  Remo blinked. The white house-it was now as brown as German chocolate cake-was actually smoldering. It took a second for Remo's eyes to discern that. The hissing foam splashed everywhere, making it hard to see the wisps of smoke. Then he noticed that the once-white paint was bubbling and darkening like burning milk.

  The air soon filled with acrid fumes.

  "Retreat! Retreat! We used too much!" Captain Holden screamed.

  Abandoning their sprayers, the Army unit surged back from the now-burning house, holding their air filters to their mouths.

  "We'd better get back too, Little Father," Remo warned.

  The Master of Sinanju faded back from the stinging cloud. A swelling yellowish genie, it billowed madly in all directions.

  They passed the press on their way to safety. The press was charging the smoldering ruins, their eyes shiny like drug addicts'.

  "A story! This is great! This is wonderful!" they cried.

  "This is madness," Chiun said acidly.

  "If they want a ringside seat, let them have it," Remo growled. He pointed to the sheltering cornfield, adding, "Let's try there."

  They plunged into the spring corn, which was low but thick.

  It proved to be a bad idea, because the field was where Dirt First!! had found shelter.

  "Not you again!" Remo barked, holding his nose.

  "We were here first, man." It was the group's leader, Remo saw with distaste. With his tattered curtain of hair hanging open, he looked like a sheepdog that had survived a head-on collision with a Mack truck.

  "You've just been evicted," Remo snapped.

  "No fair. Look what they did to that house. You see what we're talking about? The pig ecoriders don't know how to coexist with the environment."

  Remo looked back at the house. It was now fully engulfed in flames. It seemed to be melting as much as it was burning.

  "This DS-2 stuff is so toxic they have to store it in concrete bunkers," the Dirt First!! protester was saying. "Can you dig it, man? Th
e stuff they use to clean nerve gas off their tanks is as hazardous as the gas itself. Un-fucking real."

  "I hate to say it," Remo admitted, "but you have a point."

  "Right on. I got a membership blank somewheres on me. Interested?"

  "You also reek," Remo added. "Now, vamoose."

  "Yes," Chiun put in sternly, "do what my son says, malodorous ones. Papoose."

  The Dirt Firster put his hands on his hips. "Make me," he said defiantly.

  Remo stepped away to give the Master of Sinanju room to work. Chiun regarded the Dirt First!! spokesman with steely eyes. One long-nailed hand drifted up to the man's tangled locks.

  Chiun described a short sideways motion, and something plopped to the ground at the Dirt Firster's grimy feet.

  He looked down. And saw three years of hirsute growth piled on his dirty boots like a stepped-on tarantula.

  "My hair!" he howled in anguish.

  "Your life next," Chiun warned.

  "I'm gone."

  Complaining bitterly, Dirt First made a disorderly retreat through the spring corn. The corn rows turned black as ruffle-feathered crows in their wake.

  "Amazing," Chiun muttered, watching them go. "No matter how much dirt rubs off them, they remain as sooty as chimney sweeps."

  "There's nothing amazing about dirt," Remo scoffed, looking around. The media had gotten as close to the conflagration as possible and were filming madly. The Army and the National Guard were huddled behind the Army trucks. They were joined by Sky Bluel and a few unidentified people, including, Remo noticed, assorted lawyers and the flashy condo salesman-or whatever he was.

  "Did you ever see such a mess, Little Father?" Remo asked.

  "No. And why do you not do something about it?"

  Remo grunted derisively. "Like what? Step up to the flames and blow them out like Clark Kent?"

  "The fire will spread to other houses and soon the entire town will be destroyed," Chiun warned.

  "Will anybody care? Let's face it, the townspeople are all dead."

  "That man cares," said Chiun, drawing Remo's attention away from the disintegrating house with one long-nailed finger.

  It was the supposed condo salesman. He was practically having a fit, and taking out his frustration on Captain Holden.

  Remo tuned out the surrounding noise and focused on what the man was shouting.

  "That's a ninety-thousand-dollar starter home going up in flames, you moron!" he was screaming. "Why don't you do something before that charming split-level ranch house next to it turns to ash?"